Shotgun That Imagination Juice
Thinking about using more of my imagination, more of yours, and some examples of how to get there.
The Teardown
Thursday :: October 10th, 2024 :: Approx. 9 min read
👋 Hi, this is Chris with another issue of The Teardown. In every issue, I cover how we interact with technology that enables our day-to-day lives.
If you’d like to get emails like this in your inbox every week, subscribe below.
And, if you enjoy today’s thinking, let me know by tapping the Like (❤️) icon or forwarding the email to someone else.
They Just Get Along
Jason Bateman
Who is Jason Bateman? He’s a TV and movie heartthrob, first appearing on screen as an early 80s child actor. He is the leader of the Bluth Company, a bright focused star in a quirky distracted family. He depicts an exacting manipulative drug money intermediary in Ozark. He spits the driest humor and commentary on the Smartless podcast.
Not familiar with Smartless? You should be. Smartless is Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett speaking with each other - often teasing — and interviewing celebrities, friends, comedians, in an unstructured format. The podcast’s haphazard formula seems to work:
The three hosts talk, joke, and pick each other apart based camaraderie developed over years of friendship and common work.
One of three hosts determines the interview guest and surprises the other two as they record the show. The two in the dark can’t prepare. They don’t prepare, as far as I watched in the HBO series about the podcast. They don’t seem to practice what they’ll do.
And, if ratings mean anything, the guys are crushing it.
I watched HBO’s Smartless On The Road during two of the last three evenings. The documentary provides a behind-the-scenes and during-show view into the lives of the hosts and their podcast process.
But I wrote a moment ago that the hosts don’t practice before the show. You don’t see rehearsing when watching them on HBO (yes, it’s edited, I know). The rapid speed and evolution of their banter suggests that any such practice would cause the show to flop like a soggy piece of bread. The show develops
Instead, their friendship is the practice. They spend lots of time talking to each other, and in doing so, inadvertently develop and hone the material that spills from their mouths during Smartless.
The podcast is also practice. Every episode builds on a growing base of material that influences future episodes. Every phrase and moment of banter is exercise.
Some of my funniest or most engaging friends talk a lot. They are your worst nightmare if you’re feeling less talkative but somehow stuck on an elevator with them. They always ask you questions when you’re sneezing or when your mouth is full. Jokes slosh around in their bellies, begging to escape. Some are good, some bad, many unfriendly to any desire or understanding of political correctness.
Those friends and I sometimes run headfirst into dull moments. No one has anything useful to say in response to anyone else. The most talkative of the bunch usually siphon gas from one tank to their vocal tank to restart conversation.
Something pops into their head. It bursts out, whatever it is. It might be funny, it might not, but whatever it is reestablishes the prior conversation’s momentum.
Is that explode-in-head moment something you can practice?
Resisting The Collapsing Room
Months ago, I flicked through articles and posts and somehow landed on a three-part written series by Wall Street Journal columnist Jason Zweig. In the first, On Writing Better: Getting Started, Zweig tackled a variety of topics geared around starting writing. Anything.
Imagine that you’re sitting down (or standing at your Uplift) to write something. How do you pick a topic? What’s your first word? How do you navigate the details of that topic? How do you write well while not beating yourself to death with the wheelchair of perfection?
Zweig began the Getting Unstuck section with a familiar admission:
With soft smugness, I used to tell people, “I never get writer’s block,” until one day I looked at all the writing I had done for the exclusive purpose of not doing the writing I was supposed to be doing. Only then did I realize how much and how badly I had been lying to myself. The truth is I get writer’s block every time I write; I’ve always ended up defeating it (so far, anyway), but that doesn’t entitle me to pretend I’ve never had it. I’ve even written a little of this post in snatches of time stolen from working on my column for The Wall Street Journal!
And:
Writer’s block doesn’t mean you can’t write anything; it just means you can’t write the one thing you’ve been working on. If you switch to something easier, you will probably write better; that should help you get unstuck, enabling you to turn back to the harder writing with more freedom and openness.
In that stressful moment when just can’t type, write, or angrily scratch a letter on a surface, you might try to write about something else. Anything. Your nose hairs (or you pluck them). Your kids. The inability of your neighbor to create neat leaf piles during Northeast fall foliage and leaf blower season. Everything is on the table.
But that tactic doesn’t guarantee that you’ll succeed in writing more of what you want to write. Zweig continued:
If that doesn’t work, and you find yourself staring at a skim-milk-colored empty screen wondering how you will ever gather the words to say what’s on your mind, try a couple of tricks.
