The Answer to Skynet is Within You
How creativity can beat procrastination and the AI that seeks to automate your job
Years ago, I created a comprehensive list of everything I’d read to get me into the field of advertising, and everything I had read since then to keep up with the industry. At the beginning of this year I considered revamping the list and creating a post for Quora. However, the more I tried to create this list, the less appropriate it seemed. I have read a good number of books, both the ones that my old ad teachers recommended for producing ideas, and also esoteric ones whose names they have likely never heard. Here, instead, is what I would say in answer to the question of “how do I become creative?”
This was going to be a curated list of resources on how to get better at persuasive marketing and making products, but then I realized it would be useless. Not because the advice in those works isn’t salvageable and good for getting people to buy or at least look at your wares, but because the biggest problem isn’t a lack of resources, it’s too many of them. And any solution for getting people to pay attention that can be written down and replicated has already been automated.
What’s more, there are dozens of courses on digital marketing by people who would rather sell you a course than make a useful product. A good number of people who buy those courses are trying to market products they haven’t fully thought through. It would seem that what the world needs are better solutions, not more persuasion techniques to keep people procrastinating.
What someone who is looking to do their big thing needs isn’t another article, book, or video on how to do it, it’s how to actually solve their problem of not having done it yet. If all you needed to do was read a book on how to sell like gangbusters, you’d have already done it by now. Instead, you’re here. Reading this post.
Hey, it’s okay. I’ve been there too. A million times. A lot of this writing happens when I should be doing the thing. The thing that, when you actually start, you’ll realize isn’t all that bad at all and not worth wasting hours of your time avoiding.
So what’s the deal with all of us wanting to do the thing and then not doing it? Well, that’s life. As children, we’re trained this way. We’re born powerless and find ways to cope with disappointment and disperse fear that is way easier than confronting the problem head-on and overcoming it.
The Need to Teach Yourself Creativity
The education system takes 20 years to prepare you to solve the problems of adult life, many argue it doesn’t do that good of a job either. For all that time you are told you’re not ready. You run practice scenarios with no stakes. You do simplified, easier versions of the real-world challenges that have already been solved by other people. So that when they finally hand you your diploma and tell you you’re qualified, it sure as hell doesn’t feel that way. More years are spent protected from the real work. We do menial tasks, work at internships, and try to understand how to do more things that others have done before. Or we go back to school to get the answers out of books.
All of this is fine if you just want to make a living for now. It’s certain failure if you’re trying to acquire the meta-skills necessary to solve the kinds of problems machines can’t. This is why the coveted professions: doctors, lawyers, accountants, are now under threat. It started with textiles and printing half a millennia ago, moved into retail and manufacturing, and now any job that can be reduced to a series of “if, than” statements can be better done by machines.
Thankfully, machines have yet to figure out creativity and innovation. This is because almost every act of creativity is an act of applied improvisation. You take one or more disparate elements and then, through an act of mental alchemy, produce a golden solution for the problem at hand.
What to Do: Make Nail Guns for Hammer Problems
This is why reading a book about writing copy, sales, or (gag) neuro-linguistic programming, isn’t really going to help you sell. Instead, what will help is your ability to use tools from outside the box.
Instead, think about the old phrase, “when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.”
Let’s flip that.
When you have a bunch of nail-type problems, you are never going to get ahead if you insist on solving them “by the book” with hammers.
The guy who knows a thing or two about nails while also understanding the nature of guns has hammer-guy totally beat. A nailgun is an infinitely better solver of nail problems than a hammer, but you’ll never get there if you only follow old books on carpentry.
Start Before It’s Too Late
So here’s the thing: you probably already have all the solutions you need to tackle your problem. And if you don’t, you will find them on the way. Running to Google now will not help you, because you don’t even know what the real problems will be yet.
And if you get the thing done and it looks totally amateurish and you know you could do a much better job if you did it again? Good. Do it again. Perfection doesn’t come the first time, and it won’t come the millionth time. Instead, perfection is like infinity. You can never get there, but you get exponentially closer with repetition.
What you are looking to improve with each iteration, is discernment. You are giving your mind room to make connections and find shortcuts. You are making space to daydream the ‘what if’ scenarios involving ideas and experiences only you’ve had. And what’s most likely to improve your chances of winning the A.I. war: you’re building the acumen to know what will actually work.
Machines may replicate the mind and body, but not what makes us human
A.I. has made imagery and it has made texts, it has even made videos and movies, but the works are by and large completely unpalatable because they combine disparate elements without the judgment necessary to tell if those combinations are any good. Since the beginning, the algorithms are trying to solve this problem with brute force: show it to enough people and iterate based on how they react. But that kind of focus group thinking always regresses to the mean. It’s great at marginally improving hammers, but it will never make a nail gun, much less anything that can drive what you believe fervently into another’s soul.
Your job as a successfully creative human being isn’t to do the hammering, nor is it to craft better hammers, it’s to replace the paradigm of hammers and nails entirely. The creative act, requiring as it does the alchemical creation of something meaningful and new out of what moments before were considered useless and unrelated, needs something fully conscious beings like you possess that machines never will: the soul.
It's that discernment that's difficult. We can certainly machine-gun our approach to creativity, but then that ever-critical judgment is needed. That sense of "never getting there," rings true to the creative life—and it's what everyone has to accept if they are to enter this world.