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Love What You Hate
In the world of Everything is a Remix, doing great work is about immersing yourself in what you love and drawing inspiration from it.
But what about disliking bad work—or even hating it? What about the cleansing fire of pure white-hot hatred?
You need hate too. Hate is fuel. Hate can even be inspiring.
Steve Jobs knew this. Jean Luc Godard Godard knew this. Miles Davis knew this. Frida Kahlo knew this. You should know it too.
Too much nicey-nice
In our current media ecosystem, we’re all people-pleasers craving clicks and likes and shares. We’re needy little puppies trying to be as cute as we can to get attention. Online culture is teeming with people-pleasing.
Our hyper-commercial, algorithmic, attention-seeking media environment lacks people who just don’t care what you want. They’re making what they want to see. If you like it, great. If not, whatever.
This is always the most exciting and vital work. And often, the people who make this kind of work are driven by a deep dislike of what’s out there.
The preeminent example of this sort of creator is Stanley Kubrick.
Stanley Kubrick
Kubrick hated most films, especially sci-fi
Antagonism towards movies drove Kubrick’s career. He grew up watching as many films as he could and disliking most of them. As he later said:
One of the things that gave me the most confidence in trying to make a film was seeing all the lousy films that I saw. Because I sat there and thought, “Well, I don’t know a goddamn thing about movies, but I know I can make a film better than that”.
A genre he thought was especially bad was science fiction. Kubrick thought sci-fi films were complete trash.
The science fiction author, Arthur C. Clark, who cowrote 2001 with Kubrick, recommended that Kubrick watch the 1936 H.G. Wells classic, Things to Come. Afterward, Kubrick complained to Clark, “What are you trying to do to me? I’ll never see anything you recommend again!”
Science fiction films were an anti-influence on Kubrick. Instead, he drew inspiration from European art films and other non-science fiction. But his biggest influence was simply reality – the work being done by NASA in the mid-sixties.
The resulting film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, was worlds better than any science fiction yet made, both in its imaginative scope and its visual execution.
The prehistoric monolith scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey
So what should you hate?
Think about what you hate and draw inspiration from it. Trust me, there is so much to hate. Greed. Waste. Destruction. Apathy. Bigotry.
Study what you hate. Deconstruct it. Understand it deeply.
And the beautiful thing that will happen in this process is you will transcend this hate. You’ll understand the perspective behind bad work. You’ll be grateful for these works because they’ve inspired you.
From Posters to Thumbnails
The Rise and Fall of Covers
As a kid in the eighties, I loved to pore through the album collections of my friend’s older brothers. The albums were typically metal or hard rock: KISS, Iron Maiden, Van Halen, Def Leppard, AC/DC, and so on.
The art was catnip for boys: boobs, horror or sci fi-style imagery, many of them seemed from the universe of Conan The Barbarian.
Cover of Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell
I never actually heard Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell, but I spent a long time staring at its cover. Looking at it now, the funny thing is there’s actually not much going on. My imagination created depths that weren’t there.
These covers were little worlds to explore as you immersed in the music. They were scary, intriguing, beautiful, exciting, funny, and sometimes elusive. They only suggested. Your imagination did all the heavy lifting. They were inspiring.
Cover of Supertramp’s Breakfast in America
Later I started to explore the rotating racks of paperback books that were common at many stores. Like so many others, the first covers to lure me in were Stephen King books, like Pet Semetary.
Cover of Stephen King’s Pet Semetary
Then I graduated to literary fiction. Long before I’d seen any of the hype about Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections, I already wanted to read it based on its bold and intriguing cover.
Cover of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
Movie posters were the most grandiose and dramatic of cover art. Initially, I’d just get minutes with them as I waited in line at movie theaters, but eventually, I could saunter through rows of VHS cassettes, gazing at covers and imagining what each film had in store.
Original Bladerunner movie poster
Covers were your first experience of new and unknown frontiers. You’d flick among covers, searching for a world you wanted to enter.
Several media revolutions later
With nothing but a single thumb, we continue to flick through covers decades later. We now have more covers than ever and they remain powerful instruments of intrigue. But now they’re small and infinite.
You used to feel you were in an archive, with the musty odor of ink and decaying wood. Now you feel like you’re seeing code in The Matrix.
The modern cover browsing experience on YouTube
Covers are highly optimized for engagement and ruthlessly efficient. We’re flooded with crazy faces, bright saturated colors, white outlines, arrows, split screens, clickbaity snippets of text.
