#that takes work and a certain genius for unsexiness

[winepresswrath]

chris nolan pausing mid fuck to hop off his partner's dick and grab a script book, then bouncing back on only to make them read "now I have become strictly plot relevant and thematically significant sex scenes, destroyer of eroticism" out loud as they continue banging.

[immaturityofthomasastruc]

I think one of the issues with the writing is they fail to understand that certain ideas don't work very well outside of fanfiction

Like the constant everything is Marinette's fault, and Adrien is so neglected yet still their both so nice

Whump, hurt/ comfort, hurt no comfort, angst, etc can work in bucket loads, but that's almost always in fanfiction.

Because when an original author does it, it doesn't have the same effect. Both may be writing them into pain and suffering but it's like the power difference takes steroids when it's the original. Projecting onto vs forcing them through something

When I write or even just think of fanfiction/ au ideas I'll dive headfirst into angst and pain, even saying to myself "If I can't make myself cry then what's the point!" or even when I'm reading

But I don't do that when I'm thinking about original ideas, I just don't.

I literally plan to have my 6th member in a 5 man band die by her father killing her, but I internally treat it differently than making a character plan their own suicide on their 18th birthday. And that reflects in the writing

I'm torturing both but one I created, to begin with, and the other I altered

Salt and character hate

Like if you hate a character you've created so much 2 things come to mind

1. Why?

2. Take a step back

I'm writing the murder father to be the big unsexy bad, but I know I'm the one that's in control and technically the one that's going to make him so bad and murder his daughter. I don't need to go on about how bad he is and overindulge. I need to show that he's bad

In fanfiction, especially when we feel a character isn't treated realistically or actions aren't treated like they should be, has reason to tell and overindulge

Thomas is writing his own character's Salt. aka Chloe

Like it does get ridiculous how bad Alya is portrayed in a lot of Salt fics, but put it in the perspective of she's treated like this genius and the bestest ever friend, then doesn't fact check before posting a massive claim from someone she just met, telling her friend to always check her sources when said friend brings up concerns and the friend is always pushing her out of her comfort zone to creepy levels. It makes sense that people want to tell and overindulge in how bad she is

Writers, artists, even those who just internally come up and keep up with story ideas, are really the closest we will ever get to gods being real. Because we really are in practice the gods to these worlds. If you create a starting world you're a capital G God, the ones you expect to be portrayed as all-knowing, all good, always there, to that world, like the Christian God. You should never have to remind your world you're good (even if to who varies) because you should show that you're good. When you are taking and adjusting it you're a god with a lower case g, the ones portrayed as immensely powerful but with human flaws, like the Greek gods, they may be seen as better but flat-out pettiness can be found. Can you change if you're a lower case or capital G, yes, but that's a lot to do with how you treat your work

I can understand where you’re coming from. Part of me is wondering if the whole reason Alya is getting more focus this season is a way to prove to the critics she isn’t as bad as they say she is, just like how they’re ramping up some of Chloe’s negative traits to stick it to the people who like her more than other characters.

And like you said, the show has a serious problem of telling us how to feel about a character instead of actually giving us reasons to root for them, especially when it comes to Adrien, Alya, Marinette, and even Gabriel at times.

I still think the story you’re writing sounds interesting though.

[evilelitest2]

100 Days of Trump Bonus Edition: Bioshock

Welcome back to 100 days of Trump...bonus edition, where we talk about what made Trump possible though...well more than 100 recommendations.  I am finishing these last few up before i move unto my next project, invading and conquering Moldovia.

    So Bioshock 1 almost made it on the primary list, but i backed off, mostly because I played bioshock infinite and fucking hated it, particularly its extremely demented understanding of politics (you can see it here).  And I kept wondering to myself if I was overvaluing the first Bioshock after the disaster of infinite and upon further reflection, I do admit that the first one does the sort of piss ant thing of talking about issues more than actually addressing them....Despite that though, I think it is worth checking out.  Just ignore the terrible ending and the useless moral choice system.

