Everyone welcome to nontrivial. I'm your host, Sean McLaren. This episode I talk about the difference between consuming and creating. I discussed how we often assume the process of creating is supposed to resemble how we read about it were in reality, the creative process is fundamentally different. We'll see how this leads to a conflict between consumption and creation, hindering our ability to create affectively will see how this often leads to a kind of cycle of endless consumption.
Or we never make progress and then we'll see what it is that is so different about creating. Versus consuming and finally will learn how to take a better approach to building things. It's an interesting episode. There's lots of good examples. I think you're really going to like it. Let's get started.
OK, so in this episode I'm talking about the difference between consuming and creating, specifically how we cannot create the way we consume, and I think this is an assumption we often have, even if unknowingly we tend to believe that the process of building things is supposed to resemble how it was presented to us when we were consuming information related to the thing we're building. So for example, if I wanted to build a house or compose a piece of music or create an application.
I likely spent a fair amount of time consuming or reading about those things, and then when I go to approach the process of doing it myself of building the thing I'm going to believe that that process is going to somehow resemble the way I learned about it. So I'm going to talk about that difference between the way something is presented to us when we read about it. When we watch a video, when we consume information.
Versus how we go to attempt to build the thing ourselves and at the heart of that difference is this. There is a difference between providing a solution to a problem and wrapping a problem around a solution, so I'll say it one more time. There's a difference between providing a solution to a problem versus wrapping a problem around a solution, and if that doesn't make sense yet, that's fine.
That's something I'm going to expand on as I go through this episode using examples, but I just want to kind of put that in there right now as an anchor, and then expand off it going forward, but I'm going to argue that one of those providing a solution to a problem is what occurs.
When we consume information and the other one wrapping a problem around a solution only occurs when we create something, and so because there's this fundamental difference between the way solutions an problems play out between consumption and creation, we tend to kind of this conflict between the two. And so this is what speaks to the fact that you cannot create the way you consume.
So let's layout some definitions first, between consumption and creation, and then I'll give an example of how these two come into play and why there's a conflict. And obviously as we go through, the episode will look at the resolution to it. But let's layout some basic definitions first. So when I say consume, I'm talking about the ingestion of information, right? So this is anytime we are reading or watching a video or listening to a talk, whatever it is. And why do we do this?
Because we want to learn, we want to be informed. We want to be. May be prepared for something, or maybe we just want to be entertained when we create something we're building or crafting something, or assembling. Why do we do this? Because we want to bring something into the world. Maybe we want to be known or recognized for something we want to make a difference. Maybe we just enjoy the process of building. Or maybe we're trying to solve a specific problem.
Now there's a relationship between consumption and creation, because they have a way of feeding off each other. So if I'm going to consume something, read a book, watch videos, I'm going to get ideas. I'm going to get motivated. I I'm going to learn how to do something, or at least I think I'm learning how to do it. And then that's going to kind of compelled me to create something when I'm creating something.
I'm also going to be compelled to then go back and consume things because I'm building something I'm probably running into challenges. It's not quite working, and so I might want to go read information on an online form to try to resolve the issue, maybe. You'll pick up another book to learn more about the business or whatever it is, so consumption has a way of feeding into creating. Creating has a way of feeding into consumption and.
Along the lines of that relationship, we can say that we are almost always doing more consumption than creation, right? And the. The reason for that is obvious, because the cognitive load on consumption. Is a lot lower than that of creating. We're consuming we're looking at something that was pieced together by someone else who did all the work and trying to bring together resource is an articulate the message and then present that to it.
So in some sense, when we're consuming, we kind of just sitting back and ingesting the information. But when we're creating. Word out the individual responsible for bringing together resource is trying to find a way to compress that down into some articulate message and then present that to others. But we tend to think that building things resembles how it was presented, and that's what I want to get at in this episode.
And again at the heart of that, I'm going to be going back to that kind of fundamental aspect of the solution in the problem. You can approach something as the solution to a problem, or you can rap a problem around an existing discovered solution. When we consume, we're being presented a story or a narrative. That sounds like it's a solution to a problem, but when we are creating it has more to do with discovering some kind of solution and then wrapping. The problem with the narrative around it.
OK, so let's jump into an example to try to make this clear. This example is going to be simple at 1st, and then I'll bring more relevant examples further on in the episode, but I want to frame the problem simply at first. So here's my example. It's going to be pool trick shots, so pool as in billiards. I'm talking about the game where you're shooting the white ball with acute it smacking other balls and going into pockets. But I'm not talking about playing the game against an opponent.
I'm talking about individuals that do trick shots. So if you go onto YouTube and you put pool trick shots or something into the search engine. You'll see these individuals that set up these really fancy shots and they hit the ball. You know it hops and it does this funny little curves and it makes other balls kind of bouncing in random directions or seemingly random directions, but then it lands at a specific predetermined destination.
You know the white ball or the other balls or whatever it is, so these are fancy tricky shots. They look really impressive and there are a lot of fun to watch and so this is the example I'm going to give. We're going to talk about how that shot or these shots are presented to us, right? How we consume that information. And then I'm going to talk about trying to do that ourselves. Going off on her own and creating our own trickshot.
So first, let's talk about how we would consume this information when we're looking at these videos. How are these trick shots being presented to us? This is the professional he walks up to the table. He positions his body and then he thrust his weight into the queue and then it hits the white ball. Now maybe the white ball. Maybe he glanced it on the left side so it kind of went to the right and then it hit the right edge of the pool table and then did this bounce.
And then when it landed on the bounds it kind of did this curve. And then it curved into maybe a bunch of balls that he had set up towards the center of the pool table and those kind of explode out. And then maybe some of those go into the pockets and then the white ball maybe lands or rests, you know, perfectly in the center, after all is said and done, so I'm just making up some kind of trick shot.
