Love Your Work

You can't get through a project on momentum alone. But there are mechanisms you can use to tweak your motivation and make better use of what momentum you have. These motivation mechanisms aren't one-size-fits-all – you have to choose which ones work for you.

As I talked about on episode 291, getting through a creative project is like skateboarding through a halfpipe. You have a lot of motivation going into a project, due to your high expectations. Even if your expectations were to be met, it would still be impossible to coast through to the end of a project. There's too much friction along the way.

Experienced skateboarders know how to soar out of halfpipes, because they know how to tweak their momentum. Experienced creators know how to follow through on creative projects, because they know how to tweak their motivation. But gaining this experience is a catch-22: You can't finish projects if you don't know how to tweak your motivation, and you don't know how to tweak your motivation if you haven't finished projects.

You have to learn, through trial-and-error, what keeps you motivated. Finish smaller projects and build your shipping skills along the way. But it doesn't have to be guesswork. If you know what motivation mechanisms are at your disposal – and the strengths and pitfalls of those mechanisms, you can more quickly gain an understanding of your motivation.

There are three main motivation mechanisms: carrots, sticks, and blinders. The carrot and the stick are classic motivation mechanisms that have been in the scientific literature on motivation for a long time. If you're riding a horse, there are two ways to motivate him: dangle a carrot in front of his face, or strike him in the flank with a stick. The carrot represents the promise of potential reward, the stick represents the threat of potential punishment, and what I call blinders block out distractions and keep the horse focused on the road ahead.

We're attracted to rewards, and we avoid punishments. If we set up our projects so action leads to carrots and inaction leads to sticks, we'll get motivated and maintain the momentum to finish – in theory.

One way to work carrots into your projects is to have promising data. If you have market research that suggest you'll earn a lot of money if you finish the project, you might have an easier time getting motivated. Or, you might merely be so curious about the outcome of the project, that motivates you to follow through.

You can also use external rewards as carrots. For example, you might promise yourself a vacation if you finish a project. On a more granular level, you might promise yourself a piece of chocolate for every 100 words you write.

One way to work sticks into your projects is to do part of a project that will result in a punishment if you don't finish the rest of the project. I called this "The Whip," in my book, The Heart to Start. When I create a new email course, for example, I use the whip. I set up a landing page promising emails on a schedule, then send traffic to the landing page. Once I have sign-ups, I'm highly motivated to finish writing all the emails in the course, as the promised dates approach. This same tactic has worked for other people who have tried my "Explosive Email Course" formula.

You can also use external punishments as sticks. You can promise to pay your friend $100 if you don't finish your project by a certain date. On a more granular level, you can punish yourself for behavior that doesn't drive your project forward. Maneesh Sethi, who I interviewed on episodes 13 and 117, created Pavlok, a wristband you can program to shock you when you do things you'd rather quit. I once used it to quit Facebook, and it was shockingly effective.

Carrots can reward you for the behavior you want to be motivated to do, and sticks can punish you for what you don't want to be motivated to do. Blinders can keep you more focused on what you want to be motivated to do, while blocking out what you don't want to be motivated to do.

Blinders can be physical, or mental. If you have a dedicated office, or space you do your work, that's a form of physical blinder. By working in that space many times, your mind has been trained to focus on work when in that space. As I talked about in Mind Management, Not Time Management, even if you don't have much space, you can set up certain cues in your environment to serve as blinders. When I was first starting on my own, in a tiny bedroom in San Francisco, I transformed that space from bedroom to office through strategic use of a room divider, aromatherapy, and lighting.

Physically separating yourself from a potential source of distraction is another type of physical blinder. If you put your phone in another room, or in a lockbox with a timer, that's a blinder. By using a "grippy" instead of "slippy" tool, you're also using a blinder. There are many options of distraction-free writing devices, but I write my first drafts on an antique typewriter.

Rules and schedules can serve as mental blinders. Simply by deciding that you will or won't do something within some period of time, you focus your mind on the target behavior, while blocking out distractions. The first-hour rule is an effective blinder: Spend the first hour of your day working on your most important task. You can get a lot done in an hour, and can usually hold off any other activity for that short period of time.

You can also use mental blinders not only for the benefits of the behaviors they promote, but also for the secondary effects of those behaviors. The ten-minute hack – or setting a timer for ten minutes to focus on one task – isn't powerful so much for the work you do in those ten minutes, but for the momentum it creates. Ten minutes is an easy decoy goal that short-circuits your ego's excuse engine, but once those ten minutes are up, you usually have the momentum to keep going. On the contrary, "cheat days," whether when dieting or reducing, say, social media intake, can let the superego take a rest, and let the id blow of steam. It can be hard or even detrimental to quit things cold-turkey, but if there's one day a week you cheat, it can make the rest of the week tolerable.

As you can see, there is a huge variety of motivation mechanisms you can use to keep yourself going when projects get tough. But the motivation mechanism that works for one person won't necessarily work for another. And some mechanisms are prone to particular pitfalls that others aren't.

First, some of the pitfalls of these mechanisms. The biggest problem with carrots is eventually you get your fill of carrots. This tends to be more of a problem when the rewards you're using are external, and not an integral part of the project. If you're, say, giving yourself a piece of chocolate for every 100 words you write, there's a good chance you won't be as motivated by the tenth piece of chocolate as you were by the first. But even when the rewards are integral to the project, you can tire of those rewards, and need to search for another source – as I talked about in my reflections on fifteen years as a creator on episode 283.

Also, external carrots especially can make doing the work more about the destination – the carrot dangled in front of you – than about the journey. External rewards can actually reduce your motivation. Behavioral scientist Dan Ariely described on episode 51 that Intel lost productivity when an experimental monetary bonus was removed – relative to more integral rewards, such as verbal praise.

When self-administering external carrots, you also need to be disciplined enough to dole out the reward to yourself properly. It doesn't take much imagination to see how giving yourself chocolate for every 100 words could backfire.

Sticks can be prone to many of the same problems as carrots: The punishment may lose its effectiveness, doing the activity while motivated to avoid punishment may cause you enjoy it less, and you have to be disciplined enough to administer the punishment for it to matter.

Blinders tend to have fewer problems than carrots or sticks. They don't use external stimuli, so there's less chance of your motivation getting misdirected. Instead, the more you use blinders, the easier the target activity tends to get. As the neuroscience saying goes, "Neurons that fire together wire together," so each time you do the target activity, it's easier to do it again. Each time you work in your home office, you train yourself to work when in your office. When you spend the first hour of your day working on your most important project, you make it easier to do it again tomorrow.

Blinders are nearly foolproof because the source of your motivation stays within the project or the activity itself – and that's the best source of motivation. So if you must use external carrots and sticks, do so sparingly. If you're relying on external rewards and punishments to motivate yourself, or if you can't find the self-discipline to administer your own blinders, that's a bad sign. You clearly don't enjoy the activities involved in completing the project, and/or completing the project isn't meaningful enough to you to be a source of motivation.

There's of course a lot of research on motivation – how effective carrots, sticks, or even blinders are – but none of that matters as much as how each of these motivation mechanisms work for you, personally. A motivation mechanism, such as external rewards, may backfire in the confines of a scientific study, in a context different than your project, and averaged out amongst the study subjects, rather than on an individual basis.

If you want to finish lots of creative projects, you need to become an expert on your own motivation. Be a curious observer of yourself, and how you respond to carrots and sticks, internal and external, and how well you can administer and react to your own blinders. You'll get through more projects, and each time you do, you'll learn a little more about how keep and build upon momentum to get through bigger and bigger halfpipes.

Image: Park of Idols, Paul Klee

Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to Paul Millerd at The Pathless Path.

As always, you can find interviews of me on my interviews page.

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/carrots-sticks-blinders/

The Network, by Scott Woolley, tells the history of wireless communications, and the stories of the characters that were a part of it. It's the first book strictly about media history that I'm summarizing and adding to my best media books list.

