I hate seeing good people buy bad things. It’s not my business what someone buys with their money or attention, but I do care about the work that a creator/marketer presents to a paying public. To use a food analogy, I feel especially angry when the presentation is all sizzle and no steak; when a piece of low-quality beef that was hurriedly and unlovingly prepared is being billed as a bone-in ribeye that’s been painstakingly marinated, seared, and slow-cooked into a medium-rare oblivion of bliss.

Quality matters. But so does presentation. Substance without style is never even looked at. But style without substance is a blatant lie.

Here’s what got me thinking…

Is it fair to judge a book by its cover?

An acquaintance of mine from years ago recently published a book. I saw a very excited post on Facebook about it, overwhelmed with emotion about the book “hitting the bestseller list.” I was curious and excited because I like this person and wanted to see what he had made, so I clicked through to check it out. Immediately, my bullshit meter started pinging based on the design of the website and book. But I wanted to give it a chance. After all, he was self-publishing this book, and maybe he’d had to create the collateral himself (he’s not a designer). So I bought the book, hoping there was more substance than there was style.

I’m sad to report that book is an utter waste of space and attention. More than money, I want my time back.

I’ve come to realize that while I love style, I don’t value style unless it’s backed by substance. And so I find myself conflicted. I’m torn between judging the merits of another’s work and Read the rest…

I’ve come to believe all creative work is a constant struggle between hope and fear. Hope that what I’m making will add value to the world. Hope that it will be accepted by the market. Hope that it will be interesting or resonate in a meaningful way. Fear that it won’t. Fear that everyone will laugh at me. Fear that people will call me names and think I’m an idiot for having made something so laughably dumb.

There’s a lot of fear. Especially when I let the noise in or get sucked into the trap of comparing myself to others.

But none of these fears outshines the biggest fear I have. Top billing is reserved for a fear that whispers to me in my quiet moments, the moments when I’m otherwise unencumbered and have some space to think: my fear of getting too comfortable. My fear that I’ll stop growing, which is the day a creative starts dying. The mere suggestion of such a stall scares me. But I remain hopeful.

Hope - Fear = Momentum

I’ve come to realize that the moment-to-moment balance between hope and fear is a leading indicator of my momentum on a project. In any creative work, shit happens: features turn out to be much more difficult or impossible to implement, characters don’t develop predictably, plots change, timelines shift. Each of these moments feels like a miniature crisis, threatening the very life of my project itself and calling into question my sanity and capabilities. Over the course of a project this can happen tens or hundreds of times—and the effects are cumulative. If measurable, the psychological sum of these moments would represent a score indicating where on the fear–hope continuum I’m currently operating. The closer I am to fear Read the rest…

It’s an incredible moment when you meet the real person inside someone you’ve casually known for years.

Tonight I was at a dinner at USC with a large group of people I’ve known since my time there. Most of us have met before, had some meetings, maybe even been out socially in that sort-of-colleagues-but-also-sort-of-friends way that was so common in my life before I got that I have to bring who I really am to everything I do.

At dinner, I re-connected with a college peer I’ve known for about six years. I wouldn’t say we were ever friends, but we knew each other and had worked together. After dinner, we walked together across campus and had the first real conversation we’ve ever had. It was exciting—I made a new friend, a real friend—we had independently experienced similar struggles and were discussing our journeys since leaving college. When we parted, I felt like I had just met an entirely different person. We hugged, and without even thinking I said “nice to meet you” to a guy I’ve known for six years. But in a sense, I had just met the real him for the first time.

Conversations are powerful.

Conversations are powerful because moments are powerful. Moments are where we take risk. Read the rest…

Over the weekend, I dropped Wordpress and moved this blog to Octopress.

I’m still working out a few kinks with the switch, but those should be resolved soon.

