Toni Morrison and The "Take a Dozen" Theory
And Toni Morrison was five short. She did fine though.
This edition of Kinda Genius is broken into two sections: The Main Event (a longer story or idea) and Picks & Links, which is just what it sounds like.
The Main Event: Toni Morrison and The “Take a Dozen” Theory
When I was 19, I went to see Toni Morrison speak at a non-descript lecture hall somewhere in Kansas City. A local Barnes & Noble had won some sort of company display competition for which the prize was that the great one herself would come and give a lecture in the the winner’s city. (I can find no documentation anywhere of this, so please apply the appropriate level of uncertainty to the specifics).
I remember quite a bit of her talk, including how she brooked no guff from facile Q & A questions that were actually comments. The most jaw-dropping moment for me though was when she said she rewrote every sentence in Paradise seven times. To me, who at the time resisted deleting a single word from an essay draft because that was a backward step from the word-count finish-line, this was as wild a statement as saying she wrote her first drafts in binary. In the intervening decades, it was the amount of revisions and reconsideration this represents that I have wrestled with, but I never thought much about the specific number—seven.
As impossible a standard as Morrison’s Seven remains for me, she might actually have been a little short of optimal. In Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiousity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life, Shigehiro Oishi surveys some research about how much exploration (which I am here using as a fuzzy stand in for creative options), writes about the “Take a Dozen” theory formulated by psychologists Samantha Cohen and Peter Todd. In their work in the area of mate-selection (yes, that is what it sounds like), they found that exploring twelve prospective partners yielded a very good probability of finding a top 10% outcome.
For example, say you were naming a new newsletter you wanted to write about creativity and were trying to think of names, you should aim for at least 12 candidates. Then, you pit them against each other, starting with the first two, and then the “winner” of that pairing squares off against the next one. Then the survivor of that round takes on the next. And so on.
Some choices are more amenable to this structure than others, but the underlying insights are widely applicable. Generate a bunch of choices but you do not need to go completely nuts and consider every possibility. After about 12, you will have a sense of the range and, crucially, what a top 10% (ie really good!) option looks like. I tried it out for the subject line of this email and am pretty happy with the result. It was certainly better than my first crack, not as good as Beloved. I am ok with that.
Picks and Links
MOVIE: Sinners , written and directed by Ryan Coogler. You do not need me to tell you about this movie, which in very rare company might in its second weekend of release make more money than its first. But I might be able to point you to this shockingly entertaining and informative bit of marketing from Kodak that has Coogler walk through various film formats, break down their attributes, and explain why and how a filmmaker might use each of them.
GAME: Baltaro has eaten the last 10 days of my life. Baltaro is what happens Bruce Banner had pointed the gamma ray emitter at a deck of cards rather than at his chest. With gameplay elements of a rogue-like (where you start over from scratch each game) and the scoring structure of poker, Baltaro’s combination of intermittent rewards and deck-building deceptive complexity apparently interfaced precisely with the reward-chemical pathways of my brain. And I am not the only one so ensorcelled: the acclaim for this game, developed entirely by a single, anonymous individual, has been widespread. Highly recommended but be warned—if this hits for you, a lot of your time is about to disappear into it.
RHETORICAL MOVE THAT SOCRATES JUST RATED FIVE STARS FROM A CRYPT SOMEWHERE IN GREECE: I’ve had this one in the chamber since December, but Julia Steinberg of Stanford’s student newspaper absolutely suplexed Stanford University President Johnathan Levin in this Q&A:
Stanford Review: What is the most important problem in the world right now?
President Levin: There's no answer to that question. There are too many important problems to give you a single answer.
Stanford Review: That is an application question that we have to answer to apply here.
So yes, if those admission essays seem impossible—it is because they are. Straight from the Head Cardinal himself.
ESSAY: I am a proponent of using “they” as a singular personal pronoun. Have been for a couple of decades now. It does introduce the problem of number, even as it tames the gender and grammatical awkwardness of using gender in pronouns. John McWhorter blew my mind in this essay—just capitalize They to indicate the singular. We already capitalize “I,” so the association of the capital with “one” is baked in. Brilliant. I am spreading McWhorter’s good word here and wanted to give Them credit. Ok, it will take some getting used to.
ALMOST GOOD IDEA FROM ME: On the Book Riot podcast, we do an occasional episode of half-baked ideas, which itself is an idea stolen from Kevin Wildes’ appearances on The Bill Simmons Podcast. These are ideas that rise to the level of “you know what that kind of makes sense” but top out there for one reason or another. I keep a log of these as they occur to me, but I thought this might be a good place to initiate what will surely be a swift and comprehensive uptake of them by the wider world.
Here is my latest:
Add color to salt. How much salt did I put on those eggs? Wait is that sugar or salt? This is why we should add color to salt. We did it with natural gas AND SAVED LIVES. This is the same, except with color and saving amateur cooks an embarrassed apology. I propose pink be the color. There is already the Himalayan sea salt thing out there, and while if you are in that line of work hey I am sorry but I have under/overseasoned too many dishes to care. Pink salt. There you go.Thanks for reading Kinda Genius. If you know someone who might like it, you can use this button to share it with them. Or you can forwarded it to them like an absolute demon.