    So Bioshock is about Objectivism, the intellectual black hole where good ideas go to die, and is about Andrew Ryan (GET IT) an objectivity billionaire who builds an underwater....Ayn Rand (GET IT) city where his Free Market Utopia can live in peace.  And it immediately goes to shit like...holy crap.  

And his initial pitch sounds pretty good if you like empty hollow rhetoric to you know....facts 

Notice how the entire philosophy of this is basically “Guess what, you are a special awesome person who doesn’t have to abid by the rules” but it doesn’t take a genius to reason how fundamentally myoptic it is, because if you want to have a city (let alone a country) based on these principles, you are going to run into problems, because to get a society running you need to make decisions based on the city rather than a bunch of individuals with a god complexes.  And what happens when those individuals run into each other and start to compare egos? Oh right, if everybody is special, there isn’t any room for compromise.  

    Its kinda interesting how much Objectivism borrows from Marxism actually, I mean listen to this (and trust me, this speech is a lot more articulate and compelling than anything Ayn Rand wrote, it is only three mins for example)

   Huh, an endless cycle of history being based on a lie spread by the ruling classes?  An obsession with ownership of labor.  A love of broad sweeping historical generalization rather than a more nuanced approach that takes into account various trends, and a conspiratorial dismissive of all things he doesn’t like as in fact being the same?  Huh, sounds like the writings of a certain German philosopher with a big beard, except Marx at least had the decency to have a sense of humor.  Also very noticeable how he claims that FDR was being taken over by communist, when in fact the New Deal actually killed the Communist/Socialist movement in the United States, because if you can get out of the depressing using capitalist means, there is no need for a revolution.  

The obsession with “the parasite” reminds me of nothing so much as “The Kulak” or “The Jew” in Soviet and Nazi circles, or heretic we see in Christian of Islamic Fundamentalism.  Because Utopian self indulgence always seem to end to the same boring end.  But its romantic, say what you will about the man, he sure can make a speech, and that romantic ideal of a society is very tempting, while the practical reality of building a country, based on checks and balances has its faults, but it is fundamentally practical, because you have to assume this society will deal with the actual unsexy realities of running a country.  Ryan and by extension most of this sort of Koch Brothers Trumpian right wing Utopian just sort of expects things to work out if you are dismissive enough and self indulgent enough, that if you massage your own ego just a little bit more, that will make the difficult problems of governance go away. 

   Huh...personifying the market as some sort of living sentience, for somebody who rejects religion you do sure seem to have a very predestination perspective, I mean if the market is some sort of personified sentence then you don’t have to offer actual solutions to the problem now do you?  Just like if feudalism is gods plan, if the Purges are natural step in the march towards true equality, if genocide is just the battle between the races, that means you don’t have to bear personal responsibility for when it all falls apart.  And indeed it really does fall apart.  

You do have to love the fact that he compares people wanting food to not die to sexual predators, which is not so dissimilar of the the attitude of our own ...job creators.  

   Because if you try to built John Galt’s home for imaginary political philosophizers at the bottom of the sea, you need to take into account some pratical realities.  They cut off contact with the surface to keep socialist ideas from infecting their free market utopia, but in doing that, you create regulation, which allows a black market for smugglers.  But ultimately, men (and this really is a male centric game and philosophy) are not inherently rational, Andrew Ryan certainly isn’t with his refusal to understand how markets work when narcotics are involved 

 But so is everybody else, human beings are not wholy rational creatures, and if you don’t account for that, you find yourself with a golf club in your brain.  

   But this philosophy always seems to find adherents, in large part because it is extremely self indulgent, this is an adolescent power fantasy, you are the most special misunderstood creature in the world and everybody else is just holding you back.  But if everybody thinks that way, what do you in a society which necessitates poverty to exist, if you have no welfare state, then society will need losers and what happens to those losers when they realize they can’t become captains of industry but only mop toilets.  And whats more, what happens when you get a ruthless ambitious man who doesn’t wish to be held back by the petty morality of reverence for the free market? 

   A shitty final boss fight, thats what.  

