Creations

Creations aren’t merely beautiful things, and include anything where we add quality to something:

• Adding value to an eyewitness account with a recorded video.
• Adding value to information in a spreadsheet by compiling a report.
• Adding value to a friendship by giving a gift.
• Adding value to understanding by using science or philosophy
• Adding value to a human connection by making an agreement or settling a conflict.

We always add what we perceive as value. According to others’ perceptions, the value-adding may or may not be legitimate, or it may be more than others can interpret.

Most creations are expressed through a medium or media, but it’s not always physical:

• Adding worth to an idea by simplifying it for yourself.
• Studying creates and intensifies new neural connections.
• Philosophers work almost exclusively with ideas.
• Every creator across any medium, ranging from music to visual art to computer programs, must build at least a prototype of something in their mind long before it becomes external reality.

All things we call work are creating in some way, and it’s necessary for living a good and meaningful life. Without creating anything, we’ll become frustrated and unhappy with the world around us.

We only create because we believe the creation will fulfill a future purpose, and we can usually imagine its results.

Purpose

When people create, they are either imagining it first or acting from habit, and they’re always drawing from the world around them.

Sadly, while some creators are taking social risks to explore truths, most of them are imitating other creators for the purpose of self-interested reputation or wealth.

Creations that aren’t designed for a specific need are typically either tools or media, and are always designed for present-tense or future-tense use.

The longer that we imagine a creation in our minds, the higher and more grandiose we imagine its created value will be when it becomes reality.

Broadly speaking, across societies, people use a few major angles that refine chaos into meaning. The creators’ efforts funnel into an approximate trend derived from how much understanding they have of the subject:

1. Art – grabbing from the unknown and making clearly understood stories that capture the human condition.
2. Science – understanding facts extracted from those stories.
3. Engineering/Inventing – using scientific facts to create technological answers to problems.
4. Pioneering – taking risks to build order from chaos using known-working solutions.
5. Improving – becoming more effective at accomplishing known purposes.
6. Maintaining – letting habits (or automation) create things repetitively.

Tools

The value of a tool lies in how many perceived purposes it could theoretically solve. General tools (like a crescent wrench) are valuable in many applications, while specialized tools (like an oil filter wrench) are more often than not completely useless while being extremely valuable when they’re needed.

We try to find the best tools for the task. A hammer can pound things better, but a screwdriver is better at piercing. There’s no such thing as a “best” thing because “best” is tied to the purpose we’re trying to use it for.

Every tool’s purpose represents something like a vitamin, pill, or candy:

• Vitamins are solutions to mandatory, routine needs and wants, such as housekeeping, budgeting, culinary arts, and groceries.
• Pills are solutions to mandatory, unusual needs and wants that almost always require a clear decision, such as repair work or surgery.
• Candy are solutions to non-mandatory, fun things we don’t need, such as video games or recreational reading.

As we gain understanding in our preferred specializations, we tend to accumulate things that are more specific and less general. A professional mechanic, for example, will use their wrench set (and oil filter wrench) far more than their crescent wrench.

Creations can often be tools designed to make other tools, usually based on a philosophical framework. Computer technology, for example, is a logic-based tool designed to magnify someone else’s purposes. Practical information is an understanding-based tool.

Media

Most other creations are a medium of communication. It may have a long-term purpose (like a written work or an accounting report) or short-term (like a text message or speaking with someone). There are many varieties:

• Spoken and nonverbal language
• Humor
• Written works like stories
• Visual works like paintings, sculptures, and film
• Performances like plays, music dancing, and orchestras
• Practical designs like a cell phone case or automobile
• Large-scale endeavors like architectural projects or a social movement
• Social space designs like architecture or interior design.
• Answers to complex problems.

A creation’s quality in expressing the human experience is also known as “art”. In that sense, all things made by people in any capacity are somehow forms of art. Their story may drill down into small text messages or encapsulate a person’s entire life, and they are subject to the rules of how quality works (the most prominent being that most of the instances of that thing aren’t particularly good).

Every creator is trying to convince a series of ideas with their creation. They may give specific context or add details to communicate their point.

Media has a specific purpose, not only for creators, but also for consumers. Consumers are usually trying to find connection with others’ stories to understand how those people reasoned and whether it gave them the good life. At the end of the story, we decide how to add the experience to our identity.

