“Whatever It Takes!” Is a Great Way to Do Sloppy Work
Or, an empty canvas is more limiting than liberating
👋 Hey there! My name is Abhishek. Welcome to a new edition of The Sunday Wisdom! This is the best way to learn new things with the least amount of effort.
It’s a collection of weekly explorations and inquiries into many curiosities, such as business, human nature, society, and life’s big questions. My primary goal is to give you some new perspective to think about things.
In 1960, two men made a bet. The first was Bennett Cerf, the founder of the publishing firm Random House. The second was a guy called Theo Geisel. Cerf challenged Geisel to write a children’s book using only 50 different words to win 50 bucks.
The result was a little book called Green Eggs and Ham, which was published on August 12, 1960. By 2001 it had become the fourth-best selling English-language children’s book yet written. As of now the book has sold 200 million+ copies.
Theo Geisel was none other than Dr. Seuss, and this story is an example of how constraints make us creative. It shows what can be built off of a simple question like, “what if I had to use only 50 different words to write a book?”
But arbitrary constraints—that are set for the sake of setting constraints—are useless. We have to learn how to choose the appropriate constraint based on the creative goals we are pursuing.
For example, an empty canvas is an artist’s nightmare because it presents infinite possibilities. But it’s more limiting than liberating. To overcome this, we need some way to narrow our view. We need space constraints.
In the above example, instead of working with infinite words for his children’s book, Dr. Seuss had to find a way to work with only 50. This narrowing down allowed him to get creative.
When you give yourself space constraints, for example, paint with primary colours only, or write a technical essay that a 10 year old can understand, you give yourself the freedom to think inside the box. This prevents the mind from wandering.
If you are building software, the space constraint question is: “what if I could pick only one feature?” Despite that, space constraints have no control over time. If you pick a big feature, the MVP itself may take a year instead of a month. In such cases, we need to create some time constraints.
When we start a project, we set some arbitrary deadlines based on the arbitrary MVP in our mind. We can do better by asking ourselves: “what if I had only a month, how would I get this up and running?”
A time constraint forces us to get better at picking. For example, restricting yourself to get something done in a month or a week would force you think very differently than restricting yourself to get the same thing done in three months.
Brian Chesky, the founder and CEO of Airbnb, talks about an art assignment they got when he was a student at RISD. The teacher had asked the class to do a self-portrait. The students spent hours on the assignment, polishing each and every brush stroke until perfection. Once they were done, all the projects were put up in the class for display. When the students looked at each others work, they wondered how they could have done better—if only they had more time, or they had done something differently. Then they got the next assignment: to complete 200 self-portraits.
In order to do 200 self-portraits, they had to get creative and approach the problem completely differently. Deadlines define the work, not the other way around.
If you let the work define the deadline, you are promising yourself that you’ll do whatever it takes to get the project up and running, no matter what. It’s hard to find three words loaded with more inspiration, aspiration, and ambition than “whatever it takes!”
But “whatever it takes!” is a great way to do sloppy work. Edward Smith, the captain of the Titanic, gave orders to do whatever it takes to get to New York faster than expected to break the record. “Whatever it takes!” is an iceberg you should avoid.
A better approach is to ask, what will it take? It’s an invitation to add some space constraints on top of the time constraints. Now you have the room to make tradeoffs and cuts, or come up with a different approach all together.
What if you have no job a month from now? What if you have only one month worth of savings? What will it take to get a project up and running so that it generates cash the next month onwards?
Combining space constraints with time constraints gives you the right frame of mind to avoid the trivial path, and get things up and running creatively. Much like writing a children’s book with just 50 words.
Old Things New Context
I came across this old article from Snap Inc. It talks about how photography has transformed in the age of social media.
Photography isn’t about creating an art object any more. As taking photos have become ridiculously simple, it’s the communication of the experience itself. Selfies aren’t self-portraits but a sharing of experience—like a communication of where a person was, and how they felt.
It got me thinking. Like photography, other activities (such as chatting with friends, or taking notes, or reading books) aren’t what they used to be. In the new context, they have found newer meanings. Food for thought!
— The Frame Makes the Photograph
Work Lives Forever
Jackie Chan once said, “Whatever you do, do the best you can. Because films live forever.”
You cannot go to every person in the audience and tell them why you couldn’t give your best because it was raining, or you didn’t have time, or you had other problems. The audience doesn’t care. It’s either a good movie or a bad movie. And it’ll be so forever.
But “the best you can do” isn’t about perfection. The best you can do is to meet a high standard in a given situation. In the film Rocky, the best Rocky Balboa could do was go the distance. That’s all that is expected from us—to go the distance.
Having reasons (or excuses) does not turn a bad performance into a good one. Results are completely unaffected by rationalisation.
Cognitive Bias and Information Overload
We confuse popularity with quality, and end up copying the behaviour we observe. When we are repeatedly exposed to an idea—typically from many sources—we adopt and share it. This translates into an irresistible urge to pay attention to information that is going viral. If everybody else is talking about it, it must be important.
Free communication is not free. By decreasing the cost of information, we have decreased its value and invited its adulteration. For example, fake news!
To restore the health of our information ecosystem, we must understand the vulnerabilities of our overwhelmed minds, and how adding friction to the spread of information can be leveraged to protect us from being misled.
— Information Overload Helps Fake News Spread
Ambient Television
My partner has a habit of watching Netflix while working. She picks a series with a simplistic plot that doesn’t require her fullest attention. This is similar to listening to music while working. Here, instead of music, it’s a series with a paper-thin plot.
Turns out it’s really a thing, and companies like Netflix are making more of such content with simplistic and monotonous plots. This is the era of ambient television.
Take the show Emily in Paris for example. Its purpose is to provide sympathetic background for staring at your phone, cooking, doing laundry, or doing some actual work.
The episodic plots are too thin to ever be confusing. Nothing bad ever happens to the heroine. When you glance back up, chances are that you’ll find tracking shots of the Seine or cobblestoned alleyways— lovely but meaningless. You haven’t missed a thing. Try it sometimes. Maybe it’ll actually help you get some work done.
— “Emily in Paris” and the Rise of Ambient TV
Negative Thinking
Spend more time thinking about the prospect of failure, and what you might do about it. It’ll help you build more resilient solutions. It is a useful mental habit but it is neither easy nor enjoyable.
The first advantage is that of contingency planning: if you anticipate possible problems, you have the opportunity to prevent them or to prepare the ideal response.
A second advantage is rapid learning. When Paul MacCready was working on his human-powered aircraft in the 1970s, his prototype plane was designed to be easily modified and repaired after the inevitable crashes. The feedback loop of fly > crash > adapt was quick and cheap.
The third advantage is that we’ll turn away from projects that are doomed from the start. Exploring the daunting prospect of disaster would provoke the wise decision not to start in the first place. Especially when the downside outweighs the upside.
But we must be careful when we stare at the prospect of failure. Stare too long and you will be so paralysed with anxiety that success becomes impossible.
— The Power of Negative Thinking
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋
Also, I'm excited that you are thinking of conducting a workshop. Have filled up the form. Looking forward to it.
Really enjoyed your video today. Great perspective!