Mental Pivot #57: Lessons in Creativity
The Beatles Get Back documentary and the long and winding creative process, Ray Dalio’s believability heuristic, and making your limited time matter.
The Beatles: Get Back is a three-part documentary film chronicling the making of the Beatles’ final studio album, Let It Be. Clocking in at just under 8 hours, it’s a hefty, but worthwhile, time commitment. Directed by Peter Jackson, the documentary is one of the finest windows into the chaos, messiness, peaks, and valleys of the creative process I’ve ever witnessed. If you have a chance, I highly recommend it (it’s available on the Disney+ platform).
The Beatles began the Let It Be project in earnest in January 1969. The plan was to record a television special, studio album, and one or two public performances. A film crew was granted access to the Beatles’ rehearsals and recorded over 60 hours of video and 150 hours of audio (the source material Jackson largely uses in his documentary).
As for challenges, there were several. First, the band had no working track list at the start, not even a rough outline or inkling of what they would perform. Second, they were insistent about using new material. This meant the group had to compose and learn, at least, a dozen new tunes. Third, the Beatles had a short window of time to work with. Ringo had a headline role in a film that started production at the end of the month. The clock was ticking, the group had three weeks to pull their ambitious project together.
That’s the backstory against which the documentary unfolds.
Most of the original project footage is from inside the music studio, during the rehearsal and recording sessions. And that’s where director Jackson keeps us, for the most part, locked up in the studio with the Beatles.
This narrow focus on rehearsal, recording, and performance is the film’s greatest strength. It delivers a wide range of candid and surprisingly intimate moments between the fab four. We see them alternately cheerful, bored, thoughtful, bitter, annoyed, enthusiastic, focused, and indifferent. We also witness the process of music-making in excruciating detail—it’s a rough, messy, and unpolished affair.
Yet, this “unpolished affair” is, at its heart, a narrative about the process of creativity. We marvel at the way songs emerge from the tiniest seed of an idea (most notably Paul’s composition of “Get Back” in the first episode). We watch how the Beatles, at various points, find themselves in a creative cul-de-sac and must actively forge a new path forward. We observe the countless, mind-numbing iterations it takes to progress from rough sketch to finished product.
Here are a handful of the creative lessons from the film that impressed me:
Structured practice vs. unstructured play: It’s clear that the Beatles engaged in both, but the film gives us an abundance of noodling and unstructured play. I’ll be honest, I found myself frustrated watching the band screw around, seemingly wasting time. But this “play” also serves a purpose. It loosens the band up and gets their musical juices flowing. At other times, it allows them to vent their frustration non-verbally. And, best of all, it yields new material that works its way onto the final album. The song “Dig It” is largely the result of jamming (even the final version sounds like a free-form jam). And some of John’s playful, spoken improvisations—developed while goofing off—get added to the intros and outros of the final recordings.
Drawing on the past/remixing the past: In addition to screwing around, the Beatles love reminiscing, both verbally and musically. They frequently stop working on a new song and start riffing on old tunes. Often, after a single verse, they break into a different tune and sequentially jump from one song to another for an extended spell. No doubt they find inspiration revisiting their artistic influences (e.g., Berry, Isley Brothers, Dylan) and replaying their own back catalog. One of their earliest compositions, “One After 909,” gets resurrected and works its way onto the album. In another instance, the influence of the past is more subtle, like when Paul—dissatisfied with the arrangement for “Two of Us”—suggests omitting the bass, something he reminds them they did with 1964’s “I’ll Follow the Sun.”
Fresh perspective/change of perspective: A change of pace can inject new life into the process. As week one progresses, the Beatles appear at a creative standstill. They’ve made incremental progress, but something isn’t right. It doesn’t help that the band is practicing in a cavernous film studio (Twickenham) which they unanimously loathe. Even worse, they’re constantly sniping at one other. By week’s end, a frustrated George quits the band and exits mid-practice. They eventually reconcile and institute two changes that reinvigorate the team: (1) they move to the more intimate Apple Studio, and (2) they invite keyboardist Billy Preston to join the recording sessions as a “fifth Beatle.” Both changes inject new life, vigor, and energy into the project.
Experimentation: There’s a telling moment near the end of episode 2 where the band is working on “Let it Be.” Paul keeps repeating the opening, trying out different singing styles, tempi, and other musical ideas. Some of his ideas seem silly or slapdash. John is visibly agitated, but Paul wants to get it right. He’s iterating through a wide range of possibilities, trying to find that optimal solution through trial and error. Experimentation also manifests in the different instruments the group brings to the sessions. Midway through episode three, John breaks a curious handheld instrument called a stylophone which astounds his bandmates; they all spend time toying with it. At another point, someone purchases a lap steel guitar and various bandmates play with that too (it ends up being used in the recording of “For You Blue”).
Repetition, repetition, repetition: There’s not much to say about this one. The creative process often requires time, iteration, revision, and incremental improvement. The Beatles are beholden to this reality. But iteration is hard and, as the film demonstrates, it also induces boredom and despair. Fortunately, the Beatles persist and emerge from the process with a work of art that’s still worth talking about 50 years later. That ability to endure the process is the mark of a professional.
