Espresso: the first draft of everything is shit - Rory Sutherland

0:01Morning, morning, or welcome. Yes, I have grown a tash, I have got a nose ring and I am covered in tattoos. I am your barista for the day. Welcome to Espresso short, snappy Espresso short podcast episodes. I've literally downloaded all the wisdom from all the founders and all the brands like Good, Tills, Coconut Collaborative, Candy Kittens, Little Moons, Planet Organic and I've distilled it into this micro, short, snappy wisdom to give you a mahoosive edge on the day, to kickstart your day so look, without further ado, let's get cracking and enjoy this espresso shot but the first kind of pathway I want to explore with you is there's a quote by Ernest Hemingway, which is, I kind of live by with a lot of my writing.

0:45And even when I come up with the questions of podcasts, it's the first draft of everything is shit. I don't know if you've heard that. And the reason I love this is I think in today's society, everyone's so obsessed. It's kind of Shakespeare who allegedly wrote without blotting a lie. I don't know who on earth has the evidence for that, but there is the claim that he basically just sat down and wrote it. I think what that quote allows you to do, lots of comedians have that on on their um laptop the first draft of everything is shit and basically what it means is that you've got a basic link this to alchemy you've got to get a lot of gold and lead to stumble across gold so you need a lot of bad ideas to come up with good ideas you need a lot of mistakes to which will allow you to to open that side door this is a fundamental problem of the way we've designed the world around kind of rational argument yeah which is if you can only benefit from things that you've argued for in advance that are pre-planned or pre-rationalized, okay, you end up with a very limited solution space.

1:47Because actually, even in science, okay, never mind things like comedy, art, painting, etc. Even in science, probably the greater part of progress is unintended. Okay, it's observational, or it's what the steam talent called stochastic tinkering. The reason steam locomotives got... Sorry, sorry. Stochastic tinkering is like, rather than planning the thing and saying, this is what a steam engine should look like, it's building a pretty good steam engine and then continually fiddling around with it to refine it, to make it better. Yes, yeah. So that, in other words, you're informed by practice rather than just theory.

2:28And we're trying to create a world where the theory informs everything. Because we place such a high value on what you might call pre-reasoning. Now, I mean, from my field of advertising, quite a lot, not all, but quite a lot of the things that actually happened were not a case of someone planning something and arguing it through. They were a case of something happening accidentally. And this is an important man someone having both the perceptual acuity to notice the significance of it and the confidence to actually use it okay in other words the confidence to act on an accidental occurrence quick one guys espresso's got a brand new sponsor unleashed unleashes inventory management software that talks directly to your finance and econ software we use unleashed daily islands i bloody love it we've got our admin time in half saving approximately 30k a year why use it save money save headaches save stress get granular clarity on your margins no way your stock is don't miss availability look your favorite brands literally use unleashed as their backbone candy kittens tiny rebel trip always religiously look there's a link in the show notes please feel free to book a call with josh and his wonderful sales team at unleashed they're amazing even nothing comes of it and even better news you'll get your first month free if you reference hungry thank you one of the greatest brand assets you can imagine the dulux dog now you can post-rationalize why it's so great to have an old english sheep dog as a you know as a character in a paintbrush didn't happen like that at all they were filming in a house which they'd rented okay the owner of the house they'd rented for filming the commercial owned an old english sheep dog and it kind of escaped and wandered into the chute and the director of the commercial said basically the dog stays in the picture okay now um if you're not allowed to do that because essentially everything in life has to be pre-scripted by a kind of cabal of rationalist accountants and um uh you know then actually your potential creative solution space is about a tenth the size that it could be and you know i'm i'm going off on saturday to be interviewed by rick rubin for his podcast and you know he completely accepts the role of serendipity accident um deliberate imposed randomness or in some cases another you know another creative technique is the art what you might call the intermediate impossible so you say we've got to make money from an airline but the one limitation is the planes aren't allowed to leave so what would just try to interrupt what What are those three things?

5:20Well, all of them are what you might call a case where you allow both fortune, serendipity, experience, and unintended consequences to inform the nature of your solution. Okay. In other words, you're not theory first, practice later. You accept that there's a constant feedback loop between doing and thinking. that's why i like the first part of everything is shit it's because it allows for that serendipity i mean someone once said which is not a bad christian of socialism socialism is a political doctrine based on the mistaken belief that you can get things right first time in other words you have a theory of how the world should work and uh the theory appeals to you so you go then i'm questioning the imposing on reality you know what the for sure what i wanted um probably a that a chrism of communism i want to like almost imagine we've i think everyone in their early career is so we're taught to go down this one route where it is is that it's that whole pre pre-planning pre-rationalizing pre-rationalizing your life 18 i think it's nuts right like there's like we want to do this yeah but i have a friend who was the head of policy for the liberal democrats and he said one of the things that he thinks is undoubtedly true but politically unsayable is that it's actually pretty good for people to bum around at the beginning of their lives working out what they want to do because they will find therefore what they end up doing for the next 20 years more rewarding and they'll be better at it okay but he said the idea that actually some period of youth unemployment is desirable is just politically unsayable it's probably right yeah you know it's off no for sure it's like it's it's is if someone i interviewed a guy called david hight it's like just because you know the problems i mean you know the solution right which i thought was brilliant thank you so so much for listening it honestly means the world to me i hope you enjoyed your morning coffee and go and have an amazing day let's be having ya if you want the fun episode it will be in the show notes a link will be in the show notes the full episode thank you so much please leave friends as well it means the world to me

7:32Bye.