You can kind of envision something yourself, but basically we have someone walking up to a table with all these obstacles. He takes the shot. Somehow, that ball is maneuvering in and around those obstacles, and it does neat little spins. And then it comes to some final resting position. Obviously takes a lot of talent to do something like that, and it looks really neat. So now it's my turn. I'm going to go off and try to create my own trick shots.
I've been watching these videos seeing the guy do these trick shots and maneuver around all these obstacles. It's inspiring. I'm getting some ideas I want to do this myself. I want to create my own videos, present it to other people. So I'm going to create my own trickshot now how am I going to do this? Well, I'm going to assume that the process of me creating my trick shot is going to somehow resemble the trick shots I've been observing in the videos. I mean, that seems to make sense.
You know, we saw the guy approached the table. He had this kind of arrangement of obstacles. And then he did this shot that he obviously got good at through practice. So I'm going to do that same thing. Let's come up with an interesting arrangement of balls that are kind of acting as obstacles or some kind of interesting pattern, and will do something trickshot.
So I'm going to take a number of balls, you know, from the game and I'm going to arrange it as a star shape in the center of the table and let's see what I'm going to do. I'm going to try to glance the ball, kind of at the left. It's going to take off to the right, and I'm going to try to make it bounce a little bit, but then when it lands, it's going to spin and go into the star, and then when it hits the star, that's going to.
Explode out and let's say each point of the star is going to as it explodes, end up in one of the pockets, right. Each of those points is going to end up in the pocket, and I think that's going to look really impressive, right? I'm taking the shot, it's doing some bounces and curves. It hits a start, explodes in the points, go into the pockets. And maybe my white ball ends up in the center of where the star was at the beginning. That should look really impressive.
That seems to make sense as a trick. It might look kind of similar to the ones I was observing in the videos, so it seems like we're good to go and again. The way I'm approaching this, the process that I'm using seems to kind of resemble how I've been consuming the information.
The videos that I've been looking at because I'm going to approach the table, there's going to be a setup of patterns or whatever of balls that I've set up in obstacles, and I'm going to do a shot that maneuvers in and around those obstacles, and had some kind of impressive ending. So it looks like the same thing now there's no reason to believe I'm going to be good at the shot at the beginning. Obviously I'm going to have to practice this.
I'm assuming that the people who made those videos that I'm looking at also did a lot of practice to get their shot really good, so I'm going to have to practice. For weeks and months I don't know how long. But I'm going to approach. The process of creating the trick shot. In a way that resembles how I consumed that information in the videos that I was watching. Now, how do you think that's going to go? Well, there's a good chance that that shot is not going to really workout. Why?
Well, I have no reason to believe that this shot even makes sense. OK, I'm envisioning that there's this star in the middle, and I'm kind of assuming I can explode that star out the points getting up in pockets, and I'm also assuming I've got some kind of weird curve and hop to the ball that occurs prior to when it eventually hits the star and explodes and all this stuff, but there's no reason to believe that that's even possible now.
I could technically try to study some of the physics before hand to see if the shot makes sense, but. That's only going to work to some extent because there's all kinds of randomness. Randomness that comes into play, right? The ball isn't perfectly spherical spherical. I've gotta hit it at the exact glancing angle. There might be divots in the pool table, and what if I wanted to do this trick at a competition where it's not my own pool table?
He probably only work with those physics so much, so there's no real reason to believe that this trick is necessarily going to even work. So chances are I do this set up. I'm trying to get this shot. I'm practicing this shot, but it's never really going to converge into a solution. It's never really resolving, so I'm probably going to start to change the arrangement of it. OK, maybe the star shape was a stupid idea, maybe I don't know. Maybe I'll do it more like a square.
I think that's kind of one of the examples on the video. I mean, again, I'm trying to create my own trick shot. I don't want to replicate what was done. I'm not going to be well known for replicating. I do want to create something original. But yeah, maybe I'll do a square because maybe my white ball can end up in the center of the square more readily. Can I get a square to explode? Does that even make sense?
Maybe that doesn't quite workout and so you're going to get caught up in this kind of feedback loop, OK? Between consumption and creation, remember when I said earlier that there's this relationship between consuming and creating we consume and then we go create, then we run into problems and we go back to consumption. What this can inevitably lead to if you're not going about it the right way? Is this kind of feedback loop where you only consume.
So if I'm trying to get the shot to work and it's not going to go back to the videos and try to watch more and maybe some of my ideas don't really make sense. 'cause I didn't pay enough attention to the And now I'm going to change my design on the table a little bit and try again and it still not really working and go back and you kind of go back and forth and eventually you kind of get caught up in this feedback loop where you're really just watching videos right?
Because you don't get the creation going and never getting it out the door. This could be all kinds of other examples right? I'm again, I'm just using the pool trick shot as the simple example. You could be really wanting to build software.
Then you keep going back to courses or you keep going back to books on how to and then eventually you're just kind of watching videos and taking courses and endlessly consuming information about how to build software, but you never really get off the ground and do it. Or some project about building a house or composing music, or whatever the creative process project might be. It's easy to get caught up in this trap of endless consumption.
Putting very little or next to no effort into the creation of your own original project itself. It has this kind of feedback where we try to figure it out. It doesn't really work. We go back to the consumption. We try to get more ideas. We go by. Eventually we just can't get our quote, Unquote Pool, trick shot to actually work. So what's going on here? Why is my trick shot not working? Why am I getting caught up in this endless kind of feedback loop of going back to consumption eventually?
