#6: What's the Point of Creating?
On finding my vague goal
I’ve been obsessed with the idea of vague goals lately. As someone who has spent too much time obsessed with planning out every single hour, day, week, month and year of my life, I’ve been learning to let go.
To try and change it up a little bit.
To breathe a little ambiguity and spontaneity into my life, while still soothing the itch that screams in terror the second I feel like I don’t have a concrete goal I'm working towards.
I love the taxi analogy Donald Roos makes in "Don't Read This Book" (paraphrased from page 27-28:
You get into a taxi, and…
Don’t tell where the driver where you want to go. Two things happen - you remain where you are, or the taxi driver drives you across the city for the entire night. Every now and again the chauffeur will stop and ask “Perhaps you would like to be here?” But you cannot determine this.
Give the driver an exact address, including the route you wish him or her to take. You will arrive at exactly that address, according to the route you determined in advance. The question you can now ask yourself is: “What has this trip brought me?” There is no room for new experiences and insights.
You provide the taxi driver with some guidelines. For instance: “I would like to go to the eastern part of the city, to a bar where they serve a good daily special and where you can also dance.” You will now end up in a place you actually want to be, but which you could not have imagined beforehand.
Decide where I want to end up, but also leave it open to the world as to which one of the infinite routes I end up taking to go there.
I realise I love too many different things to decide on one thing and stick to it forever down the exact path I plan out years in advance - I’ve tried doing that before.
I can't force myself to be narrow-minded (see: 7 years chasing a hyper-specific degree in music).
I've got a fairly large life change coming up in October in which I'm leaving my full-time job to jump into the unknown, and so I've been asking myself this question a lot: "What's my north star for this next chapter of my life?" aka. "What's my vague goal"?
After a lot of reflection and writing and long talks with friends - I've come to a deceptively simple conclusion: it's to make awesome, cool things.
That’s it, and that’s always been it. It’s been the same since I decided to pursue creativity as a career path, although I didn't realise it at the time.
The vague goal is to make awesome, cool things. Whether that’s self-directed, or a collaborative project, or as part of a studio - whether that’s a movie, a video game, a book, or an album. I don’t care!
I'm learning that, really, that’s it. That’s all there is to it. That’s the only goal I will and can take into this next period.
This feels a tad too ambiguous to be helpful on its own, though. So - what's the bar to decide something is worth spending my time on? How do I decide whether something is awesome/cool?
I was listening to an interview with the Head of Animation on Frozen, and at a certain point he describes the first time they watched the ‘Let It Go’ sequence at dailies with the whole team.
He talks about the feeling the team felt, the rush of emotions - an indescribable wave.
That’s it! That encapsulated what I'm chasing after. That’s the feeling I want, and I want to repeat it over and over again. What a rush.
I've noticed that it’s usually a communal feeling, something to be shared and gleaned with others - when it’s a collaborative project. I’m often too self-critical of my own work to get that feeling if it’s all my effort.
The average layman who doesn’t create gets that feeling too! It seems to be a different way of getting there, but I'm convinced everyone has experienced it - by playing video games, going to a music festival, listening to music while driving, watching a movie, reading a book, shooting the shit with friends, and so on.
Something strikes you in your heart that you can't put into words - where you just sort of sit in awe and bask in life.
The thing that is tough about chasing this feeling is that it’s often not within your control. You can't will it into existence - in fact, it seems like a lot of the time if you actively chase it the further it gets from you.
A lot of it depends on external factors that seem mystical and out of reach. However, if you’re the one that’s creating I feel like you can direct it a bit more to a certain extent.
Instead of waiting for the right melody or turn of phrase, you go hunting for it instead.
An active role, instead of a passive one.
To circle back to vague goals - I think that’s what I mean by creating awesome, cool things. The bar I set to decide whether something is worth my time is whether it’s something that I believe can reach that rush with.
I like this north star because it’s directional, but also vague enough for me to make a lot of different things.
I don’t have to be just a musician, or a painter, or a modeller or an animator - they're all valid as long as I'm searching for that feeling. The goal is to work only on things that are chasing after that feeling.
That rush. Ecstasy. Flow. I need to find a better word for it. Rhapsody. Trance, exhilaration, whatever!
That’s my meaning - that’s what I choose to believe in and work towards. To spend my life chasing that trance - that feels like it’d be a life well lived.
Ingest:
New Frame Plus - I’ve been obsessed with animation inside games lately, and this is a YouTube channel dedicated to analysing video game animation. I’m working through a series of how animation has evolved throughout the Final Fantasy series, starting from FF 1 in 1987!
As Derek Sivers would say: "Hell Yeah or no!"