Why the switch? Simple:

• Octopress is much, much faster than Wordpress. The old blog was horribly slow and that drove me nuts, not to mention hurting my Google-juice. It used to take 1.5 seconds before the server would even start sending you a response when you come here. Now, it takes somewhere around 0.2 seconds. That’s a huge improvement—nobody likes a slow site.
• Wordpress is bloated. It is a pain in the ass to maintain, and has far more stuff packed into it than any blog actually needs. This is because Wordpress is poorly designed from a maintenance perspective, and it is trying to be all things to all people as a CMS.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the new site. So far, I certainly do.

Josh Waitzkin was about to get his ass kicked, and he knew it.

In November 2000, Josh Waitzkin, a former national chess master—he was the subject of the movie “Searching for Bobby Fischer”—was competing in the opening round of the Chung Hwa Cup, the world championship of the Tai Chi Push Hands martial art. His opening match was supposed to be just after 9am. Around 8:30, Waitzkin went into his thirty minute pre-match routine. However, the matches did not proceed according to the official posted schedule (the Taiwanese officials of this tournament often devise tricks to throw off foreign competitors). Waitzkin had no food to snack on, and by noon he was starving and ate the greasy food he was given. Minutes after finishing his meal, he was called to the judges table and told that his match would begin immediately. He had no time to warm up or prepare. He was scattered, unfocused, and had a stomach full of greasy food. The match was over before it even began.

Waitzkin was obliterated in minutes. Waitzkin left that tournament shell-shocked, and infuriated that he didn’t even give himself a real shot at competing due to his lack of flexibility as a performer. He also left determined to return again, ready for anything.

Underneath his astounding achievements, Josh Waitzkin is one of the best learners in the world. By this I mean that he has become world-class at becoming world-class. Often referred to as meta-learning, it is mastery of the learning process itself. I recently read Waitzkin’s book, The Art of Learning, and was shocked by the depth of his understanding of the learning process and its relationship to achieving and sustaining elite performance. If you’re interested in exploring that connection, I highly recommend reading this book.

When discussing peak performance, usually in an athletic context, people tend to focus almost exclusively on the big moments. The last leg of the race, the fourth and nine conversion to keep the game-winning drive alive, the clutch three to go to overtime and win. The moments where wins or losses are obviously decided.

I love the big moment, but I’m far more interested in everything behind that moment. What are the ongoing processes, routines, rhythms that elite performers have built into their lives? How do they train for adversity? We will explore these questions and more in the future of this blog, as they are critical to being consistently creative at a high level, which is one of my primary goals. For the balance of this post, we’ll focus on one principle: the dynamic between peak moments and moments of rest, and how to traverse the gap between them.

Back to Waitzkin: what had to change to get to the next level at the world championships? He needed to master the ability to get in the zone, on demand. To be ready to go, at a moments notice, despite the appearance of unexpected or unfair distractions and obstacles. But how does a performer wrangle a state that is temporary and often fleeting? Read the rest…

I was chatting with Jaclyn at lunch yesterday and realized that I need to clarify the topic matter and direction for this blog going forward.

Much of where we’re going is driven by my high-level goals, which are simple but expansive. I want to be as creative as possible, which requires being prolific, brilliant, and healthy. I want to have uplifting relationships with great people. And I want to create peak experiences for myself and others.

Growing out of those goals, much of the future material for this blog will be focusing on themes that underscore those goals: The learning process. Creative inspiration and practices. Energy management. Performance psychology. Philosophies of experimentation and perception of risk.

I currently encapsulate all of this in the phrase “experiments in applied creativity.” My goal is to learn and grow, and for this blog to be a sort of learning lab where you’re along for the ride.

These ideas will be our roadmap. And I think the journey will be better than any destination.

Have you met The Zealot lately?

He’s the bombastic preacher who blasts all other forms of worship.

He’s the chess player who is entirely reliant on memorized gambits to win or confound his opponent, and is upset when it’s not enough.

He’s the middle manager who insists that This is How It Must Be Done. Why? Because this is how it must be done.

What do these zealots share? Circular logic. A vague malaise. A low sense of their ability to create or adapt to new ways of doing things. An inability to improvise, because they have not grasped the deeper principles of their chosen framework and integrated those principles into an overall seamless flow in decision making.

