Cows, Coffee, and Capitalism
How long do you pause? Why is the toothpaste locked up?
For many years, I’ve sought books about the processes of successful people.
Behind this interest, I think, is this idea, barely admitted even to myself, that if I find the right process, find the steps a successful leader or writer or artist or inventor follows, then I can replicate their achievements. It’s a sort of cargo-culting, thinking that if I do the same actions, I’ll get the same outcome. Or maybe process really is all there is. After all, as Aristotle nearly said: “we are what we repeatedly do”. More generously: perhaps I am hunting for technical techniques that I can adopt; specific things I can borrow to enhance my experience of work.
There’s a book by Mason Currey, perhaps the ultimate example of processes, Daily Rituals: How Artists Work, that recounts the routines of 150 writers and artists. Some are fascinating, some are borderline insane. Kierkegaard, for example, requested his assistant:
select which cup and saucer he preferred that day, and then, bizarrely, justify his choice to Kierkegaard
Beethoven would “pour large pitchers of water over his hands, bellowing up and down the scale.” It looked so silly the servants “would often burst out laughing”, but the real problem was:
so much water was spilled that it went right through the floor. This was one of the main reasons for Beethoven’s unpopularity as a tenant.
Victor Hugo got his hair cut every day, but saved “the trimmings in an unexplained act of superstition”. Friedrich Schiller “kept a drawer full of rotting apples in his workroom.” Nikola Tesla demanded “eighteen clean linen napkins” at dinner and when dishes arrived, he:
would mentally calculate their cubic contents before eating, a strange compulsion he had developed in his childhood.
Gertrude Stein couldn’t write unless she had, and I am not making this up, “a cow in her line of vision”:
If the cow doesn’t seem to fit in with Miss Stein’s mood, the ladies get into the car and drive on to another cow.
Many, many people drank excessive amounts of coffee. Balzac holds the record at “fifty cups a day”. Beethoven only had one, but liked exactly sixty beans and “counted them out one by one.” Kierkegaard, after hearing the cup justification, poured “sugar into the coffee cup until it was piled up above the rim.”
These giants of Western culture were nutters.
I don’t see contemporary writers and artists talking like this anymore. Maybe it says something about the status of cultural creators that we don’t indulge, or even tolerate, their idiosyncrasies. Instead, I see articles about tech CEOs describing their routines: up at 5AM, meditation for an hour, a run, a cold shower, grains and goji berries, picking a shirt from a wardrobe of 100 identical shirts. It is the wealthy whose eccentricity we valorize.
I’ve become skeptical of processes and routines. I’m fascinated by them, yes, but I’m not sure I believe them. Nor do I feel they describe how the subject really does their thing. Even if you ignore the ridiculous ones, the ones that hint at dysfunctions and superstitions, I just don’t believe people when they try to explain how they do the elusive thing they do. Sometimes I think they’re lying to make themselves look better, to make the success seem more hard won. But often I think they genuinely aren’t aware of what led to their success. There is a chasm between describing and doing.
Things we do unconsciously are almost impossible to articulate without significant effort. Ask someone to explain how they throw a ball, and although they can reliably throw something into a bin from a foot away, they will struggle to tell you what they did. We all know that “big red car” sounds right and “red big car” doesn’t, but you have to be a linguist to explain adjectival ordering.
Applied to artistic or industry success, areas already heavily subjective and luck-dependent, you see how people trick themselves into inventing narratives about what they do. Writers regularly say the question they dread most is “where do you get your ideas from”, not because they don’t like answering it. But because they don’t know.
When I ask people I work with about their processes, even those who struggle with the work describe rich, thoughtful, inspiring processes indistinguishable from those of billionaires. But the more closely I know them, the more I see their stated processes departing from what they really do. Precision, identifying key elements, prioritisation and understanding: the meta-cognition required to spot and articulate these things is difficult, and not a skill we develop through doing. I’m reminded that the fourth state of competence is unconscious competence.
Recently, I have noticed a backlash against self-aggrandizing processes. I see people recounting chaotic, relatable, endearing behaviours. “I get up late and really don’t do anything for ages,” Colm Tóibín says, “I’ll send emails to myself in order not to write.” And while this is funny, it doesn’t tell us anything useful. And, to be honest, I don’t know if I believe this either. The man has won dozens of awards and written so much, Wikipedia needs a separate page to list it all. And even that is flagged as “incomplete”.
The most concrete detail from his process is that he writes longhand, and only on the right-hand page, so he can make corrections on the left. But no sooner has he given us this actionable insight, something we could copy, he undercuts it: “But then I get too lazy and don’t make any corrections until it’s typed.” So we are no wiser what tricks and techniques contribute to his success.
