While sometimes the mess is a certifiable inefficient disaster resulting from laziness, the “organized chaoos” messy space acts like a mental buffer.
Here’s computer scientist Jim Gray on the purpose of buffering in a programming context, from his book Transaction Processing:
The main idea behind buffering is to exploit locality. Everybody employs it without even thinking about it. A desk should serve as a buffer of the things one needs to perform the current tasks.
Keeping things “in the buffer” redounds to productivity (and ideally, creativity). If something is closer at hand, it lowers the transaction costs of retrieval.
Memorization works this way, too. People question the benefits of rote memorization in school, but this is a useful metaphor for understanding its value. Memorizing reusable data keeps it “in RAM” for faster retrieval.
Faster retrieval reduces friction, which means faster feedback loops, faster learning.
This is a phenomenal extended (3 hour!) interview with Dana Gioia on his background, poetry, his writing process, and the habits he’s curated that
make him into a prolific and interesting writer.
As I watch my kids learn, it sits with me how much we learn by copying. Imitation isn’t the enemy of originality — it’s the foundation of it. We learn
by copying, refine through practice, and ultimately create something uniquely ours. My latest post on Res Extensa:
In our rush to be original, we often dismiss copying as somehow lesser than “true” learning. But mimicry isn’t just a shortcut — it’s fundamental to how we master skills. We see it in my daughter’s creative reproductions, in my son’s workbench discoveries, and in every artist who’s traced the footsteps of masters before them.
The path to originality paradoxically begins with imitation. First, we copy to build competence. Then we understand. Finally, we create.
A great little paean to curiosity from Henrik Karlsson:
There is something frustratingly Tao about curiosity. (1) It is by following your curiosity that you can bring something new and beautiful into the world as a gift to others. But (2) to go there you have to do things that you fear others will think are stupid or embarrassing. That is, you can only find the Tao by not looking for the Tao. By losing yourself in your line.
In the latest Res Extensa, I explored how craftsmen build expertise through deep understanding of their medium. It starts with the nature and properties of their raw materials, then moves to the individual parts, assemblies of parts, and their relationships to one another.
All sorts of woodworking, done well, benefit from skillful selection of material. The furniture builder making an arch at the top of a dresser will help themselves if they find a board with grain that flows in the direction that agrees with their design. You want your material to move with you, not fight against you.
This process perfectly illustrates a fundamental truth: mastery requires rich understanding of your craft’s raw materials. The path to expertise runs through the mastery of your medium.
Oblique Strategies was originally a set of cards created by Brian Eno and
Peter Schmidt back in 1975. Each card contains effectively a single prompt intended to help get you unstuck creatively. Prompts like:
Use an old idea.
State the problem in words as clearly as possible.
Only one element of each kind.
What would your closest friend do?
What to increase? What to reduce?
This site is an online version, each refresh showing a new random card. Interesting.
Our levels of productivity, creativity, and inspiration have an intimate, hard-to-articulate connection to our environments. And we all have different predilections — quiet vs. noisy, calm vs. bustling, light vs. dark. Each quality creates a climate that pulls something different out of us.
Adam Savage’s workshop, “The Cave”, in 360°.
I love seeing peoples’ workspaces in detail. Creators form symbiotic relationships with their environments. Our environments shape our workflows, and we mold our environments to fit our goals.
I talk all the time about trial and error. The freedom to let yourself make mistakes, and the skill to make sure they’re not too destructive, are superpowers. With every interesting innovation, company, or product, you’re seeing the late stage of a long chain of missteps and failure. As long as you have the right mindset, mistakes are learning.
We talk about this as a product team — short cycles, iteration, feedback loops — ways to navigate toward broader visions while surviving and building something increasingly useful along the way. I also talk about it with the kids. The more you practice hitting off the tee the better you’ll get at hitting the ball. The more you draw pictures the better you get at it. Practice through the frustration. I try to reinforce with them that everyone that’s great at something got their through an incredible volume of failure and shortcoming before the skill you see today.