My favorite takeaway from the film is the fact that much of the overall process is so mundane, tedious, and relatable. Yes, the Beatles exhibit their untouchable brilliance and magic throughout the film, but they also display their foibles and ordinary aspects too. It’s comforting to see the creative process, warts and all, not just the polished finished product (owl meme, anyone?).
Most of us will never sniff a fraction of the cultural influence or fame experienced by the Beatles. But the process of creativity is certainly available to all of us, should we choose to engage with it. The Beatles took no shortcuts in becoming fab, and there are no shortcuts for the rest of us either.
There’s a wonderful moment in the second episode at the 2:07:20 mark when the band finishes their first decent run-through of “Two of Us” after days of practice, bickering, and countless takes. It sums things up nicely:
George: It sounds lovely that now. After all the anguish we went through with it.
John: Well, it’s part of the pudding.
Shoutout to my lifelong friend Jason K, who helped inspire this post. Jason is one of the finest musicians I know. We spent far too many hours singing and playing Beatles songs in our youth, and a great many more discussing them (including this past week).
Now onto this week’s recommendations…
Thinking Tools:
Believability in Practice: Cedric Chin explores Ray Dalio’s idea of “believability” (a kind of credibility that is backed by real-world success and adept communication). Chin uses believability as a heuristic for figuring out whose advice is worth taking, and how to tease out the best advice from these credible sources. There are some wonderful insights on listening and learning, with the ultimate goal being getting better more efficiently.
The Real Benefits to Staying Off Social Media: Ivaylo Durmonski’s litany of benefit include a bias towards doing rather than consuming, finding validation beyond digital affirmations, avoiding toxic social comparisons, and stopping to enjoy the simple things right at our fingertips.
Ten Ways to Make Your Time Matter: Oliver Burkeman (author of Four Thousand Weeks) serves up helpful recommendations for living with the reality of time scarcity: “Rather than succumbing to the mentality of ‘better, faster, more,’ we can embrace being imperfect, and be happier for it.”
Training = Turning Pro: Steven Pressfield reminds us that, sometimes, the difference between an amateur and a pro is largely one of mindset and commitment. A short excerpt from the memoir of singer-songwriter Rosanne Cash beautifully illustrates the point.
Reading Enrichment:
The Amazon Empire Strikes Back: Ben Thompson looks at Amazon’s investments in supply chain logistics—private cargo ships, making its own containers, leasing planes—and how the company sidesteps the bottlenecks faced by competitors. Thompson also considers the broader implications for the Amazon ecosystem, one where Amazon extends this logistical advantage to its 3rd party merchants, all while owning the end-user and overall experience.
From Construction to Teaching: Seven Writers on Their Day Jobs: Emily Alexander’s inspirational piece looks at the challenges of balancing work-life with creative-life. It’s not to say the two are mutually exclusive, but in the case of the people profiled by Alexander, they actively carve out time and energy to do what they love when they can.
How This All Happened: Morgan Housel provides a high-level history lesson on the U.S. economy from the end of World War II up to the present. The key question Housel wants to answer: how did we end up in the current situation we are in? Homeownership, consumer debt, income growth followed by stagnation, inflation all play big roles in this his sweeping narrative of expectation vs. reality.
Ideas Are Getting Harder to Find: America Is Running on Fumes: Derek Thompson considers three theories that, collectively, might explain a kind of creeping stagnation—or at least a kind of incrementalism—that is afflicting both the arts and sciences: 1) an attention marketplace in which popularity is a key metric, 2) our present-day political gerontocracy, and 3) institutions biased towards inaction rather than action (aka “vetocracies”).
Perhaps You Should Not Spend All Day Ridiculing Others from Afar: Freddie DeBoer critiques the social media sport of public and communal ridicule. Per the author, one of the worst things about social media is that “it tells people they can have the benefits of public engagement without the drag of public responsibility.” The takeaway: we can willingly decline to participate as part of the mocking, public chorus.
What Whale Barnacles Know: Think the lowly whale barnacle has nothing to teach us about the world? Think again. For one, barnacles build their shells with layers of calcite. Like rings on a tree, these layers provide a kind of chronology; scientists can use the chemical signatures of these layers to determine where in the ocean a layer may have formed and, in turn, use this information to study both present-day and ancient whale migration patterns. Yes, it’s an especially narrow area of study, but it’s a fun diversion into the world of marine barnacle researchers.
Odds & Ends:
The World’s Most Popular Social Networks and Who Owns Them helps you visualize the relative size of the Goliaths of social media (e.g., Facebook, TikTok, WeChat, etc.). The social media landscape looks like a two-horse race, with American and Chinese companies battling for global consumer attention. Money, power, and influence are at stake—the average internet user spends a whopping 2.5 hours per day on social media.
The Most Frequently Used Emoji of 2021 was recently published by the Unicode Consortium. The most popular emoji? It’s the “Tears of Joy” emoji 😂—my fave too! The report tracks the popularity of specific emojis over the years and whether they are trending up or down. One of the biggest gainers in 2021 was the “Pleading Face” emoji. A sign of the times?
Three Steps to the Future is the latest presentation from veteran tech observer Benedict Evans. You can watch the presentation via the embedded YouTube video in the link above, or flip through the Google Slide deck. Evans’ also includes an archive of his previous annual presentations for your perusal.
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