[toomanysinks]

These ad execs have a venture fund they’d like to sell you

Mike Duda comes from the world of advertising. In fact, he spent 13 years at the renowned ad agency Deutsch, becoming the youngest partner in the company’s history until another creative, Brent Vartan, came along and stole the title. Little wonder that in 2010, when Duda struck out on his own to create Bullish (formerly known as Consigliere Brand Capital), he stole Vartan, later making him the firm’s second managing partner.

It isn’t that the two wanted to outgun their former employer exactly. Instead, the idea from the outset was to create an ad agency that also happens to be an investment firm. In a way, they stole a page from many Silicon Valley service firms that, beginning in the go-go dot com era of twenty years ago, worked for pay and, when the right opportunities arose, for equity.

It’s turned out to be a pretty good approach. Bullish, which is based in New York and works on a pay-for-performance compensation model, has managed to sneak checks into some of the biggest consumer new brands out there, including Warby Parker and Peloton and Harry’s and Casper, companies that have happily agreed to include Bullish as a syndicate partner including because of its advertising know-how.

In the meantime, to keep the lights on as those privately held companies have continued to operate privately, Bullish has also managed to land more traditional big-league clients, including Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, Nike and Walmart. It also counted GNC as a client and reportedly turned heads when it dropped it in order to invest $250,000 in the three-and-a-half-year-old vitamin supplement startup Care/of.

With Bullish now contemplating fund two, we decided to sit down with Duda last week to learn more about how the whole things operates, and where he and Vartan are shopping now.

TC: You’d spent your career in advertising. What circles were you traveling in that you were also seeing seed-stage startups — good ones —  in need of funding?

MD: It was through outlier circles. Like, Peloton struggled to raise money, so it got104 angels to invest, including high-net worths, and us, who looked institutional, though I laugh at that now. [Founder and CEO John Foley] didn’t know how to play the VC game. He’d been the president of Barnes & Noble and he had this idea that people thought was crazy. He had a PPM for his fundraise — he didn’t have the [traditional] ten-page PowerPoint. So a lot of people in New York passed, and those same people now funding the Mirrors of the world and Tonals of the world.

It was a similar situation with Birchbox. It trouble raising money because its founders are women, and most of the guys they were talking to were like, ‘Well, my wife would get bored of this after a couple of months.’ But the target audience doesn’t have a seven-car garage in Palo Alto. It’s a mom of two in Cleveland who subscribes to the New Yorker.

On the agency side, we worked on Revlon for two years, so we get that a consumer doesn’t have to be like just someone we know. It isn’t, ‘Oh, it’s a product for women; let me ask my wife.’ We actually do focus groups to [find] consumer insights.

TC: So the pitch is that it isn’t just money you’re bringing but a full marketing group, too.

MD: A marketing group with people from places like Deloitte and A.T. Kearney and Goldman Sachs and RBC who try to understand what’s really going on among the says 330 million Americans out there – – not just in New York, San Francisco, L.A. or Boston, which are the hotbeds for consumer investment in VC. We look at stuff that could be disruptive for the normals, which is sometimes unsexy stuff like a stationary bike with a TV.

TC: A $3,000 stationary bike is for normal people?

MD: There were 1.6 million stationary bikes being sold in the U.S. every year [when Foley first began pitching investors]. Harry’s taking on Gillette before Dollar Shave Club came along [is another example]. The jeans I’m wearing are from a company called Revtown in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, founded by Henry Stafford, who was the North American president of Under Amour and [previously worked for both] American Eagle and Gap. So this was a first-time entrepreneur who had corporate experience was paranoid about raising too much money and promising investors too much too soon. And we’re attracted to entrepreneurs who don’t want to raise tons of capital before they build a profitable business.

That’s not the case with all of our investments, obviously. Casper and Peloton have both raised a fair amount of money, but their growth kind of followed suit.

TC: Why jeans?

