Beer Mode and Coffee Mode - David Perell

Ed Sheeran and Neil Gaiman are in the top 0.000001% of their fields. They're among, say, 25 people in the world who repeatedly generate blockbusters.

If two world-class creators share the exact same creative process, I get curious. Also, while writing this, I found a video of John Mayer doing the same thing.

I call their approach the Creativity Fauce

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Here are some other techniques people use to access and maintain the zone:

• Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her—the thought that others will read th

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Two decades ago, the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi proposed the concept of “flow” to describe the internal state of energized focus that characterizes the mind at its most productive. It’s a lovely metaphor, precisely because it suggests the essential fluidity that good ideas so often need. Flow is not the singular intensity of focusing “lik

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I know that there are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative. Concrete example: let’s say you’re listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You’re in the appreciative mode. Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they’re consistent? You’re in the evaluative mode. Much of s... See more

Operator life: Quick tempo, constant follow-up, putting out fires, racing through the to-do list. Creative life: Long bouts of daydreaming, followed by short bursts of intense and inspired action.

So let’s start with ingredients. How do we cultivate the right ingredients for great idea fermenting?

III: Ingredients

There are two levels of thinking going on in our heads at any time. There’s the more active and conscious part of your brain that’s reading this article and which you think of as doing the “thinking.” Then a subconscious, processin... See more

To come up with new ideas, you have to have space to be messy, to procrastinate, and to let your mind wander and free-associate. But there needs to be a balance. You eventually need to channel it into something concrete, or you won’t produce anything.