This piece contains the immortal line "Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside." I've quoted that to my kids (and myself) many times.
These are hard topics to write about, because inspiring talk quickly slides into feel-goodness which is dangerously close to the black hole of complacency: one false move and you get sucked in. What Hugh writes doesn't do that (edit: mostly), perhaps because he's so direct about the loneliness and pain of creative work. "Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain."
There's also something about the contrast between his trivial business-card doodles and the life-and-death questions. The high and the low go together and understand each other. It's the mediocre middle that sucks.
> These are hard topics to write about, because inspiring talk quickly slides into feel-goodness
Don't you think that "Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten." Crosses that line? It's really easy to prove that wrong. Statistically, that's a bad advice. In my personal opinion, that sounds like a dishonest mean to get your readers to like you.
I don't blame him tho. I don't think he's doing any wrong. There's a difference between "scientifically correct" and "politically correct". And I understand that, unfortunately, life sometimes makes you choose the political path instead of the scientifically correct one. If a kid with mental disorder asks you "will I ever be an astronaut?", it might be dishonest to pat him in the back and tell him, of course you can, just try hard enough. But I wouldn't blame those who would.
No doubt he crosses the line - it's hard not to. I'm not sure I agree about that particular quote, though. If we all went by probability, nobody would do anything great. The soul does not live by statistics.
I am no authority, but FWIW my experience of creativity comes from a place I find hard to believe every human being doesn't have access to. As Bob Dylan sang: "In this you are not so unique". The difficulty is that we are governed almost completely by the desire to believe and do what other people say.
> If we all went by probability, nobody would do anything great.
You can be humble and productive at the same time. That's one of the goals of the Lean Startup.
Skeptically analyse the viability before doing something. That's different from avoid doing at all. You just need to be skeptical about your own knowledge and abilities, and then you can make a better decision. That's a good advice. But "believe in yourself above all else", not so much.
Funny you should bring that up. I dislike the Lean Startup ideology precisely because it is at odds with the creative process as I understand it. Did you see the interview with the Pinterest founder the other day? He said he was glad he hadn't known about it earlier because it would have convinced him to give up. Twitter may be a similar case; the founders said they kept going for a long time when people were telling them it was useless.
When you see something other people don't see, measuring their opinions is likely to tell you you're wrong. But what if you're not wrong? Emerson has a great line somewhere about the pain of having an original thought and giving it up under pressure, only to find out later that it was right.
These are hard topics to write about, because inspiring talk quickly slides into feel-goodness which is dangerously close to the black hole of complacency: one false move and you get sucked in. What Hugh writes doesn't do that (edit: mostly), perhaps because he's so direct about the loneliness and pain of creative work. "Nobody suddenly discovers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain."
There's also something about the contrast between his trivial business-card doodles and the life-and-death questions. The high and the low go together and understand each other. It's the mediocre middle that sucks.