MD: I think [Stafford[ was kind of ticked off and wondering why do people have to choose from either the Gap or a $200 pair of jeans. He wanted to build a great pair of jeans that sell for under $100 and that he can sell through great advertising. The pair I’m wearing right now is $75 and it’s a great pair of jeans. Not that I have the ability to stretch, but if I could put my foot over my head without them on, I could do it with them on, too, because they’re stretchy and durable and well-made. Also, from an operations from business standpoint, this is an adult who has built up businesses before and brings that sensibility so that we can get the scale right. Though a direct-to-consumer brand, it’s not too precious to go into physical retail earlier, either.

TC: Most direct-to-consumer brands are showing up in the offline world faster. 

MD: DTC 2.0 is definitely going to be more about going where your customers are. When Harry’s went into Target, it was a genius move, because there are people in Overland Park, Kansas who may not see its digital banners, but they’re in a Target, and they’re like, ‘That’s new, that’s interesting.’ So it’s another form of marketing.

TC: What about social media? All the platforms are already saturated. Who’s doing really novel things out there, in your view?

MD: I’ll maybe start with the stuff that just annoys us. First, I think a lot of VCs and other people involved with early-stage companies think marketing is a customer acquisition cost and it’s not. If you have to rely on Facebook and Google, you’ll never grow because your [costs] never go down.

When we think of DTC companies, we’re looking for is,  what can you do that gets talk value, not just at your initial PR launch but that [produces] advocates in a kind of flywheel talking about you. People do talk about this stuff. People like to be the one to discover something before anyone else and like to talk about it.

TC: What about TV spend? I’m always astonished to see fairly new brands spending what I’d guess is a lot of money on television ads.

MD: With digital marketing, the accountability is not there as much as people thought. And that’s why about a year ago, you started see the [men’s wellness company] Hims start spending $6 million or $7 million a month on TV advertising during March Madness. Was that a flawed strategy? No. TV works. That’s why you see companies that reach a certain size go to TV; it’s like some sort of validation that this a real company. TV is a storefront for companies that may not have one.

TC: I do wonder how these brands, many of which are great, deal with fickle customers. There are some old brands that I will always love — Patagonia, Hermes – – but a lot of newer brands that I love but I will throw over in two seconds for a newer, shinier brand when it also has a compelling product.

MD: It’s more like someone is probably not serving you well enough. They’re letting you forget about them. Is it Amazon’s fault that RadioShack and JC Penny are going out business? Probably not. They weren’t serving the customer. If you build a relationship with your consumer rather than advertising to her, you have a much better chance of keeping that person as a customer longer term. Patagonia makes great stuff, but so do other people. It’s that the company’s values are bigger than the product itself [that keeps people coming back].

TC: You’re going to start raising a fund later this year. How it will it be different than what you put together the first time around?

MD: We undershot our proposition the first time around. Being an executive at an ad agency, I wanted to be more conservative rather than sell the dream and not achieve it. It was actually harder to raise $10 million than what I was told it would have been if I’d been raising $25 million or $30 million. But we wanted to show proof of concept. Now, a lot of people have left the seed and pre-seed area as investors have raised bigger funds and we see a great opportunity, in a world where there is literally trillions of dollars in play, to get in as early as possible, then play pro rata defense [to maintain our stake]. And in our case, we’ll probably offer up later rounds to the [limited partners] who support us.

TC: A lot of seed and pre-seed deal flow comes to investors from Series A investors. Which are those firms in your universe?

MD: By and far, the most helpful firm to us was First Round Capital. Without their time, we wouldn’t be where we are.

I’m dating myself, but back in 2009, they did office hours. They were commercializing this angel VC investing thing. And I went to one of their office hours and [firm founder] Josh [Koppelman] spent 10 minutes with me and gave me his card and it was like a ‘Dumb and Dumber’ moment. I called my wife, and I was like, ‘He’s saying I have a chance!’ Then I flew to San Francisco to do another office hours . . .

TC: You flew cross country expressly for another of these office hours?

MD: Yes. And 78 people showed up. And it was like the land of broken toys. There were older gentlemen in three-piece suits, and a 19-year-old guy who showed up with a Rock’em Sock’em Robot and people who flew in from San Diego and Portland. And they just gave every one 10 minutes and I was like, ‘Here’s our proposition. It’s a marketing agency with a fund.’

