Ira Glass, of This American Life, interviewed his cousin, the famous composer Phillip Glass. Here are some excerpts on creativity and process (full interview):
Ira: In 1964 you moved to Paris and studied with Nadia Boulanger. Could I ask you to talk about what she was like?
Phillip: I always get into trouble when I talk about her because she wasn’t a very nice person. She was a wonderful teacher. She was the great master of music technique. Of counterpoint, of harmony. And she was extremely… demanding. From the first moment you walked in. For example if you arrived at her class and were a minute late it was better just to go home. Because if you came in late you got such an abuse, you were critcized on every level of your being and character and basically if the Metro were slow that day, you just went home”
I: Do you believe there is a pedagoical efficiency to terror?
P: It was at that moment that I understood what she was teaching me. I realized she was teaching the relationship between technique and style. Lets put the question another way. If you listen to a measure of Rachmonanov and measure of Bach you know which is which. You know immediately. The question is why do you know that? They both are following the same rules… but you have in the course of your listening you have recognized that Rachmononv will always solve a certain problem in specific way. You may not say that to yourself but your ear will tell you that… you’re hearing the prediciction of the composer to resolve certain problems in a highly personal way.
How hard is to define your personal way of resolving problems?
In order to arrive at a personal style, you have to have a technique to begin with. In other words, when I say that style is a special case of technique, you have to have the technique — you have to have a place to make the choices from. If you don’t have a basis on which to make the choice, then you don’t have a style at all. You have a series of accidents.
Looking at your career, one thing that’s striking is the # of colalborators you’ve worked with.
When you find yourself in a place of total ignorance, that’s where you can begin again. Learn again. The difficulty with anybody in any ordinary life is how you continue to learn. Everybody has this problem. We get what we call our training and education at a certain point and we spend the rest of our life changing our gears in the same way… The real issue isn’t finding your voice, it’s how to get rid of it. It’s getting rid of the damn thing. Because once you’ve got the voice you’re kind of stuck with it.
You said to Terry Gross, she asked do you ever try to compose to not sound like you…
I do it all the tme and I fail all the time. I learned that the only hope of shaking free of your own description of music was to place yourself in such an untenable situation that you had to figure out something new. That happened with Ravi Shankar in 1964. And I repeated that experience. I do it whenever I can. It means constantly finding new people to work with. The humbling thing is despite how often I’ve tried to do it, how rarely I’ve actually suceeded. It’s very humbling actually when you realize how hard it is to break out of your own training. It’s very very difficult.
How do you feel about that?
If I look at the body of work, over the last 30 years about 30 CDs… it takes about 10 years because the changes are so incremental.
One of the things that strikes me as a listener about the newer pieces is they seem much more romantic and melodic.
Exactly. It depends where you start. Had I stared with romantic music, I’d end up writing minimalist music. But I started writing romatinc music. Basically what point I started from, I left that point.
You can listen to the full interview here.
I’m an introvert. I like being an introvert. I’m glad someone is clarifying what introverts are or are not, which is part of what Susan Cain does in her New York Times Article, The rise of the new Groupthink. However she’s careless in how she makes her case (even though I agree with some of it).
For starters to say “I’m an intro/extrovert” is an overstatement. We all behave differently in different situations and can be more or less extroverted for many different reasons. Many people think I’m an extrovert because I give lectures, like fun debate over beers, and can be a big part of a conversation or a party. But often I’m not that way, and can sit a corner and happily observe or read for hours. I’m the same person in both cases, just in a different mood, situation or atmosphere. It’s a false dichotomy to assume because I am introverted in one situation that I am introverted in all. The main factor is if I’m around people I know and like or not, which speaks volumes about coworkers and shared workspaces.
She writes:
Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in.
Groupthink is a term coined in 1972 by Irving Janis. He described it as: “A mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive group, when the members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action”.
First, you’ll find his definition and Cain’s diverge. He focused on crisises caused by groupthink (especially military ones, like Pearl Harbor and The Bay of Pigs Invasion), rather than the passive negative effects it has on a culture at large (which is what Cain is after). But this passive cultural notion is what has become the popular use of the term for a long time.
