Madden Orlovsky who has autism, breaks into "You've Got a Friend in Me" while his father Dan watches on with tears in his eyes.
This was to honor Autism Awareness Day and the best thing youâll see today
Alright, you want to talk about âlow income kidsâ?
Texas under Abbott:
- Highest percentage of uninsured children in the United States
- Ranks 48th in overall child health
- Leads nation in mass shootings
- Your 2021 statewide power outage killed hundreds of Texans including âlow income kidsâ
- After your abortion ban, infant deaths up 12.9%
And now you want to defund the public schools that these kids depend on and raise everyoneâs property taxes!
This is one of the greatest displays of the creative process Iâve seen.
It perfectly illustrates something many of my favorite artists have described.
When you go to the studio, Mayer was asked, what do you do to generate ideas?
âWell, I donât always do it,â he admitted, âbecause it requires a stupid bravery all the time.â
Mayer strums a couple chords without singing. A nice melody begins to formââyou can sit here all day [doing this] and go, âOkay, maybe thatâs something.ââ
âBut if you donât go,â and then he starts improvising vocals,
âSunlights beating on the corner of the walls / and Iâm a Mr. know-it-all / heaven calls / get yourself right / get yourself right,â he stops, raises his finger to his mouth, and explains, âif youâre not ouija boarding immediately, youâre wasting time.â
âYou just stare at the corner of the wall,â he says, before improvising some more,
âStare at the corner of the wall / try to get it going on / but I canât sometimes / you just keep going 'til you get something / maybe Iâm a little bit shy / maybe someday Iâll tell you why.â
He stops singing to say, âyou gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it. It doesnât matter [what comes out of your mouth]...You gotta get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearlessâŠItâs hard to do.â
Takeaway:
When talking about their creative processes, many artists describe something similar to what Mayer refers to as âouija boardingââspitting out words and phrases, without worrying if theyâre good or even make sense).
When asked where his ideas came from, Pablo Picasso said, âAs soon as I start to work, [ideas] well up in my pen. To know what youâre going to draw, you have to begin drawing.â
Joan Didion famously wrote, âI write entirely to find out what Iâm thinking.â
And Judd Apatow said that his movie scripts are all a product of the Down-Up theory: âGet the ideas DOWN then fix them UP.â âGive yourself permission to suck,â Apatow says. âAnything goes. Just get something down.â Make it exist, as they say, then make it good.
Thereâs a neural explanation for this process...
I recently shared a clip of Dr. Andrew Huberman explaining what happens in our brain when we sit down to focus. Whether weâre trying to read, write, create a song, or generate ideasâwhen you sit down and try to focus, Huberman explains,
âThe brain circuits that turn on first are of the stress system...The agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of somethingâwhen youâre trying to lean into it and you canât focus: you feel agitated and your mindâs jumping all over the placeâthat is just a gate. You have to pass through that gate to get to the focus component.â
He uses a great analogy: âYou have to wade through some sewage before you can swim in clear water. Thatâs the way I always think about it.â
Essentially: you become creative by creating, you get more creative the more you create.
At the start of a focused creative session, bad ideas almost always come out first. You just have to wade through the sewage of bad ideas, âjust keep going âtil you get something,â as Mayer sang, âtil you reach clear water.
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âYou gotta keep forcing it, forcing it, forcing it...You gotta get fearless, fearless, fearless, fearless.â â John Mayer
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Did you know?
The 1876 Texas Constitution named Texas A&M a "Branch of the University of Texas." Twice, the Legislature passed an amendment to separate the two, but both times failed the statewide vote.
Therefore, constitutionally, Texas A&M is *still* a branch of @UTAustin.