Just Start: The Rubber Triangle of Creative Work
Hey team,
You’ve heard of the Iron Triangle, right? It’s the law of project management that says that when it comes to making things good, fast, or cheap, you can only ever pick two out of three: if you want something good and fast, you’re going to pay for it. Plenty of people have already picked this model apart, and I’m not going to go on about it here: you’ve probably got your own ideas.
What I’m going to talk about today is the way I try to work, especially when I’m doing creative stuff for other people. It’s inspired by the way I work when I’ve been hired to do it, but also by what I look for in people I hire — when I was editing a magazine, I dealt with a lot of freelancers, and the stuff in here made all the difference to whether I’d work with them more than once.
I call it the Rubber Triangle: partly because that doesn’t make it sound too serious, and partly because I think it offers a bit more flexibility than the iron kind. The rubber triangle has three sides (or vertices, depending on how you prefer to think about it):
Communication
Being easy to work with
Trying
Here’s how it how it breaks down:
You can’t always be fast, but you can always communicate: about how long something will realistically take you — and if something goes wrong, how you suggest fixing it and what that means for your deadline. There is nothing worse, as an editor but also in a lot of other jobs, than chasing something that’s overdue and learning that it hasn’t even been started. Conversely, most editors I’ve worked with prefer you to be honest: if you’re going to miss a deadline, it makes sense to tell them as soon as you know. That way, people can rely on you to produce stuff when you say you will, or at least tell them if you can’t — which is better than being mostly fast but occasionally impossible to reach. And this sort of leads into point two, which is that…
You probably don’t want to be cheap, but you can be easy to work with. This doesn’t mean being a pushover, but it does mean (as above) offering solutions when you bring up problems, and having a “Yes, and…” attitude to other people’s suggestions. Editors especially, but also most other people, want people who will make their lives easier: not people who are creatively brilliant but constantly lobbing spanners into the gears. If you come to someone with a problem and go “Here’s my suggestion…”, then even if it’s a bad suggestion, it’s something: it’s a starting point to work from, rather than a shrug and a blank face. It’s something to fix.
And finally:
You can’t always be good, but you can always try. I was talking to one of my oldest friends (now doing exciting, large-scale stuff) about this the other day, and he was saying that it’s something he’s constantly trying to impress on his teams: that by trying just a little bit harder, not even that much, you stand out from all the people who aren’t really trying at all. Maybe you think for a bit longer about how to frame an idea, or write an intro, or come up with a joke that people haven’t seen before, and all of those little things add up to something where the effort is obvious. Also, in my experience this effort compounds: if you try every time, over time you do get better. I don’t think everything I make is good, but I try pretty hard at everything I make.
And that’s it! If you don’t want to deal with the Iron triangle, try the rubber triangle instead: aim to communicate, be easy to work with, and try. It works for me!
Have a great weekend,
Joel x
Stuff I like
📖 Book - Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea by Charles Seife
Bryan Johnson recommended this when I interviewed him, and apart from anything else it’s a brilliant dash through the history of maths, astronomy and physics, and a re-introduction to some stuff I only sort-of-remember from maths A-level (which I loved doing). The ‘dangerous idea’ part comes from the fact that the concept of ‘zero’, or the void, has actually been pretty frightening to various philosophies and religions through the years — even though it gave a headstart to the civilisations that came to terms with it first. Brilliant stuff.
📝 Article - Superlek vs Rodtang
I don’t watch as much fighting as I used to, but I watched Superlek vs Rodtang: it was a fight between two all-time Muay Thai greats, and absolutely delivered. I’m not that familiar with Muay Thai, though, so this piece, which breaks down the nuances of how the strategy and scoring went down, was fascinating in its own right. Understanding stuff makes it more fun, you know?
🪶 Quote of the week
Da Vinci wrote a guide to drawing in perspective. Another of his books, about painting, warns, “Let no one who is not a mathematician read my works.”
From Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea
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