‘You should take the note and not the solution’

A few years ago, during a particularly rough patch on the road to the launch of an updated brand identity, a manager told me we were going in to contentious meeting to “collect input, not feedback.”

I had never really heard those two terms distinguished in that way before. Indeed, for me, they were effectively interchangeable.

Words are precise, though, and there is a great big difference between a mindset of input and a mindset of feedback. The former collects information as a process is beginning or taking place or developing, while the latter assesses the outcomes of a process with an aim toward refinement or course correction or optimization.

In the moment, the distinction mostly helped to stiffen my spine. This was not going to be an easy conversation, but our counterparts were not going to be taking the wheel from us. But it’s stuck with me well beyond that one tough meeting. Indeed, I’ve internalized it to a degree that I use this kind of framing any time I see a potentially tough conversation on the horizon. It took a long time to learn this lesson, but I’m more professionally mature now that I’ve got it down.

And, hey, this works for everyone. Take it from actress and writer Rashida Jones, who appeared on Amy Poehler’s podcast Good Hang earlier this year and relayed getting virtually the same advice from fellow comedian and writer Bill Hader when she started to get in to writing:

[Hader] once said to me … you know, you should take the note and not the solution. …

And that’s, that’s what I feel like with feedback and people. It’s like aggregate, the kind of like common threads. …

It’s like if you see somebody’s having a problem with an area of the script, or like a theme of the script or a character, you know something’s wrong, but they’re never going to know how to fix it.

When you’re a working creative this is one of the very hardest things to master. It’s hard, draining work to make something - to bring an idea to life and put it in front of someone. When you work hard on something, and it’s something you make, you, of course, want people to be appreciative.

But appreciation is really for the courage to attempt something, and it’s a whole world away from whether the attempt was any good. You need to get to that part of the conversation to make something bad, good or make something good a whole lot better. And getting there means actually being willing to hear when something isn’t quite right.

Yes, people offering criticism often quickly lapse in to solutioning - in to telling you in specific detail how to fix what’s wrong. And that, in turn, can feel extremely personal, as if you’re being told how to do you job.

Your actual job in that kind of moment is (usually) to brush off all that comes after that quick lapse. No matter their degree of skill, people are usually right when they are telling you something isn’t working. What they aren’t remotely as good at is fixing it properly. The good solution? That’s a conversation for another day. In the meantime, take the note.

To create, one must be a critic

I’m about a third of the way through Rick Rubin’s book The Creative Act: A Way of Being.

It’s great stuff in the spiritual sense. Rubin, who famously doesn’t know much about actually playing music and yet has collaborated with rock and hip-hop royalty to make music all the same, is full of all sorts of philosophical wisdom. I’m not sure I’d trust him with a grocery list, but he seems to understand and articulate well the big stuff - what it is to create, that create is a verb not a noun, that craft is perpetually in pursuit of what you can dream up, and so on.

I’ll probably have something longer to write when I’ve finished the book, but in the short-term, I wanted to share a favorite passage from what I’ve read so far.

In a chapter titled Submerge (The Great Works), Rubin says:

“The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal meter for greatness. So we can better make the thousands of choices that might ultimately lead to our own great work.”

— Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Rubin is speaking of how we engage with great works of art, literature, music, film, and so on, and he is not really saying anything all that new. What is this sentiment, but a remix of and justification for the maxim that all artists steal.

Still, I loved seeing it written this way. I spend a not insignificant portion of my spare time engaging with the work of filmmakers. It might seem like a hobby, and it has often felt that way to me, but more and more it feels like an unpaid part of my work and craft. It seems more and more like something I need to do to keep making things and to eventually make something that might be great.

I don’t think I’ve ever met someone in my field who doesn’t have their own version of my side project. It might not come in the format of a blog or be oriented around cinema, but to a person they all have something like this in their life. If they didn’t - if I couldn’t eventually uncover what that thing was - I wouldn’t trust them as a creative professional.

