You hope your work will have an impact. You dig into the depths of your being, open old wounds and bleed through new. But the message you send will rarely be the message received.
A reader once thanked Liz Gilbert for writing, Eat, Pray, Love, saying she felt especially encouraged by the part of the book where Gilbert put a restraining order on her violent husband. But, Gilbert wrote, “A restraining order? Violence? That never happened! Not in my book, nor in my actual life!” The reader found courage to leave her own abusive marriage by inventing something that wasn’t there.
You have no control over how your work will interact with people’s experiences, personalities, or current mental states. This goes not only for people whose lives are positively impacted by your work, but also the haters.
Viktor Frankl can have his book destroyed by the Nazis, spend years in concentration camps, then survive to re-write it as Man’s Search for Meaning, and some guy can go on Amazon and call it, “disappointing,” “a waste of time,” or simply complain about the print quality of the book.
It sounds unfair, but it’s not. What you create is a blank canvas on which everyone has the right to project their dreams, desires, fears, insecurities, and prejudices.
Once your work reaches someone else, it is no longer yours.
Aphorism: “Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect.” —Steve Jobs
Book:Blink (Amazon) is Malcolm Gladwell’s classic exploration of intuition.
Best, David P.S. You’ll have a better idea how your work might hit others if you know the mechanics of media.
Alfred North Whitehead said, “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”
It’s incredible how much we’re able to do without thinking. I don’t know how to fix my car, don’t know how my computer works, and can grow my own food at the rate of roughly one bell pepper every two months.
When I’m working on a book, I take my files to the print shop. I make sure to ask for “actual size,” because otherwise it defaults to a shrunken version. Every time, I have to show the person at the print shop what box to check. This is someone whose only job is printing stuff out – they’re often the owner of the print shop. Even more puzzling, am I the only person ever to want things printed how I’ve laid them out?
We humans don’t need to know how every tool works. We can press buttons, shake, bang on the side, and hope for the best. This is apparently how these print shops work, and this is how we’re using AI.
In fact, the way an LLM works is all about not having precise control over the output. Just try to get a reliable quote from ChatGPT.
If we really need help, we can call an expert – but even the experts can’t predict what AI will produce. So what happens when there are no experts?
Someone knows how to fix my car, my computer, or grow bell peppers at a steady rate. But what happens when air-traffic control, the municipal water supply, and our governments are self-perpetuating systems which no living person understands?
As we discussed a few weeks ago, feedback comes from the three-headed feedback monster.
It’s contradictory, it’s confusing, it’s…made up.
There’s a pretty robust body of research on what’s called “choice blindness” that shows why you shouldn’t listen to your critics.
People will explain why they find someone attractive. Never mind the photo they’re pointing at has been switched to the person they didn’t choose.
People will defend their political stances. Never mind the stance they’re defending is the exact opposite of what they just said they believe.
In one crazy study, people in a supermarket taste-test described why they preferred one flavor of jam over another. Unbeknownst to them, they were doing so while tasting the jam they hadn’t picked. Even if they had said they preferred Apple-Cinnamon, a sweet flavor, most then explained away what they liked about Grapefruit, a drastically-different sour flavor.
Studies of patients who have had the two hemispheres of their brains disconnected shine a light on how people rationalize after-the-fact the choices they make. If you prompt the right hemisphere to point at a snow shovel, by showing it a snowy driveway, and show the left hemisphere a chicken, it will explain the shovel is for cleaning up the chicken coop. Similar information processing imbalances prevent normal brains from objectively describing their actions and preferences.
All this to say, when people criticize your work, there’s a solid chance they don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.
When you make something, you expect that the message you’re sending will be the message received, but it almost never will. So don’t take criticism personally.
Aphorism: “Victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone” —Tacitus
Cool:The Artificial Intelligence Show is a podcast with the latest AI news, as relevant to marketers, entrepreneurs, and business leaders.
Best, David P.S. The unreliability of critics is more evidence nobody knows anything.
If you want to do a big project, start with a small project.
To be clear, I am not saying you should “break a project down.” Instead, do an entire small project that in some way relates to the bigger project.
If you want to write a novel, write a short story.
If you want to make a feature film, make a video reel.
If you want to record an album, record a 30-second demo.
The problem with “break a project down” is, you don’t learn some of the most important skills of actually bringing your project into the world, such as allocating resources, preparing to ship, and standing there naked as the world reacts.
When you break a project down, you think you’ve made bite-sized pieces. Without the skills required to swallow your pride and ship, you’ve only made chewing gum. You’ll keep going and going…
Your smaller project can be completely different from your bigger project. You’ll still learn the crucial skills of the domain.
But it doesn’t have to be. War and Peace was published serially in a magazine and only later made into a book, with plenty of changes. These newsletters are built from tweets, and I use them to work out ideas for my books.