Wireless communications today of course include cell phones, but The Network takes us from the wireless telegraph, to radio, to television, and finally to satellites. First, it gives a little background on the history of the electric telegraph, the invention which suddenly made it possible to move, in minutes, messages that used to take weeks to reach their destinations.

The electric telegraph was able to change the world thanks to one simple action: The ability to move a piece of metal at the end of a wire. That was enough to develop codes that could transmit messages, based upon the simple movement of that piece of metal. This process started in 1822, when Christian Órsted attached a copper wire to a battery and saw a nearby compass needle move.

There was a several-decade-long race to develop an electric telegraph. The first transatlantic cable was opened for business by 1866. A big customer of these telegraph services were stock traders, who could buy shares in London, sell them a few seconds later in New York, and always profit if their trades were executed in time.

Morse code was the winning format for turning the movement of a piece of metal into messages that could travel around the world. A claim in The Network I couldn't find a source for, but that sounds pretty cool: The clouds in New York City at night used to have projected on them news, election results, and sports scores – in Morse code.

The history of wireless communication started with a discovery as accidental as Christian Órsted's: Heinrich Hertz noticed that metal objects moved slightly when lightning struck nearby. He later conducted experiments where he successfully generated sparks through the air. It was pretty cool, but he concluded that the invisible waves he had discovered were "of no use whatsoever."

Electrical signals that traveled through the air were made very useful, indeed, by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. For much of its early years, most people thought his Marconi Company was a scam. Like the dot-com and crypto booms, many companies at the dawn of wireless technology made off with investors' money. One article, with the headline, "Wireless and Worthless," pointed out that more criminals were being prosecuted from wireless companies than from any other industry.

Besides, what did we need wireless technology for, when there were companies such as The Commercial, which was probably the hottest tech company in New York in the early 1900s? It owned five of the sixteen cables crossing the Atlantic Ocean, and one of the two that crossed the Pacific – which was 10,000 miles long.

10,000 miles was pretty impressive, especially when you consider that in 1896, Guglielmo Marconi could only send a wireless message one mile. What was the point?

Marconi was good at building buzz for his wireless technology through public demonstrations – you could call them pseudo-events, a la Daniel J. Boorstin's The Image, which I talked about on episode 257. In front of an audience, he'd ask a volunteer to carry around a "magic box." He'd build tension from the stage, then push a lever, which would make the magic box buzz from afar. In 1898, when his wireless range was somewhere around ten miles, Marconi set up a telegraph receiver on the yacht of the prince of Wales. Queen Victoria sent the first mundane wireless text message, asking, "Can you come to tea?" The prince replied, "Very sorry, cannot come to tea." After all, he was on the ocean. By 1899, Marconi could send a message over the English channel, and by 1901, he could send a message 225 miles.

Marconi had competition in trying to send a wireless message across the Atlantic, which was 3,000 miles. Nikola Tesla, with the money of J.P. Morgan, was working on a fifty-five ton, 187-foot-tall steel super-antenna. And Marconi didn't have the funding to build something like that.

Marconi won that race across the Atlantic. In one of his publicity stunts, he was able to relay "Marconigrams," as he called them, from celebrities in London to celebrities at a dinner party in New York. But, that wasn't enough to impress stock traders who relied on wired telegrams – the messages took ten minutes to arrive, with pre-arranged help in expediting them as they traveled to and from coastal locations on wired connections. And radio waves are easier to transmit at night than during business hours, when radiation from the sun interferes with wireless signals.

But in 1912, the day before Marconi Company investors were to vote on whether to further fund the company, the Titanic sank. Using Marconi's wireless technology, an ocean liner, the Olympic, fielded a message from the Titanic, over 500 miles away, which included coordinates, and said, "We have struck an iceberg." Another ocean liner, the Carpathia, came to the rescue. Thanks to Marconi's wireless technology, of the Titanic's 2,223 passengers, 706 survived.

What followed sounds like the third act of a great movie: When Marconi arrived at a lecture that had already been scheduled, there was a crowd overflowing out the building. He received a standing ovation, including from the once-skeptical Thomas Edison. And the vote of Marconi shareholders, on whether to issue another $7 million in stock to build stations for intercontinental telegraphs, was a no-brainer.

Working at Marconi at that time was the young David Sarnoff, who had started at Marconi after being fired for taking the day of Rosh Hashanah off work at Marconi's rival company, the Commercial. A Russian immigrant, Sarnoff's father had recently become unable to work, so he had set off to support the family as an office messenger boy, at only fifteen.

Being a telegraph operator was a hot tech job at the time. David Sarnoff bought a used telegraph key, so he could spend his evenings practicing his coding skills – his Morse-coding skills. He worked his way up until he was managing Marconi's New York office, but then transferred to what seemed like a step down – as an inspector in the engineering department.

It was as chief inspector David Sarnoff met Edwin Armstrong, who demonstrated to him an amazing signal amplifier. From a Marconi station in New Jersey, Armstrong's amplifier turned signals from an Ireland station from barely audible, to loud and crisp. They were then able to listen in on signals from competitor Poulsen Wireless, as their San Francisco station communicated with their Portland station. They were even able to listen to Poulsen's Hawaii station, despite the fact Poulsen's own San Francisco station – the breadth of a continent closer – could barely pick up the signal, amidst a Hawaiian thunderstorm.

Sarnoff thought he had found the key technology that would help Marconi dominate wireless telegraphy, and free it from having to share its revenue with rival cabled networks. Instead, Guglielmo Marconi himself refused to believe the results of the story, and another executive publicly chided Sarnoff within the company for conducting the unauthorized experiments, which he believed merely drove up the prices of inventors' patents.

Armstrong ended up selling the patent for his amplifier to AT&T. Through the use of that amplifier and other wireless-technology inventions, Edwin Armstrong achieved the rank of Major Armstrong in WWI. During WWI, Britain and Germany cut one another's cables, making wireless communication even more important. The British military took over Marconi's wireless stations within their empire. Armstrong helped intercept Germany's wireless communications.

But during the war, the way wireless technology patents were split up amongst companies became a problem. It was impossible to build useful devices without using a variety of innovations, and thus infringing on other companies' patents. The Navy used its wartime powers to allow American manufacturers to use any wireless patents they wanted, without consequence.

Once the war was over, the military sought to maintain this freedom of innovation, and – as a matter of national security – keep the American radio industry out of foreign hands. They struck a deal to cut off the American portion of the British Marconi company, and pool together patents from AT&T, Westinghouse, G.E., and – interestingly – United Fruit Company, who had patents for communications systems on their Central American banana plantations. The name of this new company: RCA. Its general manager: David Sarnoff.

Sarnoff had pitched to his bosses at Marconi, in 1915, a "Radio Music Box." Far more complex than moving a piece of metal, voice had first been transmitted over radio waves in 1906, and The Navy had done "radio telephone" calls, but nobody had thought of using radio to transmit to a wide audience. His pitch described a box with amplifier tubes, and what he called a "speaking telephone." He wrote, "There should be no difficulty in receiving music perfectly when transmitted within a radius of 25 to 50 miles. Within such a radius there reside hundreds of thousands of families." Sarnoff had already experimented with the concept by transmitting music, to a boat cruising around Manhattan, from a phonograph in Marconi's New York office.

Sarnoff's bosses at Marconi had ignored his radio music box pitch, but once he was in charge at RCA, he was free to pursue the idea. Sarnoff hadn't gotten much support for his ideas at Marconi, but he had learned the value of a well-crafted pseudo-event. The upcoming boxing match between the American, Jack Dempsey, and the Frenchman, Georges Carpentier was the perfect opportunity to show the value of using radio waves to broadcast sound to a large audience.

As was customary for big events at the time, if you wanted an update, you could gather near a telegraph station, where someone would announce a text-message update of the event. In Paris, a flare was to be released from a plane after the fight: white if Dempsey won, red if Carpentier. But if you truly wanted to know what was happening, you had to be one of the ninety-one thousand people there in the stadium. So, the rich and famous were flocking to New York. 300 rooms were booked at the Plaza, 500 at the Waldorf Astoria, and 800 at the Biltmore. Actress Mary Pickford took her yacht all the way from Hollywood, through the Panama Canal, and some came in the 1921 version of a private jet: a private train car.

