The power of emojis to spark ideas
Friends,
Good morning from Brooklyn.
Today is the World Premiere of National Geographic’s Secrets of the Whales, a documentary about the intriguing similarities between whale and human culture. The reason I’m so excited about it is because my wife scored the music. Five years ago she quit a marketing job at Google to pursue her passion for film scoring having not one single contact in the industry. Today she’s scoring a movie produced by James Cameron. Her relentless grit throughout the last five years have been a constant reminder to me that hard work and perseverance is the road to success.
Until next week,
Florian
The power of emojis to spark ideas
We use emojis to add texture to our written conversations. Sometimes they replace words altogether. They are the ultimate compression of meaning.
What if I told you you could also use them to spark your creativity?
I’ve been writing a new piece every Sunday now for twelve weeks. I used to see creativity as something that only artists have to wrestle with. Now I have to confront the sudden bursts and frequent stalls of inspiration on a weekly basis.
Creativity is the ability to summon ideas. And it’s hard.
I couldn’t help but nod in agreement when I read these lines by Elizabeth Gilbert:
“Ideas are a disembodied, energetic life-form. They are completely separate from us, but capable of interacting with us—albeit strangely.”
She captures a core truth about ideas: in their ethereal form, they are fleeting creatures, hard to catch and bring to the blank page. The flashing cursor in your Google doc is as threatening to them as it is nerve-wracking to you.
So how do we summon ideas?
Emojis. Use them as bait.
Visual cues put the spotlight on your thoughts. So why keep struggling in the fog of your own mind? Let your eyes give you a hand!
Let me explain. First, I picked a series of emojis that I was drawn to. Then, for thirty minutes I wrote down the ideas they made me think of.
This is the result.
🚿 Shower thoughts are ideas that come while you are in the shower. I wish I could just relax and just enjoy a shower sometimes but ideas do seem to thrive in steamy environments. I need to get myself one of those waterproof notepads.
👁️ Contemplation is the most underrated skill. In a world where productivity is the obligatory religion, the act of disinterested contemplation feels sacrilegious. I struggle to go for a walk in my neighborhood without seeing an opportunity to catch up on a podcast. But when I do resist the urge and look up, I allow myself to get caught into the particular dance of humans going about their day.
Last week I woke up early but instead of my usual morning routine, I sat on my couch and did nothing. I just let thoughts wash up on the shore of my consciousness. The gods of productivity were furious. I was content.
📺 There are two ways of approaching a conversation: broadcasting mode and scuba dive mode. In broadcasting mode, you’re thinking about what you’re going to say next while the other person is finishing up their point. Your intent is having something to say. In scuba dive mode, you’re plunging into the other person’s perspective and studying it like the oddest of coral. Your intent is to learn.
🪕 I recently acquired a banjo and I’m experimenting with it. I don’t use the word “learning” because I think we deny ourselves the pleasure of trying something new by setting unrealistic expectations. Learning is a big word. I’ll probably never “learn the banjo”. But there’s tremendous value in studying a few songs. Instead of the 10,000 hours you supposedly need to become an expert at one thing, I’d rather do 10,000 different experiments.
🏔️ Mountains are nature’s version of Stoic philosophy. Whether it rains, hails or thunders they don’t budge, run away or hide. Their peaks are white in the winter and green in the summer but underneath beats an eternal heart of granite.
Your turn.
Weekly Wisdom
🤔 Chesterton's fence: I learned about this from Kasey Klimes, a former Google designer and brilliant polymath. The idea is that before making changes to a system, we must understand the underlying rationale that led to its creation beyond what’s immediately obvious. One example would be to engage in the demolition of old housing in a neighborhood to replace it with modern buildings. First order thinking draws us to replace old with new but by doing so we fail to acknowledge the social function a particular type of architecture serves in bringing the community together.
🏃A brief history of the Exit sign: We’re all familiar with the little green person rushing through a door. The history of its conception by Japanese Graphic designer Yukio Ota reveals a core truth about signs that we encounter every day: they have to be designed to be understood by anyone no matter the language they speak. In a way, signs are a truly universal form of language.
🚲 Subtractive design: Studies have demonstrated that we are naturally inclined to improve a product by adding features to it instead of removing some. Think about bikes for kids. Only recently have we started building them by removing pedals. But historically, they’ve been designed with two wheels at the back.
Lateral Thought
A true revelation, it seems to me, will only emerge from stubborn concentration on a solitary problem.
I am not in league with inventors or adventurers, nor with travelers to exotic destinations. The surest -also the quickest- way to awake the sense of wonder in ourselves is to look intently, undeterred, at a single object. Suddenly, miraculously, it will reveal itself as something we have never seen before.
Cesare Pavese