How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  Daquan’s story is not unusual. Rappers have a reputation for becoming criminals, but criminals more frequently become rappers, or musicians in other genres, or writers, actors, artists, or creators of some other kind. In 1985, a seventeen-year-old crack cocaine dealer named Shawn Corey Carter borrowed a gun and shot his older brother in an argument about jewelry; in 1999 he was arrested and tried for allegedly stabbing a man in the stomach in a New York nightclub. Carter pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor and was given three years’ probation. It was a turning point. He said, “I vowed to never allow myself to be in a situation like that again.” Today, Carter is better known as a rapper named Jay-Z. By 2013, after twenty years of success in music and business, he had a personal fortune of around half a billion dollars.

  Music has diverted children from crime all over the world. Israel has a program called Music Is the Answer; Australia’s Children’s Music Foundation has a Disadvantaged Teens program; Oliver Jacobson, Daquan Lawrence’s music teacher, was a volunteer for the U.S. nonprofit Genuine Voices; and in Britain, the Irene Taylor Trust, a charity, operates a program called Music in Prisons. In an evaluation of one of its programs, the Irene Taylor Trust claimed that prisoners were 94 percent less likely to commit a crime during the program and 58 percent less likely to commit a crime in the six months after completing it. These numbers are too good to be true—the data is sparse and the research poorly controlled. It would be wrong to say that a few months of music school ends a life of crime: Daquan Lawrence continued to deal drugs, and get caught doing it, for several years after he started to rap. But all the good outcomes make the truth obvious: the more we create, the less we destroy.

  We are inclined to regard passion as positive and addiction as negative, but they are indistinguishable apart from their outcomes. Addiction destroys, passion creates, and that is the only difference between them. In the 1950s, George “Shotgun” Shuba hit baseballs for the Brooklyn Dodgers. One night after he retired, Shuba sat in his basement with sportswriter Roger Kahn, drinking cognac and talking about the game. Shuba described how as a boy he had practiced by hanging a length of knotted rope in his backyard and hitting it with a weighted bat. Then, old and slightly drunk, he demonstrated. From a case on the wall he took a bat weighted with lead and prepared to hit an old knotted rope as if it were a ball. Kahn described what happened next:

  The swing was beautiful, and grunting softly he whipped the bat into the clumped string. Level and swift, the bat parted the air and made a whining sound. Again Shuba swung and again, controlled and terribly hard. It was the hardest swing I ever saw that close.

  I said, “You’re a natural.”

  “Ah,” Shuba said. “You talk like a sportswriter.”

  He went to the file and pulled out a chart, marked with Xs.

  “In the winters,” he said, “for fifteen years after loading potatoes or anything else, even when I was in the majors, I’d swing six hundred times. Every night, and after sixty I’d make an X. Ten Xs and I had my six hundred swings. Then I could go to bed.

  “You call that natural? I swung a 44-ounce bat 600 times a night, 4,200 times a week, 46,200 swings every winter.”

  The secret of Shuba’s swing was what psychologist William Glasser later called “positive addiction.” Shuba was so passionate about baseball that he acted like an addict. He could not sleep unless he had swung his bat six hundred times. His addiction, or passion, became his career.

  One way or another, your passion will out. Use it as the courage to create.

  7 | HOW TO BEGIN

  Passion must be structured by process. Woody Allen starts with a drawer full of pieces of paper, many torn from matchbooks and magazine corners, all little patches of possibility:

  I’ll start with scraps and things that are written on hotel things, and I’ll, you know, ponder these things, I’ll pull these out and I’ll dump them here like this on the bed. I have got to go through this all the time, and every time I start a project I sit here like this, and I look. A note here is “A man inherits all the magic tricks of a great magician.” Now that’s all I have there, but I could see a story, forming where some little jerk like myself at an auction or at some opportunity buys all those illusions and you know boxes and guillotines and things and it leading me to some kind of interesting adventure going into one of those boxes and maybe suddenly showing up in a different time frame or a different country or in a different place altogether. I’ll spend an hour thinking of that and it’ll go no place and I’ll go on to the next one.

