Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World
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Last annotated on October 8, 2016
On the 27th of January 1975, a seventeen-year-old German named Vera BrandesRead more at location 52
Vera Brandes was introducing Keith Jarrett and his producer Manfred Eicher to the piano – and it wasn’t going well.Read more at location 57
‘this tiny little Bösendorfer, that was completely out of tune, the black notes in the middle didn’t work, the pedals stuck. It was unplayable.’Read more at location 64
he could do nothing about the muffled bass notes, the plinky high notes and the simple fact that the piano – ‘a small piano, like half a piano’ – just didn’t make a loud enough sound to reach the balconies of the vast auditorium.Read more at location 68
Jarrett didn’t want to perform. He left and went to wait in his car,Read more at location 70
Desperate, she caught up with Jarrett and, through the window of his car, begged him to play. The young pianist looked out at the bedraggled German teenager standing in the rain and took pity on her. ‘Never forget,’ Jarrett said. ‘Only for you.’Read more at location 72
That night’s performance began with a simple chiming series of notes, then quickly gained complexity as it moved by turns between dynamism and a languid, soothing tone. It was beautiful and strange, and it is enormously popular: The Köln Concert album has sold 3.5 million copies.Read more at location 77
When we see skilled performers succeeding in difficult circumstances, we habitually describe them as having triumphed over adversity or despite the odds. But that’s not always the right perspective. Jarrett didn’t produce a good concert in trying times. He produced the performance of a lifetime, but the shortcomings of the piano actually helped him.Read more at location 80
The substandard instrument forced Jarrett away from the tinny high notes and into the middle register. His left hand produced rumbling, repetitive bass riffs as a way of covering up the piano’s lack of resonance. Both of these elements gave the performance an almost trance-like quality.Read more at location 83
the proportion between the instrument and the magnitude of the hall,’Read more at location 87
Standing up, sitting down, moaning, writhing, Keith Jarrett didn’t hold back in any way as he pummelled the unplayable piano to produce something unique. It wasn’t the music that he ever imagined playing. But handed a mess, Keith Jarrett embraced it, and soared.Read more at location 89
Keith Jarrett’s instinct was not to play and it’s an instinct that most of us would share.Read more at location 91
The argument of this book is that we often succumb to the temptation of a tidy-minded approach when we would be better served by embracing a degree of mess.Read more at location 94
We succumb to the tidiness temptation in our daily lives when we spend time archiving our emails, filling in questionnaires on dating websites that promise to find our perfect match, or taking our kids to the local playground instead of letting them run loose in the neighbourhood wasteland.Read more at location 98
the careful commander is disoriented by a more impetuous opponent; the writer is serendipitously inspired by a random distraction; the quantified targets create perverse incentives; the workers in the tidy office feel helpless and demotivated; a disruptive outsider aggravates the team but brings a fresh new insight. The worker with the messy inbox ultimately gets more done; we find a soulmate when we ignore the website questionnaires; the kids running loose in the wasteland not only have more fun and learn more skills, but also – counterintuitively – have fewer accidents. And the pianist who says, ‘I’m sorry, Vera, that piano is simply unplayable’, and drives off into the rainy Cologne night leaving a seventeen-year-old girl sobbing on the kerbside, never imagines that he has passed up the opportunity to make what would have been his most-loved piece of work.Read more at location 105
Bowie, Eno and Darwin: How frustration and distraction help us solve problems in art, science and lifeRead more at location 122
Keith Jarrett’s predicament was a happy accident. But there are those who take it for granted that such accidents can and should be planned; they feel that messy situations will tend to provide fertile creative soil.Read more at location 124
It was a dangerous period for me,’ Bowie reflected over twenty years later. ‘I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity.’Read more at location 130
Visconti himself had been recruited by Bowie with this sales pitch: ‘We don’t have any actual songs yet … this is strictly experimental and nothing might come of it in the end.’Read more at location 137
Eno took to showing up at the studio with a selection of cards he called ‘Oblique Strategies’. Each had a different instruction, often a gnomic one. Whenever the studio sessions were running aground, Eno would draw a card at random and relay its strange orders.Read more at location 140
