Work but to abstain from actually working mass rallies are planned later in the week the s.b.a. Has threatened civil disobedience if the military council doesn't hand over the power to the civilians Game 6 of the N.B.A.'s Eastern Conference Finals is tonight in Toronto the hometown Raptors lead the Milwaukee $1.03 games to 2 and with a victory Toronto can add them to its 1st ever n.b.a. Finals N.P.R.'s Tom Goldman has a preview it sure seemed like Milwaukee was going to cap its dream season with a trip to the n.b.a. Finals the Bucs had the best regular season record Ruhr through the 1st 2 rounds of the playoffs then dominated Toronto in the 1st 2 games of the conference finals but suddenly Milwaukee faces elimination tonight after one of the more dramatic script flips in recent n.b.a. Memory to run a star forward Cohen Leonard has led the rafters to 3 straight wins averaging 30 points and playing tough defense on Milwaukee's Younis on to decode Bo The Bucs superstar nicknamed the Greek freak promised after the 3rd straight loss quote We are not going to fold the series winner plays the Golden State Warriors for the n.b.a. Title Tom Goldman n.p.r. News and I'm Jane Herbst And you're listening to n.p.r. News from Washington support for n.p.r. Comes from n.p.r. Stations other contributors include the law firm Cooley l.l.p. With offices in the u.s. Europe and China Cooley advises entrepreneurs' investors financial institutions and established companies around the world where innovation meets the law. Last week we spoke with artists writers inventors scientists and more about the challenge of turning an abstract idea into something concrete so you start with the script and make it as good as you can that's the filmmaker Don Hahn who's worked on Beauty and The Beast in The Lion King many more and then as you actually get into the production you allow yourself to improvise and make it better so animation is a real iterative process you can visit and revisit and revisit Sometimes it takes 5 or 6 or 7 times of putting the movie up on a real to look at it and then have it fall apart and rebuild it and tear it down and rebuild it before it starts to be anything and the reason is the leap from the written word to a visual storytelling medium is huge it's like the leap from a recipe on a page to a beautifully prepared dinner that you're actually ingesting you know so on a page how do you describe a perfectly cooked steak with just the right seasoning you try your best but once you get that in the frying pan and start to cook that steak it's a whole nother thing and I think that's why some people shy away from the making parts because you can have perfection on a piece of paper and say this is a beautifully designed piece of architecture or a fantastic recipe or a great script and it's going to really go south when you try to execute it no matter what it is and it's just experience and and craft that allows you to maintain some sort of order and work that written idea into something that's actually visual up on the screen again as we've been hearing from all sorts of creatives the execution of an idea requires determination craft experience maybe a little luck. It's almost enough to persuade you Lisa in some cases that if there were a competition between idea and execution the idea isn't even such a formidable competitor there's an argument to say a film like each he or Star Wars or Roger Rabbit was a great idea out of the box and anybody could have made that movie but I kind of subscribe to the other approach which is you can take a mediocre idea and put great people on it and come up with a great movie Take the Pixar movie Ratatouille Ok so let's think this out is the worst idea for a movie ever you know how to cook and I know how to appear. Cumin we just need to work out a system it's like let's put rats in a kitchen and will make an animated film about it oh we do it I mean. It's a horrible idea and there's plenty of really good ideas you know that we've all seen movies that had tremendous promise in the buzz was great about them and then you go see him in the theater and they're awful. Filmmaking is by its nature a hugely collaborative project dozens maybe hundreds of people all with specific skills and tasks it is a creative team. That is a common construct these days in many realms we sometimes think that there's some guy or gal who goes into a garage or garrote and they have a light bulb moment that tell innovation happens that's Walter Isaacson he's written biographies of people like Leonardo da Vinci Benjamin Franklin Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein but that's not the way it is great scientific research these days is going to be done in large collaborative unit when you look at how people are going to do Gene editing or crisper technology or for that matter figure out background gravitational waves. These are the type of papers a going to have dozens of names on them or hundreds of names on them and it's not going to be like Newton serving under an apple tree or Galileo peering into a telescope because this is a bill a t. To make a great mental leap is now augmenting and amplified by our ability to work together collaboratively most work that's done right in organizations now is done on a project basis by teams. Betty has advantages because you know you're combining the efforts of many people you combine the viewpoints of many people but it's hard and that is Teresa I'm obviously a social psychologist at Harvard she has studied creativity in corporate settings by having people keep daily work diaries it's really hard to work effectively in a team it's hard to manage a team affectively and there are a number of things that can help what is to make sure that you have a nice diversity of skills in the team where people are not