A Drunk Creative Walks into a Bar
A drunk man takes 100 random steps and ends up 10 steps from where he started. Most creatives are that man before he looks up. Why direction beats discipline, and why the detours were never mistakes.
Hello World Builders,
There's a saying in engineering about a drunk man in a bar.
He staggers around taking random steps, and the math says that after 100 steps he'll end up about 10 steps from where he started. That's the random walk: with every step pointing in a random direction, distance grows with the square root of effort. A hundred steps of walking, ten steps of distance.
But why all this math Ivan? We are creatives, we can't math!
Well.. the moment he spots a hot girl (or guy) across the bar, everything changes. He gets there in no time.
Most creatives are the drunk man before he looks up.
Now pay attention to this: the tempting conclusion here is the wrong one.
The wrong conclusion is: eliminate the randomness.
Plan everything, systemize everything, execute in a straight line.
Chaos is where the ideas come from. The detours, the accidents, the thing you found while looking for something else.
Direction is a form of controlling and giving yourself on to the chaos. You keep every accident. Make it grow, add it to your pile.
I've written before about clarity of vision, and this is what I mean by it. A picture of what you want, sharp enough that your steps start leaning toward it on their own.
I'll give you my own proof. I've built entire frameworks for creating worlds, and I ignore them all the time.
When an idea grabs me, I run with it.
And the work still gets better, in small daily increments, week after week. But I do build my own boxes to fill. So when I find something great. I know where to put it. And the structure keeps me sane.
This is also the difference between creatives who compound and creatives who just accumulate years. I've written about the four stages of creatives, and the final stage, the Compounder is the most important one, the one most people can't process yet.
The compounder lets their work, work for them while they are sleeping.
Media and content is scalable,
and if you nail that distribution you can become self sustainable. I am working on that and will share all my learnings here as well.
If your steps lean in one direction over years, then your work stops being a series of separate pieces and becomes one continuous thing.
The feed is part of it. Your presence is part of it. The whole trajectory is the artwork. And under that frame, the detours were never mistakes. They were the walk #mindblown
Have a clear week,
Ivan