Be the first not to do what has never not been done before Emphasise the flaws Only a part, not the whole Change instrument roles Look at the order in which you do things Twist the spineRead more at location 142
For example, during the recording of the Lodger album, Carlos Alomar, one of the world’s greatest guitarists, was told to play the drums instead. This was just one of the challenges that Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards imposed, apparently unnecessarily.Read more at location 147
During another session, Eno stood beside a blackboard with a list of chords on it, and the musicians had to follow along as he pointed at random to chord after chord.Read more at location 148
Carlos did have a problem, simply because he’s very gifted and professional … he can’t bring himself to play stuff that sounds like crap.’Read more at location 154
Yet the strange chaotic working process produced two of the decade’s most critically acclaimed albums, Low and ‘Heroes’, along with Iggy Pop’s most respected work, The Idiot and Lust for Life, which Bowie co-wrote and which benefited from the same messy approach.Read more at location 155
It’s hard to argue with such results, and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies now have a cult following in creative circles.Read more at location 159
Given both Jarrett’s and Bowie’s experience, it seems that arbitrary shocks to a project can have a wonderful, almost magical effect.Read more at location 162
The advantage of random disturbances can also be seen in a far more technical realm – mathematicsRead more at location 164
Take the question of how to lay out a circuit on a silicon chip.Read more at location 165
there are trillions upon trillions of conceivable ways to lay out the wiring and the digital logic gates that make up the circuit – and some are much more efficientRead more at location 167
This is an example of what mathematicians call an NP-hard problem. NP-hard problems are a bit like enormous combination locks:Read more at location 168
With a lock, only one solution will work. With a chip, manufacturers don’t need to find the ultimate circuit layout;Read more at location 172
Another is to start with a random layout and look for incremental improvements:Read more at location 176
Unfortunately, this method is likely to send you down a dead end.Read more at location 178
The better method is to emulate Brian Eno and introduce a judicious dose of randomness.Read more at location 180
There’s no guarantee of finding the very best circuit layout, but this kind of approach will usually find a good one.Read more at location 182
evaluate a complex new molecule for possible medical use by comparing its structure with that of many other complex molecules with known medical properties.Read more at location 184
Here’s an analogy: imagine participating in a strange competition to find the highest point on the planet, without being allowed to look at a map. You can name any set of coordinates you like and you’ll be told its altitude: say, ‘50.945980, 6.973465’, and you’re told: ‘That’s 65 metres above sea level.’ Then you can name another point,Read more at location 187
you could try a methodical search: start with ‘0.000001, 0.000001’ and work your way up.Read more at location 191
Or you could try a strategy of purely random leaps:Read more at location 193
An alternative extreme strategy is pure hill-climbing, analogous to the step-by-step search for improvements in silicon chip design. Start at a random point and then look at all the nearby coordinates – say, a metre away in each direction. Pick the highest of those and repeat the process over and over.Read more at location 195
Hill-climbing strategies get stuck if they meet small hills.Read more at location 199
The most likely winning approaches will be a blend of randomness with hill-climbing.Read more at location 200
Improvising at the piano seems a world away from laying out an efficient array of electronic components on a silicon wafer, but the analogy of random leaps and hill-climbing helps to make sense of what happened in Cologne. Keith Jarrett was already a highly accomplished pianist: we might imagine his performances as habitually scaling peaks in the Alps. When faced with the unplayable piano, with its harsh treble and anaemic bass, it was as if a random disruption had plucked him from an Alpine peak and deposited him in an unfamiliar valley.Read more at location 204
But when he started to climb, it turned out that valley was in the Himalayas,Read more at location 208
It’s human nature to want to improve and this means that we tend to be instinctive hill-climbers. Whether we’re trying to master a hobby, learn a language, write an essay or build a business, it’s natural to want every change to be a change for the better. But like the problem-solving algorithms, it’s easy to get stuck if we insist on never going downhill.Read more at location 209
