- This video is sponsored by Skillshare
where I just launched a brand new class.
More than that at the end of the video.
The single greatest opening line ever written in a novel
can be found on page one of William Gibson's "Neuromancer."
"The sky above the port was the color of television,
tuned to a dead channel."
There certainly novels
that I've enjoyed reading more than "Neuromancer,"
but no opening line has stuck with me like that one.
In a single sentence,
Gibson conjures this lonely melancholy feeling.
It's familiar but it's also strange.
And it has stuck with me ever since I read it
when I was 15 years old.
And from a cultural standpoint,
the rest of this book is no less impressive.
This was published back in 1984,
back when the internet was barely a thing,
back when almost nobody had a computer.
And it is the book that put the cyberpunk genre on the map.
If you've watched "The Matrix,"
if you've watched "Ghost in the Shell,"
if you've played games like "Deus Ex"
or "Cyberpunk 2077," you have seen and experienced
the impact that this book has had.
And countless other movies, TV shows, books, fashion trends,
they all trace their roots back to "Neuromancer."
And reading through this book,
there's obviously a ton of raw talent on display,
but beyond that,
there is a practice that allowed Gibson
to create the imaginative world in this book,
to create the memorable turns of phrase
that are on almost every page.
And it's the same practice that helps people like you
and people like me when we're feeling creatively uninspired
and we're feeling drained.
It's a simple habit,
but it may be the single biggest differentiator
between people who make innovative, memorable work
and those who don't.
Gibson himself described it as
creating a personal microculture.
But personally, I like to use just one word.
(gentle music)
Steve Jobs once said that,
"Creativity is just connecting things.
When you ask creative people how they did something,
they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it,
they just saw something.
It seemed obvious to them after a while.
That's because they're able
to connect experiences they've had
and synthesize new things.
And the reason they were able to do that was
that they've had more experiences
or that they have thought more about their experiences
than other people."
I pulled this quote from an interview
that jobs did with Wired Magazine back in 1996.
And in that interview, he also expressed this frustration
that most people in tech don't have diverse experiences
and hence they don't have enough dots to connect
to create things that are better than average.
And as creative people,
if we want to make things that are better than average
and if we want to be inspired with our work,
we have to be collecting dots.
I've gone through enough periods in my life now
feeling listless, feeling uninspired with my work
to know that one of the main reasons for that feeling is
that I haven't been doing enough dot collecting.
I haven't been reading widely enough.
I haven't been trying new things.
In short, I haven't been exploring.
And if you're in a period right now
where you're feeling uninspired, a lack of exploration
is probably one of the main culprits for you as well.
So, today we're gonna discuss three ways
that you can make exploration
a more consistent part of your life.
The first one is to broaden the scope of what you intake.
The books you read, the movies you watch,
the people talk to, all of it.
Like Jobs said,
creativity is just combining things.
And when you're learning from a wide variety of sources,
you're building this vast treasure trove
of pieces in your head with which to combine.
Consider for a second the term cyberspace,
which was essentially coined in "Neuromancer."
If you wanna get technical about it,
Gibson actually coined the term in a short story called
"Burning Chrome" from a couple of years earlier,
but either way, what fascinates me about this is
that Gibson coined this term
and all the connotations we have around it
and he didn't have access to the internet.
In fact, he wrote "Neuromancer" on a typewriter
because he didn't own a computer.
And the first web browser wouldn't even come until 1990.
So, Gibson's conception of cyberspace
as this near ubiquitous daily destination
for billions of people,
while it seems like an obvious thing today,
back then was a complete invention of fiction.
It was something that he completely made up
or rather cobbled together from many different sources.
The main one being, as he says,
seeing kids in an arcade playing video games,
especially the way they were transfixed on the screen
in a sort of trance.
And that mental image was combined with other mental images,
other experiences,
including a flyer for an Apple II computer
that he saw at a bus stop.
And this is how all creative people work.
We bring new things into existence
not by conjuring from some void, like the one behind me,
but by combining the things that we learn and experience.
And the more you get out and learn,
the more you experience, the wider that variety of things,
the better your creative output is going to be.
But you might ask, "How do I know where to start?
How do I know the things I'm intaking
are actually worthwhile
and are actually going to lead to better creative output?"
Well, the main thing I'll say about this is
don't think too hard about it.
Don't try to force exploration
because you never know what is going to contribute
to your next piece of creative work.
So, follow your interests.
We could talk a little bit about the whole garbage in,
garbage out principle.
It's probably a good idea
to be at least spending some of your time intaking things
that are challenging, things that make you sort of work,
not just glossy popcorn stuff,
but I will provide you with this one concrete suggestion:
study the people you admire.
In doing the research for this video,
I went through all these magazine interviews,
some really, really lengthy magazine interviews with Gibson,
with Steve Jobs, with the design legend George Lois.
And in addition to pulling lots of quotes and insights
that contributed to the script for this video,
I also now have a list of a ton of stuff
that I want to check out.
And it makes sense.
If you like something, then there's a good chance
that you're going to be interested in the things
that influenced that thing's creator.
So, whatever you like, seek out the creators of it
and look for either recommendations
or maybe even just off-the-cuff mentions of the stuff
that influenced them.
You're likely to like it as well.
But don't just stop at media consumption.
Your ability to put out creative work, to combine things,
isn't solely influenced by the media you consume
and the conversations you have.
It's also maybe even more influenced
by the experiences you have.
Diverse experiences.
And I think one of the main reasons
that so many people feel so listless, so uninspired,
is that they are in sore need of some new experiences.
A lot of us get set on a path by our parents
or by a teacher or we stumble across something that works
and then we just keep exploiting that thing again
and again and again,
partly because there are material rewards for doing so,
but partly because we're afraid to try something new.