On the other hand, there’s Charlie:

Charlie Munger is a billionaire and philanthropist who is the cofounder of Berkshire Hathaway. Charlie is famous for giving speeches, and being able to think very deeply about a wide range of problems.

Here’s the difference between Charlie and The Zealot: dependence.

Charlie knows that every framework has a point of view that can be useful. Read the rest…

On Friday, November 10th, 2006, Lawrence Jackson was running out of time. The All-American defensive end for the USC Trojans had yet to register a sack in his junior season. Coming into the season, Jackson had his sights on a national title, a Bednarik award, and possibly a first-round pick in the coming NFL draft.

But so far? Eight games in. Zero sacks.

Jackson obsessed over it. It was all he thought about. As Jackson saw it at the time, even if he was playing well overall, without sacks, he was invisible.

But by midnight on Saturday the 11th, Jackson was the star of USC’s victory over Oregon—a nationally televised, primetime game with major implications on bowl bids. He accumulated three sacks, ten tackles, and one tackle for a loss—a landmark game by any standard.

So what changed in a mere 36 hours?

His approach to the game. Read the rest…

TOTAL READING TIME: 20 minutes
BOLDED SECTIONS ONLY: 4 minutes

Two weeks ago, Jody killed himself. He was a great man, entrepreneur, and teacher. I didn’t know him well, but I knew enough of him to know that. And I know many people who were very close with him and are still in shock about it. It is a sad time but if there is a silver lining, it’s that people may take mental health more seriously and stop demonizing or avoiding the issue. For Jody and all those who struggle as he did, I hope we do.

Last week, I strained the plantar fascia in my foot running and every step I’ve taken since has been a jolt of pain. I average roughly 7,000 steps a day, which is 7,000 daily jolts of pain. You don’t realize how many steps you take in a day until they all hurt.

This week, I’ve been thinking a lot about pain. In our culture, we aren’t comfortable talking about pain openly, which is a major problem.

This post is going there. We’re going to explore pain. It’s an inevitable part of life, and I want to know more about it so I can deal with it better.

Not into it? I understand — you should go watch this awesome video of extreme sports filmed from a helicopter instead.

Still here? I’m glad. First, let’s acknowledge that pain is a big, complicated topic. It’s impossible for this post to adequately cover the totality of suffering or its sub-branches.

I have two goals here:

1. I want to understand what’s going on in my body when I hurt. I’m hoping to understand pain better so I can be more thoughtful about dealing with pain in my life, and less reactive. I want to move through pain constructively and heal when it inevitably occurs.

2. Bad things happen when people don’t discuss their pain. Understanding is an essential ingredient in productive, open conversations — which we need to have when we are in pain.. So I hope that you will be open to discussing pain with people that care about you when you hurt. Even if you are slightly more willing to have an open, honest, and informed discussion about pain as a result of this post, I will consider that a win. No one is immune to pain. Ignoring that reality will not make your life any better.

Why is this post worth my time?

Learning to deal with and resolve pain is a critical life skill. No matter who you are — you can be a world-famous athlete, or just an average Joe — pain can take over your life at the most basic level, prohibiting you from pursuing or achieving any higher-level goals. Read the rest…

Two months ago, I was scared. Scared I wouldn’t be able to keep up the course I was on. Scared my progress would grind to a stop. Scared I wouldn’t be able to deliver on the commitments that I’d made. Scared that I couldn’t cut it on the new level I was playing at.

See, about five months before that, I’d decided to go full time into product and software engineering with very little background in it. It was an incredible opportunity: join one of the best software product teams in the world and learn from, and with, the best. My answer was yes, almost without thinking, when I got the chance.

That was the end of last April. True or not, I believed that to rapidly get to a level where I could really contribute, I’d have to make an almost Faustian bargain: I would have to drop everything else in my life to learn what I needed to in such a short period of time. Social life, hobbies, most everything that I did for fun, gone. Note: there was no explicit deadline looming, but I always feel the clock ticking in my head. One of the curses of my brain. But to me, this deal was a no-brainer.