But for the first time, people who couldn't be at the fight could get blow-by-blow updates. RCA teamed up with amateur radio operators, who rented out auditoriums and received a voice broadcast from ringside, via "radiophone."

This helped solve the chicken-and-egg problem of getting mass-audience radio started. You couldn't get people to buy receivers if they hadn't experienced a broadcast – and if there was nothing being broadcast – and it wasn't worth broadcasting if nobody had receivers. By getting a lot of people together for a global event everybody was already talking about, it was worthwhile to do a broadcast, and people got to see the potential of radio.

Over the next three years, secretary of commerce Herbert Hoover granted licenses to 600 radio stations – small ones that broadcast across a particular city or county. There were no radio stations or programs in much of rural America. But Sarnoff was pushing the adoption of higher-powered AM transmitters that could broadcast to multi-state regions. This idea was opposed by the smaller stations that didn't want their audiences stolen, and also by AT&T.

AT&T believed that since radio involved transmitting the voice, they, as the phone company, should be in charge of it. They also didn't want to lose revenue: For AM radio programs to be syndicated from one station to another, they had to be sent over AT&T's phone lines, as they would come out distorted if transmitted wirelessly. Additionally, AT&T felt duped from the negotiations over the RCA patent pool, which Sarnoff had been in charge of. Sarnoff had proposed that AT&T get the rights to sell radio transmitters, while RCA would sell radio receivers. This didn't seem like a bad deal in 1920, before the Dempsey/Carpentier fight, but now it looked like a raw deal, indeed. In 1924, RCA's AM radio sales were over $50 million, while AT&T had a measly market of 600 radio stations. Most of those stations ignored AT&T's patents and built their own transmitters, and AT&T wasn't successful in getting the revenue that was rightfully theirs.

The radio broadcasting industry was experimenting with business models. AT&T ran the first radio ad in 1922. For fifty dollars, a suburban housing development got to broadcast on an AT&T station. Herbert Hoover called advertising-funded radio "the quickest way to kill broadcasting." He wanted instead to fund radio broadcasts by placing a surcharge on the sale of each consumer radio receiver. David Sarnoff was on his side, which was odd, since an advertising-funded model would make his radios cheaper to consumers.

There were also fights over who could broadcast on what frequency. The Radio Act of 1912 had been passed, after amateur telegraphers' messages had interfered with one another while communicating about the Titanic sinking. Hoover tried to regulate the frequencies some stations were broadcasting on, but it turned out the 1912 act had only regulated airwaves at least six-hundred meters long – the technological limit at the time. Some stations protested by deliberately overlapping their broadcasts, resulting in an hour of unpleasant squelches, followed by a message to support the passing of a law to regulate the airwaves. The Federal Radio Commission was formed in 1927, for that purpose. In 1934, it became the FCC, overseeing all types of electronic communications.

Sometimes, an inferior technology dominates, as VHS did over Beta, but sometimes, despite the best efforts of entrenched interests, the better technology prevails, as did eventually FM radio, over AM.

AM radio signals are imprinted sounds on waves that vary according to amplitude, or the height of the waves. Thus "AM," for "amplitude modulation." FM radio waves are varied according to the frequency of the waves, or their width. Engineers in the radio industry and academia once thought frequency modulation wouldn't work. A 1922 paper from AT&T claimed to prove mathematically that it "inherently distorts without any compensating advantages whatsoever."

But Major Armstrong was pushing hard for the FM method. Armstrong once again conducted a demonstration for Sarnoff. His "little black box" that transmitted an FM signal had vastly superior sound quality than an AM radio. Sarnoff let Armstrong run tests with FM equipment from RCA's offices atop the Empire State Building – the tallest in the world at the time. The FM signal delivered better sound quality than AM with one twenty-fifth the signal power.

There was a lot at stake in switching to FM: It could deliver better sound quality, and – since signals could be transmitted on a variety of frequencies – it could add thousands of stations to the dial. But, there were already tens of millions of AM radios, and hundreds of expensive radio station transmitters that would become obsolete. A benefit to RCA, however, would be that with clearer signals, they would no longer have to pay AT&T for use of their phone network for syndicating content.

In 1941, the FCC approved a band of FM stations between 42 and 50 MHz. At the start of WWII, Major Armstrong pushed the military to switch to FM, and waived any licensing fees, increasing adoption. After the war, there was a controversy about sunspots: They work in an eleven-year cycle, and in FCC proceedings, one engineer rose a stink about how the next time sunspots came around, they would interfere with stations on the existing FM band. Despite the fact nearly every expert disagreed with that prediction, the FCC moved the FM dial to the current 88 to 108 MHz band. This made $75 million worth of devices soon-to-be worthless, and pissed off hundreds of thousands of FM early adopters. (When the strongest sunspots in two centuries came along, the old FM band worked fine.)

The stifling of FM radio continued. The FCC eventually cut FM broadcasts from a 150 mile radius to a 50-mile radius, which may not sound like much, but translates to a ninety-percent cut in coverage area. Conveniently, this meant FM stations could no longer send programs to neighboring markets through the air, and had to instead pay to use AT&T's expensive and low-fidelity telephone wires. AM radio interests had also taken over most FM stations, where they simply rebroadcast their AM programs. There was little incentive to buy an FM set, and by 1946, nine of ten radio manufacturers weren't bothering to make them.

All of this was enough to prompt Major Armstrong to file an antitrust suit against RCA, claiming David Sarnoff was conspiring to stifle the FM radio industry.

David Sarnoff was very focused on making television work around that time. He made some bold bets that helped NBC, a spin-off from RCA, be the first on the air. Searching for office space during the Great Depression, Sarnoff had decided to move RCA and NBC into the expensive 30 Rockefeller Plaza, aka "30 Rock." He pissed off shareholders by building elaborate radio studios. He had special wires installed in NBC's studios – for transmitting TV signals around the building – that weren't used for another twenty years. He had a giant studio built, with rotating stage, to work with television cameras that didn't even exist. Overall, he spent $50 million on television research over the course of twenty-five years, and it took a long time to pay off.

The FCC's poor decisions continued in the proliferation of television. Despite warnings from engineers such as Major Armstrong, they allocated VHF channels so poorly, only one or two stations worked in most cities. They had to learn from their mistakes and start over with UHF stations. But UHF wavelengths were so short, the lower the channel number a station had, the further and more clearly their signal could travel. So, stations fought over the smaller-numbered of the sixty-eight channels.

David Sarnoff was there, once again, innovating in television. There was a battle over the color standard, and Sarnoff and RCA's NSTC standard was finally adopted by the FCC in 1953. "Relay-1" was the first American communications satellite, launched in 1962. It helped bypass AT&T's cables for syndicating programs, thus doubling RCA's revenue. Some events had previously been broadcast via airplane to expand coverage area. Relay-1's first trans-Pacific broadcast was supposed to carry to Japan an address from President Kennedy. Instead, it carried coverage of his assassination, and footage of the new president, Lyndon B. Johnson.

As you can see, The Network covers a lot of the early history of wireless communications. It also does it with an engaging narrative style. There is of course much more. Read it to find out:

• Why there's no channel one.
• How Lyndon B. Johnson's wife Lady Bird built her media empire with some suspiciously favorable treatment from the FCC.
• The visions that Sarnoff had late in life for fiber optics, the internet, and e-books.
• Whether Major Armstrong's suicide at 63 had anything to do with his legal battles against David Sarnoff and RCA.

If you've enjoyed this summary, you'll no doubt enjoy The Network.

Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to David Elikwu at The Knowledge.

As always, you can find interviews of me on my interviews page.

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/the-network-scott-woolley/

A creative project is like a halfpipe. The depth of the halfpipe from which you must ascend to finish a project is equal to the height of the optimism that prompted you to begin. But there's a way to build your project halfpipe so the project itself keeps you moving forward.

