Tag: inspiration comes from strange places

I’m reading Mel Brooks’s autobiography, “All About Me!”, and loved this section about “Young Frankenstein” so much that I’m going to quote it in full. Here’s Mel:

The first cut we put together for a test screening was two hours and twenty-two minutes long. That was pretty long for one of my films. “The Producers” was only eighty-eight minutes. While “Young Frankenstein” ran long, I didn’t want to leave out anything that might possibly catch fire with an audience. I screened it at the Little Theater on the Twentieth Century Fox lot for people who worked on the lot. The theater was packed, and we didn’t get all the laughs we were aiming for. It went well, but not well enough for me. It was just too long.

When the picture was over, I got up in front of the audience and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, you have just seen a two-hour-and-twenty-two minute failure. In less than three weeks from today, I want you back here to see a ninety-five-minute smash hit movie. I want every one of you back!”

Editing was both easy and difficult. Easy because when something was supposed to get a laugh and it didn’t, I simply cut it. Difficult because I was in love with too many moments and had to cut them for the good of the overall film. Sometimes, you have to kill your darlings….

Of course, it was more than three weeks later when I reassembled most of that same audience at the Little Theater. It was actually closer to three months later. But I had a cut that was pretty damn good and wanted to show it. It went like gangbusters! Every single scene in the picture worked. The audience not only laughed their heads off, but there was a palpable feeling of sweet sadness when the picture ended.

I love what Mel describes here: He’s using audience feedback to understand what works and what doesn’t, and then is willing to use that feedback to make his work better — even when it means getting rid of something he’s proud of. Pay attention to what your audience says — they might just make your work better, too.

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That photo of a red pen comes via Unsplash and Kelly Sikkema.

I just finished “Subtract,” a fascinating book by Leidy Klotz about what humans do when given the chance to improve a situation. He writes that our first impulse is almost always to add something — to take what’s already there and add more to it in order to improve whatever it is. But he suggests that we often forget about another option: Removing elements to better the situation. If we can get to a point where we start thinking about both options, “add and subtract,” Klotz writes, we might discover opportunities that would otherwise be ignored.

Just after finishing the book, I spent a few days in Denmark, and over and over, saw examples of Klotz’s concept in action.

In hotel showers in the U.S., I often get frustrated when water leaks out onto the bathroom floor. But at our hotel in Copenhagen, the hotel had thought of an ingenious solution: Instead of adding some sort of barrier to keep the water in, they’d built the shower floor on a slight angle, to keep the water flowing more easily back towards the drain. In all the showers I took there, the water never leaked out onto the floor.

Or take their beautiful subway system, built in the early 2000s. In New York, lines often form at the entry point to the subway as travelers swipe their cards to enter the station. In Copenhagen, they’d removed those barriers entirely — and replaced them with a handful of check-in points, spread out all across the station, where people could tap their subway card before getting on the train. Even when the stations were busy, I never saw the same chokepoints that I do here in the U.S., since there was no one spot where lines could form.

Once I started noticing the ways the Danes had thought “add and subtract,” I couldn’t stop seeing them around town. Every subway station had added an underground room where someone could park their bicycle, which meant that they didn’t have to carve out space on street level for bike parking. At restaurants, people always paid at the exit, which meant that servers didn’t have to waste time running credit cards back and forth to the table, and could instead of focus on getting food and drink to customers. 

Or how about this: On regional trains in other parts of the world, trying to find an elegant solution to allow passengers to move between train cars, an engineer might add a sensor that automatically opens the door whenever someone gets close to the door. But there’s a weakness of that approach: Often, someone’s standing close to the door not because they want to move to another car, but because the train is full, and lots of people are forced to stand. In that case, the door might constantly be opening and and closing — which is both annoying for passengers and lets in cold air during the winter.

But in Denmark, engineers found a simple solution. They kept that sensor, which is just above the door — but it only opens the door when someone waves their hand horizontally just in front of the door. It’s an unusual motion that someone would only do on purpose, which meant that on the crowded trains we rode on, the doors only opened when someone actually wanted to move to the next car.

I loved seeing the way the Danes had clearly considered all sorts of options — ways to add elements, like bicycle parking, when necessary, and ways to remove elements, like unnecessary bathroom features, when it made more sense. They’d thought “add and subtract” — and built amazingly functional spaces as a result.

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That’s a photo of the doors on the regional train. Two people are standing right next to it, but because no one’s waving their hands horizontally underneath the sensor, the door remains closed.

I’m working on my annual “Things I Believe” blog post, and showed Sally the outline the other day. She noticed one bullet point, in which I wrote:

The hardest part about personal growth isn’t the setbacks — it’s the plateaus. Think back to when you first started. You’re a beginner, so improvement is rapid. Every day, every week, every month, you get a little better. It’s exciting! And then: You feel like you hit a wall. Suddenly, you’re not making progress at the same rate. Treading water feels like a step backwards. You get frustrated. You question things. Then you start again, and try to break through. If you’re lucky, you do! You start improving again. But with time, it happens again: Another plateau, and another chance to find yourself and break through.

And she looked at me and said: That’s about your golf game, isn’t it?

I looked down at the ground, and whispered: Yeah, it is.

But the thing is: Inspiration can come from anywhere! Do I wish I’d come up with that thought while walking through the halls of the Met, reading about some obscure painter who’d overcome countless obstacles to finally deliver a masterpiece? Of course! That’s a much, much better story than the truth, which is that I thought of it while double-bogeying on a public golf course in Queens.