I don’t recall there being a time between 1972 and 2012, or possibly ever, when the culture in the business world had swung heavily towards radical individualism. The was no period of “Solothink”, where we went too far towards individual isolated creativity, and are now trending back the other way to a “New Groupthink”. Staking claims of big trends is self-aggrandizing and is a good way to get attention for selling books or getting web traffic, but that’s about it. Collectivism is a natural consequence of being social creatures that lived for eons in tribes.
Second, lone geniuses have never been “in”. Not in science. Not in art. Not anywhere. Lone geniuses have always had a hard time because they were loners, and for any idea to gain traction requires other people to want to listen to you, listening being something we more easily grant to people we know and like. Lone geniuses have always been more prone to being outcasts since great ideas force change, and most cultures, and the powerful people in those cultures, naturally want status quo. The lone geniuses whose names we know had teachers, partners, agents and supporters who made their work known: even the most introverted loner genius we know of was not truly alone.
Cain writes:
Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. And the most spectacularly creative people in many fields are often introverted, according to studies by the psychologists Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Gregory Feist.In other words, a person sitting quietly under a tree in the backyard, while everyone else is clinking glasses on the patio, is more likely to have an apple land on his head. (Newton was one of the world’s great introverts: William Wordsworth described him as “A mind for ever/ Voyaging through strange seas of Thought, alone.”)
Newton was never hit by an apple, and likely most of the apple story is false. But that’s fine, as many people don’t know the truth there.
But I couldn’t find the Csikszentmihalyi study she mentions (no specific reference is offered). Having read some of his work, I know he has found many creatives show both introverted and extroverted tendencies, just as most people do. But to her main point, she is overstating her claims. It’s definitely true some people are more creative when they are alone. But everyone is different. Many great creators were collaborators, and had their most famous ideas in the presence of their partners. For many it’s the back and forth of time alone, and time with others, that fuels most creative fires.
She presents another false dichotomy. There is no reason a person can’t have both solitude and interaction with others in balance. It’s not one or the other, ever. Or even as Alan Cooper has suggested, simply split the difference and work on creative projects in pairs.
She mentions Mr. Wozniak’s invention of the Apple computer, and his advice:
“the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone …. I’m going to give you some advice that might be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone… Not on a committee. Not on a team.”
This is an anecdote from someone who prefers to work alone. I have no idea how much he has considered other people might be different from him or not, or which artists he’s talked to or studied. Artists in unavoidably collaborative fields like music and film would disagree with him.
There is a long and rich history of artists working together in shared spaces. Artist communes, artists retreats, artist studios. Edison’s Menlo park lab was filled with people much like Wozniak, and for most of them it was the most productive and creative period of their entire lives. Pick any garage based startup company in the history of Silicon Valley, and you’ll find a story of people working together, in confined spaces. I’m sure many of them needed more solitude at times than others, but to cast it as a binary choice, either work alone and be a genius, or work in an office and fail, isn’t based on any reasonable accouting of the history of invention or of art.
Anyone can go outside, or for a walk, or find some of their solitude on their own time. Better bosses wisely give employees control over environment (e.g. work from home, which is done by more U.S. employees now than ever before) and hours if it makes them more productive (including creative production), but good bosses of any kind are rare. I wouldn’t call this the rise of “The New Bossthink” epidemic, but there are some basic certainties undercutting her core premise.
And yet. The New Groupthink has overtaken our workplaces, our schools and our religious institutions. Anyone who has ever needed noise-canceling headphones in her own office or marked an online calendar with a fake meeting in order to escape yet another real one knows what I’m talking about. Virtually all American workers now spend time on teams and some 70 percent inhabit open-plan offices, in which no one has “a room of one’s own.” During the last decades, the average amount of space allotted to each employee shrank 300 square feet, from 500 square feet in the 1970s to 200 square feet in 2010.
It has not “overtaken our workplaces or schools”. Throughout the history of the U.S. high school class sizes in major urban areas have likely never averaged less than 20 people in this half century. By sheer logistics of the number of students ,or employees, we have always been housed together in small spaces. She doesn’t cite her sources for office size, and the trend may be for the worse, but the basic notion we share space with other people is quite stable and old. Colleges, universities, and cities like NYC are so dense with people it’s very hard to find solitude relative to most of the planet. But all three are well known environments for creative cultures. Exactly how much solitude qualifies? Is it a coffeeshop? A table at the library? Or is a good pair of headphones, great tunes, and a comfortable chair sufficient for some people to achieve it? Solitude is personal, and that’s the problem with all the studies. They try to take an averaging of everyone, but there is no average person.