Just watching a bunch of videos, and now it's kind of a hobby. I have just watching videos and I don't. I never got around to really creating a cool trick shot. Well, let's think about what I did when I tried to do my own trick shot. What I was doing was trying to bring a solution to a problem. So the problem was the obstacle set up on the table in the solution was my shot, or at least it was supposed to be the solution. So if we think about the videos.
That I'm watching on YouTube of all these trick shots, this is being presented to me as a solution to a problem. The problem is the obstacle set up on the table. You can see that even before anything starts you can see you might not know how it's going to play out, but you can see that, oh, there's all these arrangements of balls and you know they're not already in the pocket, so that they're not already doing something impressive, and so there needs to be a solution to that problem.
The solution is, you know the person doing the trick, it's their shot. The shot is the solution to the problem. There might be other shots that could be able to solve this problem as well, but there's probably very few, but his shot in this trick is the solution to the problem of maneuvering around these obstacles and doing something impressive. So that's the way I set up my own project is I tried to bring a solution to the problem, but the issue with this is that.
We don't know if the problem even made any sense right. Like I put the star shape in the middle and I had some obstacles and I had this kind of setup and then I said OK, I'm going to try to get good at a shot that does this thing in my head, but the problem? Was totally contrived. I don't even know if this problem makes sense, and I don't even have a shot because I'm not good at anything. The idea that I'm going to come in and practice and get good at it, but what is it? I'm getting good at?
We don't even notice that makes sense. Is that even a thing that can be done? Like can I even do a hop in a balance in a curve and explode? Is that even a thing right? The I don't have a shot and I don't have a problem that necessarily makes sense. At least there's no reason to believe it. So what's going to happen? Like I said before, I'm going to get caught in this feedback loop, something that is not matching up between solution problem. The problem maybe doesn't make sense.
I don't even have a solution. I don't even know if there's anything I can get good at and so there is this mismatch. There's something that's not working, and so we go back to the consumption. We try again, and maybe through constant iteration. Maybe I keep trying to switch the problem and practice a shot. Switch the problem you know. Switch it up a little bit. Practice a new shot, maybe those eventually line up, but there's still no reason to necessarily believe that's going to be the case.
There's something wrong here. There's something off. I'm looking at the videos I'm consuming that information as a narrative. It's telling me that this guy approaches the table and provides a solution to a problem, and I can see that that's how I'm consuming it. That's how I'm processing the information. But when I go to create something myself, that idea of bringing a solution to a problem isn't really working. There's no reason to believe I have a solution.
There's no reason to believe that my problem is even, you know, stated correctly, arranged correctly in this particular example, there's something off. There is a difference between the way. Something makes sense to me when I consume it. And the way it actually plays out when you go to create something. Something is not working. So I said at the beginning that there was this fundamental difference between bringing a solution to problem. And wrapping a problem around a solution.
So we dealt with the first one. We said bringing a solution to a problem make sense when we consume. That's how I watched the video. But when I went to create something that didn't seem to play out in what I said at the beginning was. The way it works with creating things is that it's a problem being wrapped around a solution, so let's do that example. Now to be clear. Let's say there is another way to go about coming up with a trick shot.
Maybe instead of arranging a bunch of things on the table and then trying to bring a solution to it by practicing a shot that may or may not even exist. Let's do a different scenario. Let's say I'm just messing around and I'm fooling around. Maybe I am playing a game with, you know, with a partner and maybe I'm losing the game and so I'm just going to throw it. So I'm going to do this kind of goofy thing with the ball because I don't really care anymore.
I'm just funny, maybe I want to make my friend laugh, whatever it is. So I kind of throw my weight into the ball and I accidentally glance it on the left side and it takes off and it does this little hobby thing, and then when it lands it does this really neat curve. And my friend and I both looked at what happened and that isn't that cool. That's crazy. Imagine you could do that again. Or maybe I'm just messing around.
I know I'm bored, I'm at the pool table myself and it's just my queue in the white ball. And again I kind of throw my weight in the shot. I don't really care. I'm just having fun and it does this neat thing in this scenario. What's happening is that there is a potential shot that has been revealed to me. OK, I wasn't trying to solve. Necessarily a particular problem, or I may have been trying to solve a problem, but what got revealed to me was not a solution to that problem.
It was something completely different. OK, I may have been actually trying to win that pool game against my partner, but maybe. Something else happened by accident and then something got revealed to me and it looked really neat. It didn't help me win the game, it has no context to it, but in isolation it's kind of neat. It's really interesting. It was fun to look at it. Got my attention. So what can I do with this?
Well, maybe my friend who's watching me play in mess around and kind of, you know, we had this shot revealed to me by accident. Maybe he says, I wonder if you could do that again, 'cause it looked so cool, right? It looks really neat. Imagine you could do that again. So maybe I keep practicing and maybe I don't do it there, but maybe I go off on my own and be like I want to try to reproduce that The shot itself again, it has no context. It has no meaning to it.
It's not being used to solve a problem, it's just in and of itself looks really cool. It looks really interesting. It would be great to be able to reproduce it, so I'm going to go home and I'm going to practice that shot. I kind of remember what I did when I messed up, right?
Not exactly, obviously, but I kind of so I'm going to try to build the muscle memory around that, see if I can kind of glance it more deliberately on the left this time and have it do that balance and have it do that span and do this neat thing. And let's say I eventually do get good at that. I'm able to reproduce this shot that I discovered by accident that was kind of revealed to me. I was solving an entirely different problem.
Or was even just having fun and messing around, but it got revealed to me and now I can reproduce it. Now this is neat. This is great, but what am I going to do with it? I mean, it's not really that interesting to just hit a ball all by itself and have it do this thing. It looks interesting, but you're not going to enter competitions doing that. You're not going to necessarily put a video together because it's not really. It's got no context, it's got no story.