When you begin a project, you are optimistic. Why else would you start? You're interested in the subject matter, and you expect to succeed. This optimism serves as the gravity that pulls you into the project halfpipe.

The momentum you build from this drop into the halfpipe may get you through much of the project, but will eventually run out. By the time you get to the other side of the halfpipe – the end of the project – you've forgotten the optimism you once had, and the friction of reality has sapped your energy. The project isn't as fun as it once was, and it hasn't been as easy as you had expected. You face a steep incline, and don't have the momentum to ascend.

Experienced skateboarders know how to tweak their momentum, so they have enough energy to ascend the other side of a halfpipe. Like kicking their legs while riding a swing, they're able to climb higher and higher, as they go back and forth.

Experienced creators know how to tweak their motivation, too, to ascend the other side of the halfpipe. They've finished enough projects, they know how to harness their momentum to make the most of their efforts, and coast through the tough parts. But the need for this experience is a catch-22: You don't know how to tweak your motivation to follow through if you haven't finished projects, and if you haven't finished projects you don't know how to tweak your motivation.

A halfpipe, with nothing but a skateboard rolling back and forth, is a closed system. The first law of thermodynamics states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The energy from the descent into the halfpipe is not enough to get to the other side of the halfpipe, because much of it is wasted on friction.

When you put a person on the skateboard, that adds a new energy source to the system. The skateboarder can move their body in ways that overcome the loss of energy from friction, thus maintaining enough momentum to get out of the halfpipe. But the skateboarder is a closed system, too. They require energy to move.

Shiny object syndrome often sets in toward the end of a project. There are other halfpipes all around. The excitement of dropping into one and once again experiencing effortless momentum is a lot more fun than putting forth effort to get out of the current halfpipe. So, you switch projects – you switch halfpipes.

Some creators, after dropping into enough halfpipes, figure out how to tweak their motivation to get through one – whether due to luck or experimentation. More often, they get frustrated with the endless cycle of shiny object syndrome, and burn out. They stop "skating" altogether.

But, you can turn the closed system of a halfpipe into an open system that maintains your momentum, propelling you to the finish. If you use this method to finish more projects, you'll gain experience tweaking your motivation. Maybe you need an accountability partner – or maybe you hate obligation. Maybe you gain momentum by building prototypes – or maybe you prefer to develop a detailed plan. Maybe you like to talk about ideas with friends – or maybe you discover it causes you to lose your momentum.

If you aren't finishing projects, you can't learn what works for you. A great way to finish more projects is simply do smaller projects. When you do smaller projects, two things happen: One, you make the halfpipe shorter, and less shallow, so you don't run out of momentum so fast, and you can more easily find the internal motivation to get out of the halfpipe. Two, you can more easily get momentum from the project itself, in the form of feedback loops.

For example, when I'm working on a new book, I don't just sit down and write a book. That's too long and deep a halfpipe. I might be excited going in, but I'll soon lose momentum, and I'll forget why I began in the first place.

Instead, I break the process of writing into tiny projects, which feed into progressively larger projects. I write and share an idea on Twitter. If it does well on Twitter, I expand it into a newsletter. If it does well as a newsletter, I expand it into an article and podcast episode.

After I complete this process enough times, I have a large collection of ideas I can share in my book. There's still a lot of work to be done: I need to weave the ideas together into a cohesive whole, not to mention edit the book, lay it out, design the cover, and market it.

But that bigger halfpipe of writing the book is much easier to get through when fueled by the momentum of the smaller halfpipes of tweets, newsletters, and articles. In fact, through these smaller projects with feedback loops, my halfpipe is no longer a closed system. The projects themselves are providing the momentum.

Big projects are like halfpipes: You lose momentum and get stuck. Small projects are like waves: Feedback loops keep you moving forward.

When you surf a wave, gravity is still pulling you down the face of the wave, but the wave itself is moving, too. This is why you sometimes hear the expression of "riding a wave," in business. The success of an industry or trend becomes an outside force that keeps you moving, multiplying your efforts. The success of a project itself can become a wave, too.

As blogger Tynan has pointed out, one reason it's hard to finish projects is that in the middle of the project, you've experienced all the downsides of working on the project, but none of the upsides of succeeding. You're stuck in the halfpipe. But if you design the project so you get some of that feedback throughout the process, you get to experience some upsides that keep you moving.

This works for a lot of creative projects. You can't count the number of stand-up comedians who go to one open mic after another, testing out jokes, then take those jokes on the road to polish them, then weave it all together into a one-hour special, then repeat the process over again. Even War and Peace, written when publishing wasn't so rapid and didn't have such immediate feedback, was published serially, with a different name, and wasn't even intended to be a novel. It wasn't until later that Tolstoy wove it together, and re-wrote it.

The next time you find yourself stuck in a project halfpipe, or switching to new projects each time a previous project gets tough, see if you can turn that halfpipe into a wave. Complete smaller projects that give you immediate feedback. You'll finish more projects, and learn to tweak your motivation well enough to soar out of larger and larger halfpipes.

Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to Ivan Farber at the Conversations About Conversations podcast.

As always, you can find interviews of me on my interviews page.

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/project-halfpipe/

The world expects us to be Raphaels, but some of us are Leonardos. Don't hold your Leonardo mind to Raphael standards, because this Raphael world would be nothing without Leonardo minds.

There's an inscription in the Pantheon in Rome that says, "Here lies that famous Raphael by whom Nature feared to be conquered while he lived." In other words, Raphael was such an amazing painter, Nature was supposedly shaking in her boots, afraid he would learn all her tricks. (Ironically, Raphael's remains are sealed away in a sarcophagus, where Nature can't get to them. Who's afraid of who?)

But Nature had nothing to fear. Raphael could not outdo her. As Raphael was being buried, the painter Nature should have feared lay hundreds of miles to the north, in a little church on the grounds of the King of France's chateau.

Several years before Raphael's early death, he was getting paid thousands of ducats to paint one fresco after another in the Vatican. Meanwhile, the aging Leonardo da Vinci was nearby, living off a meager 33 ducat-a-month stipend, not doing much of importance. The pope had tried hiring him to paint something, but ended up frustrated, saying, "This man will never get anything done!"

When the prolific art patron, Elizabeth d'Este, who had hounded Leonardo for a portrait for decades, came to visit Rome, she didn't bother getting in touch with Leonardo. He was a has-been, who couldn't be counted on to follow through. Who was she there to see? The young phenom, Raphael.

Raphael was very similar to Leonardo, but also very different. His most important difference was that he was a master executor. If you hired Raphael, he got the job done. He also had been raised in the workshop of his father, a court painter for a Duke, so Raphael was refined and well-mannered. He knew how to schmooze with nobility. He had the connections that came along with that background, and could get a letter of recommendation from one powerful person to another with ease.

Leonardo, on the other hand, was born out of wedlock – which made him "illegitimate" at the time – and didn't get much education. While he had gained a reputation as a brilliant engineer and architect, he had also gained a reputation as an unreliable painter.

As Raphael continued his career as the pope's wunderkind, Leonardo worked his way north. He left yet another project unfinished in Milan, then impressed King Francis I enough to be invited to join him at the Chateau d'Amboise, as the official painter, architect, and court pageantry designer. While a gig with the King of France wasn't the worst thing in the world, it was a step down from what Leonardo could have been doing if he hadn't been reputed as someone who couldn't get things done. The pope and all the nobles in all the principalities of Italy just watched him go. He'd never return again.

While Raphael had some clear advantages that helped his career advance, he couldn't have done it without the ways he and Leonardo were similar. The frescoes being painted by the young Raphael – such as his most-famous School of Athens – were exactly the kinds of projects Leonardo would have been great for, if only he could have been counted on to finish them. In fact, there was no person in the world to whom Raphael owed his own painting style more than Leonardo. When it came to painting, Raphael was mostly a reliable Leonardo.