And 75 of of the 78 people got 10 minutes, and two got 30 minutes, and one of them — me — got an hour and a half with Chris Fralic and Kent Goldman, who were kind enough to spend time with someone who kind of wanted to do what they do in a different way. Really, they’re the ones who gave me the confidence that this could work.

Photo above, left to right: Mike Duda, Brent Vartan. Courtesy of Mike Duda.

source https://techcrunch.com/2019/03/19/these-ad-execs-have-a-venture-fund-theyd-like-to-sell-you/

[fmservers]

These ad execs have a venture fund they’d like to sell you

Mike Duda comes from the world of advertising. In fact, he spent 13 years at the renowned ad agency Deutsch, becoming the youngest partner in the company’s history until another creative, Brent Vartan, came along and stole the title. Little wonder that in 2010, when Duda struck out on his own to create Bullish (formerly known as Consigliere Brand Capital), he stole Vartan, later making him the firm’s second managing partner.

It isn’t that the two wanted to outgun their former employer exactly. Instead, the idea from the outset was to create an ad agency that also happens to be an investment firm. In a way, they stole a page from many Silicon Valley service firms that, beginning in the go-go dot com era of twenty years ago, worked for pay and, when the right opportunities arose, for equity.

It’s turned out to be a pretty good approach. Bullish, which is based in New York and works on a pay-for-performance compensation model, has managed to sneak checks into some of the biggest consumer new brands out there, including Warby Parker and Peloton and Harry’s and Casper, companies that have happily agreed to include Bullish as a syndicate partner including because of its advertising know-how.

In the meantime, to keep the lights on as those privately held companies have continued to operate privately, Bullish has also managed to land more traditional big-league clients, including Anheuser-Busch, Pepsi, Nike and Walmart. It also counted GNC as a client and reportedly turned heads when it dropped it in order to invest $250,000 in the three-and-a-half-year-old vitamin supplement startup Care/of.

With Bullish now contemplating fund two, we decided to sit down with Duda last week to learn more about how the whole things operates, and where he and Vartan are shopping now.

TC: You’d spent your career in advertising. What circles were you traveling in that you were also seeing seed-stage startups — good ones —  in need of funding?

MD: It was through outlier circles. Like, Peloton struggled to raise money, so it got104 angels to invest, including high-net worths, and us, who looked institutional, though I laugh at that now. [Founder and CEO John Foley] didn’t know how to play the VC game. He’d been the president of Barnes & Noble and he had this idea that people thought was crazy. He had a PPM for his fundraise — he didn’t have the [traditional] ten-page PowerPoint. So a lot of people in New York passed, and those same people now funding the Mirrors of the world and Tonals of the world.

It was a similar situation with Birchbox. It trouble raising money because its founders are women, and most of the guys they were talking to were like, ‘Well, my wife would get bored of this after a couple of months.’ But the target audience doesn’t have a seven-car garage in Palo Alto. It’s a mom of two in Cleveland who subscribes to the New Yorker.

On the agency side, we worked on Revlon for two years, so we get that a consumer doesn’t have to be like just someone we know. It isn’t, ‘Oh, it’s a product for women; let me ask my wife.’ We actually do focus groups to [find] consumer insights.

TC: So the pitch is that it isn’t just money you’re bringing but a full marketing group, too.

MD: A marketing group with people from places like Deloitte and A.T. Kearney and Goldman Sachs and RBC who try to understand what’s really going on among the says 330 million Americans out there – – not just in New York, San Francisco, L.A. or Boston, which are the hotbeds for consumer investment in VC. We look at stuff that could be disruptive for the normals, which is sometimes unsexy stuff like a stationary bike with a TV.

TC: A $3,000 stationary bike is for normal people?