completely overlapping in what they know because that's that redundancy is not really helpful but where people do have different perspectives and different knowledge base to some extent that they can bring to the problem it's also helpful to have a different kind of styles so doing things better within a paradigm or differently outside paradigms you're likely to make a lot of progress in a project if you have both kinds of cognitive style on a team but only if you have people who can effectively translate between the different styles they have to be able to talk to each other very often you'll find conflict arising you know that is crazy how could you possibly think that that would work and on the other hand what do you do when you're stuck in the status quo you're not doing anything at all exciting you're boring and we actually in our research saw a team that had to just call a halt to its project because we had these very different cognise styles and there was no one who could mediate between them and they could be someone else on the team it could be a manager but you have to watch out for that there's one more thing successful creative team needs you need a high level of trust you need people to be too we willing to give each other a little slack. To give each other the benefit of the doubt under those circumstances if you've got that diversity of skills and styles you can do great things and. Some creative endeavors tend to be solitary even if you routinely submit your work for feedback and some creative people just prefer to work on their own so how did those artists ship How did they execute ideas without a team without the boss or studio or publisher watching over them there are some people who are only creative in the morning you know get up early the write so much and then that's it for the rest of the day Dean Simonton is a psychologist who for years to study the productivity habits of creative Giants there's others that can only work late at night after by everybody has gone to bed there's others that make their own time they they have a Q. I think a shell or who had to have the smell of rotten apples. And so he had put when he felt like being creative and pull out a rotten apple. And that would cure to be creative What about you when you're working I'm generally a morning person and you need to cue or trick yourself in any way or do you sit down and you put away the distractions and get to work I 1st of all I pick the morning because as the fewest distractions and and the smell of black coffee really helps as well Ok pretty pretty ordinary Do you think if you smelled it and didn't actually consume the caffeine it would have the same effect Oh I have to have that I have I need it so it's not just the smell it's the smell of the cue to the physiological reaction. And I need that caffeine in my system but but then usually by a few hours I'm kind of put out sometimes I can get rejuvenating before I go to bed . But then it's usually a glass of wine that doesn't so go figure so but let's say the pattern that you just described happens to be the one that I subscribe to I'm a morning person I get up early I like those hours quiet alone it's uttered cetera so if you're that person and let's say you have 4 or 5 hours of really hard core productivity and creativity and then you have the rest of the day let's say you're lucky enough to have a life like an academic like you do or a writer like I do and you can actually choose what to do no one's telling you what to do what do you do there with your now kind of diminished capacity for creativity or productivity Well fortunately guess what you know this is the case there's so much else that's involved with being creative like when the proofs arrive you know I can't do proofreading in the morning and I don't want to waste my creativity doing proofreading in the morning you know your things on your reading list that you have to catch up on and particular when you're doing what I'm doing you know scientific research are you have to find out what other people are doing I review a lot of. The minute manuscripts and grant proposals you don't want to waste your best brain cells on all that stuff oh no. I mean don't tell them they aren't using my I'm only working at half mast you know. I think you just did but that's Ok. Getting up early and drinking coffee or staying up late and drinking wine working alone or with collaborators plainly there is no single route for getting good work done everyone has their own strategies for executing ideas many people want a one size fits all what do I need to do to be creative and I'm afraid there is no one size fits all there's a few things that everybody asked in here to you know you have to know what you're doing and you have to be willing to fail you have to be committed to achieving in that domain you have to be reasonably bright. And so forth but beyond that some people have red socks and some people have purple socks. So far we've talked to artists scientists inventors and others about their creative process about having good ideas and even more important how to execute those ideas now we'll hear about a part of the creative process that everyone can relate to even if you don't think of yourself as a quote creative person this is something we all do probably more than we'd like to admit it's something that almost no one enjoys but it is an inevitable and absolutely essential component of any success let's start back in the late 1980 s. The young physicist named Saul Perlmutter at the University of California Berkeley was looking around for a good research project and at that time I was. You know to come across the possibility that we could go back and make a measurement that people had wanted to do ever since the times of Einstein and Hubble which was the measurement