MEGA MONDAYS - Bill Watterson, Knowledge & Skills, Generative Brains, Tinkering
11/11/24 - Starting your week with the MEGA lens of motivation, exploration, generation, and amelioration. Curiosity, Creativity, Connection.
Happy Monday
To this week's business:
Motivation (The End of Calvin & Hobbes)
Bill Waterson is the creator of my favourite cartoon strip Calvin & Hobbes. His story is interesting. After a decade of producing one of the most popular cartoons in the world, he suddenly decided to retire. He was offered syndication, massive commercial deals, all sorts of production deals, but he held firm: C&H was done. The media shy Watterson rarely came back into the public view.
He said this about his decision:
This isn't as hard to understand as people try to make it. By the end of ten years, I'd said pretty much everything I had come there to say. It's always better to leave the party early. If I had rolled along with the strip's popularity and repeated myself for another five, ten, or twenty years, the people now "grieving" for Calvin and Hobbes would be wishing me dead and cursing newspapers for running tedious, ancient strips like mine instead of acquiring fresher, livelier talent. And I'd be agreeing with them. I think some of the reason Calvin and Hobbes still finds an audience today is because I chose not to run the wheels off it. I've never regretted stopping when I did.
Hollywood and the sequel-mad movie world can learn something from Calvin and Hobbes ending on a high note. Some people live by their own rules, uncompromising and independent, and they are resolute enough to move on when a piece of their work has run it’s course.
I think about this sometimes - these books were special to me and my brothers as kids. Only someone like Watterson could have written them.
Exploration (Passive & Active)
There are two modes of exploration: passive and active. Passive learning is learning and taking in. Active exploration involves the act of recreation. Passive looks like reading a book, or watching a video tutorial; it’s happening to you. Active looks like writing out key cards, or playing a version of a song on your instrument; you must engage and participate in the learning. Different skills and knowledge assimilation requires varying degrees of active and passive learning.
Active learning usually does not classify as generative creativity because you are attempting to mimic something to gain the knowledge or assimilate the skills. However you veer close to generative creativity when you attempt to replicate and perhaps stumble on novel combinations or approaches.
Generation (Creative Brains)
The properties of the human brain are well observed yet seemingly not well understood. Questions of consciousness and creativity still baffle modern scientists. The best we can do is look at the effects of these things.
We are all conscious so we agree consciousness is something primary. But there is widespread misconception about creativity - many people claim not to be creative. Yet clearly we all are. Creativity is an inherent capacity that some might repress (to conform for example) but no one can get through a day or have a thought without small acts of creativity. It is the sustained and grander projects in creativity that ask for permission: with an open mode as well as earnest and consistent attempts.
Our generative brains are are our greatest genetic endowments, incredible in their potential.
Amelioration (Iteration)
Every creative project is a microcosm of the creative life. You make mistakes, you learn, you get better, you correct and revise, and try again.
The amelioration phase is about iterating your work. Most often this means converging - whittling new ideas down, but all that matters is you keep working at it. Version 5 may be the best, or version 55; but it’s through iteration that you discover something about your craft. It’s by tinkering that most technologies, scientific theories, and works of art come into being.
It is a curse to have everything go right on the first attempt
Robert Greene
Have a MEGA week,
John