They might be a minority, but there are many examples of very creative output from companies that work in shared, open spaces. Valve, the game company known for Portal and Half-Life, has teams work in large shared rooms (video of their office here). Menlo park, Google, Facebook, Hewlett Packard, all worked in cramped group spaces, at least at first. Since there are some examples, the physical environment can’t be the only variable. What is it about Valve or other successful places that allows them to thrive independent of all the research Cain offers? I have my ideas, but I wish Cain offered hers.
The New Groupthink also shapes some of our most influential religious institutions. Many mega-churches feature extracurricular groups organized around every conceivable activity, from parenting to skateboarding to real estate, and expect worshipers to join in.
Churches and religious institutions are odd examples of independent thinking. People join churches to explicitly participate in group thinking, with shared beliefs and codes. They may be even more tightly controlled today, but the core basis for the church in the first place is a fundamental interest to share well defined and old thoughts/beliefs with others.
It’s been a bad month for Brainstorming consultants, as Susan Cain takes a page from Lerhrer, with big swings at Osborn and brainstorming:
But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”
She doesn’t site a specific study. At least Lehrer named the authors and the publication year for the studies he based his argument on. If a writer refers to a study, they should be obligated to allow the reader to follow their tracks (A name, a university, a year. Something). If they don’t want to bother, than they can offer their own opinion, which would be fine. But to say “decades of research says” and give me no idea which papers in the last decade she is referring to, is problematic. Perhaps her book offers more support.
She ends with a moderate and balanced position which I can agree with:
To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work.
Here’s a good one from Grohl’s Grammy award acceptance speech:
“To me this award means a lot because it shows that the human elements of making music is what’s most important. Singing into a microphone and learning to play an instrument and learning to do your craft, that’s the most important thing for people to do. It’s not about being perfect, it’s not about sounding absolutely correct, it’s not about what goes on in a computer. It’s about what goes on in here (points to heart) and it’s about what goes on in here (points to head).”
David Grohl
Jonah Lehrer’s recent article in the New Yorker Groupthink: the brainstorming myth, is a tragedy. It makes many poor conclusions and will do more harm than good.
The article is an attack on the concept of brainstorming, but his assumptions and reasoning are flawed.
I have no stake in brainstorming as a formalized thing. It’s a method, and I’ve studied many idea generation methods. If done properly, in the right conditions, some of the them help. I’m not bothered by valid critiques of any of them. However, sweeping claims based on bad logic and careless thinking need to be addressed.
Here are 4 key things he doesn’t mention, which shatter his conclusion:
Lehrer writes:
“While the instruction ‘Do not criticze; is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.”
The intention of brainstorming is not to eliminate critique, but simply to postpone it. Workplaces are notorious for killing ideas quickly with phrases like “We tried that already” or “that won’t work here” or even “that’s too crazy” (List of familiar idea killers heard regularly in workplaces). Great ideas often seem crazy or weird at first and if they are discarded or criticized before given time to breathe they’re lost before they had a chance to show their merit.
In ordinary life when people face big decisions, like where to go on vacation, it’s common to come up with a big list of ideas, only adding items for a time. And then once the list seems reasonably long, only then does critique and debate start. This is known as divergence / convergence. You explore and add (diverge) and then cull and refine (converge). Most creative people, and processes, shift back and forth between divergence (seeking, exploring, experimenting) and converging (eliminating choices, simplifying, deciding). Brainstorming and nearly all idea generation techniques are divergence acts. And need to be paired with a separate activity that converges.
Simply put, there is an assumption in most research about creativity that only a singular method is ever used. This is wrong. Most successful creative teams use a combination of methods. Sometimes people work alone, sometimes in groups. Sometimes there is a formal activity, sometimes not. Sometimes the goal is to diverge, sometimes the goal is to converge. Their effectiveness is the combination of all of these activities over the course of a project. But most research assumes there is only one event for creativity that ever happens, and seeks to find the ideal event, which is absurd. I understand the focus on a single activity simplifies research, but it also limits the application of that research.
In Osborn’s best book on the brainstorming method, Applied Imagination, he wrote on page 197:
“Although creative imagination is essential… judgement must play an even larger part.”