of how much the universe has been slowing down its expansion over its lifetime ever since Einstein theorized it Edwin Hubble observed it everyone knew the universe was expanding but another thing everyone knew was that all the matter in the universe all the galaxies a nebulous stars and planets and moons and comets and asteroids all the stuff in the universe has gravitational attraction so physicists assumed that eventually that gravitational attraction would slow down the expansion of the universe for a physicist understanding this dynamic was itself an attraction if you could measure how much it was slowing it would tell you a couple really amazing things like 1st of all you could find out is it slowing enough so someday it could come to a halt and then collapse then this is just before the millennium so we thought we could you know work out those signs you know same heater is coming to an end if we found out that it wasn't then we would have shown that the universe would last forever and also we would have shown that we live in an infinite universe it just seemed like you know whatever you whatever we found would just be a great story and we'd love to know the answer I have to say I think the latter headline is much more exciting person not not just because of infinity and because long lasting but it's. Optimistic Yes Yes No I think that's right I think you start getting the personally invested in our universe you know even though we're talking about billions of years from now we said we'd like it to go on you know. So you can see why be valuable to measure the rate of the universe's expansion but conducting this sort of measurement even for an astrophysicist is. Hard. Had an idea it involved men. During the light coming off of supernovas but they had to be a particular kind of supernova and they had to be very far away we needed to find these these very distant ones because we want to look way back in history and the further away you look in astronomy the further back in time you're getting to see because it's taking that time to travel to from the very very distant locations we need to look you know 345000000000 years back in time for us to be able to see the slowing effect that we thought we were trying to track. Given the specificity of what they needed and the overall degree of difficulty Perlmutter knew the project would take some time you know we wrote the original proposals saying that we did not expect to be able to find the 30 some odd supernova that we would need to make this measurement in anything less than 3 years and we thought this would be like a long 3 year project Perlmutter and his team built a tool for this project a new kind of high resolution wide field digital camera that could be attached to the big telescopes you find in observatories now all we had to do was get some time on one of those big observatory telescopes telescope time on these biggest telescopes in the world is really precious one Observatory in Australia was open to a deal and we traded the use of that camera for 12 and a half nights of telescope time and so you do everything you can to try to to find the time that you'll need to make the measurements you want in those 12 and a half nights. We got 2 and a half nights of good weather 2 and a half nights of useful telescope time over 3 years remember they needed to find 30 some odd supernovas to make their measurements so how many did they find at the end of 3 years we had not yet found a single supernova. So picture that you started with a quest creative scientific idea drawing on all the knowledge you've amassed over time and all the knowledge amassed by earlier generations you formulate a plan of attack you great the grant proposals you can get the grant you invent a special tool to facilitate your plan and use that tool as leverage to gain access to an even more important tool you've done everything possible you've done everything right. And you know what you still failed at the end of 3 years we had not yet found. A single supernova the failure of Perlmutter steam was compounded by the fact that there was another team of physicists out there working on the same problem using the same technique which meant that we're going to the same telescopes and using the same instruments and so we passed each other in the airports you know going back and forth the rivalry was not all that friendly it was highly secretive between each other in general I'd say the competition with each other was a big deal but it's nothing like the competition with the ways in which the universe is trying to give you a hard time a hard time meaning instruments breaking the night sky being cloudy it was so hard to get these whole sequence of observations to work in a given semester that had to all run like clockwork and if anything went wrong the whole thing would fall apart the overall challenge was so difficult the chance of failure so strong that promoters team in the rival team led by the astrophysicist Brian Schmidt would in fact help each other out so there were several occasions where sequence was about to fall apart and the other team would help so one time we we took some of the patients for that team and some of those one time where they traded a night with us I telescopes that we could keep our our time sequence working. Years of effort years of difficulty and uncertainty years of failure but in the end the breakthrough promoters team found the supernovas they were looking for they were able to get enough observations to take their measurements and those measurements lead them to a surprising result the expansion of the universe was not slowing down in fact it was speeding up Saul Perlmutter steam rode up its findings and in 2011 was awarded the Nobel Prize in physics which is shared by the way with the other team. The lesson