It's going to narrative around it, so how would I build one? Well? Why don't I put obstacles? On the table, wherever the ball is not. Why don't I put obstacles on the table wherever the ball is not? In other words, I know I can take this shot and I know it looks really neat. Well, there's places where this really cool shot goes in those places where it doesn't go.
So if I were to put quote Unquote obstacles, wherever the ball doesn't go, what is that going to look like when I go to present it to someone? It's going to look like I take a trick shot, right? Because again, I have a shot. It got revealed to me. I understood the properties of this shot. I practiced it until I was good at it. It wasn't a solution to anything, but I can put a problem around that shot.
I can put obstacles on that table where I know the ball is not going to be because I know how it curves. I know how it bounces, you know, I know all the little hops in the little things it does because I got good at the shot so I can go put what looks like obstacles. Range balls I can maybe put little soda bottles and levers. I can do whatever I want on that table because it doesn't matter because I know the behavior of the shot that I got good at.
But when I go to present it, think about the person consuming that now what are they going to see? OK, so let's I just want to be clear what I'm doing. I had a shot revealed to me because I was messing around. I was having fun or I was trying to solve an unrelated problem and he got revealed. I did it by accident and then it decided to get good at that shot. It's out of context. It doesn't have any narrative rounded. I just got good at that shot in isolation.
Now by itself is not interesting, but if I start putting things on the table where I know my really cool shot does not go then it's going to look like my shot is deliberately maneuvering around those things. So I can make a video out of that. I could make that into a trick shot, and when people are watching the video, they're going to see the same thing I saw when I was watching videos of that trick shot. They're going to see me approach the table.
They're going to see all kinds of obstacles set up on the table, different balls arranged in a really neat pattern. Whatever it is, they're going to see me throw my weight into the Q, hit the white ball, the white ball is going to move in and around some of those arranged balls is going to do a hop, and it's going to curve around. Maybe it's doing an arc and it just seems to seamlessly somehow maneuver around.
You know, maybe some things that I placed on the table or the arrangement of balls and then it lands. And it does. Maybe an exploding thing. And then it comes to some final resting position, and it looks great. Again, they are consuming my video. As a narrative that has me walking up to a table with prearranged obstacles and me having this shot maneuver in and around those obstacles. In a way that looks like a very impressive trickshot. So in this scenario, what I have done?
Is I did not bring a solution to a problem because I never had the problem to begin with. I only had this shot revealed to me. what I did was I wrapped a problem around a solution. I made a discovery. By serendipity. Got good at it, understood its properties, was able to reproduce it. And then wrapped a problem around it. So can you see the fundamental difference between how I created something and how it gets consumed? The way I go about creating that trick shot?
Is fundamentally different than how it's going to get consumed by someone else. Now you might say, well, it seems almost kind of fake, right? I mean, is that even a really a trick shot? But you have to understand, people can only process information as a linear narrative. My discovery process was very nonlinear. It was messy. It occurred by accident. It would be very difficult to actually paint a picture or a story or a narrative of that to someone else.
I mean, it would be pretty much nonsensical, right? I mean, what am I going to talk about? How Oh well, you know. If you want to get a trick shots, you gotta mess around. You gotta focus on one problem, but it's going to be the wrong problem, you know, and then you just keep doing it eventually.
Someday something might pop out at you and then when it does, make sure you grab ahold of it and get really good, you know, and then it would just be this weird nonlinear out of order story that probably wouldn't sound very interesting. People don't process information like that, they have to have a linear set of events that make sense.
When they consume that information, they need to see the table with the obstacles the person approach it and then take a shot that maneuvers in and around it and does something neat. That's how we consume information. That's how a story make sense to us. That's how humans process things. But how we are consuming that is very different than how the creative aspect of projects actually plays out. How creativity happens.
And so if you don't appreciate the fundamental difference between how you consume, consume something and how you create something. Then we come back to that conflict between consuming and creating. Get caught up in that feedback loop and eventually just end up doing nothing but consuming because we're trying to alleviate that conflict, but we don't know where the conflict comes from, so we keep reaching into the consumption to try to resolve it.
Maybe if I read more, maybe if I watch more videos you will figure out how to take this linear narrative process and put it into my creativity. But we don't create with linear narrative processes we create with serendipity with mistake, with things getting revealed, the solution is not something you bring to the problem when you're creating. When you're creating your wrapping a problem around a discovered solution, and so that's my simple pool trick shot example.
In order to delineate the concepts between consumption and creation. When we are consuming something, we are ingesting information as a narrative as a story, and it's presented as a solution to a problem. But when we are creating, it's more about having a solution revealed to us and wrapping that problem around it so that we can paint that narrative for other people. So it's important to understand the fundamental difference between consumption.
In creation and how solutions and problems play out depending on which side you're on. 'cause If you get that wrong, you're going to constantly try to alleviate that conflict, probably without even knowing it, and you're going to find yourself into this feedback loop where you keep consuming more and more, and eventually only do consuming or not being very successful with the creative process itself.
So what I want to do now is focus on specifically the conflict that arises between consumption and creation using examples beyond the pool trick shot, something hopefully a little more relevant, so I'm going to focus on In Science, so let's do that. Now. Let's jump into a business example. So let's say we have an individual who is trying to create their own business. We can use the Crypto security software girl that we had in the previous episode.
If you were listening to that one, you know this girl was developing crypto security software an let's say she's going to create her own company. The technology is related to file sharing, doing in a secure way that runs on top of a crypto security platform. I mean, the details don't really matter, but let's just say this is her thing. She's going to go create her business, so she's going to do a lot of consumption, right? Because she wants to get motivated to do this in the 1st place.