This is often called the exploration/exploitation dilemma.
Do we continue exploiting the thing that we know is working
or do we divert some resources
towards trying to seek out something
that might pay out even greater rewards in the future?
Well, as creatives, we need to be constantly exploring.
Even if something is currently paying out right now,
if we keep sticking to just that one thing,
eventually the well is going to run dry.
And far before it does,
it's going to become uninspiring if that's all we're doing.
As creative people,
we need to be constantly taking on new opportunities,
seeking out new experiences.
And I realize that it's this mindset
that actually led me to doing the work that I do today.
To being fortunate enough to make videos for a living.
A few years ago,
the folks at Luther College asked me to write a talk
for their sophomores about my career path.
And in preparation for that talk,
I sat down and I tried to draw this map of my career path.
And what I ended up with was this critical path
with my college major and the internship I did,
but also all these little branching off shoots, experiments,
different things that I had tried.
And the most interesting offshoot from that entire exercise
was a small summer gig that I took
during the summer after my junior year.
The aerospace engineering department on campus
needed somebody to shoot a bunch of videos for a project
and then edit them together.
And I really didn't have a whole lot of experience
with doing that,
but they said they would teach me if I was willing to learn.
So I took on the job.
And in doing that, I learned how to do complex editing,
I learned how to set up lighting for interviews,
I learned how to shoot B-roll.
And my original motivation for taking on that gig was
because I wanted to make some extra money during the summer
and it seemed like an interesting enough gig,
but now I realize that experience among all others
is the number one thing
that basically enabled me to become a YouTuber.
So, the next time you're presented with an opportunity
and you're tempted to say no,
at least pause and ask yourself,
"What are my reasons for passing up this opportunity?"
Because while it's true
that you can't take on every opportunity that comes your way
without stretching yourself too thin,
most interesting opportunities have something to teach you,
something that you're going to be able
to combine with other things you learn later on,
something that can help you become a more creative person.
And you don't want to let fear
or this feeling like you need to stay in one place
and exploit what you have now be the only thing
that causes you to pass that opportunity up.
Finally, we need to talk about labels.
I feel like there's this metaphorical Burmese tiger pit
that I'm always tiptoeing around.
As I've built my personal brand online,
as I've grown my audience over the past 10 years,
I have acquired a label of sorts.
I am the productivity guy, or at least one of them.
And with that label comes a certain pressure.
I feel this pressure to act in alignment with that label
in my personal life.
I feel like I need to have read
all the latest productivity books.
I feel like I need to have experience
with all latest productivity apps.
And because time is limited,
that creates pressure for me to reject certain experiences,
certain learning opportunities that come my way
even if they're things that interest me.
And you might feel this kind of pressure as well,
maybe from several labels.
Your profession, your gender, your age.
In one way or another,
each one of these whispers, "Stay in your lane."
Well, we might feel safe if we stay in our lane,
but we sure as heck are not going to feel inspired.
So as you explore
and as you pursue things that interest you,
don't allow labels to give you tunnel vision.
Don't let a label push you away from something
that interests you.
A label can be useful as a communication device.
It can help guide your audience, potential clients,
potential employers to you,
it can help you to find your niche,
but it can also put your mind in a box if you let it.
So if you can avoid doing that,
if you can keep pursuing the things that interest you,
if you can keep broadening your array of experiences
and learning sources, you're going to find
the quality of your creative output going up.
But moreover, you're going to find yourself more inspired
and more often getting lost in the work that you do.
Before you go,
I've got a brand new class on Skillshare called
Productivity for Creatives.
And if you enjoyed this video
and you're looking for additional ways
to boost your creative output, to boost your inspiration,
I think you're going to get a lot out of this class.
Exploration is a huge topic in creativity
which is why I put so much time
into the script for this video,
but there's a lot more that we can do
to boost our abilities as creatives,
especially pulling from the realm of productivity.
And that's what this class is all about.
So, if you want to learn
how to build your inspiration muscle, if you want to learn
how to more consistently do creative work on a daily basis
and get inspired by that creative work,
we talk about that in the class.
If you want to learn
how to reduce the friction in your work,
how to automate certain things,
how to build templates that help you speed up your process,
we talk about that as well.
And because it's on Skillshare,
the cost for the class is very low,
just an hour of your time and your attention,
because if you're one of the first 1,000 people
to sign up with the link in the description down below,
you're going to get a free trial.
Which means that, monetarily speaking,
you get to take my class for free.
And you'll also have unlimited access
to every other class on the platform,
of which there are thousands, during the trial.
And afterwards,
Skillshare is still a very affordable platform
with their plans at less than 10 bucks a month
on the annual basis.
So, it is a hugely valuable service to have access to.
And they've got classes on graphic design,
they've got classes on video editing,
they've even got more classes on productivity.
In fact, my good friend Nathaniel Drew
just launched a new class of his own.
So definitely check that one out after you watch my class.
Once again, use the link in the description down below.
And if you're one of the first 1,000 people,
you're going to get that free trial.
And as always,
big thanks to Skillshare for sponsoring this video
and supporting my channel.
If you like this video, I put a ton of time into the writing
and I would hugely appreciate hitting that like button
to show the YouTube algorithm what's up.
If you didn't like it, we'll obviously don't hit it.
That's totally cool.
Maybe tell me that I have a weird face in the comments.
I'll also have a subscribe button right here,
so you can click that if you want to get notifications
of new videos when they come out.
And a couple of additional videos that have already come out
are going to be floating around the screen here and here.
Well, they're probably not going to float,
but they may look like they're floating
if I do this with my hands.
Anyway, smash your face into your phone screen
and watch from those for extra style points,
and I will see you in the next one.