369. A Good Idea Is Not Good Enough

Whether you’re building a business or a cathedral, execution is everything. We ask artists, scientists, and inventors how they turned ideas into reality. And we find out why it’s so hard for a group to get things done — and what you can do about it. (Ep. 4 of the “How to Be Creative” series.)

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:43Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:25Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:05Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:32Speaker 01

  So I'm at Harvard undergrad, like I think it's like, you know, end of my sophomore year, and I'm taking this course called Idea Translation: Affecting Change Through Art and Science.

• 2:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Jessica O. Matthews, and this class was back in 2008.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  And I had heard from people that they gave you some money to do some cool stuff, and that unlike most universities, they wouldn't own the cool thing that you did. And I was like, OK, I like doing cool stuff. I like inventing. Let's see what happens.

• 2:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  But we should say you were not remotely, you were not an engineer or an engineer wannabe.

• 3:03Speaker 01

  I was, well, I was studying psychology and economics. So I grew up wanting to be an inventor. You know, my father is a businessman. My sister, who had been at Harvard for two years before me, she actually was studying film. But she told my dad, my Nigerian dad, that she was studying economics.

• 3:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  I don't blame her.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  So two years passes, and she graduates, and they hear, oh, Visual and Environmental Studies. And my dad has, almost has a heart attack in the graduation stadium. And so I'm sitting there just like, all right, Dad, all right, Dad, I'll add economics. So anyway, yeah, so taking this course, and I remember thinking back to when I was 17, when I was in Nigeria, and I was at my aunt's wedding. And as expected, we lost power. As expected, we brought in a diesel generator. And the fumes were so bad. And my cousins, who were in their 20s at the time, they were just like, don't worry, you'll get used to it. And that's what shook me. I was like, don't worry, I'll get used to it.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  And so I was like, OK, that's a problem for, you know, the people in my, like, my family. That's a problem for people in the world. You have 1.3 billion people around the world who still, to this day, they don't have reliable access to electricity. When the sun goes down, that's often the end of their day, and that's a travesty.

• 4:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  So Matthews, faced with a classroom assignment to invent something that would effect change through art and science, she thought about this problem and she thought about a creative way to address it.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  And I observed my cousins showing passion and showing excitement when they were playing soccer, right? So this is where the psychology comes in. And, you know, the same cousins that were saying, "Don't worry, get used to it," like, had all these highfalutin, delusional ideas about what they could do on the soccer pitch that they just couldn't do. They were not as good as Pele in any single way, but like, they would tell you they were. And it's like, this is how you need to be attacking life. You know, I want to invent something, not something that would solve the energy problem, but that would address it in a manner that would inspire people to be part of the movement towards solving it.

• 5:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  The invention she came up with was ingenious. A soccer ball that captures the kinetic energy that builds up as it's being kicked and turns it into enough electrical energy to power a reading light. She called her electric soccer ball "The Socket." It won some fans in very high places.

• 5:27Speaker 02

  Some of you saw The Socket, the soccer ball that we were kicking around that generates electricity as it's kicked. I don't want to get too technical, but I thought it was pretty cool.

• 5:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  After The Socket came a jump rope that used the same technology. Matthews finished her undergrad degree and got an MBA, also at Harvard, and she started a company based in Harlem called Uncharted Power. The soccer ball and the jump rope didn't turn out to be durable enough, but Matthews has raised $7 million in venture capital and is pushing her company to work on a larger scale: the electrical grid itself.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Our platform's called MOR. It stands for Motion-Based Off-Grid Renewable Energy. And it's a platform that basically leverages our innovations in energy generation, energy transmission, and energy storage to offer what we like to call "convenient energy."

• 6:21Stephen J. Dubner?

  One advantage of convenient energy, theoretically least, is that it is decentralized and therefore would not require the massive capital investments that power plants traditionally need. How well will Jessica Matthews's idea actually work? It's hard to say, and Matthews wouldn't get into the details of Uncharted Power's technology and implementation.

• 6:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  So why am I telling you this story? Because it's a story about the power of a good idea. And I think you'd agree that turning kinetic energy that's fun to generate into electricity is a good idea. But really, why I'm telling you this story is to point out that a good idea is worth nothing without great execution. That's where Jessica Matthews stands right now, and she knows it.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  I think ideas are great, but in a weird way, it's almost like they're meaningless. They don't actually make a difference in our lives. And so, like, I had to figure out execution, because how can I go to my cousins and be like, "Oh, I have this cool idea for an energy-generating soccer ball." And then, like, two weeks later, and they're like, "Hey, how's it going?" And I'm like, "Oh, I just have more ideas." They'd be like, "What? Shut up. Stop coming here telling us dumb stuff, Jessica." So I had to come back and be like, "Here's the prototype. What do you think?" Everyone's going to be motivated by different things, but I'm the kind of inventor that's looking to make whatever amount of time we have on this world better. And so, execution has always been part of it.

• 7:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So far, in this How to Be Creative series, we've looked at what sort of circumstances produce creative people and how schools affect creativity. We've looked at where creative people get their ideas. Today, we explore the handoff from idea to execution, and why making something and making it work can be so hard.

• 8:11Speaker 03

  You can have perfection on a piece of paper and say, "This is a beautifully designed piece of architecture," or "a fantastic recipe," or "a great script." And it's going to really go south when you try to execute it.

• 8:38Speaker 04

  From Stitcher and Dubner Productions, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 8:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  Walter Isaacson has written biographies of some of the most creative people in history: Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs.