She wants to learn about business. She wants to think about how this is going to play out. How is she going to be? How she going to participate in the market? How is she going to actually successfully run a business by taking her passion of Crypto security software development? So she's going to be probably reading a lot of business books right? That would be an example of doing a lot of consumption, so any local business story has a business book section.
These are business leaders who are writing about. How to go about running a business or what you should focus on? Maybe it's the business plan. Maybe it's about how to run a team. Maybe it's about how to focus on an MVP product before getting into the big one. Whatever it is, all kinds of. Narrative's how to go about building a successful business now it's being presented as a solution to a problem. Here are solutions, right? Here's the problem. Here is the solution.
So that's the way she's going to be ingesting information, consuming information about running a business. She's going to frame it in this example as her bringing a solution to a problem. So let's paint the picture of the problem here. So this is, you know, the security industry. More specifically the Crypto security. There's this problem of trying to share files in a secure fashion, and she believes she has a solution to that, so that's kind of the narrative that she's operating under.
She wants to go bring her solution to the problem, and that's her business. So let's say she jumps in and she starts building her team and she starts working on her product and she's starting to reach out to potential clients who have the problem that she thinks she has a solution to. And now the usual challenges are going to start arising. Maybe there's people on the team that are quite jelling, maybe the.
Clients are starting to get upset because the solution isn't really doing, you know, maybe what it said it was going to do or or maybe the client themselves didn't really outline what their needs were that well, or or she didn't capture them that well. Maybe the product itself has a few bugs that need to get resolved. I mean this is all about running business and these are the usual challenges, but maybe it's not going that well for her.
Maybe she just can't seem to effectively bring her her her solution. This product to the market and match it up with clients. There's some kind of. You know friction or mismatch happening between the way she's going about it now again, the way she consumes information related to doing a business is about having a solution to a problem. Is that what she thinks she has? She's understanding her market, the industry she's reaching out to clients, he's trying to paint.
That picture of the obstacles that she's going to have to maneuver around. And then she's trying to bring her solution to that problem so that she can maneuver around it and ultimately land on a number of transactions that make her business successful. But say things aren't going that well, and so something is wrong, and so she's going to try to go back and have meetings and have talks she's going to consume more information from other people, maybe from books.
Maybe from business videos again, she's just starting out in business which is trying to make this successful, but there's all kinds of conflicts that are arising well. I would argue that a lot of these tensions in less you can work them out in a reasonable amount of time if you're not getting past that sticking point, it's coming back to this conflict between the way we think something is supposed to go based on how we consume information about it.
And the actual creative process of bringing something new into the world. Virtually every business book that she's reading is saying, You know, you got to understand your problem and then you gotta bring your solution to it. Bring your solution to the problem. Bring your solution to the problem and the reason why business books are talking like this is because, again, this is how you present a narrative. If somebody wants to give you their success story. OK, they're going to.
Have to lay that out in a way that says, well, look, there's this industry and there was this problem and I had a solution and I was able to bring that solution. And here's how it went. They can talk about trial and error. They can talk about you know happenstance and serendipity and stuff like that. But it's still being portrayed as though there was this outstanding problem in the world. And this was the solution.
And because you know, this person was able to resolve that problem with the solution or aspects of the problem with that solution, it ended up being successful and then blah blah blah and it took off. That is how the story gets presented. That's how all the stories get presented to us. They are solutions to problems, and so we tend to take that same process into our creative projects and then inevitably end up with this mismatch that I've been talking about.
So that's what she's doing here again, she's just starting out. She's reading all kinds of books about solutions to problems, different ways of doing it, but it's still a solution to a problem.
There's still some market, some industry, some set of challenges, some set of obstacles, and then people that are maneuvering around it using different strategies, using different tricks, different concepts, different approaches, different techniques, whatever it is, its solutions to problems, because that's how we have to ingest information. That's how we consume it. That's how we understand a story. But if this isn't working for her, what's your other option?
OK, because that's the example I'm giving. Is someone just starting out? They're not getting it to work, and this of course happens all the time. People fail in business, you know, with a very high percentage we know. And I'm not saying it's always because of this, but we know that's a realistic situation to paint a picture of someone trying to get started in business and not having that go.
Well, well, what is there other option if she cannot get this particular narrative that she's kind of trying to force right? This idea that she has a solution to a problem. If that's not going to take off. If that's not going to. Gain any traction in the market. Then she's going to have to pull out of business altogether or try to find another approach. And we know what that other approaches 'cause we talked about in the pool example.
But before we start getting into that, I want to focus on the science example. So my science example is going to be someone going to do research. Let's say it's a PhD program, and so they're just answering it, and the idea is to go in for four or five years, do some successful research, and then come out with. Obviously, your degrees are expected to publish papers. Maybe get a few patents.
Presumably there was some discovery in there, and so to have a successful four or five year one of the PhD, you've done some original Right, you've done some original scientific work. Well, the person entering that PhD program is going to do a lot of consumption because they're going to have to do a ton of reading, and the reading is going to be largely around scientific journals.
So obviously in science is all kinds of journals that publish work across different disciplines, whether it's physics or chemistry. You know more specialized areas like nanotechnology, so maybe there are in the chemistry realm and so the reading a lot of chemistry journals, and so they're being exposed to how science goes right there. Getting all these stories, these narratives presented to them about how research works, and that's where a lot of our education of research comes from.
So let's say this PhD student is spending a lot of time reading. Scientific journals are very realistic situation. And so they're consuming what is affectively the scientific method. Now it doesn't usually get called the scientific method in journals, and the order might not be exactly like how we learn about it. In maybe high school, but that is really how things are presented there. Is this kind of upfront research question.
There's some industry that it's relevant to, and then there's this idea that you go. You come up with some of these hypothesis and then you try to run experiments to test this hypothesis. And you do measurements and you get results. And then eventually you start to draw some kind of conclusion and then present the conclusion. So there's that you know, come up with the research questions, come up with hypothesis going and run experiments.