Art historians call the years during which Raphael spent a lot of time in Florence his "Florence period." But they might as well call them his "Leonardo period." That's the four years during which Raphael's work started looking less like that of his mentor, Perugino, and more like that of his idol, Leonardo.

During Raphael's Florence period, Leonardo was in a public face-off with another young phenom, Michelangelo. Leonardo had been commissioned to paint a battle scene in the Florence Council Hall. As usual, the first deadline came and went. Meanwhile, Michelangelo had done such a great job with his David statue, the council decided it would be a great idea to have him paint a battle scene, too.

It was a pretty awkward situation for Leonardo. He was already struggling to finish, and a committee of which he had been a part had gone against his recommendation for a less-conspicuous location and put the David right outside the entrance of the council hall. Michelangelo was an arrogant prick who openly taunted Leonardo for his past failures, and now Leonardo had to walk through the shadow of Michelangelo's latest triumph to get to his mural. Oh, and Michelangelo's battle scene mural was directly across the room from his.

By all accounts at the time, this was a painting competition – a battle of battle scenes. Leonardo wasn't competitive by nature, but this was supposedly going to motivate him to finish his mural. Today, we might say putting Leonardo in this position was pretty machiavellian. Which is ironic, because it was arranged with the help of none other than the inventor of machiavellianism, the council's secretary, Niccolò Machiavelli.

Once word of this painting battle traveled outside Florence, young artists traveled to Florence to witness it. One of those artists: Raphael – armed with a letter of recommendation from the mother of the future Duke of Urbino to the leader of the Florentine Republic, stating that the twenty-one year-old was "greatly gifted…sensible and well-mannered." It's during this "Florence period" that Raphael's work changed dramatically. It started to look as if he might know a thing or two about anatomy, he started aping Leonardo's smokey sfumato technique, and drawing contorted, muscular men in the heat of battle. He learned a bit watching Michelangelo, but he learned a lot watching Leonardo.

As it turned out, neither Leonardo nor Michelangelo finished his mural. For Michelangelo, it wasn't a big deal. He got summoned to Rome, where he eventually painted the Sistine Chapel ceiling.

Leonardo, however, had more of his career behind him than ahead of him. Yet another public failure meant he never got another public commission. So while Leonardo, in his sixties, was wandering around Europe, chasing what work he could, Raphael, in his early thirties, was getting showered with high-paying papal commissions, as a more-reliable Leonardo.

These days, we admire Leonardo more than we do Raphael, but that wasn't always the case. That Raphael is one of the few people entombed in the palace of the gods, alongside kings, is testament to his popularity when he died. Heck, at his funeral, the pope kissed his hand. Around 1800, the church in which Leonardo was buried was destroyed in the French Revolution. Nobody bothered to try to recover Leonardo's remains. They were mixed in with everyone else's and forgotten.

Meanwhile, Raphael was as popular as ever. If you take a peek at Google Ngram, you see a sharp increase in mentions of Raphael around that time. For hundreds of years after Raphael's death, he was considered the quintessential painter of the High Renaissance. The art academies around Europe, who controlled the opinion of what was or wasn't good art, built their curricula around studying the work of Raphael. But as the influence of art academies crumbled in the late 1800s with the rise of Impressionism, so too did crumble the reverence for Raphael.

Meanwhile, Leonardo has risen in popularity over the centuries. Today, if you want to find a good book on Leonardo, you have lots of choices. Raphael, not so much. The probable cause of this rise in popularity and the probable cause of Leonardo's struggles with follow-through are one in the same: Nature had more reason to fear Leonardo than Raphael.

Through the centuries after Leonardo's death, his notes began to resurface. They had been inherited by someone who was supposed to compile and publish them, but were so numerous and disorganized, that was a nearly impossible task. His notes ended up collated and bound into individual notebooks, scattered amongst collectors around Europe. One notebook was found as recently as the 1960s, hiding in plain sight in Madrid, in the collection of the library.

These notebooks have revealed that for Leonardo, painting a picture was about much more than painting a picture. When Raphael did an anatomy study, it was all about knowing how the skin on the surface of the body was shaped by the muscles underneath. The only purpose was to mimic Nature, on a superficial level. For Leonardo, an anatomy study was about much more. He didn't just want to know what muscles were under the skin. He wanted to also know which muscles were engaged by which movements, or which nerves activated by which emotions. As a painter, there was no reason for Leonardo to know what the human heart looked like, or how it worked. Yet Leonardo made observations about the heart that would have advanced science by centuries, had they been published.

As I talked about on episodes 105 and 288, economist David Galenson would say Raphael was a conceptual innovator, while Leonardo was an experimental one. To Leonardo, there was no such thing as irrelevant information. In the course of researching how to paint something, he might make a new discovery about anatomy, metallurgy, geology, or some other field, that would set him down a different path. The art historian Eugene Garin thought, based upon Leonardo's many thousands of pages of notes, that he was trying to compile a treatise of all human knowledge. Leonardo wasn't studying Nature just so he could paint it convincingly – he was trying to understand all of Nature.

Raphael didn't have to explore all aspects of the world. He merely had to copy the result of Leonardo's thinking. Galenson told me, "It's what conceptual innovators do, it turns out." Conceptual innovators take an idea, and make it their own. It's what Picasso did with the work of Cézanne, what Warhol did with the work of Pollack, what Hemingway did with the work of Stein and Twain.

Leonardo's experimental approach meant his paintings were never finished. He was always discovering something new, so he was constantly revising. For example, after one of his anatomy studies, he realized he had painted some neck muscles wrong, so he went back and repainted them thirty years after the fact. He did the bulk of his work on the Mona Lisa during four years, but moved it around for fifteen, making finishing touches until a paralyzed hand rendered him unable. The patron never got their painting, Leonardo never collected payment, and the Mona Lisa was still collecting dust in his studio when he died.

This experimental, iterative approach extended to Leonardo's materials and methods, and made it even more difficult for him to follow through. The best-practice method of painting murals in fresco required laying down plaster and painting on it before it dried and literally set itself in stone. It wasn't great for Leonardo's blurry-edged painting style, and it made iteration impossible. He couldn't lay down dozens of layers of paint over the course of years, as he did with the Mona Lisa. By the time Leonardo was painting his battle scene in the Florence Council Hall, his famous Last Supper was already fading and flaking, thanks to his resistance to painting in the reliable fresco technique. Not satisfied with adapting his style to this technique, Leonardo instead experimented once again on his battle-scene mural. He was almost finished, before the fire he was using to set colors got too close, destroying his work.

Historically, the world rewards Raphaels. It rewards the ability to formulate a plan, follow through, collect payment and prestige, and move on. So, the world trains us to be Raphaels. Why do we follow a curriculum and fill out bubbles on standardized tests with #2 pencils? Because our teacher already knows the answer. They know the answer so well, they've programmed a computer to grade the test, and it'll get confused if you use a #3 pencil.

But for the curriculum to be designed to make Raphaels, we first need Leonardos. We need people who explore and experiment. We need them to ask questions that might not have answers, and to come up with new questions nobody ever thought of. That's not a straightforward process. It's messy and disorganized, and it would cause any Raphael to pull their hair out. When you don't always find answers, and the answers you do find lead to new questions, you don't always finish.

The days of the Raphaels of the world are numbered. If somebody already knows the process, already knows the answer, we don't need Raphael. A computer or machine can follow a process. Raphael knew this. Once his fame was established, he milked it for all it was worth. His later frescoes were painted by his staff of assistants in the largest workshop of the High Renaissance. He licensed his drawings to a printmaker, who sold copies of his work.

As it becomes harder to make it as a Raphael, it's becoming easier to make it as a Leonardo. I think Leonardo would have been a great blogger. He wouldn't have to collect and document all knowledge, then rely on an heir to collate, typeset, and publish his life's work on expensive parchment. He could instead write and publish one note at a time, gradually building his treatise of human knowledge. He wouldn't have to wander around Europe looking for patrons – he could get them without leaving his home.