And he details several processes for evaluating, critiquing, and reporting on ideas. On page 200 he states:
“A list of tentative ideas [e.g. the output of a brainstorming session] should be considered solely as a springboard for future action… as a pool of ideas to be screened, evaluated and further developed before solutions can be arrived at.”
The primary thrust of Lehrer’s critique is based on a 2003 study by Nemeth (PDF), where students were divided into groups and given 3 different sets of instructions. In one group, no instruction was given (‘Minimal’). In the second group, basic brainstorming rules were given (‘Brainstorming’). In the last, brainstorming rules were given, plus students were allowed to critique each others ideas (‘Debate’). But no group was trained in how to brainstorm, nor given an example of effective brainstorming to watch.
Is the debate group brainstorming, or not? They were given the same instructions, plus one additional one (‘it’s ok to criticize’). The results do show that the group that could critique generated more ideas: but not many more. For all the participants, it was a difference of ~4 ideas. 28.4 ideas for the “debate” group and 24.5 for the “brainstorming” group. About 14%. In the U.S. this number was much higher, closer to 30%.

But these columns are mislabeled. The debate groups was given brainstorming instructions, as well as an instruction to debate. It should be labeled “Brainstorming with debate“. If the only instruction they were given was to debate, it’d be a fair comparison. But it isn’t.
Lehrer’s writes:
“But if brainstorming is useless, the question still remains: What’s the best template for group creativity?”
He’s wrong. The data from Nemeth claims brainstorming (Column 2 in the table above) is more effective than giving people no advice at all, but not as effective as brainstorming where criticizing is allowed. I don’t agree with Nemeth’s conclusions, but Lehrer does, and assuming he’d read the study he’d have seen the table above which show brainstorming generated more ideas than the control group.
More importantly, he’s asking the wrong question. There is no singular best template for group creativity. When I’m hired to advise teams, the first thing I do is study the culture of the team. My advice will be based on who they are and what will work for them, not on an abstract set of principles. Just as there isn’t a best template for group morale, or teamwork, or group anything. Is there a singular best template for good writing? For being a good person? A singular template denies how divergent individuals, teams and cultures are. Nemeth’s data shows a wide disparity between French and American success at brainstorming: clearly culture does matter.
Lehrer assumes there is a universal principle that, if discovered, would make everyone more creative. This works against the very idea of creativity: which is that each person sees the world in a different way, and it’s through exploring those differences, rather than avoiding them, than new and different ideas can be found. For groups, this means each group has it’s own strengths and weaknesses, and what will help or hurt their creative output will differ. Some teams are too freewheeling, others not enough.
Lehrer goes on to discuss the legendary building 20 at MIT’s Cambridge campus. He writes:
“Building 20 and brainstorming came into being at almost exactly the same time. In the sixty years since then, if the studies are right, brainstorming has achieved nothing – or, at least, less than would have been achieved by six decades worth of brainstormers working quietly on their own. Building 20 though, ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time, a space with an almost uncanny ability to extract the best from people. Among M.I.T. people, it was referred to as the magical incubator.”
MIT is one of the greatest concentrations of brilliant people in the history of the world. The campus is filled with buildings where great things were invented. Lehrer offers no data about the number of inventions discovered in Building 20 vs. Building 19 or E15 (where the famed Media Lab resides). He mentions Building 20 “ranks as one of the most creative environments of all time”, but there is no actual ranking. If you wanted to measure the magic of building 20 scientifically, you’d perhaps replicate the building in the middle of an empty field in Kansas, and fill it with average people. Does magic happen? More magic than other kinds of buildings in the same place? Nehmer’s brainstorming studies were done with random college undergraduates who had just met. If you want to compare brainstorming to Building 20, you’d need to try to place some fair comparisons, which Lehrer does not do.
I agree environment matters, but there’s plenty of evidence great things happen independent of environment. There was nothing magical about the buildings used for the Manhattan project. Nor for the NASA engineers who worked on the Apollo 11 moon landing mission. The car garage is the prototypical silicon valley environment for innovation, and many ideas that drive our tech-sector came from garages and cubicles. How does the legend of Building 20 compare with these other buildings? What shared lessons can be learned that incorporates these diverse examples of environment? Lehrer doesn’t say. In building 20, what idea generation techniques did they use (and was brainstorming one of them?), or did they all just meet randomly in corridors? He also doesn’t say. Did they work together at blackboards? At the cafe? I’m sure they used many different methods, and the combination of those methods matters.