for Perlmutter in all this one thing that's really interesting that it's important I think for people to hear it sometimes is that. A really tough challenging problem is worth spending a lot of time one and that you can be learning a lot while you're trying to get there. In other words failure is an inevitable component of success so in order to bring your creative project to happy place better learn to handle failure well even better as Perlmutter suggests handle it productively after all failure provides data. This doesn't work that didn't work that didn't work great now you can cross all those off the list so what does work. Coming up on Freakonomics Radio how to handle failure even when you feel like this I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying you can just confront failure head on and begin an end each day with a litany of things that I consider failures and shortcomings or take solace in the notion that occasionally this happens why on your back to feed you can turn your head a slightly different direction and then you see the tiny ray of light that represents the path ahead. 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This is Freakonomics Radio here's your host Stephen Dubner. This is not the 1st time we've discussed failure on our program there was failure is your friend back in 20161 of our 1st episodes ever was called the upside of quitting and it looked at failure as a signal that it might be time to just move on but that calculus is very very tricky. What if you quit too soon what if all your failures are an unavoidable desert you need to trek through in order to make it to the promised land in today's show we'll look at the relationship between failure and creativity the number one thing. In my view is that people who don't understand creativity who are looking at it from the outside don't really appreciate how much you have to fail that again is Dean Simonton a psychology professor who spent decades studying creative genius how many revisions the sas to go through how many masterpieces you put out there and nobody even buys a copy and maybe your mom does write her but the failure rate is chess horrendous even for the creative geniuses which genius to Simonton pick is the most successful hit maker of all time that's Mozart and he's about 60 to 70 percent success rate. Well I mean you turned upside down and that's 30 to 40 percent failure rate Ok so you've got to expect a lot of failure. But what happens when you do succeed and success can raise expectations to a level that's crippling the novelist Jennifer Egan had been writing for a couple decades when she had a breakout hit with a visit from the Goon Squad which produced among other things a Pulitzer Prize and the book after that I sort of finally got into my new book and at 1st I was actually having a great time with it I it was really going well I felt and I was excited and then things started to feel rockier and I really started to have serious doubts about whether I could actually pull it off at all and then I have to say I kind of flipped out I plunged into a state of despair over my work and I really thought maybe my career was over that maybe I was kind of ruined by all of this was the problem expectation then was at the barrier I think the problem was that I actually was struggling with my book because every book is a struggle especially if you're pushing yourself and at a certain point I started thinking about how I would be perceived if the book sucked and that's never a good it's never going to be looking at yourself from the outside in it's very difficult to engage creatively when when you know mean and horrible commentary is flowing through one's mind in retrospect I thought I was really an abusive boss I was a boss who was telling her employees namely me that I was worthless and it's really hard to work in those conditions I'm enormously self-critical I begin each day with a litany of things that I consider failures and shortcomings Nico Muhly is a composer. The youngest ever to get a commission from Metropolitan Opera back in the day it was a combination of self flagellation and complete emotional neutrality so it was like I hated it but I didn't care I didn't feel anything like I made this huge opera and I thought it was really good but literally the sense of achievement was a kin to like a successful morning of errands or like I went to the dry cleaner and bought dog food. That began to change when Muley started on a new medication I had a really dark like mental health journey involving like the wrong medication which I assumed wasn't having a bearing on my on my artistic output which of course it was but but the big change in the last like 3 years is that I'm finally able to see some pieces as. The end of the sentence of that conversation so it's not I could do better next time it's not I can't believe I didn't do better this last time and the difference is is insane to have written to have written pieces now where I'm not in it in a state of constant self flagellation and I think the 1st piece I wrote in in my new improved version was this mass called a spiral mass. So I can hear it and enjoy it and think and think that that was you know better than 3 minutes of silence. To fairly obvious fact that outsiders often overlook when they think about a creative lifestyle and how cool it must be in most cases you are both creator in critic boss and employee since many people who have a boss do not like their boss might seem incredibly attractive to be your own but do you really want to be your own boss do you have the discipline to keep your projects on track do you have the temperament to drive yourself do you have the requisite paranoia. I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying it's John Hodgman he's done a lot of creative