Through my life, I had multiple hobbies. Started creating music using software like Fl Studio, learned to play the acoustic guitar and some piano, started drawing in pencil, and now learning painting using acrylic paint. Also by education, I am a developer and computer scientist. In my professional life, I also always kept myself as a generalist wanting to learn multiple skills to experiment with everything. After many years experimenting, I started noticing that many aspects of my work and my hobbies were shared.

When I’m painting a simple sky landscape or when I’m creating an architecture for a web programming system, the skill that I’m using is fundamentally the same. There can be several parallels we can trace between those skills that can help we understand how to be better creators. We will try to dissect the skill of creating something new.

The skill of creating is composed of multiple smaller skills. We will explore some of those skills in this article.

Learning from others and copying with style

Combining existing things into something new can be an important skill for a creator. In life, everything is a remix of something that already exists. One cannot have the illusion of creating anything great completely from scratch. It’s important to acknowledge this soon and not waste your time focusing on creating something completely new from the beginning.

One of the techniques that I used to create music was to start by simply trying to copy a song that I loved completely from scratch. Rarely was the time that I could emulate the original song perfectly. What really would happen was that I ended up creating my own version of the music. After that, I knew the principal components of the song and could start playing with it. I could start combining it with other songs and creating something really new from that.

If you want to know more about the history of creation and why everything is a remix you can watch the excellent documentary Everything is a Remix after you finish up reading this post.

In the parallel with programming one of the good things you can do is always search for better practices and how others solved the problem you are trying to solve. In programming, originality is less than a concern because we have the culture of open source. So you can take a look at the best softwares written in history just by doing a research at Github. Take a look at their source code.

In the arts, we have some of this by searching videos where the artist tell how they created the piece. I always loved those videos as they were very interesting and elucidating.

Managing Expectations

One of the principles that can guide you through creation is managing expectations. If you start something and it’s not going the way you like maybe it’s a matter of just waiting for that tipping point, where suddenly everything comes together. Frequently, things can have a turning point when everything comes together and jumps from being poor to being great.

One of the concerns that you may have when creating something is how things interact and how the whole works. For example when creating a song we can have multiple parts that sound great like a killing guitar riff, or captivating vocals, but if they don’t come well with the song as a whole the song will be in trouble.

One of the takeaways that I learned from Agile methodologies is the idea of creating something deliverable in every iteration. What I mean by this is that every iteration instead of focusing on creating the best component of the creation I will focus on creating a full experience. Using the music context we can think of creating a simpler version of every instrument instead of focusing on creating the best guitar riff or drums beat. When you do this you can perceive how everything interacts before investing your time in having perfect instruments that do not go well together.

Using the drawing as an example to this, you can start by using a pen that has a thicker tip so you cannot focus on the details early on. You should focus primarily on the bigger picture, composition, how everything comes together. Start by doing a sketch of the whole drawing before committing to creating the details.

Takeaway and the future

You can learn from this general principles and try to apply this to your own job. This is what I like to call as meta-skills. Skills that are more abstract and can be applied to multiple other skills. This type of thinking can lead to general improvements in multiple areas of your life.

Many jobs today require creativity and the tendency is that it will be the only jobs left after the AI revolution. AI tends to be very good at specific skills and humans can learn one skill and apply to another being very good at generalizing and transferring learning. I believe that in the future, jobs will require those meta-skills that combine multiple skills.