First, ask yourself: What is the single most basic fact about my topic? By “basic,” I mean the simplest possible observation or evidence you can think of. It might be the name of someone you want to mention in what you write; which day of the week something happened; where you were when you learned the lesson you don’t yet have the words to describe; a saying you love; a color or sound or smell or taste or touch that reminds you of what you wish you could tell us about. Now look at that blank screen, that empty Word file or Google doc, or that virginal piece of paper, and type or write whatever that first simplest possible thing is
I mulled over what I wanted to send to you this week. Your inboxes are sacred places. You carefully curate what emails live where with filters, colors, and folders, or just heap it all on top and hop for the best. I try to send you posts that I think you’ll read or at least shuffle to the top of your heap.
As you might expect, a tech-focused post sits in my drafts folder, begging for a conclusion and some extra humor. But I couldn’t find the gear to push forward. I wrote more, but not enough to sit back and say, ah yes, this flawless piece will produce a 100% email open rate.
So, I did what I often do when my progress stalls: I went to the gym to work out.
I often listen to podcasts while at the gym, thinking that my workout is an adequately long time block to get through a 45-minute episode without many interruptions.
The podcast episode at the top of the queue?The Imagination Muscle - Where Good Ideas Come From (And How To Have More Of Them) from the Art of Manliness (AOM) series.
How did I stumble into this podcast? I don’t remember. I’m feeling acceptably manly. Last I checked, I’m still male too. Phew.
Host Brett McKay interviewed Albert Read, who was the managing editor of Conde Nast Britain and recently authored a book titled the same as the episode. Read discussed the concept of the book with McKay during episode’s opening minutes:
…What we don’t do, nearly enough in my opinion, is focus on our imaginative health, on this idea that the imagination is something that is a force within us, that can be used or not used, or can be ignored, or it can be celebrated, and it can be developed, and it can be something that grows with you.
And this idea really stayed with me for 20 years before I wrote the book. But I wanted readers to consider the possibility that imagination is akin to a muscle. It’s something that you can develop. It can make you more alive. It can make you better at your job.
And so this really was the underlying message that I wrote in the book.
Ooo, imaginative health. Read said (just before the above quote) that we spend plenty of time on our physical and mental health. But not enough or at all on our imaginative health.
He’s right, as far as the phrase concerns me. I assume that the same is true for some of you.
You’re crushing work, lifting weights, running, cooking, dealing with kids, dealing with a spouse, or any number of other activities. But how often do you let your mind wander. Or, said another way, how often do you let yourself chase imaginative thinking to see where it leads rather than think that you need to hunker down and get shit done.
Think about this simple question: do you have hobbies? And another: do you explore your hobbies?
Active Pivot Toward Imagination
The exercise Read highlighted sounded a lot like, well, the Smartless podcast, or the writing prompt from Jason Zweig I highlighted above.
The Smartless crew mostly imagines (and guesses) who they will be talking with during an episode, and exercises their imagination during that episode’s spontaneous conversation.
Zweig’s writing prompt rewires the creative process altogether, asking you to imagine what you want a reader to know about what you’re writing.
I tried his writing prompt. Derailed from my original post, I conceived this word blob at the gym, arrived back at my desk, and typed: Jason Bateman.
The entire post evolved from that one name.
In another moment, Albert Read suggested slowing your mind with a pen (or pencil) and paper. His point? You ingest and synthesize information in a more deliberate and perhaps imaginative way when you have time to poke at that information. Take a hike, NotebookLM.
What do lots of people do instead? Rely on technology. You clip articles into read later tools like Pocket. You bookmark within your account at the major news outlets you choose. Maybe you use an elaborate and over-engineered automation to retain every bit of information you gaze at in a day.
I often do what I just described. I archive a sprawl of favorites, bookmarks, and likes everywhere. Hacker News. NYTimes. WSJ. Pocket. Strewn across thousands of text messages over the years. Hastily pasted in Apple Notes, Google (anything), Notion, and just about every imaginable information gathering tool.
The process is robotic and lifeless. I think of these disparate banks as fuel for The Teardown, but in reality, they aren’t. It might be that 1 or 2 out of 100 bookmarks actually drive home a post.
So, instead, I’m tilting back towards my imagination. Not just for The Teardown, but as a general guiding principle.
But, you first: send me the first word that pops into your head when you think about the topic you most like to read. Leave it in a comment below. Or, send me an email or message.
“Esoterica” was my word! I’m particularly interested in analog knowledge - Google didn’t scan it, and no one bothered to get it out of a 1940s trade publication on Panama hats and onto the internet. There’s a lot of stuff like that and we stand to lose it if we let algorithms drive what we can know. I think analog information will have increasing importance and the web suffers from link erosion and AI pollution/vandalism.
Thank you for this look at your process. I think “efficiency” is the value we most need to get away from when it comes to digital decluttering. All these apps and technology solutions allow us to do “more” - but more of what? I tend to also bookmark a lot of things, but when I’m reading on a particular topic I’ll paste links I want to reference into my Substack draft post itself (so if or when I return to a draft I can sort of see what I had wanted to put in that idea folder).