There’s no pondering anymore. We flick, we tap. It’s like Tinder for entertainment.
So how do you recapture the old magic? It’s actually easy: head to your local bookstore, used or new, or the library. Book shops and libraries overflow with gorgeous modern covers and classics. If you’re wondering where you can find the best, most inspiring graphic art, just go walk among the aisles.
The cover of Never Let Me Go, a classic of modern literary fiction
My year in horror
Red Rooms (2024)
It’s Halloween, folks! So I’m putting on the ol’ film geek hat and nerding out to the best and less-than-best horror films of 2024. Let’s dive in.
My two towers: sci-fi and horror
For as long as I can remember, my favorite film genre has been science fiction. I was a Star Wars/Star Trek/Planet of the Apes kid and loved pretty much anything that was set in space. I even loved pure trash like The Black Hole, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and the original Battlestar Galactica. Without even a wisp of irony in my eight-year-old soul, I loved the James Bond Star Wars cash-in, Moonraker.
I loved Moonraker… when I was eight.
In more recent times, films like Children of Men, Ex Machina, Under the Skin, and the massively underrated Aniara rank high among my favorites. (Aniara, by the way, is way darker than almost all the horror films I’m going to mention.)
My other great love, though, was always horror. As a teen, I loved Friday the 13th, Halloween, The Evil Dead, The Exorcist, The Fly, Nightmare on Elm Street, Dawn of the Dead, The Return of the Living Dead, The Shining, The Thing, and of course, Alien, the best of both genre worlds.
Now, I can’t say that I love horror films quite like I love sci-fi films. Horror is mostly just entertainment for me. It’s a guilty pleasure, it appeals more to my gut than my mind or soul.
But still, it’s love. I’m a sucker for a good horror flick… or sometimes, even a bad one. Over the last couple months, after everybody is tucked away in bed and my brain is toast, I’ve kept up with the latest horror films. Here’s what I discovered.
The overlooked horror masterpiece of 2024…
The overlooked horror masterpiece of 2024 is Red Rooms, a French-Canadian psychological thriller. Although really, it’s not a horror film. It’s about horror–and I mean, real horror. The murders in the film are not exciting or dramatic or fun. They feel real and existentially sad.
Most horror films don’t stick with me, but this will be an exception. Red Rooms is an instant classic.
Sidenote: the film also features some of the very best “internet detective” scenes. I’ll be rewatching those.
Start with Shudder
A still from In a Violent Nature
The most bang for the buck for the horror aficionado is a Shudder subscription. Shudder has built a strong library of excellent indies. Here’s some of the best.
In a Violent Nature
This is Friday the 13th as directed by Gus Van Zant. If you understand what I just said, this movie is for you. If not, I’m guessing you’ll hate it.
Oddity
A gorgeous and elegantly executed film, in the A24 mold of upscale horror. The opening scene is a stunner.
Late Night with the Devil
This one was a big success for Shudder. I enjoyed it, though I won’t go so far as to say I think it’s good. Watch the trailer. If that looks fun to you, you should watch it.
Speak No Evil
There are now two versions of this film: the 2022 Danish original and a 2024 American remake. I enjoyed both, but the original is a strong and disturbing statement. Watch the original if you want the uncompromised vision. Watch the remake if you prefer horror that doesn’t go too hard.
The Shudder back catalog is also loaded with classics like Ring, Audition, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and the cult classic Exorcist 3.
The best and the rest
Still from Terrifier 3, somehow a #1 box office hit in the US
Beyond the Shudder platform, here are some of the best or most noteworthy horror films of 2024.
The First Omen
A prequel to the original The Omen, this is a prime example of IP done right. The goofy B-movie tone of the original film is expanded into something far more compelling.
Longlegs
Much like Midsommar is a semi-reboot of The Wicker Man, Longlegs is a semi-reboot of The Silence of the Lambs. It’s a good movie, but a great mood piece.
And a couple tentative comments on a pair of movies I’ve not seen yet.
Terrifier 3
I’ve not yet seen Terrifier 3, but its hype inspired me to watch Terrifier 1 and 2. The ultra-low-budget first movie is unremarkable aside from the character design, but the Terrifier 2 displays some imagination and skill. I know what to expect from Terrifier 3 – 80s-style slasher shlock. Beware of the extreme gore and sadism of these films, even though it’s all pretty campy. The charm–if I can use that word–of this franchise is that it’s so oddball, but the coming copycats will likely spoil the fun.
