Notes on Creative Context
Metadata
Highlights
- narrow creative contexts (mostly omitting “narrow”). This is the tiny little nub of a thing – maybe just an image or a phrase – that you hold onto, that gradually comes into focus, and then blossoms, the animating force driving the project. It’s the emotional and intellectual force driving the work, the thing you return to over and over. People will sometimes describe it as “the idea”, but it’s often both considerably more and less than an idea. And if you get disconnected from it, don’t nurture and stew in it enough, don’t believe in it enough, you start to lose contact with your project. (View Highlight)
- These are all things that you can grab a hold of, and keep coming back to, distilling and refining and improving, as the core driving a creative work. Surprisingly many friends of mine have told me that they did major research work because they got so terribly angry at some other paper or demo. Sometimes just a single sentence in a paper, or a few seconds in the demo! And yet when I look at their final work, I can see no relationship at all. But for them it was the emotional fuel.
I think this is, in part, what former Apple designer Jony Ive was talking about when he said of Steve Jobs: “he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.” (View Highlight)
- A few desirable qualities for creative contexts: Note that very few have all these qualities to the level you desire. You kinda have to develop techniques for improving them:
• They will help drive you to completion, shipping some project you care about, and whose scale is commensurate with your emotional involvement;
• They supply both a very powerful emotional and an intellectual context;
• The are relatively on demand and accessible when you want; and
• They’re ideally things you can revisit over and over and over again, gaining inspiration and motivation and drive for action. (View Highlight)
- In many ways that’s the hardest case, where it’s just you who has to develop and nurture the creative context. It’s so, so easy to lose emotional connection and urgency. (View Highlight)
- In particular: the more original a work, the harder it can be to connect with others on an ongoing basis, and the harder it is to create and maintain and improve that context. That is, I think, the central problem of creative solo work: finding and stably attending to powerful contexts, for long enough, and with enough belief, that you actually ship something. (View Highlight)
- Another trick is prompts: “I am scared that…” “The problem I’m having that I don’t want to think about is…” “The incredible opportunity that I’m shy to think about is…” “I fucking hate…” (View Highlight)
- A few desirable qualities for creative contexts: Note that very few have all these qualities to the level you desire. You kinda have to develop techniques for improving them:
• They will help drive you to completion, shipping some project you care about, and whose scale is commensurate with your emotional involvement;
• They supply both a very powerful emotional and an intellectual context;
• The are relatively on demand and accessible when you want; and
• They’re ideally things you can revisit over and over and over again, gaining inspiration and motivation and drive for action. (View Highlight)
New highlights added September 6, 2023 at 12:28 AM
- They should be as provoking as possible, emotional and intellectual fuel. Part of the challenge, of course, is that my thinking changes, the context evolves. But that’s part of learning to do this well. (View Highlight)
- Creative projects are primarily an emotional event, not an intellectual event, no matter the external form, and emotional and intellectual problems are intertwined. (View Highlight)
- Sharing: Shortly before starving to death in the Alaska wilderness, Christopher McCandless wrote in his diary “Happiness only real when shared”. I think this is true of many things in life. It’s true of creative work. For me, such work often is in part truly for myself – and it’s good to connect deeply to that part of myself. But also it’s invariably for others as well. It may only be for a tiny few other people, sometimes just a single person! But having extreme clarity about who am I making it for, and why, often helps enormously. (View Highlight)
- What are they actually for? When I share things with people whose good opinion I value, my work becomes for something. And so I want to tie my creative context also to a goal I believe in for an object to ship, and who I’m shipping for. I want to hold a very high value on shipping something. (View Highlight)
- I think this is part of why creative people often work so monomaniacally on things. It keeps them in the creative context. (View Highlight)
- When there is truly shared ownership and commitment – especially if it’s extremely important (maybe life-or-death!), and with people you admire enormously, and can grow with and trust – then they become shared custodians of an immensely powerful creative context. This can be just wonderful. But if it’s not fully owned with the others, it won’t be such a powerful creative context3. This, incidentally, is one reason why having people who aren’t living up to their commitments on a project is so debilitating. (View Highlight)
- I don’t control emotional response. But I can choose to harness it (or not): That said, I can influence it somewhat, create the conditions for it to occur. And having occurred I can lean into it, or away from it. But the key element is recognizing it, and deciding to act. For instance, I will read a paper, and maybe be very struck by some paragraph, full of energy. Maybe it ticks me off. I can recognize that, and decide to create something from it. Or not. (View Highlight)
- “Should” is the sign of a possibly dead context. The flipside is the things you “should not” work on. You’re obsessed by something which maybe you “shouldn’t” be, in the sense that it’s outside your identity. (View Highlight)
title: “Notes on Creative Context”
author: “michaelnotebook.com”
url: ”https://michaelnotebook.com/creative_context/index.html”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Notes on Creative Context
Metadata
Highlights
- narrow creative contexts (mostly omitting “narrow”). This is the tiny little nub of a thing – maybe just an image or a phrase – that you hold onto, that gradually comes into focus, and then blossoms, the animating force driving the project. It’s the emotional and intellectual force driving the work, the thing you return to over and over. People will sometimes describe it as “the idea”, but it’s often both considerably more and less than an idea. And if you get disconnected from it, don’t nurture and stew in it enough, don’t believe in it enough, you start to lose contact with your project. (View Highlight)
- These are all things that you can grab a hold of, and keep coming back to, distilling and refining and improving, as the core driving a creative work. Surprisingly many friends of mine have told me that they did major research work because they got so terribly angry at some other paper or demo. Sometimes just a single sentence in a paper, or a few seconds in the demo! And yet when I look at their final work, I can see no relationship at all. But for them it was the emotional fuel.