In the 1990s, Graeme Obree, a maverick cyclist nicknamed the ‘Flying Scotsman’, made some random leaps – he experimented with radical changes, building his own bike from odd components (including parts of a washing machine) and adopting unusual riding positions; one of these involved tucking his hands into his breastbone with no handlebars to speak of, and in another he held his arms straight out like Superman. Obree’s experimentations enabled him to break the world hour record twice, until cycling’s world governing body, the UCI, simply banned his tucked riding position. He switched to the unconventional Superman position and won the World Championship; the UCI banned that position too. Given the UCI’s attitude, we should not be surprised that the best cyclists and cycling teams now focus largely on marginal gains.Read more at location 218
In 2014, some of the workers on London’s Underground system went on strike for two days. The strike closed 171 of the Tube’s 270 stations, leaving commuters scrambling to find alternative routes using buses, overground trains or the stations that remained open. Many London commuters use electronic fare cards that are valid on all forms of public transport, and after the strike, three economists examined data generated by those cards. The researchers were able to see that most people used a different route to get to work on the strike days, no doubt with some annoyance. But what was surprising is that when the strike was over, not everybody returned to their habitual route. One in twenty of the commuters who had switched then stayed with the route that they had used during the strike;Read more at location 227
All they needed was an unexpected shock to force them to seek out something better.Read more at location 235
As long as you’re exploring the same old approaches, Brian Eno explains, ‘you get more and more competent at dealing with that place, and your clichés become increasingly clichéd’. But when we are forced to start from somewhere new, the clichés can be replaced with moments of magic.Read more at location 239
the spaciousness of the place stops it feeling claustrophobic, it is engagingly messy. We are surrounded by a piano and some guitars, speakers and laptops, towering bookshelves packed with curiosities, bits and pieces of half-built instruments, plastic crates full of cables and wires and art supplies, and on a desk in a corner, a perfume collection.Read more at location 251
Eno himself is a man who once dressed like a wizard, his long locks dyed silver as he played the synthesiser with a giant plastic knife and fork. Now in his mid-sixties, the glam look is long gone. He is dressed expensively but casually. Where his head isn’t bald, it is shaved. He has the veteran cool of a star architect.Read more at location 254
Brian Eno is easily distracted. We’re often told that good work comes from the ability to focus, to shut out distractions. To choose from a plethora of self-help tips along these lines,Read more at location 260
Some people turn to methylphenidate (better known as Ritalin) to help them concentrate.Read more at location 265
science writer Caroline Williams even visited the Boston Attention and Learning Lab – an affiliate of Harvard and Boston Universities – to have her left prefrontal lobe zapped with magnetic pulses, all in an attempt to resolve what one of the lab’s neuroscientists called her ‘issues with attention and distractibility’.Read more at location 265
Yet here is a creative icon, one of the most influential people in modern music, who seems unable to hold a conversation outside a soundproof box.Read more at location 268
Look around a record shop and Eno is everywhere: as a glam rocker with Roxy Music; composing ambient work such as Music for Airports; creating My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a collaboration with David Byrne in which two white geeks anticipated hip-hop; and making Another Green World, the record that Prince once named as his biggest inspiration. (It’s the one featuring Phil Collins and the beer cans.) But the albums with Eno’s name on the front are just the start. Look in the small print and he is everywhere, a zephyr of cerebral chaos blowing back and forth across the frontal lobes of pop. Famous for his contributions to David Bowie’s albums, Eno has also worked with Talking Heads, U2, Paul Simon and Coldplay. Along the way he collaborated with punks, performance artists, experimental composers and even the film director David Lynch.* When the music magazine Pitchfork listed its top 100 albums of the 1970s, Brian Eno had a hand in more than a quarter of them.Read more at location 269
Distractible brains can also be seen as brains that have an innate tendency to make those useful random leaps. Perhaps, like Keith Jarrett’s unplayable piano, distractibility is a disadvantage that isn’t a disadvantage at all.Read more at location 278