Smile 2
I’ve also not seen Smile 2, but I really enjoyed the first film and this sequel looks promising.
Talk To Me
If missed it, the best horror film of 2023 was Talk to Me.
Skippable
Cuckoo and MaXXXine are both decent enough for serious genre fans but skippable for everybody else.
Happy Halloween everybody!!!
There are affiliate links in this article.
How can you be creative if you have no time?
Image via Unsplash
It can seem impossible to find time for creative work when you’re working long hours or raising children or caretaking or coping with diminished health. How can you be creative if you have no time?
A powerful concept I love from David Kadavy’s excellent book Mind Management, Not Time Management is the Minimum Creative Dose. It’s inspired by the “minimum effective dose.” Just as there’s a smallest dose of medication needed to achieve a result, there’s also a smallest action required to make progress on a creative project. Think of it as creativity for the time-strapped.
By breaking creative projects down into smaller, manageable parts and focusing on completing the Minimum Creative Dose, you can keep moving forward, even without much spare time.
Kadavy highlights that this approach is especially useful for tough creative problems. By working brief sessions, you activate what he calls your Passive Genius—the part of your mind that works on problems in the background while you go about your day.
Kadavy adds that leaving work sessions slightly unfinished—what he calls open loops— allows your Passive Genius to continue processing, working on the problem without your direct effort.
Here’s how to try out the Minimum Creative Dose for yourself.
Identify the Smallest Step: Ask yourself: “What is the smallest action I can take that will move this forward?”
Keep It Simple: It should be so small that it feels easy and doable.
Leverage Incubation: Your subconscious will continue processing the open loop of your project, making connections without needing your active focus.
Repeat Consistently: Repeat sessions as often as you can and over the span of weeks or months, you can finish substantial creative projects.
Your Best Creative Ideas In 4 Steps
In this video, we explore the mysterious process of generating creative ideas, breaking it down into a four-step method known as BIAS: Bound, Ingest, Arrange, and Stop.
Drawing inspiration from James Webb Young’s classic technique for producing ideas, we’ll look at how setting boundaries, consuming diverse content, organizing your thoughts, and then stepping away from the work leads to breakthroughs. You'll learn how to harness the power of your subconscious mind to come up with innovative ideas, with practical tips on how to create the perfect conditions for inspiration to strike.
Transcript
Getting ideas is the most fun part of starting a new project. You get to just dive into a subject that you are passionate and excited about and you can just consume everything in sight. It's a ton of fun.
And like many creative things, getting ideas is not something that you go about in a super direct way.
I mean, getting ideas could be summarized as just...
ingest bunch of stuff,
brew on it,
and an idea pops up.
It's that simple, but also that mysterious. Like what happened here?
Dunno, nobody does.
I'll explain why shortly.
Quick detour before we get into it. Here's something super fun that can help you start feeling out a direction for your project. If you're into music, give yourself a soundtrack.
The filmmaker Ari Aster wrote the film "Midsummer" while listening to the British electronic musician, the Hacks and Clokes album Excavation. Check it out. You can hear how this creates a mood, a tone. It pulls you in a direction.
So give yourself a soundtrack. Listen to mood music when you are researching, writing, daydreaming, relaxing, whatever. Have fun with
All right, ready? Let's dig in. Let's get some ideas. Where ideas come from is an eternal mystery. Even authors who seem best equipped to reveal to us where ideas come from can't. The author, Neil Gaiman, simply put it this way.
We don't really know. And we're terrified the ideas will go away.
Ideas are mysterious for a very simple reason. They are generated by your subconscious mind, the part of your mind that you're unaware of. Your conscious mind, where we do what we consider thinking, never actually sees how the idea gets made. Your subconscious mind is the hero in your idea-seeking quest. Your job is to set it up so it can do its thing. The weird part is you will never actually be aware of what it's doing until it just lays an idea on you.
All you can do is create the conditions from which an idea will emerge.
So I have a process that does just this. I have used it for many years and it truly works. I don't think it has ever not worked. And further, I think any creator that you admire is doing some version of what I'm about to describe. This method is based on James Webb Young's short 1939 book, A Technique for Producing Ideas. Over the years, I've adapted it for my own needs. Without further ado, these are the four steps for getting an idea. I'll briefly introduce them here. Then I will go through them in detail.
