Setbacks and Sheeran's Law

🤔 INTERESTING

Sheeran's Law
("Rule of the Dirty Faucet)

A piece of advice I give my screenwriting students:
Write ALL your ideas down.

Especially the bad ones.

If you leave it, the gunk expands and muddies your thinking.

If you want to make the good stuff, you have to get through the bad stuff.

"When you switch on the dirty tap, sh*t water is going to flow out for a substantial amount of time. Then clean water is gonna start flowin'”
-Ed Sheeran

📐 DESIGN

There’s a lot that goes into clarifying, simplifying and amplifying an idea and turning into a visual, but ask any creator and they’ll tell you it all starts with writing down observations.

Sounds simple enough.

But one important principle most people forget:
Delay judgement until you’re in the execution phase.

One thing I tell my students all the time is “brainstorming is an idea generation process, not a decision making one.”

Here’s one of my original notes:

Not pretty I know but I try to make it a point to draw an idea from my head in less than 10 seconds in notes.

This observation later turned into this:

Takeaways:

• Write all ideas and observations down without judging their merit.

• Challenge yourself to getting it on the page in less than 10s.

🔮 ENCHANTING 

"An arrow can only be shot by pulling it backward.

So when life is dragging you back with difficulties, it means that it's just going to launch you into something great.

So just focus, and keep aiming."

-Stephanie Simpson

🧠 ANALOGY

"Remarkable results are simply the result of unremarkable daily effort."
-Sahil Bloom

If you’ve never seen a stone cut this way, it’s actually quite amazing.

In this video, a 26,000 pound block of granite is split into 2 equal parts with a 2 pound hammer:

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