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Been talking with two friends who are artists — and talented — but who have not had any success. I notice that they think about what they are doing slightly differently than me, and I’m not able to convince them to think like I do — but I suspect it could be useful. Maybe it can be of use to someone. So my friends think about what they want in a very pre-determined way ime. The musician among them, for instance, is on a label and puts out albums and does music videos etc — he does the full package of what “being a musician” looks like. It doesn’t work at all. And I say, “Ok, but what if you think more concretely about what you are trying to do? Like, what are the precise day to day activities that you want to fill your life with? If you think about your life as an object that you are designing — what are the constraints?” Ie. instead of “I want to be a musician and that means having a label and making albumbs etc” think “the thing I actually like to do is jam: I want to do that as much as possible. that is one contraint. another is that I need to pay my bills and I want to spend as little time as possible doing things that are frustrating or unethical etc. third I want to stay with my gf so whatever the solution is it has to be in this city…” that is: you list the constraint. or rather you surface the contraints: because there are tons and tons of hidden contraints and assumptions that you are operating under. like the contraint that you need to have a label. and need to make music videos. and full length albums, etc. are any of those contraints actually vital for the kind of day-to-day life you need or would you be ok treating those as variables? as in: yeah, I’ll sign with a label if it helps me spend more time jamming and less time doing things that frustrate me, otherwise I won’t. and then—having surfaced the contraints and removed those that are not vital. you iterate: you run thousands of experiments, you build skills, you follow the design process where it wants to go. maybe you end up writing music for video games, or you end up working part time as a programmer while staying in the woods where rent is cheap and you can jam without thinking about making an income from that. etc. most likely you end up with something that you could not predict at all. the key is thinking in terms of contraints: realizing how many you impose on yourself, and taking a hard look at them and saying I can do with out this and this and this. because if you do not loosen some contraints you’ll have such a hard time solving the key problems: they are hard enough. anyway, I can never convince anyone to think this way. but I think it is useful!

Been talking with two friends who are artists — and talented — but who have not had any success. I notice that they think about what they are doing slightly differently than me, and I’m not able to convince them to think like I do — but I suspect it could be useful. Maybe it can be of use to someone. So my friends think about what they want in a very pre-determined way ime. The musician among them, for instance, is on a label and puts out albums and does music videos etc — he does the full package of what “being a musician” looks like. It doesn’t work at all. And I say, “Ok, but what if you th