Step 1: Bound
This is a simple and possibly brief, but vital phase in which you decide the boundaries in which you are going to explore.
Step 2: Ingest
In this step, you'll eat up everything you can within these boundaries. You can just think of this as research, but that makes it sound less fun than it actually is.
Step 3: Arrange
Next, you'll arrange the material which you have acquired. You'll study, organize, map, create stories, and so on.
Step 4: Stop
Yes, stop. Walk away, unplug, go do other things. That's when the magic happens. That's when the idea comes. You will then get an idea or ideas. Hopefully you'll get a small crop of them.
You can remember these four steps as BIAS:
Bound
Ingest
Arrange
Stop
All right, that's the overview. Let's go deeper with each of these.
Step 1: Bound
The first thing you need to do is establish boundaries. This will create a perimeter in which you will explore.
You're limiting yourself to one area and removing everything else. So you start with something like, let's say I wanna know everything about video essays from 2010, and you should be intensely interested in what lies within those boundaries.
This step is very important because if you get it wrong, you gotta start over. That's not quite as bad as it sounds, but let's try to avoid it. There are two mistakes you can make here.
You can choose boundaries that are too big, or you can choose boundaries that are too small. In other words, you can give yourself too much direction or not enough direction.
If you make your boundaries too small, you won't experience enough variety, okay? It's hard to come up with something exciting and different if you've limited yourself to a very small niche.
For instance, if you design cars and you just study four-door sedans, you will likely come up with just another four-door sedan.
If your boundaries are too small, you get mediocre ideas. Your imagination needs variety. It needs varying elements to play with.
Now, if you make your boundaries too large, your most likely outcome is no idea at all. When it comes to creativity, there most certainly is such a thing as too much freedom.
As is so often the case in life, you are seeking balance. You are seeking the sweet spot. You want that point that just feels right.
You want boundaries that are big enough to give you exciting possibilities, but narrow enough to give you a direction. As you do this more and more, you'll develop a feel for
Step 2: Ingest
Next, you will ingest everything you can within the boundaries you have established.
You will read books, talk to people, travel, try products, listen to music, taste foods, do whatever suits your subject.
In other words, you'll research. You will learn all you can within your area of interest.
Go deep here. This is the rare occasion where binging is good.
When you should leave the ingest phase is very difficult to describe, think of it this way. It's a feeling. Stop when you feel like your brain is full. When you feel like you've got a mind full, you're there. It's time to move on.
But here's that sweet spot again. Make sure you do indeed have a brain full. You don't want to leave this phase too early. You want to be fully saturated and filled to the brim. So if you have doubts about whether you've got a brain full or not, keep going, stay put, keep ingesting.
Step 3: Arrange
Next, you will study the materials you've collected and organize them. You'll arrange them into narratives, group things together, find connections, create maps of what you've learned, and more.
t is human nature to spend too much time on the previous phase, on the ingest phase. We are collectors by nature, whether it's books or magic cards or Pokemons or shoes or plants.
We love to collect. It's just a thing people enjoy. Arranging things might not feel like quite so much fun. Well, roll up your sleeves. It's time to do that homework.
And when you can find ways to make this process feel more fun, then do it. Like if you want to get a bulletin board and some red string and go on what feels like a conspiracy adventure, then have fun, and go for it. When you can make things more fun, then do it. This work is surprisingly hard, especially the deeper that you get. So when you can find ways to make things more fun, do it.
In the ingest phase, you might have to push yourself a little bit to stop. In the arrange phase, you might have to push yourself to keep going.
Now, I'm sure some of you might be thinking, are you kidding me? I love arranging things. This is gonna be even more fun than the last phase was. For you folks, let me warn you about something called analysis paralysis.
Don't let yourself get distracted by arranging and arranging and rearranging and finding new and different arrangements and on and on and on and on.
Again, the sweet spot is always your goal, folks. And the more you do this, the more you'll develop a feeling for when it is time to move on. All right, let's pause for a moment and recap because it's a lot, right? A lot has just happened. That was basically the whole process.
You've now done the hard work, okay? With these first three steps, you've gotten a teeming pot of ingredients bubbling away. And by arranging these materials as much as you can, you've set your subconscious mind up to work on generating an idea. Your subconscious mind will now take over and keep working on this problem. You won't be aware that this is happening, but it will be. You've given your mind a problem to solve and it will. This brings us to the final step and this is the easy one.