The best lesson I can pull from Lehrer’s mess of an article is this: creativity is personal. Building 20 was built cheaply and seen as a failure, which made it easier for motivated creatives to rearrange and redesign the environment. There were fewer rules than your typical building. They were allowed to take control over how they worked. The diversity of people forced people to hear different points of view. And the highly empowered and competitive pool of makers ensured things would ship, and not languish in bureaucracy or self-doubt.
If you want more creativity, hire people who demonstrate creativity. Do not expect to magically graft it onto people you hired for their rigid conservatism. Then give them resources and get out of their way. Let them decide what methods to use or not. If you want to know how to generate ideas in groups, go find a creative group and watch what they do. You’ll learn more from observing that experience than Lehrer’s article.
Related: A previous defense of Brainstorming against Marc Andresen, with supporting links.
Two heroes in the pantheon of inventors are Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla. Of their many contrasts, a favorite was their divergent approaches for how to solve problems.
Edison is famous for his affirmations of hard work as the key ingredient in invention:
It’s good advice. The idea for something is rarely the hardest part. Instead, it’s the willingness to work on the long list of little issues that must be solved to bring an idea to fruition (or the marketplace). In problem solving lingo, this kind of approach is called brute-force. You apply great energy to exhaustively try out every different alternative.
Tesla had a different approach. His intuitive understanding of the principles of science allowed him to think about problems in ways Edison either could not, or did not want to. Tesla wrote:
Both of them were right.
The best approach to problem solving is synthetic: to use the synthesis of both ways of thinking to serve you. You should be willing to apply brute-force, but also be willing to do thinking in advance to make solving a problem easier.
Decades ago, in my computer science classes, I recall a clear division among my programmer peers. When given a new assignment, some would jump right in to writing code. I’d call them little Edisons. Others would put the keyboard away, and think for a while on paper. They’d sketch things out, and perhaps ask a question or two online. These were the little Teslas.
Which are you?
(P.S. This is of course an oversimplification of how both of them worked).
I’m speaking today at Creative Mornings Seattle on Creative Thinking Hacks.
I just learned there will be a livestream. You can tune in at 9am PST to watch/listen.
Description: Scott will simultaneously demystify creative thinking, provide tips and tricks for finding ideas, provoke wild opinions and comical rants, and explore how to become more powerful at the creative aspects of your work and life. 20 minutes + 20 minutes Q&A.
Livestream here (at 9am): http://www.ustream.tv/channel/seattle-creative-mornings
(At the moment this video is still live: skip to 54:00 to get to the start of the talk. A proper edited video will be available soon)
Before I share the list of the 5 best books on innovation, here’s a list of 5 things you need to know before reading that list. It’s worth it. I promise.
There. All done.
I can confidently say if you only read 5 books these are the ones to read and re-read:
There. Have fun.
Most of these books are old. Well guess what? Innovation and creativity are old too. The best advice is not necessarily the newest, despite our compulsive neophilia. Just be glad I didn’t recommend Vitruvius’ ten books on architecture (which happens to be one of the only sources for the story of Archimedes and ‘Eureka‘).
But I implore you to do more than read. Like learning to play guitar, you can only learn so much from books. You must get to work yourself. It doesn’t matter what you make, but go make something. And when you finish, think about how to make it better and try again. This is the only thing that will make you more creative: the practice of making things. And only then can what you learn from books matter.
Last week I spoke at the Puget Sound SIGCHI meeting. Since it’s a group of designers and user researchers, I let them participate in picking the topic, and top mistakes won by a wide-margin.
Rather than talk about tactical mistakes, such as in prototyping and running studies, I focused on the ones we overlook the most, about attitude and culture.
Here’s the list I used during the talk:
Good Project Managers empower the people in their team. But good project managers are rare.
How do we educate our co-workers of our value?
People want data (observation from audience member)
Pay attention to how decisions get made:
Another Mistake: Never Make It Easy
Film analogy and design decisions
When there are smart, confident people working on things they are passionate about, there’s going to be unavoidable messiness. There is no ideal team where everything goes smoothly and every decision is contention free.
Inspire people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Have vision (observation brought up by audience member)
What do you think we missed? Leave a comment.