A few years ago a team of researchers including Shelley Carson of Harvard tested a group of Harvard students to measure the strength of their ability to filter out unwanted stimulus. (For example, if you’re having a conversation in a busy restaurant and you can easily filter out the other conversations going on around you and focus only on the conversation at hand, you have strong attentional filters.) Some of the students they studied had very weak filters – their thoughts were constantly being interrupted by the sounds and sights of the world around them. You might think this was a disadvantage. Yet these students were actually more creative on all sorts of measures.Read more at location 281
There were 25 of these super-creatives in the study; 22 of them had weak or porous attention filters. Like Brian Eno, they simply couldn’t filter out irrelevant details.Read more at location 288
the ADHD sufferers were more creative in the laboratory than non-sufferers and were more likely to have major creative accomplishments outside the lab.Read more at location 293
showed pairs of people blueish and greenish slides, asking them to shout out whether they were blue or green. The experimenters had a trick to play, however: one member of each pair was actually a confederate of the researchers, who would sometimes call out baffling responses – ‘green’ when the slide was clearly blue. Having been thoroughly confused, the experimental subjects were then asked to free-associate words connected with ‘green’ and ‘blue’ – sky, sea, eyes. Those who had been subjected to a confusing mess of signals produced more original word associations: jazz, flame, pornography, sad, Picasso.Read more at location 301
Researchers showed their experimental subjects a set of three words and then asked them to tell a brief story involving the three words. Sometimes the words had obvious connections, such as ‘teeth, brush, dentist’ or ‘car, driver, road’. Sometimes the words were unconnected, such as ‘cow, zip, star’ or ‘melon, book, thunder’. The more random, obscure, challenging combinations spurred the subjects into spinning far more creative tales.Read more at location 313
Adrian Belew, another fine guitarist, who was drafted into the David Bowie recording session where Carlos Alomar was ordered to play the drums. Belew didn’t really know what was happening and had barely plugged in his Stratocaster when Eno, Visconti and Bowie told him to start playing in response to a previously unheard track. Before he could ask why Carlos was on the drums, Belew was told that Alomar ‘would go one, two, three, then you come in’. ‘What key is it?’ asked Belew. ‘Don’t worry about the key. Just play!’ ‘It was like a freight train coming through my mind,’ said Belew later. ‘I just had to cling on.’Read more at location 327
Eno admits that his experiments with Belew, Alomar and the other musicians in Berlin weren’t much fun for them. Used to finding a comfortable groove, they had their routines ‘entirely subverted’Read more at location 336
The eventual result of the freight train coming through Belew’s mind, sliced and spliced by Eno and producer Tony Visconti, became a guitar solo that is the spine of Bowie’s single ‘Boys Keep Swinging’. The solo is now regarded as a classic.Read more at location 338
when we listen to a Bowie album, we don’t see the mess and frustration of the recording session; we can just enjoy the beauty that it produced.Read more at location 340
The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually,’ he says. ‘And the friend is alertness. Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it.Read more at location 357
That alertness is Keith Jarrett on stage in Cologne. It’s Adrian Belew desperately trying to make sense of ‘Boys Keep Swinging’.Read more at location 359
They force us into a random leap to an unfamiliar location, and we need to be alert to figure out where we are and where to go from here. Says Eno, ‘The thrill of them is that they put us in a messier situation.’Read more at location 361
Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Erikka VaughanRead more at location 364
Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials. The other half got the same documents reformatted into one of three challenging fonts: the dense Haettenschweiler, the florid Monotype Corsiva or the zesty Comic Sans Italicised. These are, on the face of it, absurd and distracting fonts. But the fonts didn’t derail the students. They prompted them to pay attention,Read more at location 365
Students who had been taught using the ugly fonts ended up scoring higher on their end-of-semester exams.Read more at location 369
He has been a physicist, an engineer, a mathematician, a molecular biologist, historian and a linguist, and he’s won some big scientific prizes for his work. All before he turned forty.Read more at location 376
Ed Yong describes Aiden’s working method as ‘nomadic. He moves about, searching for ideas that will pique his curiosity, extend his horizons, and hopefully make a big impact. “I don’t view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method,” he tells me. “I’m constantly looking at what’s the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on.Read more at location 377