• 9:07Speaker 05

  Who, in his first stint at Apple, was such a perfectionist that he holds up shipping the original Macintosh because he doesn't think the circuit board inside is pretty enough, even though nobody will ever see it. And after a while, he gets fired from Apple because he's such a perfectionist. And he would say, well, real artists sign their work, meaning they have to wait until they're perfect before they ship. When he comes back to Apple at the end of the 1990s, they give him a new model, which is, "Real artists ship."

• 9:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  But how do you ship your work? How do artists, and scientists, and inventors, and other creative people turn the sparks flying around in their heads into something they can share with the world?

• 9:56Speaker 06

  Well, one of the difficult things, of course, is moving projects forward. There's a big difference between the idea and the execution.

• 10:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's the pioneering astrophysicist Margaret Geller.

• 10:08Speaker 06

  And sometimes, you know, you start to do something, and nature just doesn't conform. And you wonder, why me? After the fact, it's fun, but it's not so much fun while you're doing it. It's often very slow. It takes a long time. A lot of it is drudgery. It's not as though you have an idea, and tomorrow you'll write a paper, and you submit it to the journal, and it's done. And I think it's the same with art, with writing.

• 10:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, there are exceptions to prove every rule. The writer Michael Lewis, for instance. Among his books are The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Undoing Project. Even when he writes about complicated topics, Lewis's writing is extraordinarily pleasurable and easy to read. So I once asked Lewis, it can't be so pleasurable and easy to write, can it?

• 11:02Speaker 07

  Yes, it is pleasurable and easy. I hate to ruin your punchline, but actually, what's hard for me is figuring out in the beginning what I want to say. I spend a lot of time gathering material and organizing the material before I sit down to write. I'd say three quarters of the time is that. When the actual writing starts, it's, for me, fun. It's just fun. I mean, it's fun and hard, but if it's hard, it's hard in a fun way. And people who have, like my wife, who has walked in on me while I'm writing, I write with headphones on that just plays on a loop the same playlist that I've built for whatever book I'm writing. And I cease to hear anything in the world outside what I'm doing. And apparently, I'm

• 11:47Speaker 07

  sitting there laughing the whole time. And so I think basically what I'm doing is laughing at my own jokes. But I wasn't even aware of that. But people, my kids and my wife, say that you're sitting at the desk laughing all the time.

• 11:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay, so let's set Michael Lewis aside. He's his own category, the untortured artist. Let's look at a project that was so difficult to execute that its creator did not finish it in his lifetime, and which is still being worked on today, nearly a century after his death. If you've ever been to Barcelona, you already know what I'm talking about. The Sagrada Familia Church, designed by Antoni Gaudí, among the world's best-known architects today, who during his lifetime was a troublemaker.

• 12:31Speaker 08

  He was someone who was very loath to follow the kind of textbook standard way.

• 12:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Geis van Hensbergen is a Dutch art historian who's written a biography of Gaudí. He is also, interestingly, a certified suckling pig specialist.

• 12:50Speaker 08

  Yes, I trained to write a cookery book, in fact, and using food as a way of understanding a different culture. So I went to train in Segovia, in the center of Spain, just north of Madrid, as a suckling pig chef.

• 13:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  All right, let's get back to Gaudí, the man behind the unfinished masterpiece in Barcelona.

• 13:11Speaker 08

  You know, he was someone who was prepared... Not to just go down the orthodox route of what his teachers were saying. And in fact, once somebody asked him, who influenced you most? And he said, well, I probably learnt more from watching my father making boilers than I ever learnt at architectural school.

• 13:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  He was born in 1852 and grew up in a rural area outside of Barcelona.

• 13:36Speaker 08

  As a child, he suffered badly from a youthful version of arthritis. And so as a kid, he couldn't always go to school. And his father, who was a boiler maker for making the stills for brandy distilling, would take him out to the workshop out in the country.

• 13:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  He was enthralled by the exotic look of buildings around the world.

• 13:59Speaker 08

  It was also for his generation, the first generation that could actually just look at photographs and see photographs of buildings all over the world. And he spent all his free time in the library, just going through magazines and looking at photographs of buildings.

• 14:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  He was also enthralled by nature.

• 14:15Speaker 08

  The little details of shells, the way the wind blow, the way that trees grow, the kind of magical kind of Fibonacci sequences that appear in sunflower heads. And all of these things, he was kind of instinctively, but very empirically, kind of noticing and would reappear in his buildings and his building techniques later on.

• 14:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gaudí studied architecture formally in Barcelona, but was unimpressed by the orthodoxy of his teachers. It bored him. When he started getting commissions for houses and apartment buildings and parks, he was relentlessly experimental. His traditional elements were exotic. His modern elements, phantasmagorical. Gaudí was also an oddball, a hermit, a celibate and something of a despot. He'd show up at a building site in the morning and order the contractors to demolish what they'd built the day before so that he could redesign it. Meanwhile, in the rural Catalonia where he'd grown up, there was a massive economic disruption caused by phylloxera,

• 15:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  a disease that ruined the grapevines that were the source of many farmers' income.

• 15:31Speaker 08

  Once the vines started being attacked and people lost their vines and they lost their livelihoods, came flooding into the cities. And it meant that there was a massive, massive social pressure from a predominantly illiterate working class, which would fill the factories and massive overcrowding. And the working classes felt that they were being abused. But particularly with the church, they felt that sometimes the church was misusing its so-called charity, looking after them, but actually, in a sense, controlling them.