Step 4: Stop
We've arrived at the plot twist, folks. You now stop. Move on, go hang out with your family or friends, go on a walk, go see a movie, take a little vacation, do whatever your life and your schedule will allow. Your subconscious mind will now continue to play with this mass of information that you have filled it with.
Ideas like to happen in quiet moments, okay? And they often happen in one of the simplest of all human activities, walking. I cannot recall how many times people have told me that they get ideas while walking.
Other routine activities are also effective, showers, driving, cooking, gardening, riding your bike, sitting on a bus or subway.
Notice that these are all activities that require little of us. Ideas tend to come when your mind is open and unoccupied. In my very unscientific opinion, motion is good. Now that can mean moving your own body like going to take a walk or it can mean your body moving through space like on a train. JK Rowling, for instance, got the idea for Harry Potter while on a train. The objective here is to give your mind a break. Don't zone out on a bunch of social media or television shows. Don't stuff your mind with a bunch of nonsense.
Now, when an idea springs up, grab it, capture it.
The filmmaker David Lynch claims he has lost two or three big ideas. I've forgotten probably two or three major ideas and it may make you sick, it's just horrible. Write the idea down. You say, well, never forget this idea. Uh-uh, you can forget them. Your short-term memory is very short indeed. It's about 15 to 30 seconds. So when the idea arrives, the clock is ticking. Repeat it to yourself, hold it in your mind and then write it down. Make sure you give it enough detail that you can remember the full idea later. Don't just write down a few vague terms that don't really describe the idea.
I'll talk more about notes later, but your phone is perfect for this because it's with you most of the time or just carry a paper notebook. Do whatever you like, whatever works, do it. Okay, so after you stop, how long do you wait for an idea to appear?
I can't tell you exactly, but I would say it shouldn't take too long because after a while your mind will move on to other things. I would guess more like days or weeks. If it's taking months, I would say that it didn't work and you need to start over.
All right, here's what to do if this doesn't work. Let's say you've done everything I've described here, you did it to the best of your ability and no idea, nothing came up. I'm guessing what you got wrong is step one. Your boundaries are either too wide or too narrow. Adjust them and resume with step two. And then yes, you'll have to go through the other three steps, but it'll be quicker and easier this time because you're building on the work you've already done.
Now, another issue you could end up with is too many ideas. You can end up with a bunch of competing ideas. Needless to say, this is a problem you want. Matter of fact, if you keep coming up with ideas, you'll develop a library of ideas and you can only execute a limited number of them.
So that's how you get ideas. Now, how long should this entire process take, all four of the steps?
You are doing this while working and living your life. You're not doing this all day long. So how long this will take can vary a great deal. If you want to make something very small and specific, it could just be days. If you wanna make something big, could be months. That's what happened for me with Everything Is Remix. It took months.
There you have it. The four steps to getting an idea.
Bound, ingest, arrange, stop. Remember it as bias. It simply works.
AI won’t make art, but it will help us get work done
Dall-E 3 image created using the prompt "an android with writers block." Notice how much doesn't make sense in this image. There's a keyboard with no display AND a typewriter AND a pen and paper (I think).
One of the most insightful commentators on AI is the science fiction author Ted Chiang. (Somehow I have yet to read Chiang! If anyone has recommendations for where to start, let me know.)
Chang’s recent article, Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art, is packed with razor-sharp observations, like this…
Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.
And especially this…
What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new.
The entire piece is a great read and I largely agree with Chiang. But we diverge at an important fork in the road and this leads us to entirely different conclusions.
Chiang argues that AI won’t make art. Agreed. But its true potential lies elsewhere, in helping us manage the more mundane aspects of work.
A better definition of intelligence
Here’s how Chiang views intelligence.
The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills.
Intelligence is about how easily you learn. By that standard, my two-year-old son is brilliant. He gains and improves skills every moment of every day and sometimes wakes up having received a cognitive upgrade.
Viewed this way, AI can be seen for what it is: a very low-level form of intelligence. It’s extremely slow to learn, requires a colossal volume of data, and the result is a very fragile sort of knowledge.
Now, to be very clear, low-level intelligence is a historic milestone, very useful, and very promising. But my guess is it’s not a waystation en route to AGI.
