In this episode of The War with Art, we pull another card from Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies deck and get a prompt that hits uncomfortably close: “Bridges — build — burn.”

From modular synth patches you create and then tear down, to monks spending days on intricate work only to wipe it clean, we talk about why building and burning is baked into the creative process. Sometimes you have to strip a piece back to its core idea. Sometimes you have to scare yourself a little. And sometimes you have to let go of what you’ve already built... even when sunk cost is screaming at you to keep it.

The guys also explore the deeper version: making something can be a bridge between who you are now and who you become after you’ve finished — and once you cross, you don’t really get to go back.

If you’ve got your own interpretation of the card, drop a comment as we’d love to hear it.

“Maybe you need to burn the bridge in order to make it not easy — and then rebuild something new.”

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Timestamps:

• 01:10 — What *Oblique Strategies* is (and why we’re using it)
• 02:40 — The card: “Bridges — build — burn”
• 03:50 — Burning as a creative tool: risk, conflict, and scaring yourself
• 06:10 — Modular synths: build the patch, then tear it down
• 07:15 — The monks: the work matters more than the artifact
• 12:05 — The deeper take: building a bridge to a new version of yourself
• 16:45 — Audience, tone, and the bridges you build (or burn) with words
• 19:10 — “Diet vanilla” and using the cards to push the work further

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Referenced in this episode:

• Oblique Strategies — Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt
• Sand Mandala: Sacred Art of Tibet (Thames & Hudson) — on the creation and ritual destruction of sand mandalas
• Sunk cost fallacy” (concept)