In the case of fiction, which is essentially imagination by adding/removing existing rules from reality, consumers have an unspoken contract with the creators: they’ll accept that the creator is breaking the rules if they can amuse them (e.g., time travel, a person existing in history who actually didn’t). Failure to amuse often irritates the consumer because it wasn’t a reciprocal agreement.

Future Use

For nearly everything else that isn’t a tool or communication, it’s a stockpile or a decoration, which are both future-tense. It’s either a useful tool/communication at some indeterminate point in the future or communicating an image the owner wants to express.

Hacks

One of the most profound creations is a “hack”. By using something beyond its originally designated or culturally acceptable purpose, someone can use a familiar object outside its expected area:

• Altering computer code to make software run differently than it was originally designed.
• Using a screwdriver to hold open a door.
• Using common office supplies to secure an object.
• Finding the easiest way to learn something.
• Using others’ interpreted statuses to climb to the top of a group.

The natural result of most significant hacks is that they’re a tremendous social risk. Compared to what they can gain from it, most hackers either don’t know or don’t care.

Design

All creations are inspired remixes of other things, and high-quality creations copy and remix the best attributes of what they reference. Therefore, all creativity is the combination of two or more things, with at least one of them being what they’re focusing on and the rest being pulled from unconscious symbolic association.

Specific rules constitute good design, which are practically non-negotiable because they tie closely to the universal qualities of humanity.

When we imagine what we want to build, we summon beauty as we understand it. However, we tend to forget our sources and smash multiple elements together as we imagine and manipulate them. In the process, the creation’s “mold” is an image of our soul.

The ability for someone to build a seemingly new thing is a product of their soul’s ability to connect unrelated elements. But, since it’s borrowing from nature, none of it is technically “new“. It’s more that nobody noticed where they borrowed it from, often because the creator skillfully hid their sources.

Usually, a created thing will be the foundation for other things by future creators. In retrospect, that creation will become “quaint” (e.g., a tired trope). However, the higher-quality work by later creators needed the lesser thing as the foundation for their existence.

We create at a speed proportional to how much we believe the creation will create desirable results. On larger projects, this means we work faster near the beginning (since we don’t understand how much work the project will require) and near the end (since we can see the entire project coming together).

Limits

Brilliance typically comes through limits the creator must confront.

First, all creative works have inherent limits:

• The creator’s capacity to create, which is limited by their human constraints, understanding, and personality
• The audience’s attention span for consumption.
• The possible things the creator can express or how long it would take for them to communicate it.
• The other media that may have already done something before, or the fact that no other media has!

All media is a commentary of other media. We often imagine the “classics” to be original, but we usually don’t see the unoriginal elements that existed in the context where they weren’t original. For example, historical documents and a historian’s textbook of historical documents are equally anecdotal, but from different eras.

Each media also has its own special limits:

• Written and spoken words are limited by language constraints, along with (until recently) the budget for paper and marketing considerations.
• Images are limited by the colors our brains can process, as well as a lack of context beyond the frame.
• Music is limited by the human ear’s ability to distinguish sound, as well as certain cultural expectations.
• Collaborative works, like movies and video games, possess all the strengths and weaknesses of multiple media simultaneously.

The fact that nothing is “new” is also a type of constraint:

1. We can only create from the basis of what we perceive, so all creations fit into a finite range.
2. Further, creations must conform to how our human universals define them.
3. We face a limit to how many high-quality, memorable things we can make, especially after a trend has matured.
4. The constraints become even harsher if we bring intellectual property rights into it.

Most creators are determined to accomplish through those limits:

• Some of the most brilliant books and movies were made on a very limited budget or time schedule.
• The Sistine Chapel required a ton of elaborate artwork, but on a ceiling.
• Uber converted anyone with a car into a taxi driver.
• Netflix was tape rentals, but digitally streaming.

The limitations often define the work itself. Beautiful things arise from our ability to overcome the inner conflicts of our creation not quite looking like what we envision it to be.

Naturally, those limits go away with technological developments:

• Capturing visual sensations through photos and videos.
• Capturing audio as digital symbols for disassembly and reconstruction.
• Sending language across long distances.

Usually, there’s a creative person in the right place at the right time (like Shakespeare, Bach, or Charlie Chaplin) who can take advantage of the new technology to make a permanent reputation for themselves.

If creators are confronting cultural tradition, they may start a far-reaching trend.