This is not the AI you’re looking for
Chang refers to current AI as “turbocharged auto-complete.” This is exactly what it is. LLMs can cleverly predict words that are related to other words. That’s it.
We have an exaggerated idea of what current AI is because we conceive of it as, y’know, artificial intelligence. A more suitable descriptor would be Language Prediction Systems.
My guess is we are not on the path to AGI, but to something far less dramatic and far less threatening. This AI will be for gruntwork, not creative work and other cognitively demanding tasks.
AI’s superpower is boring work
The point where Chang and I diverge is on the topic of art.
Chiang is an artist and his focus is on AI’s application to artistic endeavors. He asks us this question…
…is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them?
Speaking as a small business owner and niche content creator, my answer is yes. There is not enough time in the day to write all the text that could benefit me and my audience. These tasks are not creative, they are mundane. I can’t generate all the promotional copy, support documents, summaries, drafts, and more that I need.
Also, many of these texts are only for internal use. Chang is a published author and assumes we all want to publish.
It’s clear to me that AI is useful for freelancers and small organizations. That’s what current AI excels at: information processing tasks.
AI doesn’t give you excellence. It gives you mediocrity. And most of the time, mediocrity is great. To paraphrase my friend Peter Nilsson, AI is superb at elevating you to the level of mediocrity. And guess what? We are sub-mediocre at almost everything.
This extends the productive reach of those of us who aren’t surrounded by skilled professionals.
AI may never create good art, let alone masterpieces… but that’s what I’d expect from a Language Prediction System.
This article contains an affiliate link to Ted Chiang's Amazon page. If you make a purchase through this link, I may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you.
Is Obsidian overhyped for creative work?
Obsidian has become the dominant note-taking application and attracted a fanbase so devoted it verges on a cult.
But anybody who’s tried Obsidian knows it has plenty of issues.
It’s not especially user-friendly and can be overwhelming.
It’s limited in weird ways.
Its mobile app isn’t very good.
It lacks collaboration features.
These issues prevent many from getting into Obsidian. And yet, I use Obsidian for notes and writing and I wholeheartedly recommend it. Obsidian deserves its cult. Why?
Obsidian knows your notes are gold
Your notes and writing are among the most precious documents you will create. You must never lose access to them and they need to be future-proof.
Obsidian gets this. Obsidian has no proprietary file format. It creates generic text files that are formatted using a simple text-based system called markdown. You can open these files with any of the countless applications that read markdown. So if Obsidian stops being developed or you stop liking it, no problem, you can easily switch to something else.
Also, my entire vault of notes is 35 megabytes. It’s quick and easy to upload it wherever. You can back it up on a flash drive or even on the free storage plan of DropBox, Google Drive, and so on.
Markdown is worth the small learning curve
Markdown text formatting makes your notes safe but it’s also part of Obsidian’s awkwardness. Markdown uses symbols like asterisks and hashtags to format text. For instance, italics are done with a pair of *asterisks*. So your documents get sprinkled with asterisks, hashtags, and more. We’re all accustomed to just seeing bold or italic or bullet points and not dealing with symbols.
Also, markdown formatting is very limited, so basic things like creating tables is clunky.
But markdown is worth its small learning curve.
Once you get used to it, markdown is fast and easy to type.
Markdown works in countless other places, like Notion, Trello, Asana, Slack, Discord, and Github.
Again, you will never lose access to your files and you can seamlessly open them in many applications.
Obsidian is a flexible way to think
I have abandoned folders and now arrange notes in a more flexible way. I structure my notes like a simple website and make regular use of the search function.
The basics of my note-taking and writing process are this.
1) Got a new idea? I drop it in a note called Inbox.
2) I break out the best ideas into new notes.
3) I create a list of links to related notes. For instance, for my recent The Remix Method course, the page I began with looked like this, like a mini-homepage.
The Remix Method Video Course
* Inbox
* How to get ideas
* Scheduling your days
* What is inspiration?
4) I then add text on this homepage as needed. So it might look something like this.
The Remix Method Video Course
Keep tone throughout light, fun and playful.
Each chapter should be less than 10 minutes.
* Inbox
* How to get ideas < SHORTEN
* Scheduling your days - combine this with Obey your body
* What is inspiration? < FOCUSPotential Additions
* Why we lose it
* Make a mess
Over time, what began as sketchy notes grows into a series of complete scripts.
