Author: phillip

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Distill Your Work to Its Essence

Creative wisdom often advises us to boil down the work to its essence. You must keep the essence – the core theme – in mind when creating. Otherwise, how can you stay on track?

Different people have different techniques for this:

  • Steven Pressfield advises us to boil down an enterprise into a single page.
  • Austin Kleon chooses a “secret sentence” for each book he writes.
  • Francis Ford Coppola choses a single word for each film.
  • Quintus Curtius points out how Pliny advised speakers to distill matters to their essentials and hammer the points home over and over again – “focus on the main issue and never leave it”.
  • Gary Keller has his concepts of 4-1-1 planning (4 weeks, 1 month, 1 year) and the 1-3-5 planning (one goal, three strategies, five priorities for each strategy) – effectively boiling down your goals into actionable, one-page plans.

What, specifically, you choose to do does not matter much. But you do need to distill down to the essence. Do not stray. Stay to the path.

(This also works as a pre-writing exercise: ask yourself what the core concept is, and make sure it is clear to you.)

References

  • Nobody Wants to Read Your Sh\*t by Steven Pressfield

    The problem in fiction, from the thrashing writer’s point of view, is almost always, “What is this damn thing about?”

    In other words, what’s the theme? What’s the theme of our book, our play, our movie script? What’s the theme of our new restaurant, our start-up, our video game?

    When we don’t know the theme, we don’t know the Problem.

    When you as a writer carry over and apply this mode of thinking to other fields, say the writing of novels or movies or nonfiction, the first question you ask yourself at the start of any project is, “What’s the concept?”

  • Do the Work by Steven Pressfield

    Discipline yourself to boil down your story/new business/philanthropic enterprise to a single page.

  • See the Throat, and Latch on to It by Quintus Curtius

    By this he meant, of course, that the speaker must distill matters down to their essentials, and hammer home these points over and over. Since men’s powers of judgment vary widely, and their estimations are prone to gross distortion resulting from their backgrounds and experiences, the speaker must focus on the main issue and never leave it.

  • In One Word by Austin Kleon

    At the very end of this video (excerpted here), the director Francis Ford Coppola explains how he chooses a single word for each of films to keep him on track as he makes decision after decision:

    Learning from the great Elia Kazan, I always try to have a word that is the core of what the movie is really about.

    In one word.

    For Godfather, the key word is “succession.” That’s what the movie is about.

    Apocalypse Now: “morality.”

    The Conversation: “privacy.”

    Megalopolis. You know what it is? “Sincerity.” That’s the word I use when I say, “What should I do?”

    For each book I write, I choose a secret sentence.

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The only person you need to be aggressive and straightforward with is yourself

Jocko Willink made a comment roughly along these lines in a podcast episode (which one, I failed to note).

The only person you are allowed to be aggressive and straightforward with is yourself.

Being aggressive to others is not a good tactic. It does not work; it only makes people enemies.

Be covert and use influence.

This makes me think of my younger self – he was definitely guilty of being aggressive and straightforward with others. I can confirm that, as Jocko says, it does not work. In the best case, such an attitude results in intimidation. In the worst case, fear. Neither leads to an endpoint of being effective. Even in cultures that claim to operate in an aggressive spirit, this type of approach only serves to build enemies.

Play the game, even if it seems painful or offensive to you. Building up relationship capital is the best path to success in your interpersonal endeavors.

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Don’t shoot down other people’s ideas

Humans, in general, are so keen on shutting down other people’s ideas. Especially when what is being suggested sounds wrong or stupid to our ears.

Adopt Jocko’s attitude instead: don’t shoot down ideas, or crush people, or insult. Swallow your pride. Don’t voice pointless disagreements. This applies whether or not we are in a leadership or creative role.

These people are sharing information. You can learn from anything you don’t shut down blindly. Perhaps there is the seed of a good suggestion even in the seemingly stupid comment. Perhaps you are learning something about the person making the suggestion. Perhaps, if you swallowed your own ego, you would see that the suggested idea is even better than what you were thinking of.

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Advice from General Gronski: Know Your Person Core Values

On Jocko Podcast episode 302, Gen. Gronski advises you to know your personal core values. This isn’t just having them written down – you need to be able to list them off if asked. Without knowing them, they can’t factor into your decisions. Take the time to identify them. When you go to make a decision check – does this decision align with your core values?

