A.J. Jacobs says delusional optimism and faking confidence are essential for creative work. He fails about 25% of the time, pitches constantly, and schedules daily 15-20 minute brainstorming sessions knowing most ideas will flop.
"delusional optimism".
Initially says ~50%, then revises to ~25%.
15–20 minutes per day.
A 30-minute appointment (example: 3:00–3:30).
I want to talk about experimentation in a minute because we have so much to talk about. But you have interviewed a lot of these amazing, interesting people. You mentioned the Yale professor, and I know you've interviewed a ton of people. What are some of the patterns you've learned about people who are at the top of their field? Like, one is. You just said they paint a lot of crap before they make it to the top.
Well, another one is just the idea of. I like to call it delusional optimism. And I am a fan of it, because you have to be a little bit delusional in any business when you get in there, because you've got to convince yourself this is a really good idea, because if you don't, then no one's going to pay attention to you. And I interviewed George Clooney once for Esquire, and he said, you know, when he got up to his philosophy in life is the same as he had when he was playing baseball, I think, in college, maybe high school, where he'd say he wouldn't think about whether he was going to hit a home run. He was thinking about, is the home run going to be the left field or the right field? And I love that. I love having this delusional optimism. You know, sometimes. Sometimes you're going to fail. And. But you have to have that idea. And if you don't have it, then this isn't. This is a. One key I've learned from all of my experiments is that you pretend to have it. So you. Again, the idea of sort of faking it till you make it. Like, when I was writing a book about health, I was totally overwhelmed. First of all, I'm not very healthy. You know, you can see my abs. It's like, I'm not an exercise guy. I'm not like Tim Ferriss, our friend, you know? So I was like, oh, what have I got myself into this. This topic is too big. No one's going to listen to me. No one cares. But I would convince myself, you know what this is? I would. I would say, what would a confident person do? What would an optimistic person do? And I would do that. So I would call and set up interviews with doctors. I would call my publisher and say, all right, here's for the launch party. What if we had kale martinis? You know, just coming up, like, acting as if this is going to be a huge hit. And after a couple of hours, I convinced myself, you know. You know, you are able to get into that mindset, the momentum. You trick your mind and you become more optimistic and confident.
I mean, you're pitching editors, you're pitching all kinds of stuff. And you mentioned that your failure rate might be 50%, which shocked me because from the outside, the idea is once you make it, it's just coasting along. And I think what you're sharing with us is that it never stops. Oh yeah, you always continue having to grow, to pitch, to sell yourself and your ideas. Maybe you get a little bit more comfortable with failure, but it never stops.
No, I mean, 50%, that's probably far too kind. I would say now it's like probably 25%. And yeah, you just have to be okay with that. And I have lots of book ideas that'll never happen that just, you know, sort of die and undignified death.
Well, I think also another thing that makes it acceptable is you don't have a scarcity mentality. Like, this is my one big idea, I need to have it happen. I know that you put aside time to think of ideas. To you, ideas are like, ideas are a dime a dozen. You probably come up with an idea on the way here, 10 on the way home. And so if one doesn't work out, you have a huge vault of a million other ideas. I wonder if we can talk about that.
Well, that is, I do love that because some ideas, you know, you get while you're in the shower. But I actually like to. It sounds paradoxical, but structured creativity. So I will make an appointment, I'll say from 3 to 3:30, I'm gonna sit down, turn off all distractions and just come up with ideas. And you know, 95% of them are gonna suck, as we discussed. But there are a few. And so I really do think that, you know, I surround myself with like maybe magazines, books, and then just riff. And even if none of them turn out, I still think it's a good use of time. And I talked to my friend James Altucher about this. You know, he says that if you're doing this, your brain is like a muscle. And if you are constantly keeping that creativity muscle going, then you're going to, in life just be better. You know, you're going to figure out how to fix a flat tire if you don't have a tire iron. So I do believe I, I, I try to carve that. I don't know if you succeed, but I do try to carve out 15, 20 minutes a day to just brainstorm.
Interesting.