• 16:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Catholic Church was looking to rehabilitate its relationship with these newly urban parishioners. So it decided to build a huge church in a working-class part of Barcelona. It would be dedicated to the Holy Family, the Sagrada Familia, because, after all, Joseph was a carpenter.

• 16:30Speaker 08

  The Holy Family could act as a model that the working man, their handed craft or whatever, should be something that is respected.

• 16:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gaudí himself was a very conservative Catholic. His feelings for the church and for Jesus ran deep and pure.

• 16:47Speaker 08

  Right at the heart of his belief system was this idea that Christ's suffering is something that we understand only through our own suffering and that his ultimate generosity, of course, was to die for us.

• 17:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  When Gaudí received the commission to build the Sagrada Familia, after the original architect resigned from the project, he was only in his early 30s.

• 17:10Speaker 08

  And I think Gaudí felt his duty as an architect, and certainly with the Sagrada Familia, was that a building should reflect the glory of God and that God was working through him.

• 17:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gaudí's concept for the church was massive, extraordinarily detailed, a mashup of every architectural style under the sun. But like nothing anyone had ever seen, it included lifelike sculptures of Bible stories, emphasis on the lifelike.

• 17:40Speaker 08

  So when on the Sagrada Familia you have the flight to Egypt, he wanted a donkey, it had to be life size. He sends one of his workmen over to look around for a donkey that might look as if it had walked 40 days through the desert. And he finds the ragged bone man's donkey. And he gets it, puts it in a harness, chloroforms the donkey and then puts it into plaster and makes moulds. He does it with chicken, with geese. One of the most dramatic moments is actually the slaughter of the innocents, where the little babies being cast down by this giant Roman centurion. Total kind of brutal scene. This baby would have his head smashed on the ground.

• 18:25Speaker 08

  And Gaudi actually took stillborn children, cast them and used those models for the sculptures that would then be on the face of his building.

• 18:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  The scale, both exterior and interior, was way larger than life, designed to inspire awe. The interior pillars resemble a forest of grand trees.

• 18:48Speaker 08

  Trees are actually some of the most efficient pieces of architecture ever grown, not built. And the way that they can put up with wind and the way that they know where they should stick out a new branch. And he creates this lapidary forest, this extraordinary forest of columns as you walk in. And this soaring space, which is so dramatic. And with these stained glass windows and this amazing light. I mean, even if you weren't religious, there is a very, very powerful kind of explosion of space.

• 19:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gaudi would work on the project for the rest of his life, eventually moving into the basement workshop.

• 19:31Speaker 08

  Later on in life, he became very ascetic. He, you know, could have made his own clothes. He looked more and more kind of like a tramp. He lived.

• 19:43Speaker 08

  The whole purpose of the Sagrada Familia, which was to create this new Christian temple on a scale which today is kind of only just, we're beginning to see what an extraordinary kind of fantasy and dream that Gaudi had created for this building.

• 20:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'm also curious because of what Gaudi said about creativity. As you write, "Creation works ceaselessly through man, but man does not create. He discovers. Those who seek out the laws of nature as support for their new work collaborate with the Creator. Those who copy are not collaborators. For this reason, originality consists in returning to the origin." So to me, that is a bit of a paradox. And I wonder if you can explain that for me as it relates to Gaudi, and especially, I guess, as it relates to the Sagrada Familia.

• 20:40Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, I often think back on Isaac Newton saying, "Look, I was just like a little boy walking along the beach, pick up a pebble, and I noticed one was shinier than the other." And there is a sense of humility about Gaudi's genius as well, and this idea of going back to the origin, because one of his signature discoveries, and something which became right at the core of his building technique, was the discovery of the power of the catenary arch. And the catenary arch is, take a chain, hold it between your fingers, and let it drop. It's gravity pulling it down, which of course, for Gaudi, becomes

• 21:22Speaker 08

  another kind of religious metaphor, because who is it that invents gravity? Well, God, of course. But what you get is this chain formation. If you flip it over, it forms this catenary arch, which is the most economical shape in architecture.

• 21:39Speaker 08

  And he uses that as a kind of leitmotif for the last twenty, thirty years of his creative life and works on a model which is four and a half metres high and all these little chains with little bags, shotgun pellets, representing the different stresses, et cetera, and almost like an analog computer, sitting there over ten years out in the countryside. People must have thought, who is this madman? And creating a system which is still used today by the architects who are working on the Sagrada Familia to try and finish it for 2026.

• 22:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  2026 will be the hundred year anniversary of Gaudí's death. He died at age seventy three after getting hit by a streetcar. As the story goes, his ragged clothes led passersby to think he was a tramp, not the city's most famous architect. In any case, a team of architects is continuing Gaudí's work on the Sagrada Familia. By necessity, they are amending his original plans. To some, this is a betrayal of Gaudí's original genius. Geis van Hensbergen is not one of those people. He thinks it's in line with what Gaudí himself would have done.

• 23:01Speaker 08

  Well, clearly, we can't go back to just what was built by Gaudí. Gaudí knew equally that future generations would have to work on it. And, you know, he talked about Chartres and other cathedrals, saying that, you know, God took four hundred years to finish Chartres. It took six hundred years to finish Barcelona Cathedral in the Gothic Quarter. And he said that God is very patient as a client. He doesn't want to be hurried.