  The three most destructive words in the English language may be before I begin.

  Oscar-winning screenwriter Charlie Kaufman: “To begin, to begin. How to start? I’m hungry. I should get coffee. Coffee would help me think. I should write something first, then I’ll reward myself with coffee. Coffee and a muffin. OK, so I need to establish the themes. Maybe banana-nut. That’s a good muffin.”

  The only thing we do before we begin is fail to begin. Whatever form our failure takes, be it a banana-nut muffin, a tidier sock drawer, or a bag of new stationery, it is the same thing: a non-beginning, complete with that dead car sound, all click, no ignition. Having resisted the temptation of others, we must also resist the temptation of us.

  The best way to begin is the same as the best way to swim in the sea. No tiptoes. No wading. Go under. Get wet and cold from scalp to sole. Splutter up salt, push the hair from your brow, then stroke and stroke again. Feel the chill change. Do not look back or think ahead. Just go.

  In the beginning, all that matters is how much clay you throw on the wheel. Go for as many hours as you can. Repeat every day possible until you die.

  The first beginning will feel wrong. We are not used to being with ourselves uninterrupted. We do not know the way first things look. We have imagined our creations finished but never begun. A thing begun is less right than wrong, more flaw than finesse, all problem and no solution. Nothing begins good, but everything good begins. Everything can be revised, erased, or rearranged later. The courage of creation is making bad beginnings.

  Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, one of the great innovators of twentieth-century music, played a Bach fugue on the piano every morning. He started every day like this for years. Then he worked for ten hours. Before lunch he composed. After lunch he orchestrated and transcribed. He did not wait for inspiration. He said, “Work brings inspiration if inspiration is not discernible in the beginning.”

  Ritual is optional, but consistency is not. Creating requires regular hours of solitude. Time is your main ingredient, so use the highest-quality time to create.

  At first, creating for an hour is hard. Every five minutes our mind itches for interruption: to stretch, get coffee, check e-mail, pet the dog. We indulge an urge for research, and before we know it we have Googled three links away from where we started and are reminding ourselves of the name of Bill Cosby’s wife in The Cosby Show (it was Clair) or learning what sound a giraffe makes (giraffes are generally quiet, but they sometimes cough, bellow, snort, bleat, moo, and mew). This is the candy we give ourselves.

  What solitude creates interruption destroys. Science describes the destruction unequivocally. Many experiments show the same things: interruption slows us down. No matter how little time is stolen by interruption, we lose even more time reconnecting to our work. Interruption causes twice as many mistakes. Interruption makes us angry. Interruption makes us anxious. These effects are the same among men and women. Creation knows no multitasking.

  Interruption, unfortunately, is also addictive. We live in an interruption culture, and it conditions us to crave interruption. Say no to the itch. More “no’s” equals fewer itches. The mind is a muscle that starts soft but becomes long and lean with use. The more we focus, the stronger it gets. After that first difficult hour, several seem easy. Then we not only work for hours but also feel wrong if we do not. A change comes. The itch is not for interruption but for concentration.

  As we sit with our pen poised ab
ove the page we aim to turn into a novel, scientific paper, work of art, patent, poem, or business plan, we can feel paralyzed—and that’s only if we can summon up the courage to sit in the first place. While knowing that this is a natural and normal part of the creative process may ease our minds a little, it may not make us more productive. We look around for inspiration. This is the right thing to do, only much of art lies not in what we see but in what we don’t. When we envy the perfect creations of others, what we do not see, what we by definition cannot see, and what we may also forget when we look back at successful creations of our own, is everything that got thrown away, that failed, that didn’t make the cut. When we look at a perfect page, we should put it not on a pedestal but on a pile of imperfect pages, all balled or torn, some of them truly awful, created only to be thrown away. This trash is not failure but foundation, and the perfect page is its progeny.

