I was asked, “What advice would you give a young creator?”

Different personalities need different advice—so I’ll avoid specifics. Kurt Vonnegut suggests generally that everyone do something with art in it every day. And then—most of the time—don’t show it. It’s the doing that gives the most help and allows you to find your inner stuff.

A general idea that helped me was to work on the parts of the arts I loved and was weakest at. Another idea along those lines was to judge myself on “quality of effort” rather than “quality of results.” Doing the former will usually allow the latter to find itself.

An idea I knew about, but didn’t do enough about, was that we humans don’t scale well, particularly in matching up ideas to wisdom. Our cleverness has increased our physical and mental powers by factors of billions—via the inventions of mathematics, science, the industrial revolution, etc.—but we still use the same parts of our cave ancestor’s brain when it comes to dealing with waste, use of power, slow-seeming big changes, and the like. We almost completely ignore that we’ve replaced a club or spear with Tomahawk missiles, that our Paleolithic garbage dumps are now the entire planet, that our tendency to lie for gain now is hacking the larger civilizations that can’t handle the scaling of communicating via a world-wide network.

“Lying in a good way” requires an especially tricky kind of wisdom. As deep creators we essentially “make lies come true” because we have to imagine the New as “something that isn’t true yet.” We shouldn’t take that away, but we have to deal with the difference between speculation and “plain lying” (this is difficult for most people, and requires quite a bit of sophistication to do).

Advice I would have given myself 70 years ago would be that it is a duty of being a creator living in a society to help the society understand the implications of new creations.

In my case, I would have spent at least ten times the fair amount I did spend to help schools and companies understand. This is very similar to the observation that a democracy requires citizens who are sophisticated enough to actually deal with the issues rather than to view the disputes as contests of identity. (If we want a democracy, then our duty as citizens is to support educating each new generation to the levels of sophistication needed.)

If we want to live in a society that has modern technology, we must ensure that it is “safe enough”: meaning that the combination of humans and technologies will be stable enough to make progress, but not so stultified that we cease being adventurous. We can’t allow powerful technologies to simply be scaled exponentially by the industrial revolution. We need to ask not just “Can we?” but also “Should we?” and “How should we?”.

This is why we need to include “better wisdom, different wisdom, etc.” as part of what we create. The “Art of Wisdom” is the most creative Art we have. The most Difficult. The most Important.

Best wishes
Alan