• 23:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gaudí was constantly tinkering with his designs, sometimes changing them from day to day. Execution by tinkering. Turns out, this is a common thread among many creatives.

• 23:46Speaker 05

  Leonardo da Vinci worked on the Mona Lisa for more than 15 years.

• 23:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Walter Isaacson again.

• 23:52Speaker 05

  During that period, he was dissecting the human face, figuring out every nerve and muscle that touches the lips, figuring out how details of sight go right into the center of retina. But what you see out of the corner of your eye are shadows and colors. So he uses all of that knowledge, for example, to make the details on the Mona Lisa's smile go straight, but the shadows and colors go up. So the smile flickers on and off depending on how you're looking at it. He also has it so perfectly anatomically correct that it's the most amazing and memorable smile ever created. All of these things he does over the course of this very long period as he's living in

• 24:37Speaker 05

  Milan, and then in Rome, and then in Florence, and then taking it across the Alps with him when he goes to Paris. He adds layer after layer of tiny translucent brushstrokes until he can make what is probably the most perfect painting ever done.

• 24:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  The most perfect painting ever done? It's pretty hard to quantify. There are people, however, who spend a great deal of time trying to quantify different trends in painting over the centuries, different styles of execution, and their relative value.

• 25:10Speaker 09

  I am David Galinson. I'm a professor of economics at the University of Chicago.

• 25:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you would describe your research specialty as what?

• 25:20Speaker 09

  I study creativity, and really more specifically, the life cycles of human creativity. What I've tried to do is, is find the process. You know, what are the mechanisms behind the discoveries?

• 25:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Most great painters throughout history are considered innovators, at least on some dimension. But Galinson separates these innovators into two camps, what he calls experimentalists and conceptualists. Da Vinci and Gaudí would fit into the experimentalist category.

• 25:49Speaker 09

  These are empiricists. They're interested in perception, observation, generalization about the real world.

• 25:59Speaker 09

  They have very vague, but very ambitious, goals. And because they're vague, they're uncertain how to achieve them. So they work by trial and error. And these are the people who never reach their goal. They're never satisfied.

• 26:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Another example would be Paul Cezanne.

• 26:14Speaker 09

  Very near the end of his life, he wrote to a younger artist. He said, "The progress needed is endless." And that's experimental creativity. You never can reach the goal.

• 26:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Cezanne wanted to fuse the realism of the old master paintings he loved with the immediacy of a new style, Impressionism.

• 26:32Speaker 09

  Impressionism was, as the name implies, it was an ephemeral, momentary art. So Cezanne was frustrated with Impressionism, with the superficiality. There's no depth in Impressionist paintings. These are all just on the surface. He set out to combine the bright colors of Impressionism with the solidity of the old masters. So Cezanne set out to do something that was essentially impossible. But he spent then the next 40 years trying to do it.

• 27:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  For instance, in his later years, he kept painting the view of a mountain near his home, Mont Saint Victoire.

• 27:13Speaker 09

  If you just take all the textbooks of art history that you can find, there's no single painting by Cezanne that appears more than a few times. But he painted Mont Saint Victoire about 50 times over a period of about 30 years. If those were all a single painting, all of those illustrations were of a single painting, that would be the single most reproduced painting in the history of modern art. Now, they're all different. He's never doing the same thing. He's always changing. But he's changing so gradually that a lot of people don't perceive it at the time.

• 27:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  So the experimentalist, as Galenzen sees it, innovates by tweaking and tinkering, by methodically moving the needle an inch at a time. Meanwhile, the conceptualists.

• 27:55Speaker 09

  As the name implies, these are people who have new ideas. These are theorists.

• 27:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gallinson's favorite example? Pablo Picasso. Picasso's process of creation, as described by David Gallinson.

• 28:08Speaker 09

  Basically, the process is you come to a new discipline. You learn the rules and you say, I don't like some very basic rule and I get rid of it.

• 28:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Picasso's rule-breaking masterpiece? Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

• 28:21Speaker 09

  Now, that's a painting that Pablo Picasso made when he was 26 years old. And it wasn't just sort of casually done. When Picasso was about 25, you know, he's a young, sort of struggling painter in Paris. And the king of the hill was about 10 years older, Henri Matisse. Matisse had made a large figure painting called The Joy of Life. They made a tremendous splash at the annual salon. And Picasso was very jealous. So here's this young 25-year-old who starts making preparatory drawings. In total, he makes between 400 and 500 preparatory drawings for this, the largest painting he's ever attempted by far.

• 29:02Speaker 09

  That's the most preparatory works that have ever been made in Western history for a single painting, as far as we know. Here's a 25-year-old who's not really thriving economically, but he takes essentially a full year to prepare to make this one painting. So he's deliberately creating a masterpiece. That painting is in 95% of all textbooks of art that cover the early 20th century. No other painting is in more than half.

• 29:28Stephen J. Dubner?

  Now, let me ask you this. The way you just described that process, however, doesn't sound so different from the way you described the process of the experimental innovators, over and over, repeating, repeating.

• 29:40Speaker 09

  The difference is the following. If you X-ray a saison.

