Even in the midst of mediocrity, there remains a path forward for true human originality through emotional intelligence
The creative arts are, in their best form, a place for exploration and discovery, more concerned about process than results, and not often conducive to metrics such as success or failure. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder, and most people would assume that art, in all its forms, is far too subjective and beyond descriptors such as good or bad, but that’s not entirely true.
There is plenty of bad art, music, theater, films, comedy, books, and articles. With our ridiculously fractured media landscape and the thousands of channels that require an endless supply of content, it’s impossible to expect that all of it would be good, let alone great. It’s like an episode of SNL. They stayed up all night writing it over a week, and then did 90 minutes of live television. Not all of it is going to feature a cowbell.
It is also worth noting that writing a bad book, a bad film, or even a bad television show is incredibly hard, possibly just as hard as making a good one. It’s more or less the same amount of work, but with less talent or money.
Fairly early in my career, I was working with a new copywriter I had inherited when I joined a new agency. He wasn’t a bad writer, but he was inexperienced and inconsistent. Typical, frankly, of the form. I realized pretty quickly that he simply didn’t know how to edit his work. In other words, he didn’t know how to discern the wheat from the chaff. He would hand me a printout of headlines he had written, most of which would be shit, but then there would be one piece of gold buried under all the bullshit. He had gold in his hand, but he just couldn’t see it. He hadn’t yet learned how to pan for gold.
Anyone who has ever worked with dough will tell you that eventually, you just develop a feel for it. For something that is supposedly so precise and scientific, this seems counterintuitive, but it’s true. I don’t know why it’s true, but it is. I suspect it has a lot to do with the many variables of temperature, humidity, and even ingredients. You just get a feel for when it’s right. You might call it experience.
It took me a long time to really develop my pizza dough to where I wanted it, and while some of it was experimenting with different flours and hydration levels, most of it was learning how to work the dough. Or to be more precise, how not to overwork the dough. You learned to have a confident touch that was light and smooth. You’re manipulating and cajoling the dough, rather than forcing it to your will. It’s more of a playful dance.
Cooking, like art, is so much about balance. A balance of flavors, textures, and ingredients. You don’t want too much of one thing or too little of another. It’s finding this balance that creates a good product. You could argue that tastes are just as subjective in food as in art, and there’s some truth to that. Different people like different things, but there is a baseline of quality—a balance of flavors that we all recognize as good. So just as there is good food, there is also good art, and probably for many of the same reasons.
Nuance is a product of craftsmanship borne out of experience. Knowing that this is the right way, at least for you, because you have already tried the wrong way over and over, and it didn’t work. We build up expertise over time as we learn and practice our craft, and practice, my friends, is what is required. If you want to bake bread or design ads, you have to first bake a lot of shitty bread and design a lot of shitty ads. There’s no life hack for excellence.
No recipe will get you there, either. There are no simple answers. I can give you all the ingredients and tell you exactly how I do it, and you still won’t ever be able to replicate what I do because you don’t have the experience to know how it should feel. It’s an emotional, gut-level thing. Move the logo up a bit to give it space to breathe. Tighten up those elements over there to simplify the design.
These always look like little things to the novice and inconsequential because they don’t have a good feel for what is right, but they are critical. This isn’t micromanaging for effect. It’s understanding the nuance and subtlety of good design. Is it readable? Is it logical? Does it draw you in? Does it change a perception or drive an action? Good design is important because it works better, not just because I say it’s better.
The degree of difficulty in achieving great as opposed to merely good is far more expansive than it is between good and mediocre, and bad is clearly the easiest. Anyone can be bad. Good work takes a modicum of skill, very good work takes experience, but excellence requires craft, perseverance, and luck.
The real enemy of great isn’t bad, as you might think, but very good, because very good is enough for most people. No one complains about very good. It’s the easiest place to stop. It’s good enough, they’ll say. Most business operates in the middle of the bell curve at good enough. A few will tinker with very good, but only the real visionaries ever achieve greatness. It’s why great artists and chefs are perfectionists and maniacs who drive everyone else up a wall. They’re searching for excellence, and that is tricky business.
The reason excellence is so hard is that it requires failure, and most businesses are risk-averse and would prefer very good over failure every time. Why take a leap and risk falling on your face when very good lies in the grasp of your hand? Keep it safe and profitable. Searching for excellence is not for the faint of heart.
Maybe you’re not cut out for greatness; so few of us are, but that doesn’t mean you can’t seek out the gold. In this new era of AI slop and computer hallucinations, they’re no longer even trying to produce very good. They’re now satisfied with good enough. If it looks and sounds more or less correct, and they didn’t have to do anything other than use up enough power and water to supply a small village, they’ll do it. They are happy to pass off good enough, especially if it looks like it was difficult. To the untrained eye, it might even be good enough. But it would never pass muster with someone who understood the nuance of craft and seeks originality and true quality.
The AI debacle is all very disconcerting on many different levels, but if it doesn’t actually wipe out humanity first, it provides a tremendous opportunity for those of us willing to do the actual work of producing original, creative solutions to life’s problems. Humans make decisions primarily through emotional connection and not intellectual appeal, and it takes a human to truly understand the difference. I’m sure a robot can fool the dumbest of us into thinking its predictive response reflects emotional intelligence, but it will never be unique or fresh or original. It will be what they were expecting, and that’s their problem.
It will always be unlikely that a computer will create an original human response because it won’t fit into the model of what has already been done. Now, if you combine enough ingredients in an infinite number of ways, you might end up with a cheesecake, but it’s unlikely unless one already exists. The whole point of LLMs is to give you an average answer, an average of all the possible responses, because it thinks that is probably the correct one. That’s simply not how people come to original ideas.
Originality is not perfection. It is not an average of the best ideas. It’s making a leap of faith that when you leave your feet, your hand will grasp that next ledge. If no one has ever done it before, it seems impossible. It requires courage, and until someone does it, seems improbable. It is our emotional intelligence that provides the creative spark, not simply infinite knowledge. Without the spark, even your own body is just a slab of meat.
I’m not terribly religious, but I think the soul is a good metaphor for what I’m talking about. The word inspiration comes from the Latin word inspiratus, literally “to breathe into,” and that’s where creativity comes from. The human frailty of emotion and pain.
Without it, it’s just a machine.