work over the years most of it somewhere on the humor spectrum it is the most rewarding thing that I can do. But it is a constant struggle with a very. Clear feeling that I am out of gas every day every day. And and that I will not be able to support myself or my family because I have now finally run out of ideas for sure this time I mean. I started writing jokes for the Internet morphed into writing humor for books morphed into doing t.v. On The Daily Show with Jon Stewart morphed into doing some ads for Apple computer that gave me some acting opportunities and all of these I just sort of jumped from job to job very happily and very luckily. In no small part because it allowed everything to feel a little bit like a hobby and at no point was I ever putting all of my eggs say into writing books because my fear was if I run out of gas on that then I'm done if I lose the ability to write a book which sounds irrational but it is a of a true fear that I have in fact today I have it that I can always fall back on the podcast or I can always fall back on going out and touring my imitation standup comedy or I can always try to get more work as an actor it's not even a fear it is a certainty that I'm done and I have no further ideas and trick my brain into providing ideas again because they're in there you know so I'm I'm 47 years old and I've been doing this and this and only this whatever this is now for 21 years. And that's not enough of a track record to persuade yourself that there will be $21.00 more I figured out sort of rationally that I have enough data to support the suggestion that I will be able to continue but even though I understand it rationally in a deep part of me I'm certain it was done. So how do you quiet those voices of disapproval voices that are often imagined either your own or someone else's It took a what was like a year and a half of that Jennifer Egan remember was stuck on her Post Pulitzer novel Her solution was just to keep plowing through I kept working through it because one thing I really know is that you know you can work through anything I think we we think we're more fragile as artists than we really are like one thing that kind of helped me get through it psychologically was that I I finally thought you know winning appeal it surprise shouldn't ruin anyone I mean if I really can't write another good book because of winning that I was done and the only reason I'm terrified now is because I'm not actively working on it today but when I get down into it line by line something clicks something comes together John Hodgman also finds the only solution for fearing the work is doing the work and also helps to be in the shower I remember back in early 2009 I was invited to do some comedy at the Radio and Television Correspondents awards dinner. Which is sort of the Junior League White House Correspondents' Dinner the tradition was the comedian would do comedy and the president would be there and say some words as well. This was a stunning imitation for me to receive I had only been on The Daily Show for a couple of years. Yeah and of course I had to say yes even though I had no idea what sort of comedy I could do. On that stage for then newly inaugurated President Barack Obama whom I liked but also who had no track record as a president to even make jokes about and I really was frozen for a long time as I tried to think of jokes quote unquote to tell and then I was in the shower and I remembered just sort of talking out loud to myself I remembered that on a different radio show Wait Wait Don't Tell me. Peter Sagal had asked for rock Obama who was a guest on the show at the time when he was a Senator is it true that you saw Leonard Nimoy in the streets of Chicago and did you flash him the Vulcan salute and Barack Obama confirmed that this was true and I remembered that Barack Obama had been making jokes regarding dilithium crystals and Jor el the parent of Kal-L. Was of course is better known as Clark Kent slash Superman and like oh right there's a reason I like this guy he's a nerd Yeah or is he a nerd or is it on act and I realized in that moment in the shower what my preoccupation was and what I wanted to know was Are you really a nerd or are you fake and if which which I realized in that moment was sort of the question that everyone on all political sides were asking about Barack Obama are you for real of course we remember. A lot of people who did not like Barack Obama asking him if he was a real u.s. Citizen ask him if he wasn't secretly a Muslim or an alien or whatever it was. Then there are a lot of people who forget there are a lot of people on the left leaning wing of the spectrum who didn't trust that he was a real liberal and there was so much about him that was unknown and for me I had a genuine question to ask Are you really a nerd that could serve as a metaphor for asking Who are you and what kind of leap of faith are we taking with you. Hearing Hodgman describe this you may be thinking wait a minute you were asked to do comedy is this nerd thing funny and what's more important than funny when you're creating comedy is what are you genuinely curious about what are you genuinely feeling even the most absurd fake facts that I wrote for The Daily Show had to resonate around. An ounce of truth so tuning into that one of my what am I thinking about knowing what you know or not knowing what's going on in the back of your head is kind of the hardest part and once you once you get that out of there suddenly for me that's me snapping my fingers for those listening on the radio it all it all floods out from there. Coming up after the break some people deal with failure in a most unusual way they treat it like success of cost you could say it just faces it's not so. Forget me write me like that for me not I was happy but I