• 29:45Speaker 09

  You'll find there's nothing underneath the paint. He painted what the artist say directly. He just began using a brush on canvas. He made no preparatory drawings for his paintings, ever. The whole point, actually, was to be spontaneous. That was the point of Impressionism. Whereas if you x-ray the De Moiselle, you'll find very precise underdrawing. And it's not an accident. I mean, if you go to the Picasso Museum, where they have these dozens and dozens of sketchbooks, you'll find that everything in that painting was planned extremely carefully. So that by the time he began painting the painting, he knew what it was going to look like. See, this was the first thing I discovered about the difference between experimental

• 30:27Speaker 09

  and conceptual artists, that it's not just that they paint differently, but they want to paint differently. The conceptual artist wants to know before he starts, before he picks up a brush, he wants to know exactly what the painting's going to look like. Whereas the experimental painter goes out of his way to avoid that. They want to make discoveries in the process of painting. So it comes to this fundamental question. Do you make the discovery before you start working or while you're working? And in discipline after discipline, that is going to be the key question separating the two types of innovator.

• 31:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  "Experimental innovators," Gallenzen has written, "work by trial and error and arrive at their major contributions gradually, late in life. In contrast, conceptual innovators make sudden breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, usually at an early age." Picasso invented cubism in his 20s. Bob Dylan wrote "Like a Rolling Stone" when he was 24.

• 31:25Speaker 09

  You can get an idea at any age, but the most radical ideas come not necessarily when you're young chronologically, although you tend to be, but when you're new to a discipline.

• 31:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  "Experimental innovators," meanwhile, build up to their masterpieces. Virginia Woolf was 44 when she wrote "To the Lighthouse." Cezanne was still painting Mont Saint Victoire when he died at 67. The novelist Jennifer Egan is now in her mid-50s. Oh, my gosh. By the time Egan won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book "A Visit from the Goon Squad," she'd been writing for a couple decades. She'd only completed three novels during that time, and the one that followed, Manhattan Beach, took another seven years. One reason it takes so long? Her process, the way she executes the idea.

• 32:16Speaker 10

  Once I write that first draft, which in the case of Manhattan Beach was 1,400 pages, and type it up, I do many, many, many revisions, usually by hand on hard copies. But we're talking ultimately 40 to 50 drafts per chapter. So there's a lot of fixing and problem solving. And in certain ways, that's where a lot of the writing happens. It's the big moves that I'm trying to get a hold of in that first draft. And then, once I have those, then I can sort of work with it and try to bring it all up many, many notches to be something that's actually readable and entertaining. Like, my first drafts are full of cliches. I loathe cliches. It's not that you can't write them in the first place. They have to be replaced.

• 33:00Speaker 10

  So ultimately, I have weighed every word to use a cliche.

• 33:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay. So if your style of execution is to produce draft after draft after draft, or sketch after sketch, or prototype after prototype, how do you judge what's working and what's not? Every domain is different, of course. Writing a novel is different from building a better means to capture kinetic energy. But in every case, how do you measure the success of your execution? When Jennifer Egan was writing her first novel, The Invisible Circus, she did not have a reliable way to do that.

• 33:41Speaker 10

  I wrote in a vacuum. And that was just wildly unsuccessful. I spent two years writing horrible, just dreadful. And this isn't even being overhearted. So I'm never going to make that mistake again.

• 33:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ever since then, Egan has relied on a writers' group, even today, after all the success and all the awards.

• 34:02Speaker 10

  It includes a couple of the people I've been showing work to since 1989. We have an essayist, a playwright, a poet, and then a couple of fiction writers.

• 34:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  What the writers' group provides Egan is something that every creator needs constantly, whether you're working in the arts, science, and business, whatever: feedback.

• 34:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  Coming up after the break.

• 34:27Speaker 10

  I think the biggest danger of being successful creatively is that people don't tell you what they really think anymore. I mean, if that happens to me, I am lost.

• 34:39Stephen J. Dubner?

  And a creative endeavor where everyone is forced to respond to feedback all the time, even when it is terrible advice.

• 34:47Speaker 03

  Kids started wiggling in their seats and moms started running out for a bathroom break. So it got cut from the movie.

• 34:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's coming up right after this. And if you want to hear all the episodes from this series, you can find them on Freakonomics.com, How to Be Creative series. Also, our entire archive is on the Stitcher app and Apple Podcasts works great, too. Talk to you in a minute.

• 35:16Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 36:00Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 36:21Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 36:53Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 37:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's not that great ideas are easy, but without good execution, an idea doesn't mean much. A key component to execution, a key component to getting better at anything, is feedback. The writer Jennifer Egan was telling us that she still relies on a writer's group to workshop her current novel in progress.

• 37:56Speaker 10

  Even with Manhattan Beach.

• 37:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's her latest book, an historical novel, published in 2017.

• 38:01Speaker 10

  I had an idea about a sort of present day narrator who would be kind of winking at the reader because we all know that it's not 1934 anymore. That was so dead on arrival.

• 38:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  And when you get that kind of feedback and you decide ultimately that it's fruitful and that it's correct, what does that feel like?

• 38:22Speaker 10

  It feels like a relief because usually I can feel when something is not working. Sometimes things aren't working because I just haven't spent enough time making them better.

• 38:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  Did you have to beat up your writing group a little bit after you started winning these awards and say, "Listen, I still need you to come at me as hard as you did"?

• 38:41Speaker 10

  No, they didn't. No. I would recommend that anyone do this. People are afraid of hearing criticism. And so I think often when they say, "What did you think of something?" You know that they don't really want to know if you have any thought that isn't positive. And I so understand that. I mean, it's awful to hear that something you think is working isn't. And I've sat there and many times thought, I'm done. I'm never coming back here. It's been great. You guys suck. You don't get it. Other people tell me I'm great. But, you know, even by the end of the of the meeting, I'm already, I'm, I can feel my brain kind of prickling around whatever it is, and I'm already starting to think of solutions.

