I’ve been annoying anyone who would lend me their ear with my newly-found obsession: Jacob Collier. And now it’s your turn, dear reader.
Since discovering his music about a week ago, I have devoured interviews, live performances, studio recordings, production breakdowns, and even the very niche Collier meme community. I can’t remember a time in my life when I’ve been so enamoured with an artist. He’s a multi-instrumentalist musical prodigy who bends genres and musical theory to create sound that is entirely unique. It’s jazz but listenable for the mainstream. It’s groovy but infused with classical influences. It’s choral in nature while also maintaining a solo pop feel. It’s magic.
And you should start here, here and here.
But what makes him special is not just his music. That is, as always, subjective; and won’t appeal to everybody. What makes him unique is his philosophy of creativity.
When you watch his interviews or Logic Pro breakdowns you very quickly get a sense that this 24-year-old has an other-worldly creative brain and thinks so much more deeply about what he tries to do with his music than you could ever imagine. He has been labeled as the Albert Einstein of music or the Mozart of our generation and I don’t think that’s too far from the truth.
I’ll expand on (and probably butcher) one of his ideas here, for brevity, but I’d encourage you to dig into everything you can find of him (At least so I’ve got people to talk about it with).
Idea fragility.
For anyone who does creative work (and I think this extends to almost everybody - even if you don’t think of yourself as an artist), it is almost certainly true that you’re not lacking ideas. One of the potential burdens of unleashed creativity is that if you tap into it and take it seriously, you will very quickly realise that you have thousands more ideas than time to execute on them. You’ll also realise that 95% of your ideas are bad. So in order to make any real progress, you have to perform effective idea triage.
Performing idea triage is challenging because, at the moment of the idea, you don’t know whether it is a good one or a bad one. It’s just a fledgling idea. As it enters your mind, it has a staggeringly short lifespan. The first thing to do is to record that idea before it disappears. You grab a notebook, or the voice memo app on your phone and you get it out of your head before it vanishes. Sometimes we’re lazy and we tell ourselves, ‘I’ll remember this’, and of course… we don’t.
So the first habit to get into is to externalise every idea you have.
(No matter what it is).
Right. So you now have a collection of very fragile ideas in front of you. Now the triage can begin. On a second review, many of the obviously bad ones will reveal themselves and you can safely throw them away. Whatever remains has potential.
What Collier then describes is a strategy of letting those remaining ideas percolate in your subconscious as you continue with your day-to-day life. Instead of doing a proactive pro and con list for each one, you’re waiting for one of those ideas to nag you. You’ll find that you won’t be able to stop thinking about one and it will continue to ring its bell in the back of your mind.
It’s only when that idea is so loud and you would drive yourself crazy if you didn’t work on it - that’s when you grab it with both hands like a bird that’s inside your house.
Once you’ve grabbed it, you have to switch modes and become single-mindedly obsessed with it until it’s finished and you’ve pushed that idea into the world. These chosen ideas are fragile and liable to break due to perfectionism, distraction, self-doubt, or a myriad of other things. By pushing right through those barriers and getting it over the finishing line, you give it the strength to live on.
This method of unlimited collection, obvious triage, subconscious percolation and obsessive finishing - gives you unlimited creativity that produces actual results.
It’s a beautiful way to think about it and I can’t stop marveling over his creative brain.
New Podcast: Discovering Jacob Collier
Our newly-found respect for musical prodigy Jacob Collier dominates this episode with supporting roles played by Apple’s WWDC, Kanye West’s Yeezy partnership with Gap, Tencent’s entrance into online gaming and a quick breakdown of how to look like Thor! Dig in and enjoy.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
Links:
After watching the global markets stay weird and wonderful throughout this pandemic I’ve become even more skeptical of the efficient market hypothesis than I already was (I didn’t think that was possible). I was doing some reading up on it to test my ideas and came across this really well-written breakdown of how one might build an AI training model to trade on the market. Lots of good stuff in the post.
Here’s an interesting take on how money atomises the individual and the resulting diversification of one’s identity might be the cause of much of our social anxiety. Not sure I agree, but it is really is food for thought. “Money is both the great everything and the great nothing.”
A tale of the two Talebs: the author (genius) and the tweeter (arrogant bully).
That’s it for this week. Be kind to yourself!
Barry