got to fix up a really that's up ahead right after this and if you want to catch up on previous episodes in the series it is called How To Be creative any podcast app or even Google will help you find. Freakonomics Radio is supported by Progressive Insurance with a name your price tool providing information on a range of insurance coverage and price options more at progressive dot com or 1800 progressive Now that's progressive and by Indeed with indeed employers can post a job in minutes set up screener questions then 0 in on a shortlist of qualified candidates using an online dashboard learn more at Indeed dot com slash higher. Is supported by the mainly Mozart festivals genius weekend honoring u.c. San Diego Chancellor pretty coast with concerts by the orchestra of champions lectures and more June 7th through the 9th tickets at mainly Mozart dot org Luna grill offering fresh Mediterranean cuisine real food crafted with care prepared with locally sourced and sustainably farmed produce whenever possible now with 16 San Diego locations you can order online or find a location at Luna grill dot com in 1090 then President George h.w. Bush told the world a modern lifelong enemy I do not like broccoli and I haven't liked it since I was a little kid how our taste in food preferences in music even our pets can reveal our politics and I'm president of the United States and I'm not going to eat any more broccoli nuts this week on Hidden Brain from n.p.r. Saturdays at 3 pm and Sundays at 1 pm on k. P.b.s. It's an expensive cycle insurance gas maintenance let us help break it by turning that car of yours into public radio if your car is more work than it's useful don't need it to us we'll pick it up get top dollar for it and use the funds to bring you more of your favorite shows might even qualify for a tax deduction just call 877 k. P.b.s. Car or visit k p vs dot car easy dot org This is k. P.b.s. . This is Freakonomics Radio here's your host Stephen Dubner. Failure is such an obvious component of any success that it probably keeps a lot of people from trying things they should but the shame here again is the Harvard social psychologist Teresa modeling. If people have a growth mindset they've. Leave how I can always get smarter I can always get better at something and. I'm not going to get better unless I try things that are hard and sometimes that means I'm going to fail at something but who cares. But a lot of people do care for a lot of people failure hurts and it hurts to have other people witness your failures so who are these people who don't care where does that come from Partly that's a trait but it's something that can be changed. Parents can can talk to their kids about and we can certainly do that as as managers of ourselves look I know that this is a stretch for me. I've been asked to take on this project but I'm going to go for it and you know if it doesn't work out that well I will have learned how I can do better next time to build 5127 pressure types so a 5126 failure James Dyson is the British engineer best known for having revolutionized the vacuum cleaner and just when you've. Had enough and you think you're never going to get the answer that's the point where you must try even harder because that's the part where everybody else gave up so you must go through that. Pain barrier. And in order to succeed I I would say that for an engineer with someone developing technology it's really a life of failure and you have to use to that. Because your success is a pretty rare but it's not an unhappy life or those I mean failure isn't isn't something that makes you unhappy it makes even more curious as to how to overcome the problem and in order to fail you have to experiment and experimenting is exciting even if it doesn't work in fact it's almost slightly disappointing when it does work. Because you've been done it and that's the end of that one and you've got to get on with something else. So as you're building things you have one idea in mind. Runs a project called lifelong kindergarten at the mit Media Lab but then it works a little differently than you expect and that gives you a new idea and you start making adjustments and I do think the most creative and the most enjoyable experiences come when you're involved in that process at the intersection of making and playing we're constantly experiment iterating trying new things refining and I think it's true that in today's society oftentimes kids aren't given enough opportunities for tinkering they're given fully made things that they just use or they're given instructions exactly how to do things so I really do think we need to give them the tools materials and support where they can tinker experiment and iterate constantly trying new things that's the way they're going to best develop as creative thinkers and be ready to thrive in a society that's going to demand and require creative thinking more than ever before there's one word that Resnick does not use to describe this iterative process failure he feels a negative connotation is just too strong clearly things go wrong things are unexpectedly all of the time but you should become accustomed that don't see it as a problem but see it is something isn't of an opportunity it's really important to create. Environments where kids feel safe to take the risks because when things do go wrong if someone says a you know that's no good why do you ever try that they want to take risks again so we have to make sure to create environments where kids are encouraged to feel safe to take risks tough things go wrong but then be able to recover and to take it in new directions the ability to recognize when something's failing or at least foundering is important in the creative arts as well maybe you've had success doing one thing for a long time but tastes change