| “… too many of us think of ideas as being singular, as if they float in the ether, fully formed and independent of the people who wrestle with them. Ideas, though, are not singular. They are forged through tens of thousands of decisions, often made by dozens of people.” |
I guess Ed Catmull already wrote this post. His concepts in “Creativity, Inc.” keep helping me along. I do think he’s being modest with the number of decisions, though.
I am all for taking the mysticism out of entertainment creation and giving the world more concrete simple steps to power. Here are the parts of this quote that empower me…
A dream doesn’t matter
Some people claim to capture ideas from dreams and that’s how they make. But what if you don’t remember dreams? What if our dreams are petty dreams about painting a hotel a fresh coat of off-white for days? I’m not much of a dreamer, but I am pompous enough to say dreams aren’t the work.
Certain studiers say dreams happen in 5 to 20 minutes. Let’s say we dreamt of the perfect stage play. It wouldn’t be complete. It wouldn’t even be started. Who knows what would even happen when we put down the first words on paper. It might be totally off when made concrete. Regardless of that, we have millions of decisions to make before we have script, before casting, directing, set building. The dream doesn’t make the play any more than deciding the color for the tickets makes the play.
Anything can be the starting point, and that starting point is dwarfed by the plethora of questions to come. It’s an even playing field.
Your misstep doesn’t matter
Go for it. Make bad decisions. Don’t let a tricky decision unravel our flow. Go. We’ll fix it later if it’s bad or it may end up taking us down unexpected paths to brilliance.
Get started fast
When we think of a project as a few steps, it’s easy to spend more time on step 1. It can make us want to savor that moment and get it just right. When we see that there will be an ever-unfolding todo list, and this will not get done on time, we can prototype fast. We can quickly draft. We don’t know how much stuff we’re procrastinating on. We can’t think “oh, I’m just putting off that one thing.” It’s a million things and we don’t know which ones are going to be harder than this thing we’re on now. Jump!
Back off in collaboration
Most conflict in collaboration comes from imagining too far ahead. We can’t imagine far enough ahead to wrap our brains around a million decisions. We can’t see where our team is going.
We can let go.
We can invest more in trusting our collaborators and letting go of the idea that we know what they’re going to do.
Understand the power of trust
Speaking of trust, we can stop expecting others to trust us. Why would someone trust that a book we pen is going to be good based on a paragraph we’ve written. We can respect the trust given to us even if we’ve written a dozen good books. There are millions of potential bad decisions even a great author could make.
Don’t hold on to a single decision
I like being wrong. Probably comes as a relief from trying to be right all the time. The littleness of each decision helps make it clear that it’s okay to be wrong. It’s okay to course correct. Sure it may seem that some choices have huge impact, but it’s a great exercise to allow the decisions to be small.