Obsidian is not complicated if you don’t want it to be
A lot of Obsidian’s fans like to have elaborate, highly customized note systems. But Obsidian doesn’t need to be complicated. I use Obsidian in a very simple way.
I create notes
I arrange them
I link them
I search for past notes
You can make a great note system with just these basics. Anybody can do this. All it takes is just a little bit of practice and a little bit of patience.
What is powerful and profound about keeping notes is that after it gets rolling, it works for you. It is generative. It becomes almost like a collaborator. Your notes will do way more for you than ChatGPT.
When good systems go bad
Image via Unsplash
Over the years, I've added countless systems in my work and life that compensate for my weaknesses. They do everything from help me floss, to pack my son's school bag, to deliver complex video projects.
As systems have taken on a larger and larger role in my life I've realized one problem: they all eventually go too far. A good system can turn bad if you push it far enough.
When daily workouts backfire
For example, let's say you start cycling daily. You develop a little system that helps get you dressed, out of the door, on the road, and cleaned up afterward. For many months this is entirely successful.
But after a while, problems start emerging. Maybe you start getting pain in your knees, back, or hips. Maybe it’s fatigue because you're not recovering between rides. Maybe you have your first bad accident.
You can't just crank the "cycle daily" dial to 11. You need a counterbalance.
The solution: cycle three times a week and add some stretching.
The price of success
Work and creative systems are the same. If you work a system well enough, drawbacks emerge. It's the price of success.
For instance, I'm a big believer in notes. Notes changed the creative game for me, but it's easy to go too far with notes.
You can collect too many notes.
You can waste time organizing notes.
You can consume too much media.
Above all, notes can limit your imagination. Instead of freely inhabiting your imagination, you limit yourself to the confines of your notes.
The solution:
Create fewer notes, but higher quality
Focus more on reviewing notes, less on piling up new notes
So really, it’s not that all systems eventually go bad. It's this: good system systems incorporate counterbalance.
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My biggest problem
The big event for me right now is the launch of The Remix Method.
So The Remix Method is out, it’s awesome, I’m happy… but my biggest problem reared its ugly head again on this project.
Here are the two big issues that cropped up.
The course took about 200 hours to make. That’s double what I planned.
The course shipped seven weeks later than planned.
These two issues represent a larger problem I’ve had for many years now: sprawl.
Sprawl is when a project expands after you start working on it – perhaps by many multiples. Imagine starting to run a race, and then noticing, off in the distance, the finish line rushing away from you and disappearing over the horizon.
This happens to me quite a bit on my own projects – and occasionally on client work. Another term for sprawl is “scope creep.”
I’m just now emerging from two sprawls. One was The Remix Method and the other is a video commission for a major newspaper that has dragged on for months. That one proved surprisingly difficult to define and I had to do a lot of rewrites to shape it.
Why does this keep happening?
What do these two projects have in common? The topic of creativity. I consider creativity my wheelhouse, but the topic is innately vast and this vastness creates boundary problems.
That’s my biggest problem: setting the right boundaries for projects. In other words, shaping it, defining what it is, and, even more importantly, what it is not.
I mostly set the boundaries too wide. This wastes time in a couple of ways.
Loads of excess material gets created that ultimately won’t fit the project. For The Remix Method, I created about 40 drafts for additional chapters.
Then a bunch of time and mental energy is spent adjusting the boundaries until I finally get it right.
So I know what the issue is. Why on earth do I keep falling into this trap?
It’s simple: doing interesting things requires boundaries that are a bit wide. One of my strengths as a storyteller is that I can perceive topics from a wide-angle perspective. This is one of the major reasons you’re reading me right now.
I need to find better ways to discover the right boundaries for projects before I commit to them. I won’t go into how I plan to do this and it’s still something I’m sorting out, but I’ll revisit this topic in the future.
In the meantime, here are some adjustments I’ll be making to minimize sprawl.
Be aware that my favorite topic, creativity, tends to have boundary issues. I got tricked this time because I know the topic so well and I figured I’d have the boundaries better defined than I did.
Thanks to The Remix Method, I now have a specific framework I can build on. The creation of the course has given me tighter boundaries to work within. I’ll be sticking to that terrain for a good long while.
Lastly and most simply: I have no plans to make a large-scale project for a bit. I’ll be keeping everything smaller for the foreseeable future.
Alright, that’s it for this time folks! See you all in a while!
K
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