But maybe it’s okay that no one knows how they do what they do. If there was a set process we could all follow, a concrete set of steps, then meaningful work would be a conveyor belt of piecework. Processes are inherently repeatable. Whereas all meaningful work is a step into uncharted territory, discovering the path as we go. Perhaps this is why we end up with quasi-mystical processes, filled with superstition and ritual.
Still: not sure if I’m going to get a cow into my line of vision each morning.
Elsewhere
Some Thoughts on the Real World by One Who Glimpsed It and Fled, Bill Watterson’s 1990 Kenyon College commencement speech (13 minutes)
It’s surprising how hard we’ll work when the work is done just for ourselves […] maybe utilitarianism is overrated. If I’ve learned one thing from being a cartoonist, it’s how important playing is to creativity and happiness. […] Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery - it recharges by running.
Bill Watterson is famous for not monetising Calvin and Hobbes as much as he could have. This gives him a sort of cult following among a certain sort of person. Like Tim Berners-Lee, you have a sense that he looked unimaginable riches in the eye, shrugged and carried on with his life (although I suspect both are economically comfortable).
Watterson’s thoughts are as much about personal fulfilment as they are about art or integrity. “I found that what I was chasing wasn't what I caught,” he says, “I've wanted to be a cartoonist since I was old enough to read cartoons, and I never really thought about cartoons as being a business.”
The Secret Life of 'Um' by Julie Beck in the Atlantic (9 minutes)
One thing I think about a lot is the tiny ways technology changes our lives, in particular our social interactions. The more subtle the shift, the more fascinated I am - and often the harder it is to spot. (As this is a direct conversation transcript, I’ve edited the below to avoid excessive quoting)
Beck: People usually respond to each other in a conversation within 200 milliseconds. What signal does it send if you take longer to respond?
Enfield: As the average is 200 milliseconds, it suggests people are aiming for that. If you are late, it means you were not able to hit that target, maybe because you didn’t hear what was said, or you were distracted in some way. Or maybe you were trying to buffer what we call a “dis-preferred response.” If I say “How about we go and grab coffee later?” you can very quickly say, “Yeah, sure, sounds good.” But if you say “Ah, actually no, I’m not free this afternoon, sorry,” that kind of response comes out more slowly. It’s adding a buffer because you’re aware saying “No” is not what the questioner was hoping to hear. We deliver those dis-preferred responses a bit later. If you say “no” very quickly, that comes across as blunt or rude. Others are very sensitive to what these delays means.
Enfield goes into much more detail about speech mechanics (the interview is essentially an advert for his book, How We Talk).
Think about that 200ms delay, though. The target latency on video conferencing software is 100ms (not even the average, the best case they’re aiming for in ideal conditions), which pretty much guarantees you’re going to come in late with every response, subtly sending a message of distraction or that you’re about to say something the other person doesn’t want to hear.
Joseph Roth at the CVS by Marco Roth from his newsletter The Feckless Bellelettrist (9 minutes)
Almost everything […] was locked […] behind shatterproof plastic or glass. To obtain my tube of toothpaste, I had to press a glaring red button triggering a public address system: "Customer assistance required in aisle 3," spoken in the dull but stridently unhuman tones of a robotic era that’s already outdated. […] They opened the case, watched while I leaned in and took what I needed, then pointed me toward the automatic check out. How long until this person, too, is replaced by either a robot or, more likely, an app that one must download to one's phone, providing various personal data to better customize my drug store experience […] Here was America now in one neat package, like the box of toothpaste I now held: lock her up, lock him up, lock it down, put the school on lockdown, lock the border up, lock the migrants up, lock the body up, lock your phone, get two factor authorization or facial recognition, we've got this locked up. Relentless security theater that makes everyone feel the pinch of insecurity. […]
Accompanying this deeper plunge into lockdown mode is the American penchant for accelerated technological solutions to problems that appear to exist only in the minds of human beings frightened of face to face interactions of any kind. Just as the answer to every social problem is the lock and key, for these people the answer to everything is greater automation.
In reading these observations, I’m reminded how much a whole political wing enjoys locking things up, down and away. Until, that is, Covid, when objecting to the lockdown became a politicized cause. Partly because this time it was they who were being locked away, but also perhaps because the reason for the lockdown was to protect others, rather than to protect themselves. Or maybe it was just because it risked impacting their income. At the end of the day, it’s always economy, stupid.
That’s all for today,
Simon