The same thing applies for your business’s core values: does your company view decisions through these values, making sure they are aligned? how do you check that?

This is the critical part, and cannot be emphasized enough: know your values and then use them.

Gen. Gronski also suggests that you go on to identifying behaviors that map to those values (e.g., organizational behaviors that you want your employees to adopt). This means identifying pre-scripted behaviors that are aligned with your values. Create your own situational playbook: “When X we do Y. We handle Z by C.”

References

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Quotes on Training (in a Business Context)

Does your company invest in training? Or are you all just winging it?

The 48 Laws of Power by Robert Greene:

What’s the point of winging it, of just hoping you may be able to charm this or that client? It’s like shooting ducks blindfolded. Arm yourself with a little knowledge and your aim improves.

Sell or Be Sold by Grant Cardone:

If you find yourself backing off anywhere in the sales game, it is because you are not submersing yourself enough in training and education and then practicing-drilling-rehearsing.

I want to connect these notes on training with checklists, which we should be using in training and execution. From The Checklist Manifesto:

It is common to misconceive how checklists function in complex lines of work. They are not comprehensive how-to guides, whether for building a skyscraper or getting a plane out of trouble. They are quick and simple tools aimed to buttress the skills of expert professionals. And by remaining swift and usable and resolutely modest, they are saving thousands upon thousands of lives.

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Three Quotes on Asking Questions

Is lack of curiosity an age-related condition? by Peter Attia

What is it about children that makes them ask so many curious and thoughtful questions that adults can’t answer, or never even think to ask? If I’d been keeping score, I doubt I’ve had answers to more than half of my kids’ questions. Or maybe it’s just that the questions I can’t answer become more seared into my memory than the ones I can.

In Building a Second Brain, Tiago Forte suggests relating your work and learning efforts to a set of questions you’re interested in:

Ask yourself, “What are the questions I’ve always been interested in?” This could include grand, sweeping questions like “How can we make society fairer and more equitable?” as well as practical ones like “How can I make it a habit to exercise every day?” It might include questions about relationships, such as “How can I have closer relationships with the people I love?” or productivity, like “How can I spend more of my time doing high-value work?”

This quote from Willingness to look stupid, by Dan Luu, reminds us to keep asking questions without the fear of “looking stupid”:

Although most of the examples above are “real life” examples, being willing to look stupid is also highly effective at work. Besides the obvious reason that it allows you to learn faster and become more effective, it also makes it much easier to find high ROI ideas. If you go after trendy or reasonable sounding ideas, to do something really extraordinary, you have to have better ideas/execution than everyone else working on the same problem. But if you’re thinking about ideas that most people consider too stupid to consider, you’ll often run into ideas that are both very high ROI as well as simple and easy that anyone could’ve done had they not dismissed the idea out of hand. It may still technically be true that you need to have better execution than anyone else who’s trying the same thing, but if no one else trying the same thing, that’s easy to do!

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Three Quotes on Leadership

Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin:

PRINCIPLE
What’s the mission?

Planning begins with mission analysis. Leaders must identify clear directives for the team. Once they themselves understand the mission, they can impart this knowledge to their key leaders and frontline troops tasked with executing the mission.

Ridgeline by Michael Punke:

Red Cloud had learned the virtue of patience over the years—or at least resigned himself to the need for it. As he waited, he found it particularly difficult to apply in practice. Others—like Crazy Horse and High Backbone and Big Nose—would do the fighting. His responsibility was different, and it was difficult to adjust to this new role. His responsibility today was not to fight, but to watch … to observe and to think.

Twenty-Seven Articles by T.E. Lawrence

Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually, also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as, perhaps, you think it is.

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The Dichotomy Between Memento Mori and Future Planning

Zorba the Greek poses a key question:

Look, I was passing through a small village one day. An old fogey ninety years old was planting an almond tree. ‘Hey, grandpa,’ I say to him, ‘are you really planting an almond tree?’ And he, all bent over as he was, he turns and says to me, ‘My boy, I act as though I’m never going to die.’ I answered him in my turn, ‘I act as though I’m going to die at any moment.’ Which of the two of us was right, Boss?””