If you're a Leonardo mind, don't fall into the trap of evaluating yourself by the standards of the Raphael world. There's a reason why the Raphaels are so good at getting it done: Their task is simpler. Don't beat yourself up by your inability to plan and carry out a vision no one could reasonably execute on their first attempt. Instead, find a way to explore in public, one little project at a time, building up into your grand masterpiece.

Leonardo's remains were forgotten for sixty years. Some scientist, perhaps motivated by the gradual resurfacing of the notes revealing Leonardo's genius, gathered together some bones he figured were those of the master. They're in a tomb in a chapel on the grounds of the chateau, and it's one of the top attractions in Amboise. Are they actually Leonardo's bones? Probably not. His remains are probably where they should be – not sealed away in some sarcophagus, but one with Nature.

Thank you to Costa Michailidis for having me on the InnovationBound podcast.

As always, you can find interviews of me on my interviews page.

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: https://kadavy.net/blog/posts/leonard-mind-raphael-world/

Today I have a special episode for you. If you missed last month's AMA/Livestream, I'm delivering it right to your ears. In this AMA, I answered questions about:

• How should I start marketing my books?
• How can you cope with burnout that gets in the way of creative work?
• How can you market your books when it doesn't come naturally?
• How did you build your audience and how long did it take? (How can you build an audience without "niching down"?)
• What's the difference between an accountability partner and a creativity partner?
• How did you get your first book deal?
• How can you stay motivated and get help from others when you work in isolation?
• How can you create luck in creative work?
• Which is better: Medium, or Substack?
• Do you use editing software, such as Grammarly?
• How did you come up with the Seven Mental States of Creativity?
• Have you made soap lately?
• How are you improving your fiction and storytelling skills?
• How do you hack learning a new language?
• Why are you using a pen name to write fiction?
• What are good writing goals for a beginner?
• Why do you prefer self-publishing over traditional?
• How can you pick a creative project when you have too many ideas?
• How do you make foreign-rights deals for your books?
• What should do with lots of different content on different topics?

I also mention in this my new giveaway, and I'll tell you briefly about it now. I'm giving away 20 of my favorite creativity books. As you know from this show, I'm a creativity enthusiast. I love to think about how to tap into your creativity and motivate action, and I love stories about how all creators do that, whether they're writers, painters, musicians, scientists – or do any kind of creative work.

I've compiled a list of my favorite creativity books, spanning mindset, creativity science, biographies, and more. I'm reaching into my own pocket and buying all twenty book for one lucky winner. Find out which books are on the list and sign up at kdv.co/giveaway.

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/ama-september-2022/

The book, Old Masters and Young Geniuses shows there are two types of creators: experimental, and conceptual. Experimental and conceptual creators differ in their approaches to their work, and follow two distinct career paths. Experimental creators grow to become old masters. Conceptual creators shine as young geniuses.

University of Chicago economist, and author of Old Masters and Young Geniuses, David Galenson – who I interviewed on episode 105 – wanted to know how the ages of artists affected the prices of their paintings. He isolated the ages of artists from other factors that affect price, such as canvas size, sale date, and support type (whether it's on canvas, paper, or other).

He expected to find a neat effect, such as "paintings from younger/older artists sell for more." But instead, he found two distinct patterns: Some artists' paintings from their younger years sold for more. Other artists' paintings from their older years sold for more. He then found this same pattern in the historical significance of artists' work: The rate at which paintings were included in art history books or retrospective exhibitions – both indicators of significance – peaked at the same ages as the values of paintings.

When he looked closely at how painters who followed these two trajectories differed, he found that the ones who peaked early took a conceptual approach, while those who peaked late took an experimental approach.

The perfect examples of contrasting experimental and conceptual painters are Paul Cézanne and Pablo Picasso. Paintings from Cézanne's final year of life, when he was sixty-seven, are his most valuable. Paintings from early in Picasso's career, when he was twenty-six, are his most valuable. A painting done when Picasso was twenty-six is worth four times as much as one done when he was sixty-seven (he lived to be ninety-one, and his biographer and friend called the dearth of his influential work later in life "a sad end"). A painting done when Cézanne was sixty-seven – the year he died – is worth fifteen times as much as one done when he was twenty-six.

Cézanne took an experimental approach to painting, which explains why it took so long for his career to peak. Picasso took a conceptual approach, which explains why he peaked early.

Cézanne left the conceptual debates of Paris cafés to live in the south of France, in his thirties. He spent the next three decades struggling to paint what he truly saw in landscapes. He felt limited by the fact that, as he was looking at a canvas, he could only paint the memory of what he had just seen.

He did few preparatory sketches early in his career, but grew to paint straight from nature. He treated his paintings as process work, and seemed to have no use for them when he was finished: He only signed about ten percent of his paintings, and sometimes threw them into bushes or left them in fields.

Picasso, instead, executed one concept after another. He had early success with his Blue period and Rose period, then dove into Cubism. He often planned paintings carefully, in advance: He did more than four-hundred studies for his most valuable and influential painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. One model described how he simply stared at her for an hour, apparently planning a series of paintings in his head, which he began painting the next day, without her assistance.

Cézanne said, "I seek in painting." Picasso said, "I don't seek; I find." Cézanne struggled to paint what he saw, and Picasso said, "I paint objects as I think them, not as I see them."

Here are some qualities that differ between experimental and conceptual artists:

• Experimental artists work inductively. Through the process of creation, they arrive at their solution.
• Conceptual artists work deductively. They begin with a solution in mind, then work towards it.
• Experimental artists have vague goals. They're not quite sure what they're seeking.
• Conceptual artists have specific goals. They already have an idea in their head they're trying to execute.
• Experimental artists are full of doubt. Since they don't already have the solution, and aren't sure what they're looking for, they rarely feel they've succeeded.
• Conceptual artists are confident. They know what they're after, so once they've achieved it, they're done, and can move on to the next thing.
• Experimental artists repeat themselves. They might paint the same subject over and over, tweaking their approach.
• Conceptual artists change quickly. They'll move from subject to subject, style to style, concept to concept.
• Experimental artists do it themselves. They're discovering throughout the process, so they rarely use assistants.
• Conceptual artists delegate. They just need their concept executed, so someone else can often do the work.
• Experimental artists discover. Over the years, they build up knowledge in a field, to invent new approaches.
• Conceptual artists steal. To a greater degree than experimental artists, they take what others have developed and make it their own.

Some other experimental artists:

• Georgia O'Keeffe: She painted pictures of a door of her house in New Mexico more than twenty times. She liked to start off painting a subject realistically, then, through repetition, make it more abstract.
• Jackson Pollock: He said he needed to drip paint on a canvas from all four sides, what he called a "'get acquainted' period," before he knew what he was painting.
• Leonardo da Vinci: He was constantly jumping from project to project, rarely finishing. He incorporated his slowly-accrued knowledge of anatomy, optics, and geology into his paintings.

Some conceptual artists:

• Georges Seurat: He had his pointillism method down to a science. He planned out his most-famous painting, Sunday Afternoon, through more than fifty studies, and could paint tiny dots on the giant canvas without stepping back to see how it looked.
• Andy Warhol: Used assistants heavily, saying, "I think somebody should be able to do all my paintings for me," and "Why do people think artists are special? It's just another job."
• Raphael: Who had a huge workshop of as many as fifty assistants, innovated by allowing a printmaker to make and sell copies of his work, and synthesized the hard-won methods of Leonardo and Michelangelo into his well-planned designs.

Galenson has found these two distinct experimental and conceptual trajectories in a variety of fields. This runs counter to the findings of Dean Simonton, who believes the complexity of a given field determines when a creator peaks. Galenson argues that the complexity of having an impact in a field changes, as innovations are made or integrated into the state of the art.

In sculpture, Méret Oppenheim had a conversation in a café with Picasso, and got the idea to line a teacup with fur. It became the quintessential surrealist sculpture, Luncheon in Fur, but it was totally conceptual. She continued to make art into her seventies, and never did another significant work.