Aiden tried to sequence the human immune system. Human antibodies are built from a Lego-kit of different genes, snapping together quickly to meet the challenges of constant invasions from viruses, bacteria and other nasties. Aiden wanted to catalogue all the Lego bricks in the set – all the different genes that could be deployed to fight germs. After months of hard work, the project crashed.Read more at location 383
But then Aiden went to an immunology conference, wandered into the wrong talk and ended up solving a ferociously difficult problem – the three-dimensional structure of the human genome – by combining everything he had learned in failing to sequence antibodies with an obscure idea he’d stumbled upon from mathematical physics.Read more at location 387
This wasn’t a fluke. It was a strategy. Aiden seeks the hardest, most interesting problems he can find, and bounces between them. A failure in one area gives fresh insights and new tools that may work elsewhere.Read more at location 389
A question of particular interest was: what determines whether a scientist keeps publishing important work throughout his or her life? A few highly productive scientists produced breakthrough paper after breakthrough paper. How? A striking pattern emerged. The top scientists switched topics frequently. Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of 43 times.Read more at location 400
This sort of project-switching seems to work in the arts as well as the sciences. David Bowie himself is a great example. In the few years before he went to Berlin, Bowie had been collaborating with John Lennon, had lived in Geneva, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and had acted in a feature film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, as well as working abortively on its soundtrack. He had been drafting an autobiography. In Berlin, he produced and co-wrote Iggy Pop’s albums in between working on his own.Read more at location 410
Two leading creativity researchers, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, have argued that the tendency to work on multiple projects is so common among the most creative people that it should be regarded as standard practice. Gruber had a particular interest in Charles Darwin, who throughout his life alternated between research in geology, zoology, psychology and botany, always with some projects in the foreground and others in the background competing for his attention. He undertook his celebrated voyage on the Beagle with ‘an ample and unprofessional vagueness in his goals’.Read more at location 437
Gruber and Davis call this pattern of different projects at different stages of fruition a ‘network of enterprises’. Such a network of parallel projects has four clear benefits, one of them practical and the others more psychological.Read more at location 446
The practical benefit is that the multiple projects cross-fertilise one another.Read more at location 448
while we’re paying close attention to one project, we may be unconsciously processing anotherRead more at location 456
A third psychological benefit is that each project in the network of enterprises provides an escape from the others.Read more at location 461
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called this ‘crop rotation’.Read more at location 463
That’s the theory, but in practice it can be a source of anxiety. Having many projects on the go is a stressful experience that can quickly degenerate into wheelspinning.Read more at location 468
one practical solution, from the great American choreographer Twyla Tharp.Read more at location 471
Tharp uses the no-nonsense approach of assigning a box to every project. Into the box she tosses notes, videos, theatre programmes, books, magazine cuttings, physical objects and anything else that has been a source of inspiration. If she runs out of space, she gets a second box. And if she gets stuck, the answer is simple: begin an archaeological dig into one of her boxes.Read more at location 474
Eno’s friend, the artist Peter Schmidt, had a flip-book filled with similar provocations. The two men teamed up to produce the Oblique Strategies deck – a guaranteed method of pushing artists out of their comfort zones.Read more at location 502
The poet Simon Armitage, fascinated by the cards, says their effect is ‘as if you’re asking the blood in your brain to flow in another direction’.Read more at location 504
It’s like when you’re feeling a pain in your foot and someone slaps you in the face, you’re not feeling the pain in your foot any more.Read more at location 509
Alomar now teaches music at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and he regularly resorts to the Oblique Strategies. His students will sometimes experience creative block and, says Alomar, ‘I need for them to see what I saw, and feel what I felt, and the dilemma that I had when I had to come up with something out of nothing.’Read more at location 520
