Mass production techniques have brought us untold benefits. But the thinking behind the their most efficient and effective aspects seep gradually and unnoticed into other areas of our life. This threatens to poison our creativity.
Years of exposure to factory processes — creating “stuff” at scale and in volume — has given us some terrible ideas of what it means to do creative work.
If you’re going to produce work you’re proud of then we’re going to have to unearth some of the misconceptions and comprehensively destroy them.
You can’t see producing creative work as like working on a factory line. The aims are completely opposed.
Think about it…
The purpose of a worker on a production line is to ship as many items as possible that meet spec.
That lower limit of quality is crucial here. Every widget produced that doesn’t meet quality control standards is wasted. Or worse… A single faulty component that slips through the net could cause a whole product to fail.
While, conversely, there’s no benefit when factory outputs exceed the required quality level.
So the whole industrial process is geared around conformity. Make sure that none of the outputs fall below the required level of quality. But no attempt to achieve any upside beyond that line — it would simply be a waste of resources.
Creative work flips the script completely on its head.
Here, you can churn out as much rubbish as you want. You don’t have to ship anything that doesn’t meet spec. And the way to generate good ideas is to have loads of bad ones first.
So the penalty for failing is low. You just throw it out and start again. No-one need ever know.
So here we need to go the exact opposite way. When the factory worker is looking to be as consistent as possible, we want to be massively inconsistent.
It’s not a game of cumulative. The factory worker wins by adding up lots of little bits. Each one counts and what matters is the size of the pile they build at the end of the day.
The artist scoffs at that. Stacking up 1000 mediocre works (that meet spec) doesn’t amount to much. While a true success has no limit on what it’s worth. It only takes one breakthrough work of art to cause ripples across the universe.
In factory thinking, anything that gets thrown away because it doesn’t meet spec is waste. The whole aim is to minimise that.
In creative thinking it’s not merely allowed — Brahms went as far as to claim that how much someone throws away is precisely what marks them out as an artist. So lean into that risk. Aim to throw out 90% of what you create. If you’re not doing that then it means one (or both) of two things:
You’re not creating enough stuff. So you can’t afford to throw the worst bits out.
Or you’re being too consistent.
That sounds good. But it’s actually terrible.
It means you’re spending too much time getting everything up to scratch — when you should be ditching the less promising attempts early on and only putting time into the ones which are developing beyond your expectations.
And/or you’re choosing to run with too many “safe” ideas to start with. Not enough of them are doomed to fail.
So maximise the chaos. Let your creativity flow in all sorts of wild and crazy directions so you have a chance of finding that spark of magic. Risk, no embrace, failure. Because when you keep things ordered and safe (factory thinking again) you’re limiting the downside (which we don’t care about) but you’re also restricting the upside.