MD: There were 1.6 million stationary bikes being sold in the U.S. every year [when Foley first began pitching investors]. Harry’s taking on Gillette before Dollar Shave Club came along [is another example]. The jeans I’m wearing are from a company called Revtown in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, founded by Henry Stafford, who was the North American president of Under Amour and [previously worked for both] American Eagle and Gap. So this was a first-time entrepreneur who had corporate experience was paranoid about raising too much money and promising investors too much too soon. And we’re attracted to entrepreneurs who don’t want to raise tons of capital before they build a profitable business.

That’s not the case with all of our investments, obviously. Casper and Peloton have both raised a fair amount of money, but their growth kind of followed suit.

TC: Why jeans?

MD: I think [Stafford[ was kind of ticked off and wondering why do people have to choose from either the Gap or a $200 pair of jeans. He wanted to build a great pair of jeans that sell for under $100 and that he can sell through great advertising. The pair I’m wearing right now is $75 and it’s a great pair of jeans. Not that I have the ability to stretch, but if I could put my foot over my head without them on, I could do it with them on, too, because they’re stretchy and durable and well-made. Also, from an operations from business standpoint, this is an adult who has built up businesses before and brings that sensibility so that we can get the scale right. Though a direct-to-consumer brand, it’s not too precious to go into physical retail earlier, either.

TC: Most direct-to-consumer brands are showing up in the offline world faster. 

MD: DTC 2.0 is definitely going to be more about going where your customers are. When Harry’s went into Target, it was a genius move, because there are people in Overland Park, Kansas who may not see its digital banners, but they’re in a Target, and they’re like, ‘That’s new, that’s interesting.’ So it’s another form of marketing.

TC: What about social media? All the platforms are already saturated. Who’s doing really novel things out there, in your view?

MD: I’ll maybe start with the stuff that just annoys us. First, I think a lot of VCs and other people involved with early-stage companies think marketing is a customer acquisition cost and it’s not. If you have to rely on Facebook and Google, you’ll never grow because your [costs] never go down.

When we think of DTC companies, we’re looking for is,  what can you do that gets talk value, not just at your initial PR launch but that [produces] advocates in a kind of flywheel talking about you. People do talk about this stuff. People like to be the one to discover something before anyone else and like to talk about it.

TC: What about TV spend? I’m always astonished to see fairly new brands spending what I’d guess is a lot of money on television ads.

MD: With digital marketing, the accountability is not there as much as people thought. And that’s why about a year ago, you started see the [men’s wellness company] Hims start spending $6 million or $7 million a month on TV advertising during March Madness. Was that a flawed strategy? No. TV works. That’s why you see companies that reach a certain size go to TV; it’s like some sort of validation that this a real company. TV is a storefront for companies that may not have one.

TC: I do wonder how these brands, many of which are great, deal with fickle customers. There are some old brands that I will always love — Patagonia, Hermes – – but a lot of newer brands that I love but I will throw over in two seconds for a newer, shinier brand when it also has a compelling product.

MD: It’s more like someone is probably not serving you well enough. They’re letting you forget about them. Is it Amazon’s fault that RadioShack and JC Penny are going out business? Probably not. They weren’t serving the customer. If you build a relationship with your consumer rather than advertising to her, you have a much better chance of keeping that person as a customer longer term. Patagonia makes great stuff, but so do other people. It’s that the company’s values are bigger than the product itself [that keeps people coming back].

TC: You’re going to start raising a fund later this year. How it will it be different than what you put together the first time around?

MD: We undershot our proposition the first time around. Being an executive at an ad agency, I wanted to be more conservative rather than sell the dream and not achieve it. It was actually harder to raise $10 million than what I was told it would have been if I’d been raising $25 million or $30 million. But we wanted to show proof of concept. Now, a lot of people have left the seed and pre-seed area as investors have raised bigger funds and we see a great opportunity, in a world where there is literally trillions of dollars in play, to get in as early as possible, then play pro rata defense [to maintain our stake]. And in our case, we’ll probably offer up later rounds to the [limited partners] who support us.

TC: A lot of seed and pre-seed deal flow comes to investors from Series A investors. Which are those firms in your universe?

MD: By and far, the most helpful firm to us was First Round Capital. Without their time, we wouldn’t be where we are.