  The most creative force we can conceive of is not us, it is what created us, and we can learn from it. Call it God or evolution; it is undeniably a brutal editor. It destroys almost all of what it makes, through death, extinction, or simple failure to reproduce or be produced, and selects only the best of what is left for survival. Creation is selection.

  Everything, whether nature or culture, was created by this process. Every peach, every orchid, every starling, like every successful act of art, or science, or engineering, or business, is made of a thousand failures and extinctions. Creation is selection, iteration, and rejection.

  Good writing is bad writing well edited; a good hypothesis is whatever is left after many experiments fail; good cooking is the result of choosing, chopping, skinning, shelling, and reducing; a great movie has as much to do with what ends up on the cutting room floor as what does not. To succeed in the art of new, we must fail freely and frequently. The empty canvas must not stay empty. We have to plunge into it.

  What we produce when we do will be bad, or at least not as good as it will become. This is natural. We must learn to be at ease with it. Whenever we begin to invent or create or conceive, whenever we begin to make something new, our heads fill with advocates of same, holding censor’s pencils, babbling criticism. We recognize most of them. They are the ghosts of hecklers, judgers, investors, and reviewers past, present, and future, personifications created by our evolved instinct for keeping things the way they are, manifesting to stay our hand and save us from the perils of new.

  These characters—all us in disguise, of course—should be welcomed, not rejected. They are important and useful, but they have arrived too early. The time for critical assessment—their time—comes later. For now they must be shown to a room in our mind where they can wait, unheard, until needed for editing, assessing, and redrafting. Otherwise they will not only paralyze us, they will drain our imagination. It takes a lot of energy to script and voice all those naysayers—energy we need for the task at hand.

  The same is true of their opposites. Sometimes inner critics are replaced by cheerleaders of new who urge us on with fantasies of fame and glamour. They imagine the first bad stanza we write bringing down the house on Broadway. They script our Nobel acceptance speech while we are drafting the title of our scientific paper. They rehearse the anecdotes we will share on the couches of chat shows while we are writing the first page of our novel. For these voices, anything new we make, or even conceive of, is perfect. Show them to the waiting room, too.

  Almost nothing we create will be good the first time. It will seldom be bad. It will probably be a dull shade of average. The main virtue of a first sketch is that it breaks the blank page. It is a spark of life in the swamp, beautiful if only because it is a beginning.

  And, somehow, long after the beginning and far into an endless middle, something takes shape. After the tenth prototype, the hundredth experiment, or the thousandth page, there is enough material to enable selection. All that clay thrown on the wheel has the potential to be more than new. It has the potential to be good.

  This is the time for those advocates of same, our inner critics and judges, to be let through the door they have been pounding on for so long. They have been eavesdropping all the while and are ready to attack the work with blue pencils as sharp as teeth and claws. Let them be loud. Let them brutally scrutinize the data, or the draft, or the sketch and cut out anything and everything that doesn’t need to be there. Selection is a bloody process. Beautiful work, maybe months in the making, is culled in moments.

  This is the hardest part of all. We are the sum of our time and dreams and deeds, and our art is all three. Abandoning an idea can seem like losing a limb. But it is not nearly as serious, and it has to be done. The herd must be thinned or it faces extinction, and any new work that does not suffer selection faces an equivalent fate: it is unlikely to pass peer review, or be produced or patented, exhibited, or published. The world will always be more hostile to our work than we are. Ruthless selection gives it less to work with.

  When the frenzy is over and only our fittest work, our very best new, has survived, it is time to begin again. The agents of same, sated for now, must retreat so that whatever is left, however slight, can reproduce and grow into a second draft, another prototype, a changed experiment, a rewritten song, stronger and better adapted.

  And so it goes on. No eurekas or flashes of inspiration. Innovation is whatever remains when all our failures are removed. The only way to work is to accept our urge to create and our desire to keep things the same and make both pull in our favor. The art of new, and perhaps the art of happiness, is not absolute victory for either new or old but balance between them. Birds do not defy gravity or let it bind them to the ground. They use it to fly.