Constantin Brancusi spent a lifetime as an experimental sculptor. He said, "I don't work from sketches, I take the chisel and hammer and go right ahead." He did his most famous work, Bird in Space, when he was fifty-two.

In novels, Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn experimentally, in at least three separate phases, over the course of nine years. He finally published it when he was fifty. Hemingway's novels were conceptually driven, using his trademark dialog as one of his major devices. He picked up this technique and synthesized it from studying the work of Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, and Twain himself.

When I talked to Galenson on episode 105, he explained the way to spot the difference between an experimental and a conceptual novel is to ask, "are the characters believable?" Conceptual novelists focus on plot, while experimental novelists focus on character.

In poetry, Robert Frost, who spent his career trying to perfect how rhythms and stress patterns affected the meanings of words – so-called "sentence sounds" – wrote "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" when he was forty-eight.

Ezra Pound developed his technique of "imagism" when he was twenty-eight, and had thought it through so well he published a set of formal rules. With this conceptual approach, he created the bulk of his influential poems before he was forty, despite living well into his eighties.

In film, Orson Welles created Citizen Kane when he was only twenty-six. The carefully-planned conceptual innovations in cinematography and musical score make it widely-regarded as the most influential film ever.

Alfred Hitchcock didn't make his most-influential films until the final years of his life, as he was about sixty. He said, "style in directing develops slowly and naturally."

I really enjoyed Old Masters and Young Geniuses. I find this dichotomy of experimental versus conceptual approaches really helpful in understanding why, in general, some creative solutions come quickly, while others take months or years of searching.

Galenson is careful to stress that you aren't either an experimental or conceptual creator – it's a spectrum, not a binary designation. But in case you're wondering if you can make yourself a conceptual creator, to become successful more quickly, Galenson says you can't. You might switch from a conceptual to an experimental approach, and find it works better for you, as did Cézanne, or you might try to go from experimental to conceptual and find it doesn't, as did Pissarro. But you can't change the way you think. He told me, "It's like trying to change your brain, and we don't know how to do that."

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/old-masters-young-geniuses

Do you want to build an audience online, but have such a wide variety of interests, you don't know what to focus on? I think you'll like this interview with David Perell.

David Perell (@david_perell) calls himself "The Writing Guy." He runs the cohort-based online writing school, Write of Passage (I love that name). His marketing is very specific, but he has incredibly diverse interests, and enthusiastically shares content related to those interests online.

I went through his links on his website (no longer posted) to prepare for this conversation, and just my highlights of his links were over 6,000 words long! The topics included economics, art, urban planning, golf, music, and much more.

I've been really impressed watching David's online presence, so I brought him on the podcast for my first interview episode in more than two years!

We'll talk about:

• The four grants David has gotten from Tyler Cowen's Emergent Ventures. How did he get those grants, and for what projects?
• Have all the opportunities to grow your audience online passed? David will share what he thinks is the biggest growth opportunity right now.
• We'll talk about how to please the Twitter algorithm. What about it is "so brutal," as David says?

• Write of Passage
• David Perell Twitter
• David Perell's podcast
• "The Hedgehog and the Fox" by Isaiah Berlin
• David's viral logo thread
• Tyler Cowen
• Tim Ferriss
• Joe Rogan
• David Galenson
• Old Masters and Young Geniuses
• Pablo Picasso
• Paul Cézanne
• Andy Warhol
• Leonardo da Vinci
• Raphael
• Michelangelo
• Cézanne's studio
• Claude Monet
• Impressionism
• Cubism
• Space X
• Mark Manson
• Tim Urban on Tim Ferriss
• Hacker News
• Patrick Mackenzie
• Quantitative Easing
• Dodgeball
• Foursquare
• Mark Manson Twitter
• James Clear Twitter
• "Fake Take"
• Don't hate the player, hate the game
• Emergent Ventures
• Renee Girard lectures
• Naval Ravikant on leverage
• The Age of Leverage
• Nat Eliason on speed versus mass
• Warren Buffett spends one year deciding
• The Barbell Strategy for content marketing – Alex Birkett
• Matthew Fitzpatrick
• Mark Broadie
• Strokes Gained
• Trackman
• Titlelist Performance Institute

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

• Twitter
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• Facebook
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• Apple Podcasts
• Overcast
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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/david-perell-podcast

Submit your questions and mark your calendars for my upcoming AMA/Livestream.

In 1977, Richard Bachman published his first novel. In an unusual move for a first-time author, Bachman made his publisher promise to release his books with hardly any marketing.

Bachman's books were to skip the hardcover format and go straight to bargain-bin paperback – the kind you'd find mixed in with other nobody-authors, at a truck stop on I-80, somewhere near Grand Island. He also insisted he was unavailable for interviews, which cut his books off from a key marketing channel. Most publishers wouldn't agree to such bizarre terms, but they were especially excited to release Bachman's books.

Today, forty-five years later, most people have unsurprisingly never heard of Richard Bachman. His books did alright, though: His fourth was optioned for film rights, his fifth sold 28,000 copies, and he got a couple letters a month from fans of his writing.

But his books were so good, one Washington D.C. bookstore clerk was suspicious. Steve Brown dug through the Library of Congress copyright records, and confirmed his suspicion: Richard Bachman was Stephen King.

Why did one of the world's hottest authors publish – in the same genre – under a pen name? At the time, King's publisher had an almost-superstitious belief that if they published more than one of his books in a year, they would distract readers from This Year's Book (that they let King publish Bachman books with so little fanfare speaks to their conviction in this belief). King later described it as like being married to someone with a drastically-smaller sexual appetite: He had to find an outlet somewhere else.

While he was publishing under a pen name, he figured he'd conduct an experiment. He wondered, to what degree was his massive success due to luck? So, as he has said, Stephen King "stacked the dice" against Richard Bachman. He wanted Bachman's books "to go out there and either find an audience or just disappear quietly."

After word got out that Richard Bachman was Stephen King, his books sold even better. That book that sold 28,000 copies for Richard Bachman – Thinner – quickly sold ten times that as a King title.

At first glance, King's Bachman experiment is an open-and-shut case: Bachman's books sold way more copies with Stephen King's name on their covers. But King himself feels his experiment got cut short. He said of Bachman, who he killed off in a press release by "cancer of the pseudonym," "He died with that question – is it work that takes you to the top or is it all just a lottery? – still unanswered." Bachman worked in anonymity for seven years, and released five books – how is that not enough?

William Goldman was a two-time Academy-Award-Winning screenwriter. He wrote the screenplays for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Princess Bride, and Misery (which was supposed to be Richard Bachman's sixth book, but instead was released by Stephen King). In Goldman's book, Adventures in the Screen Trade, he pointed out that in one typical movie season, sixteen major films were released by the major studios. One was a runaway success, and ten of those sixteen lost more than ten million dollars.

Why did those studios bother making the stinkers? Because, as Goldman said:

Nobody knows anything...... Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what's going to work. Every time out it's a guess and, if you're lucky, an educated one.

Nobody knowing anything takes the appeal out of King's Bachman story. It sounded like the perfect story for aspiring creatives to point to and say, "Look, the universe is conspiring against me. If you don't have a big name already, you're screwed."

But really, nothing can guarantee success. You could say you have to have connections, and I could point out that Richard Pryor's son played at the Apollo, and got booed off the stage. You could say you need name recognition, and I could tell you that the 28,000 copies Bachman's fifth book sold was four-thousand more than Stephen King's own fourth book sold. You could say all you need is your big break, and I could remind you that Steve Martin was on The Tonight Show – the big break in the comedy business at the time – sixteen times before someone recognized him in public.

Nobody knows anything. If movie studios knew blockbusters, that's all they'd make. If record companies knew hits, that's all they'd release. If publishers knew bestsellers, that's all they'd launch. And if venture capitalists knew "unicorns," they'd just be called capitalists.

Nobody knows anything, but somebody knows something. As Goldman himself said, you can make an educated guess. I bet he'd agree that a ninety-minute cellphone video of a ham sandwich sitting on a plate is unlikely to fill theaters.