You certainly want to keep death in the forefront of your mind. You can easily forget that the future is not guaranteed. You can easily trade the present moment for an uncertain future. As Marcus Aurelius stated so succinctly:

You could be good today. But instead you choose tomorrow.

But this does not mean that you forego planning for the future entirely. You do not know when your death will come, and you may be blessed (or cursed) with a long life. It would be a mistake to ignore the future in your calculations.

This is the dichotomy between memento mori and the need to consider the future. You want to adopt a middle road, if you can find it. Plan and invest as if you’re going to live forever (plant that tree, continue to invest in learning). At the same time, keep your death firmly focused in mind. Enjoy the present – for that is all that you are ever really given.

One perspective cannot be allowed to dominate the other.

References

  • Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
  • A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine

    As Seneca notes, “If God is pleased to add another day, we should welcome it with glad hearts.”4 And after celebrating having been given another day to live, we can fill that day with appreciative living.

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Creating and Editing Require Different Mindsets

When you’re working as a creative, whether that is as a programmer, a writer, or a musician, it is important for you to recognize that creating and editing are two different mindsets. You need to separate the two processes. If you don’t, you will block the creative process. You’ll be at risk of tuning into “K-FKD radio”. You’ll also be less effective, as you’re not aligning the work in front of you with the mode you’re in.

Application for General Creative Thought

Fundamentally, you want to create and edit at different times or on different days. One way to approach this physically is with Walt Disney’s three-stage creative process.

What we are really trying to separate is the generative flow and the critic. When ideas are coming, we want to receive all of them. Their quality is not important when the ideas are flowing, just capture them while they are coming.

The time to review ideas, to edit a work, or to scope the effort is separate – nothing stops the flow of ideas like those types of activities. And when you’re in that critic mode,

Application to Writing

Start with a brain dump – don’t organize or edit or filter, just let it flow. Then, later, reorganize into a coherent outline.

Write your first draft by vomiting on the page. Then, later, go through and edit it into something more succinct and effective.

Recognize what mode you’re in, and tune your tasks to that.

Application to Programming and Product Development

Writing new code, in the sense of exploring a problem space or taking a first pass implementation, is more creative/generative in nature. So is coming up with the design for a (sub)system, brainstorming product features, and figuring out what kinds of tests you might need at the factory.

Code reviews, design reviews, refactoring code, running static analysis tools: these are tasks for the critic mode.

A common problem in software development is that we don’t often enforce good separation of these modes, often mixing the work. We set out to write new code, but end up getting sucked into refactoring work along the way. It would be much better to refactor first, then write new code. Or solve the new problem first, and then refactor to a more elegant solution. Similarly, the time to clean up commits is at the end of a working session, not in the middle of it.

Mob programming is often held up as an alternative to code reviews. The problem is that writing the code and reviewing code mixes the two mindsets, and the same separation idea applies. Also, if you’re focused on solving a problem as a group, you’re going to approach the work differently than if you’re focused on looking at the code as a group with the editor mindset applied.

In fact, how powerful would it be to have mob code reviews? Look over the code as a group and identify all the ways you can make improvements. Why not schedule that as a regular weekly team activity? How much better could you make your code base?

References

  • A Guide to Code Inspections by Jack Ganssle

    The author is present to provide insight into his intentions when those are not clear (which is a sign there’s a problem with either the code or the documentation). If a people shortage means you’ve doubled up roles, the author may not also be the reader. In writing prose it has long been known that editing your own work is fraught with risk: you see what you thought you wrote, not what’s on the paper. The same is true for code.

  • Do the Work by Steven Pressfield

    Let’s talk about the actual process—the writing/composing/ idea generation process. It progresses in two stages: action and reflection. Act, reflect. Act, reflect. NEVER act and reflect at the same time.

    Unless you’re building a sailboat or the Taj Mahal, I give you a free pass to screw up as much as you like. The inner critic? His ass is not permitted in the building. Set forth without fear and without self-censorship. When you hear that voice in your head, blow it off. This draft is not being graded. There will be no pop quiz. Only one thing matters in this initial draft: get SOMETHING done, however flawed or imperfect. You are not allowed to judge yourself.

  • The Jerry Seinfeld Guide to Writing by David Perell

    Writing and editing should be separate activities.