I’m dating myself, but back in 2009, they did office hours. They were commercializing this angel VC investing thing. And I went to one of their office hours and [firm founder] Josh [Koppelman] spent 10 minutes with me and gave me his card and it was like a ‘Dumb and Dumber’ moment. I called my wife, and I was like, ‘He’s saying I have a chance!’ Then I flew to San Francisco to do another office hours . . .

TC: You flew cross country expressly for another of these office hours?

MD: Yes. And 78 people showed up. And it was like the land of broken toys. There were older gentlemen in three-piece suits, and a 19-year-old guy who showed up with a Rock’em Sock’em Robot and people who flew in from San Diego and Portland. And they just gave every one 10 minutes and I was like, ‘Here’s our proposition. It’s a marketing agency with a fund.’

And 75 of of the 78 people got 10 minutes, and two got 30 minutes, and one of them — me — got an hour and a half with Chris Fralic and Kent Goldman, who were kind enough to spend time with someone who kind of wanted to do what they do in a different way. Really, they’re the ones who gave me the confidence that this could work.

Photo above, left to right: Mike Duda, Brent Vartan. Courtesy of Mike Duda.

Via Connie Loizos https://techcrunch.com

[saberessinfronteras]

Einstein was an Artist: How Creativity Actually Works

Einstein inspired a paradigm shift in physics not as a scientist but as an artist. Our entire construct of the world depends on language. What we see isn’t what the universe has defined, but what our brains have learned to label. English distinguishes a scientist as someone who systematically learns about a part of the natural world and uses that knowledge to describe and predict it. An artist, on the other hand, is defined as someone who creatively produces. These labels are important. They’re not perfect, but they allow us to differentiate between the different aspects of our reality. The harm occurs when we use them incorrectly. When it comes to categories like science and art, we have a tendency to presume mutual exclusivity. Einstein may have been a practicing scientist with a focus on theoretical physics, but that doesn’t mean that he wasn’t also an artist. In fact, we can easily argue that more of his success was attributed to his creativity than it was to his underlying knowledge of the field. There are many smart and knowledgeable scientists. Rarely, however, are they capable of producing work that shifts our entire understanding of the world. That requires an entirely new way of looking at things. You don’t have to play the violin or write a poem to be an artist. It’s simply about producing, and the quality of what you produce is largely dependent on creativity. Believe it or not, there isn’t as much to it as you might think. 1. Don’t Wait for Inspiration to Get Moving There are many misconceptions about how breakthroughs are made. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that they’re suddenly inspired — like the often told story of the moment the fall of an apple led Newton to discover gravity. In a slight way, they do happen, and sometimes, sporadically. That said, if your sole tactic is to sit and wait for inspiration to strike, then you’re almost always setting yourself up for failure. Dr. Mark Beeman leads the Creative Brain Lab at Northwestern University. He uses brain scanners to conduct research studies to understand the creative process. In his own words: “Although the experience of insight is sudden and can seem disconnected from the immediately preceding thought, these studies show that insight is the culmination of a series of brain states and processes operating at different time scales.” Simply put, eureka moments occur because of the work leading up to them. Action stimulates inspiration more often than inspiration stimulates action. 2. Treat It Like an Unsexy Job Doing creative work isn’t sexy. It’s about setting a schedule and just doing it. In 1902, Einstein got a job at a Swiss patent office. He had searched for a teaching position in the preceding years with little luck. This forced him into an inopportune and uninspiring place relative to his interest in physics. During his time there, however, he chose to manage his day so that he had a disciplined balance between the hours he spent on the job and the hours he dedicated to scientific work. He was deliberate in his commitment to creation, and the fruits of his labor led to the Annus Mirabilis papers. Scientists call it the miracle year. It would inspire the formulation of the two fundamental theories in physics: the theory of general relativity and quantum mechanics. Had Einstein waited for the right moment, the world might not be where it is. The best way to create is to treat it as a job. Pick a time, show up, and produce. 