Brent Bushnell shares practical ways to spark creativity: adopt beginner's mind, seek random input by crashing trade shows or riding buses, take notes by hand, and build spaces where people can make things. He describes how his organization 2Bit uses demo nights and game nights to keep creativity flowing.
Chapters
Okay, good. So, you know, I would encourage you all to make an active habit of cultivating creativity. It's a muscle, just like everything else. And, you know, it is a practice. It's, you know, things that are practices are not things that you, you know, like riding a bike, you sort of know it or you don't, and you can't really forget it. But you can become less creative by, you know, changing your life. choices. And one of the things from Zen Buddhism that I frickin' love is this concept called shoshin. And the idea is to cultivate a beginner's mind. And a beginner's mind is an outlook on the world, right? How do you approach everything like you're a beginner, right? You guys are all entrepreneurs, meaning you're, by your very nature, you are going to be breaking something in the world, right? You're gonna be changing something. You're gonna be doing it differently. And so the established thinking is that that's not how it's done, right? And so you sort of have to go into everything, every new project thinking like, well, I don't care how it's done right now. How should it be done? And you're going to have to start as a beginner in that domain in order to really sort of tease out where the aspects are that could change.
Random input.
One way to cultivate creativity is to expose yourself to lots of stuff, right? And the opposite of this would be to just kind of have the same life over and over and over again. Wake up, go to work, go home, go to the gym, wake up, go home, go to work, whatever, right? But how can you expose yourself to lots of different things, as many different things as possible?
Yeah? We all collectively as a class went to Folsom and had to self-provide your condoms at Folsom where they were giving them away for free.
Amazing. That's such a cool project. Yeah, that's great. Great. Yeah, that's interesting.
I think it kind of forced a lot of us to just step outside of ourselves and really unite together for a cause, like to just do something because we need to get it done.
Yeah, rad. That sounds really fun. So great, I like that. So more of that. One that really works for me is trade show crashing. If you don't go to random trade shows, definitely do that. I highly encourage it. Stuff that has nothing to do with your domain. is totally awesome. And that is important too, because oftentimes creativity comes at the intersection of domains. And so if you can— you walk into the packaging convention trying to solve some problem, and you'll see that some innovation in packaging might just apply to what it is that you're working on now. Now maybe not. You might leave the packaging convention and nothing happened. But just your exposure to that will inform maybe 6 months down the line some new problem that you're trying to solve, right? All of this is creative fodder for your future life. So, and lots of other ways to do this. A friend of mine, when he gets writer's block, he literally just gets on a random bus. He doesn't care where. He tries to imagine the story of everybody getting on and off the bus. And then when he arrives at his random destination, he has to figure out how to get home. But just sort of forces him into uncomfortable situations to get him out into the world. Okay, the opposite of random input, reflecting, right? And this is about It's kind of the total lack of stimulus. And meditation and mindfulness is really getting a lot of play now, and I don't think that that's accidental. We are in a world that is constantly bombarding us with stuff and information, and so try not listening to music, not watching anything, just staring off into space. Your brain is an incredible parallel computer that will draw connections between lots of stuff if you give it the time to. And so really taking time to reflect is awesome. Take notes. Physical, real notes. I have kept a folded piece of paper in my back pocket since I was 13, and it is invaluable. And in fact, one time, trade show crashing, I went to a neuroscience conference, and it was the neuroscientist who was passing out notebooks. And he was like, here, because your brain is fallible. Here, because your brain is fallible. And I was like, gosh, just about anybody could give me a notebook and tell me that, and I would be like, yeah, but what do you know? But the neuroscientist does it, you kind of listen. And the interesting thing about— there's all sorts of research that's come out about this. You don't even have to look at the note ever again, and it actually is still valuable. The act of writing engages more of your brain and makes that memory more permanent. And it's one of those things where you're going to hear a lot of stuff every day that you don't know about. Write it down, right? You don't become an expert passively. And it becomes harder and harder to become an expert as you know more and more stuff. So you really have to seek out the unknown. One of my favorite quotes, don't make the mistake of the artisan who claims 20 years experience at something when they've really had 1 year experience 20 times, right? It's so easy to replay the playbook that you already know. But it's hard to actually find the stuff that you don't know, especially once you get pretty facile in a domain. Access to tools. And this has never been more awesome than now, right? There's so many cool tools. And you would be surprised at how much that stimulates its own creativity. Having access to some tools, you might say, gosh, what can we do with this laser cutter or this CNC tool? All of a sudden, this gives us, sort of unlocks new potential. And these things are getting Super easy to use, right? It used to be like you needed a freaking PhD to operate a CAD. Now you can do it in your browser, right, in pictures. So really encourage you to just spend time at a makerspace or go tour Autodesk's Pier 9. That place was the first time in a decade of life that I was like, maybe I should drop everything and just be here. A stimulating environment. So this one is a little bit about sort of like software in your life. We cultivate at 2Bit a lot of different kinds of events. We have a top secret nerd night where local hackers come and bring their projects. Just like Fight Club, if it's your first time, you have to present. So everybody in the room has presented, which is a really nice filter. But it exposes our team to crazy new stuff. It exposes the community to our team. So that's really fun. We make games. So we have a game night. A regular board game night, just testing lots of new stuff. We do— we're very militant about iteration and testing. So we have a demo day where just our immediate family comes in to play the latest stuff. We have a beta night where once it sort of graduates from demo day, we invite the sort of closest Cirque followers. Yeah? What's the most important thing that you've learned