Do some measurements, get some results and present the results. And that's how really the story of science is played out in pretty much any Science Journal. Again, they're not all exactly like that, but they follow this rough kind of scientific method structure. Well. That's the narrative that you're consuming as a PhD student. If that person now goes into the lab and starts running experiments, do you think that that's how it's going to go? What are the odds of it actually following?
That approach, let's find out. So let's say this individual goes into the lab and they did spend some time thinking about irrelevant industry. Let's say this is like an applied chemistry. Maybe they're trying to come up with a new material and the industry is say, alternative energy. Maybe it's really hot right now, so they want to do something in alternative energy. Thinking about the industry. They're thinking about the problem, right? That they want to kind of solve.
An then they're going to come up with some ideas about what they could go. Try to figure out in the lab you know whether or not you call them. Hypothesis is basically the same idea. You know? What do I think might happen? What am I going to try to find out and so the person goes in the lab and starts doing this and. Inevitably, just like the business, and just like the pool shot, it doesn't really go like that. You kind of set up the problem statement.
You have these ideas and then you're trying it, but there's something that's kind of mismatched. I don't know if it's the problem wasn't really laid out properly, or you know whatever you're trying. Is it really a solution to that problem? We're in the same situation the way you consumed the information in the scientific journals was basically the scientific method. It had this order to it.
It had this nice narrative structure to it, but when you went into the lab And you try to do something in the real world. It didn't really seem to go this way. Something was wrong with the problem or you didn't really have a solution or something is mismatched and so just like with the business where you go in with an initial process, you think it's going to resemble the way you consumed information. You're kind of coming up against the wall, and it's not really happening.
That's what we're looking at in the science example as well, and we saw that same thing with the pool shot. So now let's take these examples. And and talk a little bit about the feedback loop that you get caught up in. And then we're going to resolve the whole thing that we're going to bring it all back to instead of it being the problem.
Matching a solution will talk about wrapping a problem around the solution, just like we did for the pool shot, but we'll see how that plays out in business and how that plays out in science. So just really quickly, we said we get caught up in this feedback loop. So what does that look like in the business situation? Well, she can't get it going, so she's going to start reaching back to you.
No more business books, people intermeeting try to consume more information, and eventually she might just kind of become. This person who is really interested in business. She might go to a lot of conferences. She might, you know. I go to. I don't know Ted talks and she's reading business books all the time. She's like a business person, but is she doing business? How many actual transactions is she executing on? Is she actually delivering value to a client? Issue?
Running anything successful in our example here, this is someone who's starting out and not getting that traction going, so she's getting caught up in the business world in the consumption of it. She's very businessy. Maybe she's doing a lot of things on LinkedIn. Maybe she's promoting yourself. But the actual transactions that need to take place to have a successful business or not taking off, so she's getting caught up in that feedback loop.
In the science example, you know that you're going into the lab, the PhD students trying to get something going. It's not really following the scientific method, there's something wrong. The problem isn't there with the solution, isn't there? They're both not there, or something is not lining up, and this nice neat narrative of the scientific method doesn't seem to really be playing out in the real world. It's not.
It's not leading to a discovery, it's not getting me something that I could write myself and present to others by publishing papers or getting patents or whatever it is. So again, so that research is going to start reading more papers because they're trying to get more ideas, read more papers, different angles, try to understand it, and make sense to do that because you're stuck. So we're going to read more.
Read more, read more, consume more information to try to alleviate the tension that we now know based on our previous discussion. Is between consumption and creation OK, so let's talk about how this gets resolved. We have the business example in the science example in the business example she got stuck.
She wasn't getting traction in the market doing a lot of businesses stuff without actually doing the business itself, meaning she wasn't really doing transactions that would lead to a successful business. It was just kind of getting caught up in the business world and so she starts to just consume, consume, consume. In the case of science, the researcher wasn't having a lot of success by trying to approach science using the scientific method the way that.
They would have consumed that information by reading scientific journals, so they got to the sticking points and then they kind of get caught up in this feedback loop. She's going to keep reading business books and going to conferences. The researcher is going to continue to read scientific Journal articles trying to I don't know, get exposed to the right idea or try to come across something that might allow them to bring a more effective process into the lab. But it eventually gets the point.
We just really stuck, and so either you drop out of business or drop out of the program, or you think of an alternative approach. You switch it up. And we know what that switch up is, because we dealt with it in the pool trick shot example, we said that instead of. Trying to bring a solution to the problem, which is how the pool trick shots were presented to us in the videos and wasn't really working.
We said what if there was just, you know, paying attention to a really neat shot that was discovered in a way that was unrelated to the original problem we were trying to solve. Maybe we were playing a game, but then we did something by accident. Or maybe we're just fooling around on a table.
Or maybe we're trying to throw the game again, something got revealed to us and then we try to understand it and replicate it and get good at that thing in isolation and then wrap a problem around it, right? Put the obstacles on that pool table. So that the shot that you're already good at ends up looking really good among those obstacles, right? Rap the problem around the solution that was revealed to us. So what does that look like in business and science? So when business?
Perhaps the cripple security software girl who originally had what she thought was a solution to what she thought was a real problem is doing all these other activities and has something revealed to her. Maybe she's working on her super secure file sharing technology that again, that was the goal.
That's what she was going to do with the, you know, the solution she was bringing to the world to what she thought was a problem in this industry, but something at the deeper levels kind of got revealed to her about cryptography. Now I don't know what it is. It could be anything, you know. Maybe there is a new way to secure or something.
