Long read: Being creative requires taking risks

Mr Karlsson’s point is simple but powerful: “When children learn to draw, they tend to make more and more interesting images for several years until around age five, when they learn to be boring. The multicolored hedgehogs with 47 legs give way to a series of established forms and colors, like stick figures, pastel green grass, and houses with triangular roofs. The wild diversity is gone. From now on, it’s crude, habitual symbolism. Most people never relearn how to draw anything interesting again.

This tends to happen in all domains of our lives. We figure out how to do things “well enough” and then get stuck…

nce you learn that grass is “supposed” to be green, it becomes almost embarrassing to make it blue (even though real grass often is blue, as good painters learn when they start to pay closer attention to reality). Once we’ve learned that grass “is” green, we often can’t even see that it actually looks blue in a certain light (and red in another), until someone points it out to us…

Unless we actively push against it, it seems like we will mode collapse like this in all domains. As Andrej Karpathy put it in a recent interview with Dwarkesh Patel, children “will say stuff that will shock you, because you can see where they are coming from, but it’s just not the thing you say. They’re not yet collapsed. But we are collapsed. We end up revisiting the same thoughts. We end up saying more and more of the same stuff, and the learning rates go down.” We get stuck at good enough and then ever-so-slowly backslide. I saw that with our 8-year-old last month. After making predictable drawings for a few years, she had a breakthrough and learned to pay attention to how horses actually look. Then, after she’d mastered a more accurate way of drawing horses, she stopped looking and began repeating the new form until it hardened into caricature.”

So what can we do? How can we stay fresh and original and daring as we age and worry about mortgages and pensions? How can we avoid becoming a sad, old man who watches IPL matches in the evening preceded by some doomscrolling about filthy migrants taking over our neighbourhood? Mr Karlsson’s recipe is to throw it all away and start all over again.

“…people who are able to remain interesting design “their lives to avoid [mode collapse] happening to them.” He suggests they do this by writing a lot and exposing themselves to information that contradicts them or is novel to them:

It seems that when you’re younger, weight updates happen kind of naturally. As you age you have to do this explicitly, which means:

1) reading and writing a lot, to make updates “clearer”
2) having conversations with people, esp people who disagree with you

And on the reading, at least some of the time you need to be sampling from places you wouldn’t normally look. Otherwise the natural tendency is just to read more of whatever reinforces your existing views.

This is good advice. But the hard thing is that this gets more painful the older you get. As you learn more and grow more skilled, there is more reward associated with staying within a limited mode; the opportunity cost of remaining uncollapsed increases.”

Mr Karlsson then gives us a case study, the legendary British musician Brian Eno (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Eno). You don’t need to be a music aficionado to appreciate how Mr Eno has stayed original & uncollapsed over his 50-year career which has described by Mr Karlsson in the following way:

“Take Brian Eno, who I, at least, find remarkably interesting 50 years into his career. When I listen to Secret Life, the album he did with his protégé Fred Again in 2023, it sounds to me like one of the most modern and novel sounds in recent years—just as the album Eno did with Roxy Music in 1972 sounded ahead of its time (and is still surprisingly strange and interesting). In between, he invented ambient music, was one of the midwives of the No Wave sound of late 70s New York, helped shape arena rock with U2, and so on. He also wrote interesting essays, made procedural art, invented oblique strategies, and co-founded the Long Now Foundation. Almost at any point in the last 50 years, it feels like Eno’s been doing interesting work!

As I was reading about Eno and others last year, I was sort of hoping to come across a clever trick you could do to keep going like this. But the truth is painful and simple. Eno is able to remain interesting because he’s willing to risk everything he’s achieved again and again.

It is an endless loop where:

A reason it is hard to have both a creative career and remain interesting, then, is that it is a high-risk strategy. There is probably a lot of survivorship bias in the sample I studied (meaning: most people who were wild enough to blow up their first success never got around to a second success, and so there are no biographies written about them)…

…I don’t think we should read too much into the survivorship bias, though. If these risks are necessary for creative work, then not taking them means you automatically lose; and it is possible to take these risks in a somewhat controlled manner. It is clear to me that Eno did so. He might like to give the impression that he was simply following his curiosity, but it was at least partly calculated. Especially in the early years of his career, he did the obvious, rewarded thing more often than he did later. But he did so in order to position himself to do wilder things longterm.

It is sometimes necessary to play conservatively, to be able to pay the bills. But if you’re wired like me and care deeply about doing good, creative work, you must never lose sight of the hierarchy of values.”