Test Your Material
Jerry Seinfeld brilliantly reveals the core molecular structure of the creative process, which is equal parts ideation and experimentation:
“I have two phases. There is the free-play creative phase. Then there is the polish and construction phase of, and I love to spend inordinate... amounts of time refining and perfecting every single word of it until it has this pleasing flow to my ear. Then it becomes something that I can’t wait to say. And then we go from there to the stage with it. From the stage, the audience will then — I imagine, it’s a very scientific thing to me. It’s like, 'Okay, here’s my experiment,' and you run the experiment.
Then the audience just dumps a bunch of data on you, of, 'This is good, this is okay, this is very good, this is terrible.' That goes into my brain from performing it on stage. Then it’s back through the rewrite process and then new ideas will come...
It’s just work time. I like the way athletes talk about, 'I got to get my work in. Did you get your work in?' I like that phrase."
(Full transcript of his marvelously enlightening conversation with Tim Ferriss here)
“Did you get your work in?” is such a great phrase. It alludes to the vital reality that the only way to innovate, is to keep putting the work in. To keep generating and testing as many ideas as possible. Seinfeld has said elsewhere, you don’t know whether a joke is going to work on stage until you tell it on stage. You have to put yourself out there.
“It’s excruciating — 8 or 9 times out of 10, it doesn’t work.”
The same is true of new services, interactions, and products, too. That’s why scrappy experiments are so valuable: they create proprietary data that enables innovators to make smarter resource allocation decisions. They help you beat the odds.
Ideas and experiments are the two sides of the innovation coin (one might argue that “problems” could be a third side but let’s keep things simple). Whatever your field, you’ve got to generate fresh material — potential solutions to real, pressing problems — just like comedy, you’ve got to test your material to know what works.
Related: Get Scientific
Related: Put Yourself Out There
Related: Beat the Odds
Related: Make Scrappy Experiments
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The fine folks over at Section recently interviewed me about some common mistakes I’m seeing folks make when they use AI. One of the biggest ones? The tendency to expect too little, and get just that.