3. Seek Relationships Between Existing Ideas At its core, creativity is just a new and useful way of combining old ideas. It isn’t imagined out of thin air, and it isn’t completely abstract. It’s a fresh way of making sense of the existing components of reality that have yet to merge. In 1945, Einstein wrote a letter in response to a survey by a French mathematician who was trying to understand the thinking patterns of famous scientists. It can be found in Ideas and Opinions, a collection Einstein’s writings, and in it, he speaks about his process. “The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be ‘voluntarily’ reproduced and combined. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory playseems to be the essential feature in productive thought — before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.” If you think about creativity as the ability to develop meaningful connections between existing parts of your reality, you can start to realize that creativity isn’t just reserved for the likes of Mozart and Picasso. It’s something that impacts all of our lives, and it’s something we all practice. Hone your mental inventory of knowledge and let it mingle in absurd ways. 4. Be Willing to Produce Subpar Work Like anything else in life, the only way to master creativity is to put in work. The difficulty, however, lies accepting the production of subpar work. Nobody likes to fall short of expectations, but it’s all the more daunting when it comes to creating because the result is a tangible output, like a painting or a book. One way to challenge this difficulty is to realize that we’re not the only ones that produce bad work. When we see a great creation by a genius, it’s useful to remember that they worked on more than just one piece. They produced a lot of really unsexy work that no one talks about. Over the course of his career, Einstein published over 300 scientific papers and about 150 non-scientific papers. An archive of his non-published work contained more than 30,000 unique documents, and he wasn’t always right. In Brilliant Blunder, Mario Livio predicts that about 20% of Einstein’s papers contain mistakes of sorts. A byproduct of his effort to think in unconventional ways was that his work was sometimes imperfect. 5. Compromise Today for Tomorrow Extraordinary results require extraordinary commitment. That’s the secret. John Hayes is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and he once did a study to analyze thousands of musical pieces between 1685 and 1900. He was curious about how long it took for a musician to produce world class art. He narrowed it down to 500 masterpieces by 76 composers. By mapping out a timeline for each individual, he looked at when a piece was produced. Outside of only three artists, every composition was written at least a decade after they started to take their work seriously. In follow-up studies of poets and painters, he found the same result. He termed this “The ten years of silence” — a period with a high production of work but very little recognition. To cultivate creativity, you have to not only build the courage to produce bad work, but you also have put in a lot of unrewarded time to create great work. All You Need to Know If an artist is someone who produces something new and novel, then few people in history fit the bill like Einstein. Artistry was the source of his genius. This is what his story can teach us: I. Don’t wait for inspiration to get moving. Creativity is a process. Even the seemingly sporadic insights — like the ones we get in the shower — rely on what came before them. Inspiration doesn’t just strike for no reason. It relies on a consistent pattern of work that sometimes manifests itself in the form of those rare moments. To truly practice creativity, commit to a schedule, show up, and get to work, whether you want to or not. II. Seek relationships between existing ideas. Nothing new is completely original. Creativity is simply about producing something using a combination of the existing elements of your reality. Start by developing a mental inventory of relevant knowledge, work to connect the dots, and then support those connections with a logical structure. III. Produce a large volume of work. Creativity doesn’t work unless you do.Produce in the face of failure, and produce in the face of subpar results. It’s easy to forget that not every piece of work created by a genius was all that great. A lot of it wasn’t. It’s just not talked about. Creating bad work is necessary in order to uncover great work, and it all takes time. Mastering creativity is in itself an art, and like any art, it can empower you. The internet is noisy I write at Design Luck. It’s a free high-quality newsletter with unique insights that will help you live a good life. It’s well-researched and easy-going. Join 20,000+ readers for exclusive access. CreativityLifeLife LessonsSelf ImprovementEntrepreneurship One clap, two clap, three clap, forty? By clapping more or less, you can signal to us which stories really stand out.   Follow  Zat Rana Medium member since May 2017 Playing at the intersection of science, art, and business. I write to reduce noise. www.designluck.com. CNBC, Business Insider, World Economic Forum, etc. Follow  Personal Growth Keep Learning. Keep Growing. 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