8 Clicks from Nowhere Productions

Tag: talent and learning

Chapter List

  • Advice Less

    You may have found this blog project and be thinking that I’ve made a terrible mistake.

    There’s not really much advice here, you might be thinking.

    You’re not wrong, but you’re not right.

    This was never intended to be a manual about being a creative person. No. Not at all. It was meant to be a collection of thoughts on the accidental nature of creativity. I have no solid advice. I have no lists of skills to check off on your way towards success.  I have no morals or lessons or cautionary tales with polished insights at the end.

    This is a fumbling, imperfect exercise in abstraction. It is an daily exercise in being lost on a path that is as much about the journey as it is about a destination. Imperfection is the goal.

    You want a lesson?

    Fail more. Because it means you tried something and maybe learned.

    Embrace different. Because it might be the only way to stand out in a crowd.

    Close your eyes and ignore all the other advice. Because copying is what machines do and the humanity of creativity is something that might not be teachable so much as felt, gleaned, experienced, caught, or whatever.

    You’re not wrong. There isn’t much advice here, just a few notes from the last guy to wander this path and never really find his way out.

  • Anything New

    I never really learned to play the piano.

    That is, sure, I could jab the keys and grind out a mean Chopsticks as well as the next ten year old, and sure, we had a little keyboard propped up in our living room when I was growing up, and sure, I could poke a key or two at a time to feel out a song. But I never took lessons, never practiced scales, never learned chords, and never did anything besides fumble at the ivories.

    I have been trying to remedy that in 2026, and my days are incomplete if I haven’t sat down at the keys for at least half an hour each day.

    I recommend learning something new. Anything, really.

    Acquiring new skills can sometimes unlock a powerful ability that you never knew you were missing until you found it. A new perspective, a new way of looking at old problems, or a new bit of insight into the otherwise mundane.

    And you never really know what that will be until you try to acquire those skills.

    When I took up running I started to see the world from the perspective of footpaths and interconnected trails.

    When I learned watercolour paints I suddenly saw colours in a different way.

    Now when I get my head around the piano and chords I listen to music differently, hear the shapes of things when I watch movies, and get a bigger sense of sounds that dance around genres of music.

    Your experience will vary.  But you will experience.

  • Inside Outsider

    The first time I ever thought about “outsider” influence on an art was watching that one episode The Simpsons[1]. Homer tries to build a backyard barbecue pit and turns into such a mess that some passing art gallery owner mistakes it for beauty and elevates him into the art scene. It is a parody of the notion of the idea that sometimes creation is accidental… and anyone can do it.

    It’s a farce of course. Comedy.

    But the notion of the novice outsider is not.

    I am definitely an outsider.

    I am not a pro. I am largely self-taught (provided you don’t count the occasional class at the community centre.) And I far too often break the rules simply because I don’t actually know them yet.

    Gatekeepers everywhere will pronounce, thus, that my efforts are null and void.

    And yet others of a more nurturing nature will decide that we are all students and imperfect until the day we die, so all of us are outsiders until then.

    Which is it?

    Being an outsider hardly puts me in a position to suggest what that answer might be, but I would offer that notions of “revitalizing energy”, “fresh blood” and “new talent” are not cliche by accident. I think many people recognize that outsiders can break barriers and unclog stuck patterns, maybe even helping those entrenched on the inside, offering inspiration or change.

    I’m not saying my noodling art will do that by some deliberate design or effort, but I think the possibility of such accidental insight means we shouldn’t simply dismiss outsiders either.