This is the third part of a four-part series on Titans, by Tim Ferriss. Other parts are listed below:
5. Gathering Material
Every good project begins with brainstorming. The goal should not be to keep ideas. The goal should be to kill off as many as possible. “Let’s come up with as many ideas as possible, and then … try to kill them off,” says Stephen Dubner. “If they were unkillable, keep going with them.”
When you research a topic or interview someone, take approach subjects from odd angles. By the time most people are worthy of an interview, they have their story down pat. They have given their spiel a hundred times. Cal Fussman remembers interviewing Mikhail Gorbachev, wanting to avoid the usual Q&A about the Cold War blah blah blah, Ronald Reagan blah blah blah, end of the Soviet Union blah blah blah. Finally, the big day came.
I looked at him and I said: “What’s the best lesson your father ever taught you?” He is surprised, pleasantly surprised. He looks up and he doesn’t answer. He’s thinking about this. It’s as if, after a while, he’s seeing a movie of his past on the ceiling, and he starts to tell me the story…
The oldest piece of advice for writers is to “write about what you know.” Partly, that’s lousy advice because it subtly assumes you know everything you need to know—and, in fact, good writing always requires intense research. Still, it’s a good idea to start with something you know—and build on that.
“If you’re going to talk about the neighborhood, talk about the neighborhood you grew up in,” says Joe Favreau, an actor and writer with credits like Rudy and Swingers. “Talk about the neighborhood you know. Even if it’s not you [that you’re writing about], you’re going to have a more consistent world that you’re developing then if you’re putting them on Mars, and you don’t understand Mars.”
Creativity starts with the materials at hand. You can, of course, build on your stock of knowledge and experiences. That’s what research is for. But you can also create something out of the objects nearby. Filmmaker Robert Rodriguez describes making his first movie:
I just took stock of what I had. My friend Carlos, he’s got a ranch in Mexico. Okay, that’ll be where the bad guy is. His cousin owns a bar. The bar is where there’s going to be the first, initial shootout. It’s where all the bad guys hang out. His other cousin owns a bus line. Okay, there will be an action scene with the boss at some point, just a big action scene in the middle of the movie with a bus. He’s got a pit bull. Okay, he’s in the movie. His other friend had a turtle he found. Okay, the turtles in the movie because people will think we had an animal wrangler, and that we’ll suddenly raise production value. I wrote everything around what we had, So you never had to go search, and you never have to spend anything on the movie.(629)
Mark Twain used to do something similar. He would gather his daughters in the parlor and tell stories based on the items lined up on the mantel of the fireplace.
Getting emotional, deep responses requires skill. You can’t ask a series of bland yes-or-no questions, or toss out generalities, and expect a heartfelt response. Alex Blumberg asks questions as quasi-commands.
- Tell me about a time when…
- Tell me about the day [or moment or time] when…
- Tell me about the story of…
- How did you meet …
- Tell me about the day you realized …
- What were the steps that got you into…
- Describe the conversation when…
Don’t be afraid to ask stupid questions. As long as you have made some effort to prepare for a conversation, don’t hesitate to ask for clarification. Malcolm Gladwell, the bestselling author, models his interviewing style on his father, a university mathematician.
My father has zero intellectual insecurities. It has never crossed his mind to be concerned that the world thinks he’s an idiot. He’s not in that game. So if he doesn’t understand something, he just asks you. He doesn’t care if he sounds foolish. He will ask the most obvious question without any sort of concern about it. … So he asks lots of ‘dumb,’ in the best sense of that word, questions. He’ll say to someone, ‘I don’t understand. Explain that to me.’ He’ll just keep asking questions until he gets it right, and I grew up listening to him do this in every conceivable setting. [If my father had met Bernie Madoff, he] never would’ve invested money with him because he would’ve said, ‘I don’t understand’ 100 times. ‘I don’t understand how this works,’ in this kind of dumb, slow voice. ‘I don’t understand, sir. What is going on?’”
The only dumb question is the one you don’t ask. As an old editor once told me, if you’re interviewing some named Smith, ask them to spell it. “Is that S-m-i-t-h?” Or do you spell it S-m-y-t-h-e?”
6. Asking Questions
Asking questions—whether you’re a writer or a researcher, a ballplayer or an actor, an office boss or a programmer—opens the mind.
Here’s a simple conversational trick. Don’t try to persuade people of anything. When you tell someone what to think, something in their brain automatically resists. The second they hear your proposition, their brain looks for reasons to disagree. But when you ask a question, the brain goes into search mode.
“We always need to ask: Is this true?” says Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal and the author of the seminal Zero to One. “And this is always what I get at with this indirect question: Tell me something that’s true that very few people agree with you on.”