  8 | FROM E TO F

  Why do more when you can do less? Woody Allen has pondered that, too: “Why opt for a life of grueling work? You delude yourself that there’s a reason to lead a productive life of work and struggle and perfection of one’s profession or art. My ambitions or my pretensions—to which I freely admit—are not to gain power. I only want to make something that will entertain people, and I’m stretching myself to do it.”

  New is difference, so difference makes new. When we create, we harvest what is uniquely ours, our speck of special, our very selves, shaped by our genes, by the life that courses over us daily, and, for those of us who have them, our God or gods. We each bring difference to the world. It is inside us from birth to death. Every parent knows that their child is like no other, made from a recipe of talents, tendencies, tics, and loves all his or her own. My first child loved snow before she could walk. My second rejected his first snowfall by crying for a chai latte. He was not yet two. What makes us prefer a chai latte to snow before we are two? Something innate. No matter how many billions breathe the air of this earth, you bear something that has never before been borne and will not be borne again: a gift to be given not kept.

  We may not write symphonies or discover laws of science, but new is in all of us. There is a bakery in my old neighborhood in Los Angeles. It is tiny, forty seats or fewer. A woman called Annie Miler created it in 2000. Annie is a pastry chef. She makes blueberry muffins, butterscotch brownies, and grilled cheese sandwiches. The bakery’s interior is artful, tasteful, and personal. You can see Annie growing up in pictures hanging along the wall. In the first she is a little redheaded girl shyly displaying an early cake; by the last she stands with her team on her bakery’s opening day. Annie’s baking binds her community. Her store is where neighbors meet to pet each other’s dogs and share small talk over the tang of espresso. The seasons change with the fruit in her tarts and the flavors of her soups. People go to her bakery to kick-start their day, to have first dates, and to salve the pains of life.

  Annie’s place probably sounds like a place you know. There are many people who, like Annie, have built boutiques, cafés, florists, delis, and thousands of other community businesses that go beyond mere franchises or cookie-cutter stores and have new and unique details because they are reflections of what is new and unique abou
t their creators.

  Be like Woody Allen and Annie Miler. Make passion the gas in your tank.

  1 | KELLY

  In January 1944, Milo Burcham strolled across an airstrip in California’s Mojave Desert and climbed into a plane called Lulu Belle. Lulu Belle looked like an insect: shiny green with stubby wings and no propellers. A crowd of men, swaddled in overcoats, watched in silence. Burcham started the engine, a de Havilland Goblin from England—the only one of its kind in the world—shot a brief glance of mischief at his audience, and then accelerated into the sky. When he reached 502 miles an hour, he dropped Lulu Belle low and flew her so close to the men that he could see them startle. They were still watching in silence when he landed and opened the cockpit. He pushed himself out, wearing his best just-another-walk-in-the-park face, fighting a grin and winning, until the men whooped and ran toward him, hollering and clapping as if they had never seen a plane before. Burcham cracked a smile as wide as the sky. It was Lulu Belle’s first flight. No American plane had ever flown so fast.

  Lulu Belle’s official name was the “Lockheed P-80 Shooting Star.” She was the first fighter jet in the United States military. It was forty years since the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk and 143 days since the P-80 had been conceived.

  If creating is best done alone by people with intrinsic motivation and free choice, how do creative teams work? How can anyone build an organization that creates?

  The team that built the P-80 at the height of World War II faced a hard problem: build a jet-powered airplane that can fight, and build it fast. The urgency was a matter of life and death. In 1943, British code breakers had discovered something horrifying: Hitler’s engineers had built a jet-powered fighter plane with a top speed of 600 miles per hour. The plane, called the Messerschmitt Me 262 Schwalbe, or Swallow, was agile and highly maneuverable, despite being armed with four machine guns, rockets, and, if necessary, bombs. It was in mass production. It would be raining death on Europe by early 1944. The Nazis were winning a new kind of war—a war from the sky, using technology that had been inconceivable just a few years earlier.