I think this is, in part, what former Apple designer Jony Ive was talking about when he said of Steve Jobs: “he treated the process of creativity with a rare and a wonderful reverence. You see, I think he better than anyone understood that while ideas ultimately can be so powerful, they begin as fragile, barely formed thoughts, so easily missed, so easily compromised, so easily just squished.” (View Highlight)
- A few desirable qualities for creative contexts: Note that very few have all these qualities to the level you desire. You kinda have to develop techniques for improving them:
• They will help drive you to completion, shipping some project you care about, and whose scale is commensurate with your emotional involvement;
• They supply both a very powerful emotional and an intellectual context;
• The are relatively on demand and accessible when you want; and
• They’re ideally things you can revisit over and over and over again, gaining inspiration and motivation and drive for action. (View Highlight)
- They should be as provoking as possible, emotional and intellectual fuel. Part of the challenge, of course, is that my thinking changes, the context evolves. But that’s part of learning to do this well. (View Highlight)
- In many ways that’s the hardest case, where it’s just you who has to develop and nurture the creative context. It’s so, so easy to lose emotional connection and urgency. (View Highlight)
- In particular: the more original a work, the harder it can be to connect with others on an ongoing basis, and the harder it is to create and maintain and improve that context. That is, I think, the central problem of creative solo work: finding and stably attending to powerful contexts, for long enough, and with enough belief, that you actually ship something. (View Highlight)
- Another trick is prompts: “I am scared that…” “The problem I’m having that I don’t want to think about is…” “The incredible opportunity that I’m shy to think about is…” “I fucking hate…” (View Highlight)
- A few desirable qualities for creative contexts: Note that very few have all these qualities to the level you desire. You kinda have to develop techniques for improving them:
• They will help drive you to completion, shipping some project you care about, and whose scale is commensurate with your emotional involvement;
• They supply both a very powerful emotional and an intellectual context;
• The are relatively on demand and accessible when you want; and
• They’re ideally things you can revisit over and over and over again, gaining inspiration and motivation and drive for action. (View Highlight)
- Creative projects are primarily an emotional event, not an intellectual event, no matter the external form, and emotional and intellectual problems are intertwined. (View Highlight)
- Sharing: Shortly before starving to death in the Alaska wilderness, Christopher McCandless wrote in his diary “Happiness only real when shared”. I think this is true of many things in life. It’s true of creative work. For me, such work often is in part truly for myself – and it’s good to connect deeply to that part of myself. But also it’s invariably for others as well. It may only be for a tiny few other people, sometimes just a single person! But having extreme clarity about who am I making it for, and why, often helps enormously. (View Highlight)
- What are they actually for? When I share things with people whose good opinion I value, my work becomes for something. And so I want to tie my creative context also to a goal I believe in for an object to ship, and who I’m shipping for. I want to hold a very high value on shipping something. (View Highlight)
- I think this is part of why creative people often work so monomaniacally on things. It keeps them in the creative context. (View Highlight)
- When there is truly shared ownership and commitment – especially if it’s extremely important (maybe life-or-death!), and with people you admire enormously, and can grow with and trust – then they become shared custodians of an immensely powerful creative context. This can be just wonderful. But if it’s not fully owned with the others, it won’t be such a powerful creative context3. This, incidentally, is one reason why having people who aren’t living up to their commitments on a project is so debilitating. (View Highlight)
- I don’t control emotional response. But I can choose to harness it (or not): That said, I can influence it somewhat, create the conditions for it to occur. And having occurred I can lean into it, or away from it. But the key element is recognizing it, and deciding to act. For instance, I will read a paper, and maybe be very struck by some paragraph, full of energy. Maybe it ticks me off. I can recognize that, and decide to create something from it. Or not. (View Highlight)
- “Should” is the sign of a possibly dead context. The flipside is the things you “should not” work on. You’re obsessed by something which maybe you “shouldn’t” be, in the sense that it’s outside your identity. (View Highlight)