Start with micro-projects, and build up. Recycle elements, collect reactions, stack skills, repeat.
Aphorism: “A book, in my opinion, should not be planned out beforehand, but as one writes it will form itself, subject, as I say, to the constant emotional promptings of one’s personality.” —James Joyce
Book:Chicago Homes (Amazon) is a portrait of the city’s everyday architecture.
If you’re doing work of any significance, it is going to upset someone.
Art is speech and if you’ve bothered to speak, someone won’t agree.
We’ve made a lot of progress in recent decades in considering the feelings of others. The side-effect is, assholes are having a heyday – they actually enjoy hurting people.
Meanwhile, kind people are paralyzed with fear they might offend.
And so we live in this strange world where nobody can agree what’s true. The assholes are saying whatever necessary to get a rise, while the angels are too scared to even ask a question.
There’s a quote about liberty that is essentially, “My right to move my arms ends where your right to not have your nose struck begins.” In other words, you may act and exist, but don’t harm others.
What it doesn’t account for is that another person’s perception of having been harmed is subjective. Claude Monet painted a sunrise and that absolutely scandalized the art establishment. They literally called it offensive.
If someone says you’ve offended them, you should consider what they say. They have the right to be offended, and to tell you.
You have the right to have done in good faith this thing you didn’t expect to hurt anyone, and to stop doing it if you think it did. But you also have the right to decide to continue as you were.
That is, “Your right to hold your fist in space does not end where another’s right to ram their nose into it begins.”
If someone runs into your fist, do not cut off your hand.
Aphorism: “The crisis of modern society is precisely that the youth no longer feel heroic in the plan for action that their culture has set up.” —Ernest Becker
Cool:AncientTexts.ai shows you the original Latin texts from authors such as Cicero and Julius Caesar, alongside English translations.
Best, David P.S. Dr. Aziz Gazipura showed us how to be kinder by being not nice.
When the best man gets too close to the speaker, you get a howling noise. That’s feedback.
It’s also the result of a process called feedback: The output of a system becoming input.
Unfortunately, feedback is also used to describe asking people what they think about your work, so you can turn that output into input.
Last week’s three-headed feedback monster showed us why feedback taken at face-value is confusing and contradictory.
It conjures an image of that famous Charlie Chaplin scene. Everyone’s opinion being shoved down your throat or slammed in your face.
Instead of feedback, seek reactions:
Did your song make her dance, or cry?
Did your joke make him laugh, or cringe?
Did she “like” your post, or leave an angry comment?
Reactions are not directives of what you should or shouldn’t do with your work. Someone may hate what you’ve done, and it could mean you’re on to something. Someone may like it, and it means you’ve lost your way.
Just as a rock guitarist can manipulate what might otherwise be noise to play a riff that absolutely shreds, your job as a creator is to decide what reactions to listen to, or lean into, so you can create work that’s provocative and impactful.
Aphorism: “Always, the best bits I have in a special, the ones that are like, ‘That just kills every time,’ started with silence.” —Louis CK
Book:Free to Focus (Amazon) is Michael Hyatt’s productivity system for achieving more by doing less.
He eats experimental cupcakes and drinks neglected home brew. He wears half-sewn dresses, pastes sketches of never-built sneakers to his feet, and adorns himself with jewelry of 3D-printed prototypes.
His entertainment consists of watching unedited A-roll of would-be YouTube videos, reading single-act screenplays, and listening to fifteen-second guitar riffs recorded on iPhones.
His cave walls are covered with abandoned sketches and unfinished paintings. From the stalactites of his ceiling hang mobiles of somewhat-assembled model cars and airplanes. His floors are covered with a rug of crocheted potholders and half-knitted onesies.
As Cro-Magnon man chased gazelles into exhaustion, this monster’s method of hunting is to drive creators into endless revisions. After repeated cycles of second-guessing and self-doubt, the bewildered creator collapses. By the time they come-to, their abandoned project is gone.
This monster is uniquely adapted to confusing the hell out of creators, because he has three heads. Disguised as friends and family, internet commenters and reviewers, even hijacking the inner dialogues of creators themselves, the three-headed feedback monster can sing praises, shout vituperations, and ignore the creator’s work while looking at his phone, all at the same time.
The three-headed feedback monster is mythical, but when you put your work into the world, you will be convinced the monster is real.
Some feedback will seem it’s to different works entirely – one person thinks your mystery novel is a rip-off of Sherlock Holmes, while another calls it “refreshingly original.”
Some interpret differently the exact same things – one person loves how your lo-fi production quality sounds “raw,” while another dismisses it as “amateur.”
Some will invent things about your work that simply aren’t true. Liz Gilbert said a reader was inspired to leave an abusive marriage, by a part in her book where she did the same – never mind Gilbert didn’t mention nor experience domestic abuse.
