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Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

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Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#6
What's wrong with muses?

I do money laundering with muses. I do a comic, God gives me a melody. That sort of thing.

http://www.losethos.com/hymns.html

Angels are VERY clever. They try to be just. I think if you are a good boy and do work, they bless you with ideas. This drill seargent idea probably works, but don't kid yourself -- any good ideas might not be your own.

I'm pretty confused on where myself begins and ends.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#7
I get the feeling advertising is a very "pure" industry, by which I mean its business model is pretty well set, and widely understood: take "creative" people, put them in offices, sell their services.

Compare that to the software industry: Who is the software for? Will we charge for it, and if so, how much? What is possible and what is impossible? How long will it take? What's the most important part? In software, the answers to these questions either change quickly or are opaque to the layman. In advertising, it's easy: The account execs sell to companies, the "creatives" to consumers. We've done something similar a million times, so it will cost $x.

Richard's strategy could probably work with a large development shop that made (not technically ground-breaking) "the official" apps for companies.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#8
If you read the article, it doesn't actually ever mention how creativity benefits from having tight time constraints (the drill sergeant metaphor). The closest I saw was a theory that Richards' agency didn't go bankrupt when Hyundai ended their contract, taking 10% of revenues with it, because of his tight time-tracking and budgeting.

Re: Creativity doesn't need a muse. It needs a drill sergeant.

#9
If you need to pump out a high volume of moderately creative trash, then working in factory conditions makes sense.

If you need to foster actual creativity, if you have a desire to build things that touch people's lives and that people will talk about and be inspired from then perhaps less so.

The caveat that real artists ship is still in effect of course.

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