Pulling it off damn near broke me. As of early December, I was burned out. Totally fried. I could barely think straight anymore — even easy problems felt overwhelming, and I felt a sort of persistent mental cloudiness. I’d experienced that once or twice before in my life, but not in years. I knew something was seriously wrong and needed to change, stat, or things were going downhill.

It turned out the answer was two-fold: first, I needed to take care of myself physically. It’s not news at all: Regular exercise and a healthy diet are essential (I follow a low carb, Paleo-ish diet). The mid-afternoon hours always feel flat to me, so I started going for a light jog during that time. Within 3 days, I felt hopeful again and the cloud was dissipating. But it wasn’t enough.

The other key was, paradoxically, to do less. I won’t go into a whole “less is more” tangent right now, although I do believe it to be true. Taking care of your body is only the first step in getting to a place of sustained energy and creativity, and knowing that maintaining that level is NOT an accident or stroke of luck. That feeling alone is huge: knowing how to systematically crank up your creativity. The other part is cultivating the mental space and stimuli that make you better.

In this post, I’m going to explore the mental side of reclaiming creativity and energy around work, through the vehicle that saved my ass and is rarely given the credit it deserves: a hobby. This post will give you ideas for how to get your creativity going again if you feel like I did two months ago.

Before I get into what you should do, let’s cover what you shouldn’t do: abuse alcohol and/or drugs, or stay out all night. While it’s tempting to go rage a lot and internally justify it as a well-deserved escape, this will lead to bad places. I’ve tried it and it doesn’t work.

Now, on to what does work: systematically opening up space and filling it with things that stoke your creativity. Caveat: I recommend getting your health in order before taking up other hobbies. There is nothing that generates a higher return for you than an investment in your own health.

Why should you use your time and energy to cultivate a hobby?

Context switching is a powerful hack for your mind

Your mind can be a Clydesdale horse, or a jackrabbit that runs everywhere. It is each at different times, and times when each serves you best. Learning to switch between these two modes is a useful exercise, because each is useful at different parts of the creative process. The jackrabbit is very useful early in the creative process, when you want to generate a LOT of ideas. Quantity of ideas leads to quality of ideas, and the jackrabbit is your go-to mode here. But later in the creative process, when it comes to actually creating and delivering something of value, you want to go into Clydesdale mode. You need to hitch your mind to a certain context and let it go to work. That’s how you’re able to “turn it on” when you get into your office — your mind develops an almost Pavlovian response to the context of your office. That space means it’s time to go to work. This is referred to as “embodied thinking,” in which our physical context frames not just the types of ideas we have, but even the frames in which we think and the metaphors we use to explore ideas.

Fair enough, Andrew, but how does this help me be more creative overall? It’s an easy one to miss. There is a pattern at work: association with a context influences the ideas that come to mind for us and affects what we think of. So you can do two things to make yourself more creative: first, you develop a second context for your hobby. For me, that new physical space was right around my kitchen table and stove, where I spend a lot of time reading recipes and cooking.

But the real hack is to get your mind going in one context, and then when you are not making any progress, switch to the other context. The background processes in your mind will still be working on things from the first context (programming) and your conscious mind will be occupied with the new context (cooking). This lets your subconscious do its thing and generate more answers, and fairly predictably you will realize the answer to a problem while doing your hobby.

This is the exact same principle as having an idea hit you while you’re in the shower, or busy doing something else: your subconscious doesn’t stop.

Third, the creative problems of your hobby will often find strange ways of overlapping with the creative problems you face on a day to day basis. It turns out cooking and programming have lots in common: on a basic level, you have a set of inputs that have to be manipulated to produce a desired outcome and state, with lots of constraints and state changes along the way. Working through the problems in one improves abilities in the other.

Hobbies lower the cost of experimentation and perceived risk of failure

Our minds tend to generate their best ideas when at play, because we freely form new associations without risk. Developing a hobby is great for developing the habit of low-cost experimentation. Failure is cheaper, so we try more things and in turn get more results. When we’re at play in our hobby, making a mistake is not fatal and we know that. This contrasts with the way we implicitly view experimentation at work: risk. Read the rest…