technologies change. In the thing you've been doing even if you keep improving it's just not connecting the same way 4 score and 7 years ago our fathers brought forth in this continent a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal Conan O'Brien is a history nerd maybe he'll become a us Ambassador someday I'd like to know what it pays like to know what kind of ambassadorial residence I would have. And I really free to commit crimes in those countries. In the meantime O'Brien is still a late night t.v. Talk show host which he's been doing for more than a quarter of a century but recently he made a change the story there is I realized a couple years ago that I'm killing time at half an hour when I 1st got the gig it was you know you fill an hour because it's this precious hour that needs to be filled and it's all how you do it creatively but over time you're starting to say it in my next guest in my next guest and that felt artificial to me and it felt like it didn't fit this new world were in and so he reformatted his show which is called Conan it's now 30 minutes instead of 60 he also did away with the stream of celebrity guests that marched through most talk shows instead he's focusing on the comic pieces that have driven his massive online numbers we have You Tube videos that have had 70000000 views but no one's watching the whole show other than my parents no one is watching the show from 11 to 12 there's a whole generation of people that don't watch anything like that. There is another creative medium where taste changes so aggressively so seriously the trying to out think your audience or the market may drive you mad. And. You're in devote who lives in Berlin has become quite success. Will her painting sell for a lot of money and there in the permanent collections of the pump do in Paris the British Museum in London the Museum of Modern Art in New York but she doesn't like this kind of success as a measuring stick. It's not about fading on winning it's just about being and doing yes they are always part of it to accept it and take it as Pato of a reason to do something new there's one form of failure that vote celebrates. Of course you could say the picture fails if it's not so. Far I can only write you like that for me not I was happy but I got to fix up a. Pretty tough time we had to. Time Yeah it's not right yet it's not made for sounding if you made it because you want to know something yeah and if it's ready and you know something in it then you don't need anyone to think I haven't thought. I like you in developed attitude the failure of a painting to sell is actually a success because she gets to have the painting back how you think about a failure and what other people might consider failure says a lot about who you are as a creative and as a person also as a brother this is Mark 2 plus I am a filmmaker do plots and his brother Jay have been working together extraordinarily closely since they were kids they wrote a book about it called like brothers. Yeah I mean the biggest failure we had and our career was making this feature film Vince Doria for about $70000.00 that turned out terribly and we never even finished it and then a couple of weeks later we turned around and we spent $3.00 making a short film in our kitchen and that was our 1st movie that went to Sundance so we very quickly realized that being professional and making a movie for a lot of money does not mean it's going to be a good movie but staying near and dear to your anxieties your fallibilities your vulnerabilities staying close to that conversation you had it at 2 in the morning with your sibling or a loved one or friend where you were giggling with shame or crying about something that was so personal to you you think no. One could understand it is soon as you go into that stuff that is I think that's where you win the do plus brothers over the years built an unusual and unusually robust career making films and t.v. Shows together and they wrote and directed together sometimes inseparably in the beginning Mark did a lot more acting but eventually Jay was doing a lot to most notably in transparent they made the films Cyrus Jeff Who Lives at Home and they made the h.b.o. Series togetherness that show was all consuming Yeah we wrote produced and directed every episode of that series like idiots and the main issue is that we had completely lost our desire to hang out with each other because we were essential a hang out together 13 hours a day working and we weren't spending any time together as brothers and friends and we always promised ourselves we would keep an eye on that on that work and personal balance they had had 2 successful seasons with h.b.o. And we were in the middle of writing Season 3 but there was a shake up at h.b.o. And we got the news that we were going to be canceled and neither of us wanted to be the 1st one to speak and we were both scared about how relieved we were as opposed to actually emotionally crushed and didn't want to admit it to each other and once we did it felt amazing you know we realize that. There was no way we were going to cancel togetherness ourselves there was no way the situation was too good the money was too good the creative opportunity was too good people were loving the show. We were going to go on and drive that thing until it killed us we had to actually have a taken away from us. And that began the new phase of Jay's and my relationship. So for the 1st time in forever mark in j 2 plus weren't really a team anymore it was a sort of failure and we both felt a little bad about it and both felt a little excited about it and it's been really healthy for us in the long run I mean I'll be honest it is a lot of tears and a lot of heartbreak on on both of our parts and there are times when I wake up and I miss so desperately