194: Curiosity and criticism
Some Godin and Perkin wisdom, a new Seenapse, Veo3 image reference and more
Curiosity and criticism are not a Venn diagram, or opposites, or kissing cousins. But they sure do rhyme. At least within the business of being a creative person.
Which is why it’s both maddening and essential to tell the difference between curiosity as an act, a practice, a gift…and criticism as its own practice, and art form, and sometimes also a gift. We need both, yet we need to know which is which and the roles they can play in a process, or culture.
Curiosity is inherent to creating. Criticism is a reaction to what’s created.
I’m still thinking about Mike Birbiglia’s interview with Pixar’s Pete Doctor (Apple, Spotify) and their brief discussion of feedback. Specifically, how important it is—when your intention is curiosity—to announce the presence of emotions and feelings. “This [insight, strategy, headline, layout, logo, concept] you made caused me to feel [name a distinct emotion] and I want to talk about why that happened.”
Let’s repeat Pete’s structure:
Name the creativity in question
Name an emotion the work triggered
Open a dialogue to reveal why
Curiosity seeks to be within the work unfinished, to meld with a process and perhaps guide an outcome. Curiosity is a muscle. You can hone it, tune it, make it stronger and more resilient—more effective in the practice of reacting to creativity. Much of that work is centered in emotion. Discerning it. Analyzing why a given artifact radiates or generates a feeling, or lack of.
Criticism stands well past the finish line—insightful, but apart from the work.
The distinction matters because ideas can be fragile and evaluating ideas is a skill you can improve.
Both carry responsibility.
In the realm of marketing, our curiosity seeks to expand, to unearth, to strengthen, to target more effectively. The act of being curious in relation to an idea suggests a willingness to be as responsible for its evolution as those who brought it to life. There is kinship in curiosity.
In contrast, criticism is its own thing. It is not a part of the idea upon which it reacts. Criticism is something new entirely; its own form—predicated upon the work in question. The responsibility here is not to the originating idea itself but to an audience, a genre, a culture.
Of course there’s timing and tactics. When and how you express curiosity or criticism can matter as much if not more than what you convey.
But recognizing there’s a difference makes all the difference.
Notes to myself
Anyone who’s followed my writing over the decades knows I’m an ardent fan of Seth Godin. His recent “Notes to myself” is an encapsulation of 65 themes he’s written deeply about. Might take you two minutes to scan, but a lifetime to leverage. My top five favorites:
#11. Everyone who disagrees with you believes they are correct — I need to remember this one daily.
#17. Uncomfortable facts are often the most helpful ones — Alas, we often have much more to learn than we we might have hoped.
#35. Perfectionism is not related to quality — This one is a favorite. Too often the ideal of “perfect” distracts us from finishing, from progress, from understanding the real task at hand.
#43. Create tension and relieve stress — The enigma. Yet, within marketing (and to be clear, as Seth puts it, “everything is marketing”) the clearer, quicker path to solutions has to involve useful, actionable tension. If you’re not feeling something you’re living in mediocrity.
#54. Today’s world is unpredictable, and this is as stable as it will ever be again — As it relates to this last point, you can query an AI built upon all of Seth’s writing—10,000+ blog posts, dozens of books. Not a bad place to start when you’re seeking wise council.
AI+Creativity Update
⚖️ Denmark’s new copyright law
“Denmark introduced an amendment to its copyright legislation so people could own their own likeness,” notes Fast Company. “By explicitly granting individuals rights over their digital likeness, the Danish law could provide the legal foundation needed to effectively combat deepfake abuse.” You didn’t realize you don’t own your own likeness? Well, you kind of don’t in the convoluted overlap of U.S. law and AI. Thank the Danes for taking a stab at clarifying who owns what. More from The New York Times.
🌟 The new Seenapse - and the power of divergence
I’ve talked about Seenapse before (and interviewed its founder Rafa Jimenez in the podcast). Seenapse is a purpose-built idea/strategy-generation platform. Their secret sauce has been a layer of “divergence,” a model on top of ChatGPT/Claude/Mistral, etc. tuned specifically for the business of creativity. They just announced a new version of their platform, and I think it’s worth your time exploring. Two things stand out: The system’s inherent context is the realm of strategic insights and creative ideation across advertising, design, experiential, etc. so you don’t have to tell it to “act like an agency creative.” Second, the output resembles a mind map, which can be much more intuitive than a giant long scroll of text.
🤖 Veo3 welcomes image reference
My teenagers love to use my face as artwork on merchandise. So for this year’s birthday I got an umbrella. Beats last year’s bath mat to be honest. And thanks to the latest update to Google Gemini Veo3, I can generate video using this reference image. The image quality is impressive, as The Verge and Ars Technica note, but you have to have at least a $20/month plan and you can only render three 8-second videos per day.
🙏🏽 Thank you,
On the subject of challenging one’s own thinking:
“For businesses, the competitive advantage of the future won’t only be about who can be the most efficient and productive, it will be about who can innovate and think in creative ways. And so we need to think about AI in that way as well. ¶ But at a personal level, this is also about how it can help me to get to places that I couldn’t have otherwise got to on my own.”
A longer and very actionable read here on various techniques for leveraging AI in different ways to get away from generic, mediocre results.
🤖 🍁 AI for Artists and Entrepreneurs (online)
From August 25 - December 12 I’ll be teaching a wholly revised, very in-depth, asynchronous curriculum for MCAD. You can register for it here.
Thanks for the mention Tim :-)
Tim, thanks a lot for the shout out!