Or maybe the file sharing technology was actually also useful for something other than files and that ended up being a really, really cool solution, something that she never thought of originally. It wasn't the solutions that she was bringing, it was it was kind of discovered.
Maybe she was messing around, or maybe she was working with a client and all of a sudden they had this challenge that popped up during a project and then she was able to use the existing technology for something kind of different and so something got revealed. To her that she could use quite effectively and it was, it ended up being. A solution that was revealed to her, she never saw it coming. She was never using her technology for this purpose, but it got revealed to her.
Now it doesn't have to be a complete overhaul. It is not to be completely different. Maybe it's still. It's still within the same industry, maybe even it's still related to file sharing or some kind of sharing, but there's something different about it. Well, what she should do is focus on that shot. Now I'm calling it a shot because I'm using right. The pool trick shot analogy, so quote Unquote shot. She should focus on. What got revealed to her.
Regardless of how related it is to the original solution or the original problem, and there's varying degrees of this, it might be still quite related, but just slightly different. Or it might be very, very different. The point is is that something got revealed to her during the process of focusing on on a different problem. And that is what should now become her focus. Because if she does that. She can look at the properties of this new thing that popped out. She can understand it.
She could learn to replicate it, learn to get really good at it and in some way she's probably already really good at it. It's just that it wasn't the original application and now she can ask yourself. Well, what problem should I be wrapping around this? And you kind of. She already kind of this answer because maybe got revealed on this project. Something popped out and ended up being the solution to a problem, but she could start to build up that problem.
In fact, she could build up that problem so much. That it becomes her business. Right, so do you understand what I mean when I say build up the problem, I don't mean that in a pejorative sense like a problem is bad. I mean she's building up a new challenge around the thing that was revealed to her while working on it on a different problem, right? And it might not be a completely different problem.
It might be a slightly different, or maybe it is very different, but something got revealed to her. It is not something that she had in her original process. It is not something that was laid out in resemblance to how information she was consuming about running a business or doing something encrypted security. It was revealed to her it kind of popped out. Now she's focusing on it and she can build.
The problem the challenge around that discovery which is in this scenario really saying build the business around the scenario because the business is her solution to a given problem and she has the solution that was revealed to her. So she wants to build a full on business. Then she should be building challenges around that solution just like you are putting obstacles on a pool table around the thing that you know works.
So too should you be building a business around the thing that you do know works. So again, when you're reading a lot of business books and you're trying to get started, you might think you know how this is going to go. You might think you have this solution, and so you're going to just go find that industry and then you try to play in that industry, which with what you think is a solution. And again, that's probably how you're going to start regardless, 'cause.
I mean, that's how you have to start, but in that process there's going to be this conflict between the narrative based on what you be consuming and the thing you're actually trying to create.
And if you don't understand where that conflicts coming from, you can get caught in that feedback loop and eventually just drop out of business You can try to come up with a different approach, and often that different approach is to reframe this as focusing on a solution that was revealed to you whenever that happens, and then building up the challenges around it, put the obstacles on that pool table around this thing that you can actually do really well that you know does work.
It is a real shot. It is a real shot. The original thing that she went into business for was not a real shot. She didn't know that. It seemed to make sense the narrative made sense. She's good at this technology. It seems like it could be a solution to something. There's an industry related to that, so why don't I just bring my solution? To the industry, right? As a narrative that makes sense. That's how we process information.
And if she goes to tell her story and write a business book years from now, guess what she's going to have to tell the story like that. She's going to have to tell the story in a way that kind of sounds like she has the solution to this industry into this problem. But that's not how it was created. If she ends up having us a successful business, much of that successful business is going to deviate from that original narrative.
It's not going to be about having some solution that gets fit to a problem, it's going to be having some. Some solution, some shot that was revealed to you and then building up the challenge is building up affectively. The business around that thing that got revealed to you again. How different that that revelation is from your original plan, it's going to be different for different people, but it is something that gets revealed.
It's not something that you designed from the beginning, it's not something that follows a nice linear narrative pattern. It's nonlinear serendipitous. It's about making mistakes, and it's about focusing on what gets revealed to you and then building the challenges around it. And that would be a much better approach, just like the. Pool shot the pool trick shot example. Let's do the science example now. So we've got the PhD student and they're struggling.
There's this conflict with the exception creation, but they probably don't realize it, and so they just keep consuming more than trying to alleviate. Why is it not following what is effectively the scientific method? That's how it's being taught to me. That's how I'm reading it. That's why I'm consuming it. Something's working in the lab in this case. Well, here's what's going to happen. The person is going to be doing their research in the lab.
Maybe there pipetting one solution into another and then they drop their pipette and it falls into a beaker. And then something starts crystallising out of it. So two solutions that were not supposed to be mixed together ended up mixing. And so if something starts to crystallize now, maybe it's not that drastic of an accident. It might be more of a subtle kind of deviation, but again, there's levels of radiation here.
But in this example, say the pipette falls into a beaker that it wasn't supposed to. Something starts to precipitate out, and it's got this nice era dessins to it, and so it catches the researchers attention and they're like, hey, that looks really cool. That looks really neat, just like the pool shot or just like. You know the the file sharing that end up kind of getting re purpose for something that wasn't expected. It looks neat, it's it looks like it's standing out.
It's in juxtaposition to what normally happens, and So what does that research are going to do? Well, if they're smart, they're going to take that iridescent crystal. They don't know anything about it. They don't know if it's useful. Good chance it's not actually, but they're going to study the properties of it, right? Don't spend a bunch of time, but they should study the properties. But why is it giving off this color? Put it under the electron microscope.
Or you know some scanning tunneling microscope, whatever it is, and try to understand the properties. Maybe they find out. It's got some electrical conductivity, maybe even find out. It's super conductive or something really interesting about it. Now again in isolation, this thing that precipitated out of the solution. This new crystal or whatever it is. It's not necessarily interesting. Maybe it has interesting properties, but it's got no context. It's got no narrative around it.
