Quarters, pennies, dimes & nickels

Committing to the process of creating is a hundred times more important than what you actually create.

Results come and go. Success and failure are relative. It’s the process that matters most.

Fall in love with that, get good at that, and you win. Because nobody can take that experience away from you. You’re not hanging your heart on the narrow pegs of an outdated scoreboard from somebody else’s game.

Tweedy’s inspiring and quirky book about songwriting explains how each act of creativity is an act of defiance in a world that often feels determined to destroy itself. It’s quite the morbid insight, but it’s a useful motivator.

When working as head of content for a couple of startups, my mission was always to make the creative process intentional, and make the creative product incidental.

Not every team member agreed with this system. Particularly our marketing analysts, whose number one rule was to optimize for quality. If their work wasn’t perfect, they tweaked it and reworked it for as long as they needed to until it finally looked the way they wanted it to. Even if that meant staying in the office until nine o’clock each night.

Now, this seemed noble on the surface, but frankly, everyone on our team was burned out. And in most cases, there were so many variables out of their control, that it ultimately didn’t matter how perfect the work was. They were getting ulcers for nothing.

All the more reason to make the process intentional and the product incidental.

It reminds me of a line from a famous mobster about friendship. Capone once remarked:

It’s better to have four quarters than a hundred pennies.

That actually makes a lot of sense from an interpersonal perspective. You don’t need that many friends. Only a handful of close ones should help you get you social needs met.

But when it comes to creative work, it’s the opposite. You want to build a process that lets you create as much as possible as often as possible.

Quarters, pennies, dimes, nickels, who cares what the coins are worth? The higher your overall number gets, the less the final score matters, and the more your value your streak earns. Because the whole of the long tail is yours. Forever.

I’m just getting tired of people who are afraid of not putting their best foot forward, so they put no foot forward at all.

Sorry guys, but that’s not how you build a growing brand. Volume trumps quality. Consistency trumps accuracy. You have to move your feet all the time.

And it’s not like anyone is paying attention anyway, so you may as well run up the score as high as you can.

Let me share one final story to excessively prove my point.

Last night my dream included a man who was playing piano in my house. His melody was simply beautiful, and had to be captured in some way. My dream self began singing the tune over and over, knowing that it was a dream, knowing that the song would eventually wake me up.

When my alarm went off at five that morning, the song still chimed in my head, and I began groggily singing to myself in the shower. After drying off and sitting down at my desk, I grabbed my phone and hummed it into the sound recorder.

Gotcha! There’s no way that melody was going to slip through my fingers.

Now, will that snippet evolve into a song that makes me millions of dollars? Unlikely.  For all I know, it could sound terrible next time I listen to it.

But it doesn’t matter. Because the results are out of my control. Committing to the process of creating is a hundred times more important.

The fact that the song traveled from my dreamscape to my waking life gives me a sense of creative satisfaction, spiritual nourishment and artistic pride.

That’s more important than a song.

Although if it goes triple platinum, I will definitely take the money. 

How could your team make the process intentional and the product incidental?