The feedback you get on your work will be unreliable, contradictory, and confusing.
You can’t listen to all of it – unless you want to make another donation to the feedback monster.
Book:The Judgement of Paris (Amazon) is Ross King’s dramatic telling of the rise of Impressionism.
Cool:Legentibus is an app that teaches you Latin with text and audio.
Best, David P.S. If you prefer, Love Mondays is now also available on Substack.
The best $200 I’ve spent in the past year has been for a used iPhone 11.
I put all my social apps on it, and deleted them from my main phone.
I’m usually at home, so it’s technically just as easy to pick it up and waste several hours, but this is mitigated in two ways.
One, the stuff I need to do on a phone, such as message people, no longer leads to unintended social-media time-travel. The let me check my likes a second or multitasking as you wait for a text response.
Two, when I do use my second phone, I know I’m doing it. So I’m more intentional. I either designate that, yes, it’s okay to take a social media break, or I begin with a specific social-media task in mind. Best of all, when I do those things, I have a bigger screen, yet my main phone is still the only sane size for an everyday carry phone – the 13 mini.
The amount of focus I’ve had over the past year has been worth $200, I suspect, many times over (I’ll find out for sure when my next book comes out).
By now, everyone has extra devices laying around. You cannot argue that you can’t afford a second phone. Who can afford not to?
Aphorism: “Media, as extensions of our physical and nervous systems, constitute a world of biochemical interactions that must ever seek new equilibrium as new extensions occur.” —Marshall McLuhan
Never for a moment have I believed some higher power would eventually judge and punish my behavior.
But, I’ve learned to place a lot of value in the self-government of my actions. I follow strict routines, hardly ever drink, and try my best to recognize, reflect upon, and right and faults in my demeanor and comportment.
I used to think religion was an absolute sham – that it was foolish to believe in what is observably false through the lenses of rationality and science. Nor could I appreciate the nuanced realities surrounding the many atrocities committed in the names of gods. I’m not and will probably never be a believer, but I recognize now these were ignorant and reductionist viewpoints.
I recognize there’s something very rational about a belief in God and more importantly the practicing of rules and rituals in the recognition of a god.
I think atheists, agnostics, and the “spiritual but not religious” would benefit from a sort of secular asceticism.
The major religions of the world became major religions in part because they directed the behaviors of their practitioners in ways that were beneficial to the group – and sometimes the individuals within. There were literally thousands of flavors of Christianity, for example, and those which refused to write down their beliefs or have sex even for procreation understandably didn’t make it.
Even if you don’t believe you will be struck down or suffer eternal torture for behavior deemed deviant doesn’t mean there isn’t behavior you’d be better off avoiding – beyond the obvious stuff that directly harms others. Society as a whole and the individuals within would be better off if we secularists didn’t discard with God the foundational behaviors common to the dominant religions: routine, contemplation, humility, gratitude, accountability, compassion, sobriety, judiciousness – what am I forgetting?
Societies who practice these behaviors thrive. Those that don’t, disintegrate.
Book:Essays of Montaigne (Amazon) is a collection from the 16th-century pioneer of the personal essay.
Cool:News Minimalist uses AI to tell you only the important news.
In 1874, a group of painters known as the Batignolles group held an exhibition – in the Batignolles district of Paris.
People mostly went to mock them, howling with laughter, whispering and shouting insults, even spitting on the paintings. The critics printed stories calling their work, “nauseating and revolting,” “dangerous,” “offensive,” and “horrible.”
At their next auction, the hecklers loudly interrupted the bidding. Some paintings sold for hardly the cost of the frames. The painters’ portrait commissions dried up – nobody wanted to associate with them. They got by on dinner invitations from their few supporters.
When the Batignolles group had put together their exhibition, they had made a pact: Either participate, or submit your work to the Salon – a government-sponsored who’s who of painting, juried by the establishment, who had routinely rejected their work. So, either take a stand and do the art you believe in, or once again try to fit in.
The Batignolles group became known by a name foisted on them as an insult: Impressionists.
The artists who participated in the debut exhibition included Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Morisot, Pissarro, and Renoir – names now synonymous with one of the most impactful artistic movements ever.
The artists who decided once again to seek validation from the status quo were Fantin, Gonzalés, Guillemet, Henner, Legros, and Tissot. The only name recognizable to anyone but the most ardent art-history buff would be Manet – though when you mention him many think you mean Monet.
Aphorism: “To escape criticism: Do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.” —Elbert Hubbard
Cool:TRE (Tension and Trauma Reduction Therapy) is simple, but powerful (use with caution!)
Best, David P.S. Thank you to Atul Raj for having me on The Genius Talks podcast.