If you’ve ever built anything physical, like woodworking, crafting, or DIY stuff around the house, you’ll be familiar with making mistakes, often costly ones. There’s no frustration quite like taking a furniture workpiece you’ve glued up from other parts, honed, mortised, and sanded and making a miter in the wrong place, or cutting it down to length too short. Hours and hours of work can vaporize in a second. I’ve made project mistakes like this so many times, and each time there’s a part of you that wants to put it all down and just go turn on Netflix. But great creators are made by their ability to recover from these mistakes — both in the tactical methods to fix them and the mental drive to “just fix it” and power through.
Mistakes are where most of the learning is in the creative process. It’s not only through the feedback loop of trial and error either. The more mistakes you make and navigate through, the better you get at accommodating and recovering from them.
My grandfather was a hobbyist woodworker for much of his life, cranking out hundreds of heirloom pieces over the years. If you ever asked him about making mistakes, he used to say “making mistakes means you’re doing things.” No person is immune from error. By definition, if you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t really doing anything. Or maybe nothing interesting or challenging.
New Metaphors is a project to help spur creative thinking through metaphor. It’s a deck of cards you can use in exercises to help stimulate new perspectives on an existing idea:
A metaphor is just a way of expressing one idea in terms of another. This project is a nightmare. The city is a playground. You are a gem. Creating new metaphors could help us design new kinds of product, service, or experience, and even help us think about and understand the world differently.
New Metaphors (buy a printed pack, or download for free) is a set of 150 cards (two different kinds) and some fairly simple methods for running workshops, brainstorming (individually or in groups), discussions, and other creative activities.
I’m reminded of something from David Epstein’s Range, where he writes about the importance of analogies to creative, connective thinking. Astronomer Johannes Kepler was known to use analogies to reframe problems he was working on:
Kepler was facing a problem not just new to himself, but to all humanity. There was no experience database to draw on. To investigate whether he should be the first ever to propose “action at a distance” in the heavens (a mysterious power invisibly traversing space and then appearing at its target), he turned to analogy (odor, heat, light) to consider whether it was conceptually possible. He followed that up with a litany of distant analogies (magnets, boats) to think through the problem.
Most problems, of course, are not new, so we can rely on what Gentner calls “surface” analogies from our own experience. “Most of the time, if you’re reminded of things that are similar on the surface, they’re going to be relationally similar as well,” she explained. Remember how you fixed the clogged bathtub drain in the old apartment? That will probably come to mind when the kitchen sink is clogged in the new one.”
Martin Gurri on the growing similarities between west and east coast elites:
The effect, I suspect, will be the exact opposite of the reactionary dream. In wild and seedy digital gathering-places, far from any pretense of idealism, political discussion will inevitably grow more unfettered, more divisive, more violent. The attempt to impose Victorian standards of propriety on the information sphere will end by converting it into a vicious and unending saloon brawl. No matter how revolting the web appears at present – it can always get worse.
Robert Haisfield walks through some methods he uses in Roam to make sense of the decentralized, scattered information web to get creative work done. I use some similar methods to collect the distributed notes that have collected about a single topic, but queries would allow taking it to the next level.
I refreshed myself this evening on Bret Victor’s amazing talk from 2012, “Inventing on Principle.”
He’s been working on and promoting his ideas on interactive, responsive tools for creativity are still ahead of their time. We’re gradually getting major improvements with products like Observable, but there still aren’t that many out there. Check out his current work at Dynamicland, a research group working on new interactive tools.
This is an absolutely phenomenal project showcasing each of the major satellites in the Solar System. The full interactive maps of each one are incredible. It shows how much data we’ve gathered about all of these bodies with imagery on each one and thoroughly mapped with place and feature names.
A cool piece of news here. We bought our house with Redfin and had a great experience with it, after using the website heavily during the house search process. Opendoor is also in the real estate space, but their core business is around buying up properties themselves, offering easy liquidity to homeowners needing a rapid sale. I like that Redfin sees the potential there. Hopefully it’s a good fit for each business.
The study found that walking indoors or outdoors similarly boosted creative inspiration. The act of walking itself, and not the environment, was the main factor. Across the board, creativity levels were consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting.
I definitely feel like many of my best ideas and possible problem solutions come to me while running. This research shows that the act of cardiovascular activity spurs something creatively that you don’t have while sitting.
