I was watching this documentary about Beyoncé’s 4-night residency in Atlantic City, and it got me thinking about what draws me to behind-the-scenes content.
I geek out on many things, going down endless curiosity rabbit holes through the week. The creative process is one of my favourite topics to indulge in. I luxuriate in material that shows how music, books, TV, and, even more geekily, airlines, technology, and companies old and new, are made. Besides experiencing elements of ASMR when I get a glimpse of people making things, I get a lot out of creative process discovery.
Digging for mental models
BTS content helps me piece together the mental models creatives adopt to grow, make, and contribute. For the author of ‘The Martian’, Andy Weir, one of his processes is about speculating on “cool science stuff” and then figuring out “what happens if this breaks?”. Prolific author of the ‘The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency’ series, Alexander McCall Smith, doesn’t create complete road-maps of a story, but rather writes the first and last paragraph in his head, and then fills in the gaps.
My favourite Sri Lankan writer, Ashok Ferrey, shared his process when I interviewed him for ‘A Life Less Ordinary’. He writes longhand, on scrappy notebooks, in pencil. And only one draft! My mind was blown away by this, because every piece of writing I work on goes through many, many iterations (and never on paper) before I feel comfortable sharing with the world. I was in awe of the deliberate, careful and confident crafting of words, much like a film photographer composes his 36 shots without any previews or instant editing.
I haven’t been working exactly like Weir, McCall Smith, or Ferrey since learning about their story-making wizardry, but I now have three different tools when working on my own ideas. I didn’t have to figure them out over several years, and I can combine them in different ways to amplify their impact too.
The Anointed Few don’t learn in public
I find it disingenuous when Accomplished People rewrite their histories by meticulously curating their earlier works online, forming a narrative that suggests they were brilliant from day zero. It’s bad enough when biographers and journalists portray them as divinely gifted and supernaturally talented. The problem lies in giving an impression that there were no flaws to work on, no opportunities to learn, no mentorship or coaching, no failures that led to where they are today. It wards off young minds from even trying because of the crushing pressure to be Great, even when no one’s looking.
I love it when creators are proud of their earlier work and also acknowledge they’ve come a long way since. Musician Solange takes pride in her earlier albums and songs that had gone mostly ignored by mainstream media for years, as she reveals in this epic three-hour long conversation on musician Questlove’s podcast. She’s also one of many musicians to show that creating genre-pushing, award-winning material doesn’t have to be made with the most expensive, cutting edge (and therefore inaccessible) tools to make things that have impact.
While the end product is what matters at the end of the day, actually witnessing the entire creative process, flaws and all, is empowering. Musician Esperanza Spalding gave folks not just a glimpse, but the complete, unfiltered, making of her album, Exposure, over 77 hours. Such honest sharing really highlights the value of showing up, using constraints like time, money, tools, and creative resources to amplify, not limit, one’s work.
A life much more ordinary than you’d ever believe
It’s easy to think that the creators who made what you love live their day-to-day lives in unfathomably interesting ways. Well, more often than not, they don’t. In 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki, we see the anime legend walk around in drab attire around his unremarkable studio, smoking packs of cigarettes in between sketches and meetings. His reality seems to be at complete odds with what you’d expect for the creator of such magical films. Peering into the normal lives of creatives takes the pressure away from ‘the rest of us’ to aspire to be extraordinary all the time.
Everything is a remix, even in tech
Creativity isn’t limited to the obvious domains like music, writing, or art. A PBS documentary from the 90s showed how cutting edge technology and commercial viability intersected in the making of the Boeing 777. People were pushed to their creative and intellectual limits to solve problems no one in the industry had faced before through relentless testing, learning, and adapting, building on the countless little innovations in flight that trace back as far as the Wright Brothers.
I got the same insight from the wealth of engineer interviews and articles about Apple’s quantum leap in chip development on their insanely powerful M1 chips. It wasn’t a quantum leap at all, but a series of summits conquered one at a time over several decades – switching to Intel chips in Macs the mid 2000s from tech-inferior partners at IBM Motorola, starting afresh with their own chips on iPhone 4 and iPad, and iterating over and over until they finally felt ready to go all in with their own chips on Macs, the final element to “making the whole widget on the Mac“.
The ultimate insight…
Getting to know the intimate details behind your favourite ideas might ruin the mystery and magic of their final form. But I think it’s important to know that their creators didn’t reach creative milestone after milestone smoothly. They experience soul-crushing challenges, blocks, and constraints the same way everyone else does at every stage of the creative process.
And this leads to the most valuable insight I get from peering into a successful creative’s process – they keep slogging through it all.
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