As Thiel’s suggests, questions should always seek to expand people’s horizons. Before he answers questions, Thiel reframes them. That framing process forces you to think–not just about the immediate question, but also about the broader context. Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, likes to quote Wittgenstein: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”
Luis van Ahn, the CEO of Duolingo, remembers a mentor who taught him the power of persistent questions:
My Ph.D. adviser was a guy named Manuel Bloom. … I would start explaining something, and in the first sentence he would say, “I don’t understand what you’re saying,” and then I would try to find another way of saying it and a whole hour would pass and I couldn’t get past the first sentence. He would say, “Well, the hour’s over. Let’s meet next week.” This must’ve happened for months, and at some point I started thinking, “I don’t know why people think this guy so smart.” Later, [I understood what he was doing.] This is basically just an act. Essentially, I was being unclear about what I was saying, and I did not fully understand what I was trying to explain to him. He was just drilling deeper and deeper and deeper until I realized, every time, that there was actually something I didn’t have clear in my mind. He really taught me to think deeply about things.
Lots of titans are list-makers, citing inspiration from Atul Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto. Wherever they go, they jot down thoughts and observations. So get a notebook, small enough to fit in a pocket or purse. Any time something provokes you, write it down. Does that sound excessive? Actually, by capturing thoughts that matter, you drive the trivial clutter out of your brain.
None of us can resist the Nostradamus Temptation—the built-in tendency to make predictions about the future. Kevin Kelly regularly makes lists of ideas that lots of people think are true and asks: “What if that weren’t true?”
7. Details and Style
Attention to detail spells the difference between mediocre, good, and great. In college, skeptical of his ability to earn a living as an artist, Pixar CEO Ed Catmull majored in physics. “Most people to this day think of [art and science] as so radically different from each other,” he says. “But I want to posit a different way to look at it. It comes from what I think is a fundamental misunderstanding. … In fact, what artists do is they learn to see.”
So, Rule 1 for writers and other creatives: Learn how to see.
Nothing lends credibility more than precision. Andrew Zimmern, an award-winning chef and host of the TV show Bizarre Foods, looks for people who describe things with detail. “If you go on the Internet, there are 20 recipes for pound cake,” he says. “I go with the one that describes to a quarter of an inch the size of the pan. Because if someone is describing that level of detail, you know that they have gone through it. The person who writes the recipe says, ‘Grease the cake pan’? You know they haven’t made it. It’s a tipoff right away that something is wrong.”
Lots of would-be writers complain about writer’s block. But there really is no such thing, as Sebastian Junger, the author of The Perfect Storm, notes:
It’s not that I’m blocked. It’s that I don’t have enough research to write with power and knowledge about the topic. It always means, not that I can’t find the right words, but rather that I don’t have the ammunition.
Everyone needs to develop a unique style. But before developing style, master the basics. If you’re an artist, you need to understand the body and movement, perspective and harmony. If you’re a writer, you need to write great sentences and arrange them into compelling, dramatic sequences.
The greatest creators should be your guides. Rick Rubin, a music producer for artists as varied as Johnny Cash and Metallica, says full immersion is the only way to go.
“The only way to use the inspiration of other artists is if you submerge yourself in the greatest works of all time,” he says. “If you listen to the greatest songs ever made, that would be a better way to work through [finding] your own voice today, rather than listening to what’s on the radio now and thinking, ‘I want to compete with this.’”
When you experience masters in any field, pay attention to their turns of phrase that lend special beauty and insight. Maria Popova, whose blog Brain Droppings has become a literary sensation, says she writes “BL” in the margin when she encounters beautiful language. Find a way to mark moments of special clarity or beauty, then go back and deconstruct them.
Matt Mullenweg, the original lead developer of WordPress, puts syntax at the center of all creativity. He loves “code poets,” the programmers whose every line performs the job impeccably, without making it hard to make revisions or enhancements. How do we get the syntax right? “Slow down,” he says. “I think a lot of the mistakes of my youth were mistakes of ambition, not mistakes of sloth. So just slowing down, whether that’s meditating, whether it’s taking time for yourself away from screens, whether that’s really focusing on who you’re talking to or who you’re with.”
Derek Silvers, the founder of CD Baby, an online store for independent artists, says to iterate, iterate, iterate—not just with writing or other projects, but also with life. “Do little tests,” he says. “Try a few months of living the life you think you want, but leave yourself a next the plan, being open to the big chance that you might not like it after actually trying it.”
Ernest Hemingway famously noted that all first drafts are s—. Taking that truism to heart has helped Pixar revolutionize animated feature films. Ed Catmull, one of the founders of Pixar and now its president, says the studio ripped apart early versions of films like Toy Story 2 and Ratatouille and started over from scratch.
“All our films, to begin with, suck,” he says. “This is the big misconception that people have, that [in the beginning] a new film is the baby version of the final film, when in fact the final film bears no relationship to what you started off with. What we found is that the first version always sucks. I don’t mean that because I’m self-effacing or that we’re modest about it. I mean it in the sense that they really do suck.”