Image

The people who consume a designed thing always come into the experience with preconceived notions of what to expect. The brilliance of the creator comes heavily in how much they know this and adapt to it.

The elegance and quality of a creative work come in how well the creator can hide the garbage-looking parts of the thing while maintaining the complexity of the thing itself. Hiding weld points, plastic seams, excess inventory in a store, or technologies available but rarely used in an operating system all increase the value of those things by maintaining a high-quality image.

For the sake of gaining influence or power, creators frequently try to distort how high-quality their creation appears, often by imitating or marketing tricks. We could probably measure the quality of a creation by how many awful imitators try to shortcut the process with bad copies!

The creation, after it’s been created, tends to create a fan base, which is a group that reflects the values of the created work, complete with traditions, symbols, and statuses. Occasionally, the fans can run with that idea much farther than the creator of the idea (often verging into a type of religion), especially after the creator has died and can’t communicate their original vision anymore.

The fan base of a media can occasionally have enough powerful people in positions of authority who favor it. When that happens, the media itself becomes a pillar of society:

• Purchasing media for playback at will.
• Texts and dialogues that influence or become law.
• Religious texts that were potentially inspired by a deity.
• Nostalgic association with familiar things from the past.

Recollection

After enough time, we’ve matured since we last consumed a creation. We tend to feel “nostalgia” from the past as being inherently simpler for several reasons:

1. We don’t remember many details of the past’s reality, but know more now.
2. Our understanding has grown to include many more nuances of reality.
3. Technology has likely improved, which created more specializations.

Application

Even anal-retentive bureaucrats and obsessive hobbyists are adding what they imagine is value. The only way to influence them is to treat their contributions as important (even when they aren’t).

Each person creates out of their own unique soul, so imitating another person will never quite work correctly. It’s more productive to work with your preferred style while imitating the parts of that person’s actions that work.

A creator will find more meaning in their creation than anyone else around them, often to the point of over-valuing it. It doesn’t mean others won’t find value in it, but they’ll never be as closely associated with it as the person who sacrificed for it, including groups who carry on the creation (e.g., sequels, spinoff works).

If someone imagines something as “the best”, consider what they’re using it for. The best of anything might be the cheapest or worst-quality if it’s disposable or intended for humor!

It’s critical, when we’re ever creating things of value, to consume the right things. We tend not to discriminate between quality when recalling, so consuming bad-quality things will yield inferior work than if we’d consumed high-quality things.

Even fools will sometimes absorb something wise, which is why wisdom exists even in the most childish, petty, and inane creations.

Exploring truths is such a high risk that artists can’t afford to be fragile. They must be durable enough to brave the unknown and the very high chance of failure.

If you’re consuming something, the creator of that thing is influencing you. Even dry textbooks or entertaining little things are designed to change you. Otherwise, you’d forget them and not care, and they wouldn’t make any money by selling it to people like you.

Don’t disrespect early trendsetters. They didn’t have the pre-existing understanding of the finished creation that you, the current observer, possess. Creations always take more work and risk than they appear to.

Beyond appreciating creations, we can find a tremendous amount of purpose in understanding why those people created something.

Since a creator built from their instincts, we can frequently infer the spirit and soul of something if we trust our instincts (which are similar enough to others’ to match). Even automated technology has a creator’s “fingerprint”, though it’ll be on the backend and deep inside it instead of what the technology itself creates.

The trouble with modern art is that it often claims that the interpretation of quality lies in the observer and not the piece itself. If that’s the case, there’s no reason to go to an art museum when someone can build a sandcastle with their kids or watch The Simpsons.

Brilliance operates against limits, so followup creations can’t capture the original sensation of the original. Movie, book, and game sequels all try to evoke the feeling of the original, but always lack the intensity of their predecessor because they weren’t created with the inner conflicts or context that surrounded it.

We can frequently form a bias toward creators and give grace for bad creations. The best way to fight this is to remove our association with that creator or their other creations while judging a work.

Nothing is really new, so people don’t tend to spend much money for values contained in media, and creators can’t legally patent most creative works. Instead, a creator must sell their creation by either generating enough popular demand to make plenty of extra money or by setting constraints on the physical media that contains the ideas.

If we take the time to create things ourselves (instead of merely consuming), we find more meaning in absolutely everything we touch, if we can succeed at it. It often comes with added skills and understanding as well.