I get many emails asking about writing, in response to the popular posts I’ve written about writing. Recently Shawnee M. Deck wrote in asking about writing ones life story.
I was immediately appalled by my lack of ability to put down on paper the words that seem to make everyone laugh whenever I tell my stories.
This is common. Spoken language and written language work differently. The skills needed to tell a good story in one do not necessarily transfer to the other. Our ears are more forgiving than our eyes. When listening, we can use people’s tone, pace and volume to get more information about what they are saying. When reading, we get none of that information. The words have to stand alone. It takes more skill to keep people’s attention in writing than in speaking.
Some writers do voice to text transcriptions, talking into a microphone and having software convert it to text. Give it a try. If that works for you as a way to get a draft down, go with it. But know that it will need heavy revising to appear like good writing to a reader.
Should I leave a lot of the grammar errors to my editor? What should I expect from my editor in general?
The more you know the better, but yes, any copyeditor should be your grammar expert. Editors come in two flavors: copyeditors and development editors. The former will correct your grammar and give you feedback on sentences, paragraphs and low level writing. The later, which is harder to find, is someone who can give you guidance on the overall direction, approach and voice of the book. Sometimes you can find one person who does both. Publishers sometimes have a third kind called acquisitions editors who find and negotiate with authors to sign book deals, but are often less involved in the process afterwards.
What format would you most suggest? Organized by subjects categorically? Organized chronologically? For now, I’m just getting the chapters down based on my outline.
There’s no right answer. A good book can use any of these methods, provided the writer uses the one they choose well. For now, I’d agree – it doesn’t matter. Just get your stories down. When you have a complete first draft, you can come back and change your mind about how it’s organized. If you plan for a second and third draft, which you should, you can happily postpone sorting out questions of form or structure. An outline helps get the first draft down, but there’s no law requiring your second draft uses the same outline.
Should I buy a lot of books (other than yours) and spend a lot of time researching how to write “memoirs” or should I spend a lot more time just writing.
The answer is both. You need to write and get feedback, and read and take notes (What worked in a book? What didn’t? Why?). You can also read many more hours a day than you can write (even pro writers don’t spent more than a handful of hours a day creating new work). If you read books related to what you are writing about, or in the same style, it will inform you of what you want to aim for, as well as avoid. As far as memoirs, check out Joan Didion, Ted Conover, Annie Dillard, Loren Eisley or any book in the Best American Essays series (there’s one for each year for at least the last decade). Most of the essays are memoirs or non-fiction, giving you a sampler pack of writers you might want to study.
A good friend mentioned he’d write more often if he dealt with his insecurities about writing.
I look at this differently.
All writers are insecure: they have doubts and fears that never go away. Kafka didn’t want any of his books published, and lived with perennial doubts about his talents. Fitzgerald and Hemingway both despaired about the quality of their current projects, whatever they were, afraid their new works wouldn’t measure up to their last (despite feeling this way about their previous works too). Talk to any creator while they are creating and insecurity is everywhere. Will this work? Is this the right choice? Should I cut this or make it bigger? It’s part of the deal, as making something means you have to find your way as you go.
Anyone who creates anything has an endless game of ping pong between confidence and fear going on in their minds. And although one might score an ace or a slam, neither ever wins, it’s an endless game. Complete confidence creates shitty work, and complete insecurity ends work altogether. Both confidence and fear are needed and must be lived with, not eliminated. Experience with creativity means familiarity with this process, not an avoidance of it. Fear is an asset if you use it as fuel for your fire, rather than a way to smoother it, or as an excuse for never starting it in the first place.
Writing is hard. Painting is hard. Competing at sports is hard. Everything interesting is hard. The risk of failure is what makes the challenge interesting. Take away any chance for failure, which you’d need in order to feel completely secure, and you take away motivation.
I say choose to do it anyway. So what if it’s bad? So what if no one likes it? So what if you read it and don’t like it yourself? So what so what so what so what. SO WHAT. At least you will have done it and can decide not to do it again. But to spend hour after hour just thinking and talking and torturing yourself about something you don’t do, while pretending, based on zero study of the craft, that there is a magic way to avoid all the hard parts no other productive maker has ever avoided, is beyond arrogant – it’s insane.
It’s okay to be insecure. Just be insecure about something you are actively making, instead of being insecure about some imagined reality that will never exist if you don’t sit down, shut up and get to work.