The Creative Seed

TLDR:

For some, generating ideas is a cinch, while for others, it’s a step-by-step project.

Regardless, that’s just the first step of the process. How do you decide which creative seeds to grow, or rather how do you separate the crap from the gold?

You could have 100 seeds and choose to plant all of them and see which ones are ripe enough for harvest to share with the rest of the world, but then that’s way too much work for 99% of people, a very suboptimal route at that.

Another route you could take with a single seed you have a particular eye on is to cut straight to the chase and not worry about perfecting every possible aspect you could think of, just getting version 1.0 out, and receiving feedback to determine what direction to take when going back to properly fine-tune the previous steps of the process.

But what if that’s just one of the 4-5 seeds you’ve separated from the rest of the pack?

The simplest answer to that is to further water the one seed that resonates with problems that aren’t ones you believe the world needs help solving currently, but ones that you yourself have.

As Paul Graham writes in his “How to Get Startup Ideas” essay, this is one of three things the best startup ideas have in common, the other two being that they can build it themselves, and a few others realizing that it’s worth doing.

To work on a problem you have ensures the problem indeed exists. It won’t be a “made-up” startup idea as they dub them at YC Combinator, but a potential pathway to a good startup idea.

By that token, to have a seed that you know aligns with what really gets you excited, that’s your best shot at producing a work of art that sees you in the light of Michaelangelo, for you’ll realize that if you have an innate passion for it, you’d want to do whatever it takes to build it, finding people along the way who have the same problem and drive as you do if not right now.

So what if you’re the latter, in that after completing the project, you find only one creative seed in your hand?

As Vinh Giang says, if you plant the seed, ripens 10 years later and then you realize it was crappy all along but still pursue it for another decade because of the time you’ve invested in it, you won’t realize that all this time, you’ve dug a broad but shallow sunk cost fallacy hole for yourself all this time

Instead, like Graham says, the hole should be narrow and deep akin to a well, otherwise you’re no better than a painter deep into cognitive decline.

So in layman’s terms, go back to the drawing board.

All of these aforementioned approaches to the craft of creativity are nuggets I’ve assimilated into my brain over the past 24 hours.

In my experiences, specifically, as I dived deeper into the realm of creative work, I’ve found the highest quality creative seeds to be ones where I’m trying to figure out the answer to something I’m intellectually curious about, as Graham talks about in “The Age of the Essay.”

I’ve found pursuing such needs to not just be truly nourishing, but in turn, my outlook on the seeds to sift through for the next project to be a more deliberate process, as I better understand what I really want to be doing with my time as I take the steps to harvest the plant to showcase to the world.

But that’s just one of many ways to harvest your creative seeds as optimally as possible, one that’ll help you reach the end destination of your Road to 10.