There was another author, named Robert Galbraith, whose debut novel didn't do great. It sold 1,500 copies in the first few months – not bad either. But there was something fishy about Galbraith's work. A journalist tweeted that she had enjoyed Galbraith's book, but it seemed way too well-written to be the debut novel of who was supposedly a retired military officer.

An anonymous account tipped this journalist, saying That's because it's not a debut novel: Robert Galbraith is actually a really well-known author's pseudonym. That led to a computer linguistic analysis and the London Times confronted the alleged author. J. K. Rowling admitted that she was Robert Galbraith, then The Cuckoo's Calling, a crime novel, proceeded to sell like hotcakes. So, of course Rowling's name recognition helped the book sell, but try as she could to hide her identity, she couldn't hide her quality. Her writing was, to paraphrase Steve Martin, so good it couldn't be ignored.

Stephen King got to enjoy the anonymity of his pen name for seven years. Rowling hers about three months. Maybe there's some others out there who never got caught, but it seems social media and computer linguistic analysis has shortened the life of pen names. But King and Rowling both had the same problem: You can't hide quality, and you can't hide voice. From the beginning, King got letters asking him if he was Richard Bachman.

Bachman had the extra challenge that he wasn't merely copying the style of an author already dominating a genre – he literally was that author. Sometimes a copycat does better than the original, because they can't help but be different as they try to copy. For example, Kurt Cobain said he was trying to rip off the Pixies when he wrote Smells Like Teen Sprit. An exact copy doesn't have much chance, because the original already punctured the exact same vacuum.

Jerry Seinfeld likes to tell beginning comedians they'll never make it. Because if they hear that from a comedy legend and still do comedy, he figures, they might have a chance. Maybe it's not satisfying that nobody knows anything. It kind of makes you want to throw your hands up and say, What's the use?! But maybe that's a good thing. If you can know that nobody knows anything, and still be dedicated to your craft, maybe you have a shot.

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

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Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/nobody-knows-anything/

"Crumb time" is the little pieces of time that get lost throughout the day. Instead of giving away your crumb time to unproductive distractions, build systems that complete big projects with small actions. Today, I'll tell you how.

Crumb time is everywhere throughout our days. Whenever we do something substantial with our time, little chunks of time of various sizes and shapes fall to the floor.

Crumb time has a combination of the following qualities:

• Short amounts of time. Crumb time can be less than a minute, or several minutes.
• Unknown lengths of time. You often don't know when your crumb time will be over. It could end in a few seconds, or a few minutes.
• Distracting environments. It's hard enough to focus when you don't know when you'll be interrupted, but the environments in which crumb time take place are often noisy, with lots of activity.

Some examples of crumb time:

• Standing in line at an airport: Lots is going on, you're waiting for your boarding call.
• Riding in a cab: The scenery is changing, but you might have a good idea how much time you have.
• Waiting for a friend to meet you for lunch: They could come in the door in two seconds, or twenty minutes.

Crumb time feels insignificant, and we think we need a controlled environment and a big block of time to do anything useful. You don't have the time or mental bandwidth, it seems, to make substantial progress reading a book, or writing an article. So, we doomscroll on Twitter, blow off steam with a game such as Wordle, or do something pseudo-productive such as check email once again.

We just give away our crumb time, but we could turn it into something useful. Here are some things you could do with crumb time:

• Review highlights in your Zettelkasten: My favorite use of crumb time is reviewing my highlights from a book. I export them to Markdown, and whenever I have a moment, I scroll through the highlights in a plain-text app on my phone. I bold any of the highlights that are extra interesting. When my crumb time is over, I mark my place and lock my phone.
• Learn about something: A crumb-time list is a key component of a system of curiosity management, which I talked about on episode 284. Keep a list of subjects you'd like to learn about, and when you have crumb time, read a Wikipedia page. (I'm not a fan of read-later apps, because the easier it is to save articles, the harder it is to read all of them).
• Brainstorm social media updates: Twitter is a great place to share ideas, a terrible place to have them. Brainstorm potential tweets in a text file, to polish and schedule later.

Another valid use of your crumb time is simply doing nothing. But when you choose to do something, you may as well do something useful. Anything other than giving away crumb time is better than building that bad habit. The more you give away crumb time, the easier that becomes the default use of your crumb time.

You don't need to change your crumb time habits all at once, forever. Instead, try a seven-day crumb-time challenge. Here's how:

1. Delete social media apps. You can do most things on Twitter or Instagram from desktop. Get them off your phone, to force yourself to make good use of crumb time.
2. Block social media websites. Use the parental controls on your phone to block websites to which you give away your crumb time. For me that's twitter.com and instagram.com. On the iPhone, use the "Limit Adult Websites" feature, and add whatever sites you want to the block list. (You can also add adult websites to the allowed sites if that's your thing.)
3. Set up crumb-time actions. If you have a Zettelkasten, you know what to do. If you don't have one, for a quick-start you could export your highlights from your favorite book and have them available on your phone. Set up a list of things you'd like to look up when you have crumb time. Set up a scratch file for brainstorming social media updates, or set up anything else you could make progress on when you have a minute.

You're of course not always able to use your hands during crumb time, such as when you're driving. This is actually a great reason to have a podcast. Sharing your ideas with others is nice, but if you want to review your own ideas during crumb time, with a podcast you already have a convenient format in which to do so. But, you can also listen to articles or text you'd like to review using the text-to-speech feature on your phone, or an app, such as Otter.

I like the term "crumb time" not only because it implies crumb time's perceived insignificance, but also because substantial things consist of crumbs. Bakers talk about the "crumb structure" of a cake, which is the mix of air and pastry that makes up the cake. In agriculture, soil has taken on a "crumb structure" when it has the right amount of moisture for the soil to bead into crumbs. Soil with a crumb structure has an ideal mix of air and moisture to be a good environment for plants to take root, and for microorganisms to assist in the plant's growth.

Crumb time is powerful because it seems too insignificant to be worth anything. But if you use your crumb time well, those little pieces of time can build into something bigger. Here are some ways:

1. Write a book: A book is little more than a collection of thoughts, and crumb time is enough to develop individual thoughts. I shared on episode 260 my newsletter system, which makes use of crumb time: My tweets grow into newsletters, which grow into podcast articles, which grow into books. Or, you can take a more direct approach. Walter Isaacson has said he writes on his phone while waiting in the airport, and Kirsten Oliphant wrote an entire book during two weeks' time on the treadmill.
2. Build a database of knowledge: Instead of writing a book, you can aim to build a database of knowledge, such as the Zettelkasten I talked about on episode 250. Highlighting highlights is the easiest use of crumb time, but you can do other Zettelkasten tasks with your crumb time, such as clearing your inbox.
3. Make real progress: Even if you don't aspire to write a book or build a Zettelkasten, you can use your crumb time to make real progress on any of your projects. Think of crumb time as a "context", a la Getting Things Done. Just as you might mark a next action as "@home", "@office", or with my Seven Mental States of creativity, you can mark tasks as "@crumbtime". Then you have a list of tasks you can do with little time and attention.

Pay attention to how you use your crumb time, and you'll find significant uses of time and energy that could be put toward something productive. In the same time and mental effort it takes to play Wordle every day, you could build a database of knowledge, write articles, or even books.

I encourage you to try a seven-day crumb-time challenge. Let me know how it goes!

Image: Pexals

Thank you for having me on your podcasts. Thank you to Ben Henley-Smith at Cord's Best Work podcast. As always, you can find all podcasts I've been on at kadavy.net/interviews.

David Kadavy is author of Mind Management, Not Time Management, The Heart to Start and Design for Hackers. Through the Love Your Work podcast, his Love Mondays newsletter, and self-publishing coaching David helps you make it as a creative.

Follow David on:

• Twitter
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• Facebook
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• Apple Podcasts
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Put your money where your mind is. Patreon lets you support independent creators like me. Support now on Patreon »

Show notes: http://kadavy.net/blog/posts/crumb-time/