• 39:25Speaker 10

  So it hurts, but it's not going to kill you. I feel like criticism that's wrong-headed, okay, it's just, I don't agree with it. Fine, keep going. Like, there's a fear that somehow criticism can break you. I don't believe it.

• 39:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you have any advice for people who have that fear, which I would guess is probably 95% of humanity?

• 39:46Speaker 10

  I would say, think very carefully about which is worse. Finding out now that this work has problems, or finding out after everyone's told you it's perfect and you've published it. You're going to find out.

• 40:04Speaker 11

  I think the best thing we could do is to find one honest person who you know will give you honest feedback.

• 40:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Theresa Amobule is a psychologist who studies creativity.

• 40:18Speaker 11

  Ideally, you'll have an artist friend, or maybe it's a teacher, who knows you reasonably well, whom you trust, to whom you can say, I really want some feedback on this, but I need you to not dampen my spark here, if you would. I think that's much better than trying to get feedback from a large number of individuals. One or two people who will be honest with you, but who can give you the feedback. In a way that you'll be able to use it and not be destroyed by it. We can manage our feedback givers.

• 40:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what if you aren't in a position to manage your feedback givers? What if your feedback givers are your employer, or your funder, or your customer?

• 41:04Speaker 03

  We test screen everything we do. We bring in a living room full of people and show them the movie and then sit around afterwards and have a really painful discussion about things they didn't understand, or story points that they didn't like, or characters they didn't like.

• 41:17Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's Don Hawn.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  And I'm a filmmaker, and I've made most of my career producing animation for Disney, but now do a lot of documentary work.

• 41:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Among the films he has worked on, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Beauty and the Beast, both the animated and live versions.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  And The Lion King, a little story about a lion cub that gets framed for murder.

• 41:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hollywood calculus, as we all know, can be strange. A team of filmmakers can work on something for a couple of years and then have it quashed by a roomful of little kids who get squirmy at a test screening.

• 41:51Speaker 03

  And then you have to go away and decide whether they're right or not. And you can also dismiss it to your peril or dismiss it to your advantage. You know? Gosh, and there's endless stories about that. In Pocahontas, the animated movie, there was a love song that Mel Gibson, as John Smith, sang to Pocahontas. And he was tied up in a tent and Pocahontas came in and they sang this beautiful love song, "Under the Moon." You know, it's like a lovely song, but the audience just checked out and started, you know, kids started wiggling in their seats and moms started running out for a bathroom break. So it got cut from the movie. But conversely, there's a, there's a song in Little Mermaid called "Part of Your World", and it's, it's Ariel's I Want song.

• 42:34Speaker 12

  Up where they walk, up where they run, up where they stay all day in the sun, wandering free. Wish I could be part of that world.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  And that was a real kind of wiggler song where in previews, even though it happens early in the movie, and even though it's crucial to Ariel's character, our executive at the studio said, you know, kids are wiggling during this, we have to cut it out. It's not working. And he was wrong. The directors and the animators came back and said, you know, kids may wiggle during it, but it's the kind of song you need in these movies. It's a statement of what she wants. It's a statement of her goals and passions and without it, it's ambiguous what she wants. So it stayed in the movie and became, you know, one of the most favorite songs in the movie.

• 43:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  You can see why producers and studios might be cautious. A big film is a huge investment. The desire for feedback has deep roots in Hollywood, including Walt Disney himself.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Walt Disney used to famously walk around the studio and he would tell the story of, let's say Pinocchio, to a couple of guys in the coffee lounge. And then he'd get their reaction and then he'd go down the road to a couple of secretaries and tell them the story. And so he was workshopping again and again and again, this story and every time refining it in his mind a little bit more until it became very close to what was in the film.

• 44:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  A documentary film, meanwhile, which is what Don Han is mostly making these days.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Documentaries are a little different because you're telling an existing story, but you have to go where the story takes you. And when you start out, you may not know all the ins and outs of the plot. So it's a little like putting a jigsaw puzzle together without the picture on the box. You're kind of feeling your way through the dark. And a lot of times there's discoveries halfway through the making of the movie. Like we did a movie for Disney Nature called Chimpanzee about a mother and her little baby chimp. And halfway through the shooting, the mother went out one night and was killed by a panther. So you just go, okay, I guess we're done. But over the ensuing weeks, the alpha male in that tribe of chimpanzees adopted that little baby, otherwise it would have died. And that's something that just never happens.

• 44:48Speaker 03

  Jane Goodall even said she didn't ever see that in the wild. So sometimes you have to just open up enough to go, kind of ride the horse in the direction that it's going to have the movie tell you what it wants.

• 45:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Another documentary that comes to mind is the 2007 film, The King of Kong, directed by Seth Gordon.

• 45:07Speaker 13

  It was definitely a let's see what happens mission in the sense that we had no idea what would transpire.

• 45:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  Gordon's made a lot of big movies and TV shows since then. He also worked on a documentary version of Freakonomics. That's how I got to know him. The King of Kong is a great story about a couple of guys competing for the world record score in the arcade game Donkey Kong. There's the self-important defender, Billy Mitchell.