Well, should they just toss it out because there's no narrative around it? Of course not with the research is going to do is start building the problems around that revealed solution, right? If it ends up being a solution. So in this case, let's say it has this really interesting electrical property property to it, and maybe that could be used in integrated circuits somehow.
Maybe there's a way to use that in the heat dissipation of integrated circuits where you have to do things on a very small scale, and if we could kind of self assemble this crystal, it would be able to. You know, kind of help. I don't know. Help with the arrange transistors to dissipate heat or whatever. It doesn't matter. I'm making stuff up, but the point is.
The thing that got revealed in the lab could be a really good solution to an interesting problem, but it wasn't necessarily the problem you started with. It didn't follow the scientific method, it got revealed to just like a pool shot or just like some file sharing thing in a business, it got revealed to you and you can build up the narrative around it. So now remember the researcher was originally focused on alternative energy right there. Going to do something for alternative energy.
Maybe a new material that captured the sun and converted to electricity. Now it's not even really related to that. But now what they could do if they want to turn that into a research program and they want to eventually write a thesis they wanted, eventually published papers, or get patents on it. They would almost do the scientific method in reverse, right? Or at least in a different nonlinear order. They would say, OK. Well, what is the industry integrated circuits?
OK, well, what kind of problems do they have an integrated circuits? So there's this heat dissipation problem. I mean, the researcher might not even know much about this right? And so now they're kind of wrapping the industry and the industries challenges around the serendipitous discovery. And eventually. They would be able to paint a narrative, but the discovery was just that it was a discovery. It was revealed to them it was not something that followed.
You know the process of thinking about an industry and the challenges coming up with hypothesis and doing specific experiments and then using that to find some resolution to a problem. It wasn't even really the right problem to begin with, right? Fell into the wrong Bieber beaker precipitated out had interesting properties. They got good at knowing those properties just like just like getting good at a pool shot. And then they took that shot and made their business out of it.
They took that shot of the crystal with those properties in built the narrative around that so they could present it to other people. The business girl took the shot that was revealed to her. Which he was doing some file sharing with a child with a client and built the challenge around it. Built the business around it. The trick shot individual. If this was me, I took that surprise shot. Got really good at it and built the obstacles around it on the table.
If I'm presenting the pool shot, if she's presenting the business. If if the researcher is presenting the PhD work. It's not going to sound like that right? Because that story is going to be all nonlinear and nonsensical. It's going to sound more like, hey, there's this industry called integrated circuits and they have this problem called heat dissipation and what needs to happen in this industry is blah blah blah.
And then there's going to paint the story and then here comes my research and isn't this great and it's got these electrical properties and it's a real solution to the problem. It's going to be presented as a solution to a problem when in reality the creative process is much more about wrapping a problem. Around a revealed solution. So I hope those examples made sense.
I hope I hope you understood the simple pool example and then the business and the science and look this can happen in all kinds of areas. Really any creative process I believe is going to have much more to do with having something revealed to you and then wrapping the challenges around that so that you can present it to other people. It's not going to follow how we consume information. Again, that is how we have to consume information. That's how we process it.
It's very hard to tell a realistic story about creativity. It's very difficult. People want nice linear end to end stories that make sense. They want to hear that it's a solution to a problem. In fact, we have to hear that it's a solution to problem. That's the way we process it.
But you created hours ago about that, so you need to appreciate the difference between how you consume and how you create the difference between bringing a solution to problem and wrapping a problem around a solution that's going to play out in all kinds of ways. So my advice going forward is to don't be so concerned. With trying to map the consumption to your creative process, I'm not saying Don't go read books. Of course. Go read books and go get motivated. Go watch a videos.
This is going to probably get you started in the first in the first place. In fact, even go ahead and take the initial narrative process. Into your creativity at the beginning because it's probably the only way you're going to get started, right? You're probably it's very hard to understand. You're not going to know when something gets revealed to you. You have to have a narrative just to begin. But the purpose of that narrative is to be destroyed.
OK, so go ahead and take the scientific method in. Go ahead and think of an industry. Think of a challenge. Come up with some hypothesis and go get yourself measuring in the lab because he got to go in the lab, right. Whatever your lab is, you gotta go on the Chalkboard. You got to go start that business. You gotta start trying to build a software. Create the piece of music.
Build a cottage of the house, whatever it is and if you had no plan whatsoever, there's a good chance you just wouldn't get started right? I'm not saying just go do anything random. Go ahead and take that quote, Unquote Scientific method into what you do, but understand. That it's going to get destroyed. There's going to.
There's going to be a deviation from that process, and when that deviation occurs, you need to pay attention, because that's probably a shot getting revealed to you, and that's what you're hunting after you're trying to find your shot, you don't know what that is at the beginning. It's going to get revealed, and once it does, you need to start wrapping a problem around it. Your final narrative that you present to someone you can't know what that is.
You're not going to know what that is, but you can arrive at it. So so go participate getting gaged appreciate the difference between consumption and creation. Let the world revealed to you the things that you're meant to be doing. Start to rap narratives around it, and then go talk about it and present it to other people. That's the difference between consumption and creation, so thanks a lot for listening.
That was episode 3. I always say you can find me on Twitter, so please reach out to me if you have any questions or any ideas for episodes. Shaunee McClure, sea an underscore A underscore McClure that's shaunee McClure on Twitter. Happy to get into conversations about these things. I hope you enjoyed that episode. I know I've got some other interesting ideas for the episodes coming up, so please go subscribe to nontrivial on your favorite platform. It's it's on all the major ones. It's an Apple.
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