Let the Elephants Run by David Usher

Author:David Usher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2015-02-25T02:02:47+00:00

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ACTION

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ELEVEN

Are you nervous? The next time you have to do something in front of a group of people — at a lunch, a meeting, or a presentation — try stopping into the bathroom first and holding the power pose shown. Record the results below. Start to experiment on yourself and be sure to document your progress.

Hold this position for two minutes or more.

As an artist I never wanted to examine what I did too closely. I felt that being overly analytical with my process was somehow unethical or unartistic. I had internalized the idea that breaking it down to its structure and “formula” would mess with my magic mojo.

It was only when I started to work on building tech for the Web and exploring start-up culture that I really began to look seriously at my own process. I started to see the incredible similarities between the ebb and flow of the creative process of building technology and the process I used to make music, albums, and videos. All the steps seemed to line up. I began to re-examine the process I was using to make music, stripping away all the extraneous artist baggage that I had built up over the years. When I laid it all out plainly, I found that I really do work with a specific formula. In every process, I repeat the same steps over and over to get to the result and the final product. I had previously never been able, or willing, to really study what I was doing and had always just done it all by instinct. Once I dove in and started to deconstruct my process, it became obvious that there really is a methodology to the madness.

Be warned: once you pull back the curtain and see the nuts and bolts of how it all works — Oz back there pulling on the levers — you can never go back. When you rip away the myth of the process you lose a certain naïveté, but what you gain in return is far greater. You get to look at the creative process as something that you can learn, something you can get better at and continually improve upon. It becomes something you can do over and over again, and eventually master. Instead of it being just a lucky mystery, it is actually a discipline that you can study. This is something the geek in me loves.

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