But who cares? Sometimes, inspiration strikes while reading a great novel, and sometimes while you’re taking a few minutes to stare out in quiet contemplation at the ocean, and sometimes when you shank a 7-iron into the woods. Wherever it strikes, be grateful it did.

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That’s a photo of me standing over the the final hole at Penha Longa, a golf course in Portugal.

There’s a great quote from John Wooden, the UCLA men’s basketball coach who won more than 600 games and 10 national championships: “Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

I was thinking about that yesterday. I was playing golf — my pandemic hobby’s continued into 2021 — and on a par 5, hit one of the best shots I’ve ever hit, a 7-iron that rolled up to the green and landed about four feet from the hole. I had a chance to make an eagle — two shots better than par — for just the second time in my life.

Everyone else in my group was further away from the hole, so I waited for them to putt first. As I got over the ball to finally putt, I realized: My ball had come to rest in a sizable divot. A quarter of the ball was essentially submerged below the surface of the green.

The logical thing would’ve been to pause, mark my ball, fix the divot, and then putt. But I looked at my playing partners, who were waiting for me to putt. I thought about the group behind us, who were standing over their balls in the fairway, waiting for us to clear the green so they could hit their next shots.

So instead of taking an extra 10 seconds to fix the divot, I tried to putt out of it. Naturally, the ball hit the lip of the divot and started spinning sideways. It stopped six inches from the right of the hole. I tapped in for birdie — still a great score, but a disappointing result considering the initial opportunity.

As I moved to the next hole, I had to remind myself: There’s a difference between moving with urgency and rushing. There’s no need to hurry. Take your time, do what you need to do to prepare, and then take the shot.

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That’s a photo of UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion, the arena where John Wooden once coaching. It was published by Francisco Lerma on Unsplash.

If it’s alright, I’d love to tell you about one of my favorite random things on the internet.

It’s a video of Eric Clapton playing his hit, “Cocaine,” at the Royal Albert Hall, in 2015. It starts with that legendary riff, in E, and you can see the crowd recognize it immediately. But here’s the thing that amazes me the most: You’ve got one of greatest guitarists of all time, in one of the most famous concert halls in the world, and people are just… sitting there. They’re not, up they’re not dancing. Eric Clapton is playing freaking “Cocaine,” and people are sitting on their butts like they’re watching someone perform at an open mic night.

And then comes one of my favorite random things on the internet.

It happens at about 2:19 in the video. Clapton’s in a guitar solo, and the camera pans across the crowd: 5,000 people, lots of butts in seats.

But there, in the bottom corner, at the edge of the stage to Clapton’s left, is this one couple.

They’ve snuck up to the front, and they’re dancing like — excuse the cliche, but it’s accurate here — no one’s watching.

They shimmy. They shake. They twirl.

They — and I mean this in the best possible away — do not appear to give even the slightest shit about the fact that no one else is dancing.

The camera cuts to the band, and they’re loving it. They cut back to the couple: Now jumping up and down, cheering wildly for Clapton.

And then something happens: People notice that couple, and seem to snap out of their stupor. They remember: They’re watching Eric Clapton! One of the great rock and roll musicians of all time! And he’s playing one of the most famous rock and roll songs of all time! People start to get out of their seats. Some folks rush to the stage to cheer. The crowd gets loud.

Sometimes, it takes two people, getting up and showing everyone else the way. Sometimes, you have to be the one to give everyone else permission to get up and do something — to dance, to experiment, to try something bold.

We’re moving into this next phase of the pandemic, and I don’t know what happens next. But here’s your permission: Don’t stay seated. Don’t idle. Get up and dance, even if you feel like you might look a little silly. You never know who might be right behind you on the dancefloor.

We went on a road trip this week up into New England, just to get away from work for a few days. On the road, we stayed in a few different hotels.

At pretty much every hotel room I’ve stayed in over the past decade, there’s been a tiny coffee machine in the room — something like this:

To me, they’re like the alarm clocks in hotel rooms: Something that’s purely decorative. In all the nights I’ve stayed in hotels, I don’t think I’ve ever used one of these machines.

But one night on our trip, in Burlington, Vermont, the front desk explained that they’d recently renovated the rooms, and made a small change. Instead of a coffee machine in each room, they’d built a coffee bar on each floor, available to all guests. We’d find it at the end of the hall.

When we went upstairs, we noticed it right away: They’d built out a full bar area with coffee, tea, and hot chocolate, as well as sparkling and still water on tap. And in the room, where there’d usually be a space for a coffee machine, the hotel had been able to carve out a bigger space for a desk.

It was a small thing, but it got me thinking: What else are we doing simply because we’ve always done it a certain way? Sure, a coffee bar instead of a machine in every room is a small tweak for a hotel. But to me, it suggested that this hotel had asked some interesting questions when redesigning their rooms. They’d clearly asked guests what they wanted, and likely heard that guests wanted a better selection of coffee and water on demand. (Why is it that at most hotels, to fill up a water bottle, you have to go to the hotel gym?) They’d almost certainly noticed how many of those coffee pods were going unused by visitors. (Do those get thrown away? Do they just sit there, waiting for another guest?) And they’d considered how costly it is to maintain hundreds of small coffee machines instead of just a single machine on every floor. (Where do you even get the in-rooms machines repaired?)

The result was a simple but really smart innovation. And I’m betting that if you took a step back and looked at your work, you might find a few opportunities for improvement, too, simply by asking two questions:

Why do we do it this way?

And: Do we have to?

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I took that photo of a tiny coffee machine at a different hotel. In retrospect, I probably should’ve taken a photo of the coffee bar, too!