• 45:31Speaker 14

  Since I debuted on the scene, there hasn't been anybody who's played even close.

• 45:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  And the underdog challenger, Steve Leeby.

• 45:38Speaker 13

  I was just doing it because I thought it'd be a neat achievement. I didn't think it would ever blow up to be a big story. I had been going to the arcade featured in that film in New Hampshire. It's called Fun Spot since I was a kid. And I was aware that there was a culture of gamers for whom that was where the battles would be waged and the official scores would be set because they have all the legitimate old machines. And I knew of Billy Mitchell, but I didn't know if he was going to commit to be filmed by us, you know? So that was a big question. And then the other was, how would he and Steve be on camera?

• 46:17Speaker 13

  And because those were very much unknowns, we were simultaneously chasing other rivalries in the video game world. And we thought it was going to be a film that was about portraits of these rivalries. But because Billy is such an extraordinary person and a masterful storyteller himself.

• 46:38Speaker 15

  Competitive gaming?

• 46:40Speaker 13

  He made the movie become about him.

• 46:43Speaker 15

  When you want to attach your name to a world record, when you want your name written into history, you have to pay the price.

• 46:50Speaker 13

  Because of the situations that he created and the actions that he took, all the other storylines paled in comparison.

• 46:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  It makes sense that you can't foretell how a documentary will unfold, but what about scripted entertainment? How locked in are you there and how flexible do you need to be?

• 47:08Speaker 03

  So you start out with a script and make it as good as you can.

• 47:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  Don Han again.

• 47:12Speaker 03

  And then as you actually get into the production, you allow yourself to improvise and make it better. So animation is a real iterative process. You can visit and revisit and revisit. And sometimes it takes five or six or seven times of putting the movie up on reels to look at it. And then have it fall apart and rebuild it and tear it down and rebuild it before it starts to be anything. And the reason is, the leap from the written word to a visual storytelling medium is huge. It's like the leap from a recipe on a page to a beautifully prepared dinner that you're actually ingesting. You know, so on a page, how do you describe a perfectly cooked steak with just the right seasoning? You try your best, but once you get that in the frying pan and start to cook that steak, it's a whole nother thing.

• 47:57Speaker 03

  But I think that's why some people shy away from the making part, because you can have perfection on a piece of paper and say, this is a beautifully designed piece of architecture, or a fantastic recipe, or a great script. And it's gonna really go south when you try to execute it, no matter what it is. And it's just experience and craft that allows you to maintain some sort of order and work that written idea into something that's actually visual up on the screen.

• 48:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  Again, as we've been hearing from all sorts of creatives, the execution of an idea requires determination, craft, experience, maybe a little luck. It's almost enough to persuade you, at least in some cases, that if there were a competition between idea and execution, the idea isn't even such a formidable competitor.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  There's an argument to say, a film like E.T. or Star Wars or Roger Rabbit was a great idea out of the box, and anybody could have made that movie. But I kind of subscribe to the other approach, which is, you can take a mediocre idea and put great people on it and come up with a great movie. Take the Pixar movie Ratatouille.

• 49:08Speaker 16

  Okay, so let's think this out.

• 49:10Speaker 03

  It's the worst idea for a movie ever.

• 49:12Speaker 16

  You know how to cook, and I know how to appear human. We just need to work out a system.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  It's like, let's put rats in a kitchen and we'll make an animated film about it.

• 49:22Speaker 16

  Oh, would you listen to me? I'm insane, I'm insane, I'm insane!

• 49:25Speaker 03

  It's a horrible idea. And there's plenty of really good ideas, you know, we've all seen movies that had tremendous promise and the buzz was great about them, and then you go see them in the theater and they're awful.

• 49:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  Filmmaking is by its nature a hugely collaborative project. Dozens, maybe hundreds of people, all with specific skills and tasks. It is a creative team. That is a common construct these days in many realms.

• 49:53Speaker 05

  We sometimes think that there's some guy or gal who goes into a garage or garret, and they have a lightbulb moment, and that's how innovation happens.

• 50:00Stephen J. Dubner?

  Walter Isaacson again.

• 50:02Speaker 05

  But that's not the way it is. Great scientific research these days is going to be done in large collaborative units. When you look at how people are going to do gene editing or CRISPR technology, or for that matter, figure out background gravitational waves, these are the type of papers that are going to have dozens of names on them, or hundreds of names on them. And it's not going to be like Newton sitting under an apple tree, or Galileo peering into a telescope, because this ability to make great mental leaps is now augmented and amplified

• 50:45Speaker 05

  by our ability to work together collaboratively.

• 50:48Speaker 11

  Most work that's done in organizations now is done on a project basis by teams. That has advantages, because you're combining the efforts of many people, you're combining the viewpoints of many people, but, oh, it's hard.

• 51:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Theresa Amobule again. She has studied creativity in corporate settings by having people keep daily work diaries.

• 51:13Speaker 11

  It's really hard to work effectively in a team. It's hard to manage a team effectively, and there are a number of things that can help. One is to make sure that you have a nice diversity of skills in the team, where people are not completely overlapping in what they know, because that redundancy is not really helpful. Where people do have different perspectives and different knowledge base, to some extent, that they can bring to the problem. It's also helpful to have different cognitive styles, so doing things better within a paradigm or differently outside paradigms. You're likely to make a lot of progress in a project. If you have both kinds of cognitive style on a team,

• 51:58Speaker 11

  but only if you have people who can effectively translate between the different styles. They have to be able to talk to each other and very often you'll find conflict arising. You know, "That is crazy. How could you possibly think that that would work?" And on the other hand, "What are you doing? You're stuck in the status quo. You're not doing anything at all exciting. You're boring." And we actually, in our research, saw a team that had to just call halt to its project because we had these very different cognitive styles and there was no one who could mediate between them. And that could be someone else on the team. It could be a manager. But you have to watch out for that.

