Five For Your Hive: You Don't Know the Answer When You Start
Pixar, Nike, Haruki Murakami, He Not Busy Born is Busy Dying, It's A Job Like Any Other
You Don’t Know the Answer When You Start
Pete Docter goes down as one of those legendary animators in Pixar, having had his hand in Inside Out, Toy Story, Monster’s Inc., and A Bug’s Life. Making animations is a long-drawn process. Up—which was conceived and directed by Pete—had to go through four iterations that unfolded not over months but years. This involved going back to the drawing board multiple times, revamping the characters, and rehashing the structure and storyline. The team was always in a state of panic, but “if I started on a film and right away knew the structure—where it’s going, the plot,” Pete says, “I don’t trust it.” From the conception of an idea to the day it’s screened, the journey of creating an emotionally-rich and original film requires filmmakers to “push ourselves and try new things,” even though it’s discomforting and chaotic. However, the creative process is about the evolution of ideas that will eventually find its core. “I feel like the only reason we’re able to find some of these unique ideas, characters, and story twists is through discovery,” Pete says, “and by definition, ‘discovery’ means you don’t know the answer when you start.”
Why Not Do That with A Shoe?
In 1981, Tinker Hatfield was hired to design retail stores and office buildings for Nike. By 1985, the company was struggling. So CEO Phil Knight shifted the company’s focus towards consumers and the brand. To find top creative talent within the company, all designers were asked to take part in a shoe design competition. Drawing on all the buildings he’d designed, the places he’d visited, and the things he’d discovered, Hatfield produced a design that won, beating all the shoe designers. Before all that, though, he had no clue as to how to design shoes. But then he recalled a visit to the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris, an inside-out building that’s “spilling its guts out into the world” and exposing all the structural and mechanical systems—the elevators, the escalators, the aircon vents—for people to see. And he thought to himself, “why not do that with a shoe? Let’s cut a hole in the side and show what’s in the shoe.” And so he did. Hatfield revolutionized the entire sneaker industry with his own design: the Air Max 1. When you design something, Hatfield says, “what you design is a culmination of everything you’ve seen and done,” and every work you produce is evidence of what you’ve discovered along the way, from the things you know and don’t know. Since its release in 1987, the Air Max 1 has paved the way for the overall image and design direction for the brand and revolutionised the culture of sneakers we know today.
A Distinctive Rhythm Began to Take Shape
When Haruki Murakami first started writing novels, he hated the way he crafted his words. “Good grief, this is hopeless,” he moaned, looking at the first draft of Hear The Wind Sing. He felt it was too boring, and “if that’s the way the author feels,” he wrote, “a reader will react even more negatively.” Then, he decided to do an experiment: to write the opening of his novel in English. Despite his limited proficiency, it forced his ideas to be as plain as possible. “The language had to be simple, my ideas expressed in an easy-to-understand way, the descriptions stripped of all extraneous fat, the form made compact and everything arranged to fit a container of limited size.” At first, he did not know if this unorthodox method would work. He had no answers. He had no clarity. It felt weirdly uncomfortable, but as he struggled to express himself in that manner, “a distinctive rhythm began to take shape.” If he had his thoughts and ideas written in Japanese, “those contents would swirl like mad, and the system sometimes crashed.” As he led with a foreign language, he realised he could express his thoughts and feelings with utmost clarity and poise, and with a limited set of words and grammatical structures, it eventually led to a new style of Japanese that was uniquely his own. “Now I get it,” he wrote, “This is how I should be doing it.”
He Not Busy Born is Busy Dying
On the evening of July 25, 1965, Bob Dylan went up on stage with a Fender Stratocaster over his shoulder and crashed into his opening line, “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s farm no more!” What followed was a mixed reaction of jeers and cheers. Some were dancing, some were crying, some were dismayed, some were angry. Some even tried to “cut the sound cables with an axe.” Dylan was known for his acoustic tunes and melodies, but having transitioned to electric that evening, many fans cursed him a traitor. “He drew a line between himself and those who tried to claim him,” Elijah Wald writes in The Night Bob Dylan Went Electric. Dylan was busy trying to be who he thought he was and everything he represented. “[He] presents youth and the future,” Wald writes, “and the people who booed were stuck in the dying past,” not looking for answers, not realising that the future was in the electrification of the sound. In the creative pursuit of musical expression, it’s paramount to know that times are changing and we need to find answers in this complex world, even if it means going against the grain. For those wary of following new paths, Dylan warns, “He not busy born is busy dying.”
It’s A Job Like Any Other
According to Russell Davies, there are two schools of thought when it comes to creativity. First, he writes, “it’s a magical, intuitive, mysterious process that can’t be forced. You just have to wait for the muse to strike you. It might help if you sip Absinthe or are French.” Or the second—which resonates with me as it does with Davies—“Inspiration is for amateurs. It’s a job like any other. You just need to show up and do the work.” You put in the hours to develop the habits one day at a time, turning discipline into outcomes. “I lean towards the latter view because it’s more optimistic,” Davies writes, “You’re not just waiting on fate.” You’re not just sitting around, doing nothing all day. The creative process behind filmmakers, shoe designers, writers, and musicians is a culmination of everything they’ve seen or done. The more we feed our brains with knowledge, research, and information, the more our brain makes these associations. We don’t always know the answers when we start, but as we journey to make discoveries, connect the dots, and put in the work day-in day-out, you’ll eventually get it. You’ll eventually know what works for you.