the way it felt when Jay and I were 23 and 27 just moving through the world as one being but we're also aware that like. That was of a time in a place when our life was a unilateral thing and we can't really get that back and we have to redefine what that thing is now for us there's the collaboration feel a little bit like a phantom limb that lake I'm used to working this way and I guess another way of asking the same question is does it feel like something that you want or need to get back to or that you're kind of happily or resign and we're just organically getting to a new phase and you're willing to take it as it comes. It does it doesn't feel dissimilar to a really amicable break up and I would liken it to like a couple that breaks up because one wants to have kids and the other one doesn't they still very clearly love each other but they have different views of the future and they would miss each other desperately but also know that it doesn't work right now if they were to do that right and so that's very similar to the way Jay and I are there's actually. Kind of a working rhythm that we have developed into where my brain is this very fire worki loud explosive place where ideas tend to come whether I want them or not you're the bar for correct yes I'm the bar for and they're noisy and there are at times quite annoying to Jay because he can't get the space to like incubate his sort of like really well crafted quiet thoughtful soulful ideas at the same time Jay can be really annoying to me because I'm ready to go my fireworks are going off and he's kind of holding me back because he's like trying to do his thing and so we said we had to get honest with each other be like oh we might be creatively bad for each other right now and this is just one rhythm and one phase we're in and God knows what's going to happen a year or 2 from now we might listen to this podcast and be like whoa you were totally wrong you just needed 6 months away and then you'll be fine but you know he'd be the 1st one to admit it feels like an albatross to my rhythms at certain times. It's really it's really good for us but the phantom limb thing is I would say very very accurate I can go. Make a project on my own I can literally hear what Jay is saying to me without him saying can't because I know what he would say and I can get a lot of his feedback so he needs I'm going to think that yeah and then and the other element is that we have been able to take some of the lessons we've learned as collaborators and collaborate with other people and make those collaboration is pretty successful too because I will say this to anyone out there if there is anyone in the world who is interested in collaborating with j.d. Plus there is no greater more self-aware suite or more generous collaborator in the universe would he say the same about you roughly slightly different adjectives maybe I think he would use different adjectives I think what he would say I know what he would say he would say that there is no more generous collaborator than Mark there's no one who is willing to drown himself while holding you above water so you can achieve your glory and then mark which is a you know some some else I'm working on in therapy too but you know that's a whole that's a whole other project. Thanks to Mark Duplass and everyone else who's shared their ideas their fears their advice in this how to be creative series if you want to hear some of the full interviews from the series check out stitch or premium you'll find my full conversations with Jennifer Egan Conan O'Brien and when Marcellus. You can find all our creativity episodes and our entire Freakonomics Radio pod cast archive at Freakonomics dot com or on the stitcher pod cast that you can get our most recent episodes on any podcast act you can also subscribe thanks so much for listening will be back next week. Tune into live from here with Kristy Lee broadcasting this week with the St Louis Symphony or. On a has Michel and an ad where you won't want to miss a Saturday evening at 6 Sunday morning at 11 on the p.p.s. Where news matters. Is supported by California coast Credit Union offering certificates designed to help you achieve your financial goals visit Cal Coast c.u. Dot org or visit a branch near you open Saturday at select branches federally insured by n.c.u.a. Sullivan solar power co-hosting solar experiences Saturday June 1st in Point Loma and Carmel Valley learn how solar works battery storage in time of use rates s.d. 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More than a decade ago N.P.R.'s social science correspondent Shankar Vedantam looking into the unseen influences that shape our lives psychologists even have a term for this behavior as racial biases might also be playing licensing there's a what I found astonished me not a lot of people know that this is I even a sell off my chair when I saw this was one of those things that the world was never supposed to see or hear bringing these hidden influences into the light that's what the show is all about we uncover clues to our deep ourselves the archaeology of our daily lives politics today feels like an endless argument but is that a bad thing certainly in the United States conflict has been not every time but a lot of the time very productive we discuss the role of conflict in our democracy plus the psychological differences between liberals and conservatives 1st this news live from n.p.r. News in Washington I'm Janine Herbst President Trump is on his 1st state visit to Japan meeting with Japanese and u.s. Business leaders promoting the American economy but the visit comes amid tensions over trade between the 2 countries as N.P.R.'s Yuki Noguchi reports President Trump's visit to Tokyo comes at a time of deeply aggravated trade tensions with the u.s. This week.