• 52:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  There's one more thing a successful, creative team needs.

• 52:47Speaker 11

  You need a high level of trust. You need people to be willing to give each other a little slack, to give each other the benefit of the doubt. Under those circumstances, if you've got that diversity of skills and styles, you can do great things on a team.

• 53:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some creative endeavors tend to be solitary, even if you routinely submit your work for feedback. And some creative people just prefer to work on their own. So how do those artists ship? How do they execute ideas without a team, without the boss or studio or publisher watching over them?

• 53:25Speaker 17

  There are some people who, they're only creative in the morning. You know, they'll do all their, get up early, they'll write so much, and then that's it for the rest of the day.

• 53:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Dean Simonton is a psychologist who, for years, has studied the productivity habits of creative giants.

• 53:42Speaker 17

  There's others that can only work late at night after everybody's gone to bed. There's others that make their own time. They have a queue. Like who was it? I think it was Schiller, who had to have the smell of rotten apples. And so he'd pull, when he felt like being creative, he'd pull out a rotten apple. And that would cue him to be creative.

• 54:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  What about you when you're working?

• 54:09Speaker 17

  I'm generally a morning person.

• 54:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  And do you need to cue or trick yourself in any way? Or do you sit down and you put away the distractions and get to work?

• 54:19Speaker 17

  I, first of all, I pick the morning because it's, there's the fewest distractions. And, and the smell of black coffee really helps as well.

• 54:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  Okay.

• 54:30Speaker 17

  Pretty, pretty ordinary.

• 54:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think if you smelled it and didn't actually consume the caffeine, it would have the same effect?

• 54:36Speaker 17

  Oh, I have to have it. I have, I need it.

• 54:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  Oh, so it's not just the smell. It's the smell is the cue to the physiological reaction.

• 54:44Speaker 17

  Ah, no, I need the caffeine.

• 54:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 17

  In my system. But, but then usually by a few hours, I'm kind of pooped out. Sometimes I can get rejuvenated before I go to bed. But then it's usually a glass of wine that does it. So go figure.

• 55:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  So, but let's say the pattern that you just described happens to be the one that I subscribe to. I'm a morning person. I get up early. I like those hours, quiet, alone, et cetera, et cetera. So if you're that person, and let's say you have four or five hours of really hardcore productivity and creativity, and then you have the rest of the day, and let's say you're lucky enough to have a life like an academic, like you do, or a writer like I do, and you can actually choose what to do. No one's telling you what to do. What do you do there with your now kind of diminished capacity for creativity or productivity?

• 55:36Speaker 17

  Well, fortunately, guess what? You know, this is the case. There's so much else that's involved with being creative. Like when the proofs arrive, you know, I can't do proofreading in the morning and I don't want to waste my creativity doing proofreading in the morning. You know, there's things on your reading list that you have to catch up on. And particularly when you're doing what I'm doing, you know, scientific research, you have to find out what other people are doing. I review a lot of submitted manuscripts and grant proposals.

• 56:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you don't want to waste your best brain cells on all that stuff?

• 56:10Speaker 17

  Oh, no. Don't, I mean, don't tell them that I'm using my, I'm only working at half mast, you know?

• 56:18Stephen J. Dubner?

  I think you just did, but that's okay.

• 56:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  Getting up early and drinking coffee, or staying up late and drinking wine, working alone or with collaborators, plainly, there is no single route for getting good work done. Everyone has their own strategies for executing ideas.

• 56:39Speaker 17

  Too many people want a one-size-fits-all. What do I need to do to be creative? And I'm afraid there's no one-size-fits-all. There's a few things that everybody has to adhere to. You have to know what you're doing, and you have to be willing to fail. You have to be committed to achieving in that domain. You have to be reasonably bright, and so forth. But beyond that, some people have red socks, and some people have purple socks.

• 57:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  That willingness to fail that Simon had mentioned is at the heart of every creative endeavor. We've all heard all the mantras: fail fast, fail well, et cetera, et cetera. But how do you actually do that? We'll find out next time on Freakonomics Radio. I begin and end each day with a litany of things that I consider failures and shortcomings. And what if the failure is you?

• 57:44Speaker 10

  I was really an abusive boss. I was a boss who was telling her employee, namely me, that I was worthless. And it's really hard to work in those conditions.

• 57:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  That's next time on Freakonomics Radio. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Fraschka, with help from Stephanie Tam and Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Kreglo, Greg Rippon, and Zach Lipinski. Our theme song is "Mr. Fortune" by The Hitchhikers. The rest of our music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The entire archive is available on the Stitcher app, or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes. If you'd like to hear the entire archive without ads, plus lots of bonus For this episode, go to StitcherPremium.com/Freakonomics. We are also on Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn.

• 58:41Stephen J. Dubner?

  You can reach us by email at [email protected]. You can also hear us on many NPR stations. Check your local station for details. As always, thank you for listening.

• 59:02Speaker 04

  Stitcher.

• 59:08Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 59:41Stephen J. Dubner?

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