How to do good work and give good advice | #24
I hope you like factoring
Hello friends!
This 24th issue of The Pole is for folks who want to do good work and give good advice that people receive well.
I'll try and tie together a few stories about factoring (yes, algebra!), creating art, and a YouTuber meetup I went to.
At the meetup, I learned a neat trick for giving (and receiving) good advice. Which I will share below.
Enjoy!
Factoring, as in algebra
I first took (and failed) Algebra in 8th grade. My most salient memory is learning to factor.
First I learned how to do it with numbers.
I didn't see the point, but it was easy enough.
Then, they started factoring equations.
It was a struggle at first, but I got the hang of it. I still didn't understand why I should care, though.
Then I got to college and the factoring got EVEN CRAZIER.
Turns out, you can factor damn near anything. Pictures, sound waves, data.
If you hear a chord and you want to know which notes it's made from, you can use math to find out!
The fancy term is Fourier transforms, which is how we factor sound waves.
I no longer thought factoring was boring. Factoring was cool.
Factoring, as in art
My appreciation for factoring sky-rocketed even more when I started making videos.
I started out watching YouTube and reading blogs. Then, I started getting ideas.
At first, I did nothing with those ideas. But one day, it occurred to me that I could make those ideas real, if I wanted to.
So, I picked an idea and gave it a shot. I spent about 25 hours on a Djikstra's Algorithm video.
It sucked. I wanted to get better.
I watched some videos from one of my favorite YouTubers to see if I could intuit what I could do better.
There was a lot of stuff I could change. But, it wasn't obvious what was important and what wasn't.
I checked out a few other YouTubers. They all had different styles and different things that made them successful.
I decided I was a little in over my head. I had no formal art, design, or film training.
I wanted to focus on animated videos, so I enrolled in Animation Bootcamp by School of Motion.
It was there I learned about the 12 Principles Of Animation. It turns out that not all great animated videos follow all the principles. But most videos follow most of the principles.
Complicated animations were just compositions of basic movements.
And that's when I realized why factoring, as a general idea, was so useful.
We break things apart so we can take the useful parts and re-use them elsewhere.
The "parts" can be anything. Principles, themes, motifs, colors, shades, brush strokes, sentences, words, letters, notes, chords, verses.
Originality is not creating new primordial parts. Originality is creating a new arrangement of existing parts.
I didn't invent any of the words I'm using right now, but this is writing is still original.
We tend to focus on what separates great work, but we forget that we all live within a shared experience. The base language and protocols we use have to be at least mostly the same, otherwise we can’t communicate.
If the art too esoteric, nobody will use, understand, or resonate with it. It will be indistinguishable from bad art.
So now, I tell myself the following:
Don't be afraid to borrow parts and inspiration from your favorite artists. Follow the principles advocated by your field's community.
Great work is a remix of all the work that came before it. It's all factoring if you zoom in enough.
Factoring, as in advice
It's bold to claim that everything is a remix. We've all encountered a piece of writing, painting, music, etc, that is in a league of its own.
It doesn't break the rules, but it bends them, and sometimes sets precedents for new rules.
That can be disorienting for people new to the scene, trying to learn. It's easier to follow clear, specific rules than ambiguous, flexible rules.
Hence, modeling great artists can be difficult, like I experienced earlier.
Factoring their work can feel like trying to un-salt soup. Even for the great artists themselves.
Some factors become so foundational that they fade into the background. They become so obvious that they stop being talked or thought about.
Imagine trying to explain how to talk or breathe to an alien.
Another problem is our feelings and egos. Managing emotions and creating a space that enables us to share and receive feedback can be hard. In fact, it's often the hardest part.
Recently, I was taught an exercise that helped solve both of these problems.
I was at a PTYA meetup on Friday, June 2nd, 2023.
(PTYA = Part-Time YouTuber Academy)
Ali Abdaal had us do the following exercise:
get together in groups of 3-4 strangers
each person talks about a challenge they have for ~10 minutes
everyone else can then talk about their personal experiences or ask questions
no giving advice allowed
I was intrigued. I assembled my group and, excited to try this out, I went first.
Here's what I noticed:
Articulating your challenges to strangers is an effective way to help you help yourself. Painting a picture of your journey from scratch facilitates serious dot-connecting. Like a reboot you didn't know you needed.
The personal stories of others were a great source of contextual advice. If it felt like they were solving similar problems as me, it was a great source of ideas. If the context they provided didn't match mine, it was at least interesting to hear the story.
Advice was not a good source of advice. Occasionally, some folks in my group broke the no-advice rule. I didn't find that advice useful because I didn't know the context behind it. Had they personally done it? What had they tried before? Were they sure we were solving the same problem with the same constraints?
Giving advice is tempting AF. It feels good to listened to. It feels good to paint yourself as an expert. It feels good to be helpful. How cool would it be to solve this person's problem in a few sentences? Unfortunately, un-contextualized advice is rarely distinguishable from noise.
It's now my goal to avoid giving advice as much as I can. Instead, I'll opt for asking questions and telling stories.
Or whatever helps reveal the factors and context. =)