Moments of Conception 180: The Bar Scene from 13 Conversations About One Thing

June 24, 2015 2:51 PM

All creativity begins with the moment of conception.

That little piece of kindling that gets the fire going. That initial source of inspiration that takes on a life of its own. That single note from which the entire symphony grows. That single spark of life that signals an idea’s movement value, almost screaming to us, something wants to be built here.

Based on my books in The Prolific Series, I’m going to be deconstructing my favorite moments of conception from popular movies. Each post will contain a video clip from a different film, along with a series of lessons we can learn from the characters.

Today’s clip comes from the bar scene from 13 Conversations about One Thing:

Find any scrap of serendipity. Hugh said that when we try to reverse engineer the
universe from our own ego, hilarity ensues, and that a winning approach is to
just do our work to the best of our ability, and think of every project not so much in terms of
the result we want to have, but as an experiment of, let’s see if this works. That’s about all we can do. We can try
stuff. I
once wrote a dopey little article about sugar packets, and it was republished
by the biggest business blog in the world. Another time I wrote a series of
blog posts about luck, and they were discovered by the largest television news
magazine in the country. Amazing. And yet, despite my best efforts to identify projects that turned out to be wildly popular
and pretend that such serendipity could be reverse engineered, I admit that it
was luck. Pure luck. Yes, people who expect good luck constantly seem to experience
it. Yes, once we start earning luck, we think we know how to get it back. And
yes, we can build systems designed to
make it easier for luck to find us. But
we have to remember, human beings are superstitious natives who have to chalk
everything up to something. It satisfies the human impulse for order. In fact,
that’s why narrative was born. Stories shield humanity from the true randomness
of the world, the chaos of the human experience and the unnerving element of
luck. In what ways can you
prepare for the serendipitous?

The best way to beat the odds is with massive output. Regardless of the blood, sweat and tears I invest in
my work, I still know that every project is just another public bet with my
imagination. There’s no way to predict which idea will stick, there’s no
formula to recreate lightning in a bottle, and there’s no telling which product
might to strike a chord with people. So I just keep on creating. I keep on
showing up every day, even if most people are ignoring me, even if I’m starting to think I don’t understand the world
anymore. Because that’s what professionals do. They play the long arc game.
They trust the process. And they eventually beat the odds through massive
output. Kind of like taking a cross country road trip. When you
miss an exit on the highway, you don’t cross the median and bust a u-turn, you
don’t pull off on the shoulder and put the car in reverse, you just keep
driving. Because in a few miles, you’ll
come across another exit and try again. And who knows? Maybe that turn will be the path to glory. The
one that sticks. Or, maybe it will be another dead end. Doesn’t matter. Winning,
losing, it’s all the same after a while. It’s the risk that keeps you going. When will your accumulation of small breaks
finally catapult you to the next level?

Pessimism blunts your healthy appetites. This movie is a meditation on the things that prevent
people from reaching happiness. It’s a dramatic reminder that optimism doesn’t
increase your success, but it does increase your field of perception, which
allows you to better notice the opportunities that lead to success. That’s why
optimists tend to try lots of new things. They know that mindset helps luck
find them. Troy even says it himself. He believes there is such thing as luck, but
he also believes he’s lucky enough to notice it when it comes his way. People
with bad attitudes, on the other hand, never seem to get better because they
never seem to look for ways to make themselves better. Pessimism blunts their
healthy appetites. And so, the negativity becomes an infinite regression. The
more pessimism they have, the more opportunities they have to be right about it. But
they delude themselves into believing they’re successful, when they’re really
just successful at being right about being a pessimist. The point is, optimism
isn’t just a clever technique to win friends and influence people at cocktail
parties, it’s a practical, intelligent and proven system for increasing your
odds of happiness in the long run. It’s a legitimate strategy for letting the
best have a real chance at you. Are you
willing to practice eternal optimism, no matter what the present tense may be
telling you?
LET ME ASK YA THIS…