    Seinfeld treats his writing self and editing self as two separate people. He treats his writing self like a baby. He nurtures it, loves it, and supports it. But once the editing phase begins, he changes his personality. He turns into a “harsh prick, a ball-busting son of a bitch” who says “that is just not good enough. That’s got to come out or it’s got to be redone or thrown away.”

  • Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works by Lafley and Martin

    At this reverse-engineering stage, there is absolutely no interest in opinions as to whether the conditions pertaining to a given possibility are true. In fact, expressing such opinions is counterproductive. The only interest is in ferreting out what would have to be true for every member of the group to feel intellectually and emotionally committed to the possibility under consideration.

  • Quintus Curtius, on Twitter

    In my view, an author generally should not try to: translate his own work, narrate his own work on audio, or be the only person to edit his work. Reason? You need a fresh perspective. It’s too easy to slip into your own world, and overlook problems.

  • Clean Agile: Back to Basics by Robert Martin

    The idea here is that writing code that works and writing code that is clean are two separate dimensions of programming. Attempting to control both dimensions at the same time is difficult at best, so we separate the two dimensions into two different activities.

To say this differently, it is hard enough to get code working, let alone getting the code to be clean. So we first focus on getting the code working by whatever messy means occur to our meager minds. Then, once working, with tests passing, we clean up the mess we made.

This makes it clear that refactoring is a continuous process, and not one that is performed on a scheduled basis. We don’t make a huge mess for days and days, and then try to clean it up. Rather, we make a very small mess, over a period of a minute or two, and then we clean up that small mess.

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Walt Disney’s Three-Stage Creative Process

Creating and Editing require different mindsets, so you often don’t want to mix the two activities.

Walt Disney agreed with this idea. He would break up the process of thinking up and refining ideas into three distinct phases, focusing on only one stage at a time:

  1. Dreamer
    1. For fantasizing, creating raw ideas without any filter
    2. This stage is about “why not?”
  2. Realist
    1. Re-examine dreamer ideas and rework them into something more practical
    2. Not about the reasons it could not be achieved, only about what could be done
    3. This stage is about “how?”
  3. Spoiler/Critic
    1. Shoot holes in the refined ideas from the realist stage

Ideas that survive this three stage process are the ones you should work on. By compartmentalizing the stages, you gain distinct advantages:

  1. You can come up with ideas without letting reality or criticism get in the way
  2. You can refine ideas without the harsh filter of a critic
  3. You can criticize and examine a well-thought out idea, something with a bit more structure.

The problem is that most brainstorming meetings (or meetings in general) involve a group of people with mixed roles/focuses – a combination of dreamers, realists, and spoilers. In a mixed environment, dream ideas don’t stand a chance.

Physically Representing the Stages

This process is best implemented physically. You can do this in multiple ways.

The simplest approach is to work in the different stages at different times, whether that is times of day or days of the week. Alternatively, you can steal another lesson from Disney and compartmentalize the stages in different rooms in your office or house. For example:

  • Conference Room A in your office can ONLY be used for the dreaming stage. No filtering, realism, or spoiling is allowed in this room.
  • Conference Room B can only be used for the realist stage. The only activity allowed is finding ways to convert dreams to reality.
  • Conference Room C can only be used for the spoiler stage – being a critic and editing to find weak spots before an idea goes live.

Another way to physically embody this is to associate each of the roles with different pieces of clothing. You can take the “wearing different hats” metaphor literally, putting on a different hat (or no hat at all) depending on your target role. You could also use shoes, slippers, or other accessories as a trigger for the specific mindset.

By consistently following these rules, you will find it much easier to trigger the desired state of mind.

References

  • Disney Brainstorming Method: Dreamer, Realist, and Spoiler
  • The Practice by Seth Godin

    Ideas hate conference rooms, particularly conference rooms where there is a history of criticism, personal attacks, or boredom.

  • Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte

    There’s a name for this phenomenon: the Cathedral Effect. Studies have shown that the environment we find ourselves in powerfully shapes our thinking. When we are in a space with high ceilings, for example—think of the lofty architecture of classic churches invoking the grandeur of heaven—we tend to think in more abstract ways. When we’re in a room with low ceilings, such as a small workshop, we’re more likely to think concretely.