Half Baked
seths.blog
seths.blog
The thing is, you can’t tell if an idea has legs until you share it. And even after going through your own filter and that of your colleagues and other disciplines, the only thing that’s actually important is how the product is received by the audience.
So holding it all close to your chest is just a really good way of reducing the likelihood of success. And because of this, wherever I can, I try to mock up a cheap prototype of a product first, something that expresses my ideas in a tangible way that others can understand, just to make sure that what I’m working on is actually worth the time.
For example, replacing a table view that gets limited engagement with a feed with some workflow actions.
Half baked at this point might be some static screenshots from figma.
It can go wrong in a few ways.
Probably the worst way is where the customer takes a half baked demo or idea as a preview and a commitment, and then demands that you deliver it, or complains when you don’t; not all half baked ideas can be turned into a product.
Another potential pitfall is that the idea may be seen to represent a change to something important to them, and they get scared. Inducing needless fear is best avoided!
They might just tell you that it’s a stupid idea. Which at best is just embarrassing.
There are probably many other negative scenarios, but those come to mind from experience.
So while on the whole I think you really, really should let customers be part of the ideation process - they are the users and beneficiaries of the work, after all - you have to chose who you include carefully, because the relationship with your customers is fundamentally different to the one you have with your coworkers, and it can go south in really unexpected ways.
All of these things relate to your points: you want them to contribute to the creative process, which ultimately results in a better product, and makes them feel like they’ve made a positive contribution. Everyone wins: you get hired again because you deliver a good product while making them feel good.
I didn't know what this meant. Apparently there is a legend that Pythagoras discovered harmony accidentally by overhearing four hammers working. Upon closer inspection of the forge, he also heard a fifth hammer that was discordant to the other four, so he discarded it.
Search "Pythagorean Hammers" for multiple shaky retellings that don't always include the fifth hammer, and a book named after it.
The one thing I'd try to add or note is that, in a more public environment, I'd love to see more ability to signal how baked we think our shit is. A lot of being online is just fun & merry making & not heavy, is apt for spitballing & play & exploration, but that mixes in with so many serious, real, important shares in the mileau. Just having a knob, high or low bakedness, seriousness, doneness: this kind of information or annotation or metadata could help us better navigate our information spaces so much more clearly.
Some bloggers have adopted attaching epistemic status to their posts. Gwern for example has a write-up on his blog's use of "status"[1], which is to inform the reader essentially of how far they've gotten diving into the topic.
The music for most recorded song of all-time, Yesterday, came to him in a dream; he went to the piano upon waking up and played it. That's just one example. If you won't call that "genius," as opposed to mere "skill," you have very, very high standards, I would think unrealistically so.
But Seth is allowed to share his writing before it's fully-baked. :)
But, I think Seth may be pushing too hard to make his point. I think it's very arguable that at least during the 60's to early 70's, John and Paul were both categorizable as geniuses. As another example, John wrote Imagine without Paul, and it is frequently considered one of the greatest songs of all time. If it was a one-off, that would be one thing, but he also wrote some of the greatest Beatles songs with little input from Paul.
Half-baked, not half-ass, is the key.
I thought this was the key. For the beatles it probably wasn't that hard to do. But for other people taking inspiration, know where and when to share.
Had the beatles performed their half-baked songs in front of a mediocre band that was to perform the very next day in front of a large audience, what would have stopped this mediocre band from stealing a song and performing it as their own?
Closed-source software makes all the money in the world today.
https://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Weather_20music#1372541387
Weather music
The Four Seasons
Weather. It's all very well and good, but you can't get it on iTunes. Until now.
For several decades, thousands of weather stations around the globe have been recording barometric pressures on a minute by minute basis.
In a recent lucrative deal with the Met Office*, MaxCo. has secured the non-exclusive rights to this data. Sped up by a factor of several thousand, and digitally remasturbated, these barometric pressure fluctuations become a dynamic soundscape available on a wide range of regionally-themed CDs.
The daily fluctuations in recorded pressure become a rich A above middle C. Spells of sunny, dull or stormy weather add modulations and overtones, whilst the seasonal barometric trends become deep bass notes. Longer-term climate shifts are reflected in gradual transitions of timbre and amplitude.
Listen from the comfort of your own armchair to fifteen years of your local weather. Enjoy full stereophony as the pulsing mercury of Africa plays a counterpoint to the slow- shifting monsoon-driven barometry of Asia, or let the perpetual depression over North Wales lull you to sleep.
Buy now while weather lasts!
[*actually we just had to agree to buy them several packets of Hobnobs]
— MaxwellBuchanan, Jun 29 2013
I think this might be the more important part. I am a firm believer that you do your best and most creative work under known and limiting constraints. With the constraints in place you couldn’t afford to NOT bring your half-baked ideas to the table.
Before you ask, they only stream on Disney+.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030924144329/http://www.baking...
This post feels like shallow, Malcolm Gladwellish, wrap-a-simple-idea-with-a-random-narrative stuff.
Paul McCartney might be the greatest pop musician/songwriter of the 20th century. Some (most?) of his best works were performed after the Beatles. If he's not a genius, then no musician is a genius.
This was frequent term used in the 2000s.
"MVP" software is the modern day equivalent of half-bake/beta.
oh, yes he is.
This post feels like shallow, Malcolm Gladwellish, wrap-a-simple-idea-with-a-random-narrative stuff.
Yes, MVPs are good. But Paul McCartney might be the greatest pop musician/songwriter of the 20th century. Some (most?) of his best works were performed after the Beatles. If he's not a genius, then no musician is a genius.
I'll argue that with John and his "fresh ears" Paul was able to write some of his most creative songs with the Beatles.
Maybe there’s no such thing as genius. Maybe what we call genius is the synthesis of many people’s work, or luck, or both.
Not to say Paul isn’t an incredible musician. Just that maybe the Beatles were genius, not any single member.
I imagine this is a really unpopular and/or uncommon opinion! I do not share it.
Junk, Uncle Albert / Admiral Halsey, Too Many People, and Heart of the Country (to name a few) would have easily fit on any later Beatles record.
Now you can see that he is saying that Paul is a genius, just that his true genius isn't exactly what we think it is when we talk about creative genius.
'Yesterday':
“I woke up with a lovely tune in my head,” he told author Barry Miles for the biography Many Years From Now, which was published in 1998. “I thought, ‘That’s great, I wonder what that is?’ There was an upright piano next to me, to the right of the bed by the window. I got out of bed, sat at the piano, found G, found F sharp minor 7th – and that leads you through then to B to E minor, and finally back to E. It all leads forward logically. I liked the melody a lot but because I’d dreamed it I couldn’t believe I’d written it.”
https://www.biography.com/news/paul-mccartney-the-beatles-ye...
You've identified Seth Godin's entire schtick. The man is the godfather of vapid "give me your email address in exchange for a free ebook where I teach you to how to become a billionaire" hucksters and is not worthy of respect.