And that’s because to be someone who makes things, you must engage actively - obsessively even - with how things get made. Understanding how things get made means grasping the balance between vision and execution. After all, an idea isn’t worth much until it can be brought to life - until an audience can engage with it.

There’s an episode in one of the last few seasons of Mad Men where Don Draper sneaks out of the office to go see the newly released film Planet of the Apes. The conventional reading of this behavior, given the context of the series, is that Don is once again skirting the rules and avoiding accountability. While the rest of his colleagues and underlings work, the mercurial genius is engaging in a form of selfish escape. Other days, it’s an extramarital affair or a three-martini lunch, but today it’s Charlton Heston.

I never felt that way about this particular sequence, though I would never argue with the idea that Don is selfish, aloof and generally unbound by common decency and consideration for others.

In this very specific case, I would argue Don was working, in a very loose sense of the word. In this line of work, even when you’re not in the process of making something, you’re in some process of tuning. Creativity is an act, yes, and, Rubin hints, it is a perpetual one.

Generative AI is for going deep, not wide

Last month, I shipped out to Las Vegas to attend this year’s Adobe Summit. A few of my colleagues handled more overarching recaps of the event. As for me, I’m stuck on one particular theme that clearly stands out. Naturally, that’s generative AI.

Groan. Eye roll. Stick with me.

Let’s start with this: Adobe, just like Microsoft, Google, and other tech giants, appears to be making great strides toward integrating generative AI capabilities directly in to its tools. This is kind of a duh revelation, but, in my estimation at least, it is the easier-said-than-done development needed to mainstream AI for, well, for people like myself.

Put another way, at this exact juncture, generative AI has almost no bearing on my day-to-day professional life. There are a few reasons for that, but the biggest is quite practical. To use ChatGPT or Midjourney, I have to leave Adobe Experience Manager, or Figma, or Microsoft Word, or whatever application I’m actually using at that moment, put in my prompt and cross my fingers. If all of that goes well, I have to save the image or copy and paste the text, and by the time I’ve round-tripped back to the tool I was actually using when all of this started, well, I haven’t really saved myself much, if any, time. And that’s not even broaching the topic of ethics or legality or brand safety as we weigh up generative AI’s utility in its current form.

Anyway, Adobe seems deadset on changing this calculus. Almost every session I attended featured some showcase of these tools going native in a way that goes well beyond Firefly finding its way in to a few more Creative Cloud applications. If you, like me, are tasked with managing brand consistency while also enabling dizzyingly voluminous scale, then Adobe’s introduction of Custom Models, which will allow Adobe’s AI to be trained on your brand, is the biggest deal of all. Not only will AI be native to Adobe’s tools, but it will also know me and my brand.

Not coincidentally, this is where this starts to get exciting on the day-to-day level. And that is because the real power of generative AI, as showcased over and over out in Vegas, is in the endless remixing of what you already have on hand - your logo and color palette and visual style and owned assets and so on.

Do the math. You don’t actually need very many raw materials to get to hundreds of thousands or even millions of combinations. In fact, you probably have the basic ingredients to get there right now. What you don’t have - at least not yet - is a machine to help you rapidly assemble and re-assemble all million of those combinations in a matter of minutes.

We humans are constrained by the laws of time and space. Not so for generative AI. It does some very strange things when given an almost blank canvas - its six-fingered men and casually told lies belying its lack of humanity. But when given some guardrails, its potential to do what those of us who are corporeally challenged can not seems likely to be cause for celebration. And, wonderfully, that capability does seem to be at our fingertips now.

Sure, generative AI still has a role to play in other parts of the creative process. It can certainly serve as a built-in riffing partner when you are ideating. But, at least to me, it’ll be a much more exciting though slightly less magical development when it can instead be handed a fully-formed idea and give it legs that stretch from social to email to website to out-of-home advertising and beyond.

In this context, it seems almost silly to worry about the machines taking jobs. What they’re really coming for is a job none of us has the time or spirit to do. We can go wide - maybe wider than ever before - coming up with a winning idea, safe in the knowledge that once we’ve stumbled upon just such a thing, the machines will be able to help us go deep.