Cows and creativity

You are not going to be more creative by spending more time in a day trying to be creative. Instead, you need to "chew the cud"

For starters, Neal Stephenson, he of Cryptonomicon and The Baroque Cycle and Termination Shock, is on Substack.

And he has an awesome latest post, in which he describes his process of creativity. It is basically a “cow process”. The money quote from his post is this:

You can’t milk a cow 24/7, you have to milk her for a short time and then let her go out to pasture and be a cow for the rest of the day, chewing her cud and so on. Likewise with writing or any other form of focused creative work.

If you are doing any sort of creative work, you ought to recognise this. Sometimes All the time we seem to forget that creativity is like milking a cow, and think that the more the time we spent in working, the more we will get done. While that is true for “fighter” work, the scaling just doesn’t happen for creative work.

There is this optimal period of working, which is far less than a conventional work day, where the return on investment on creative work gets maximised. You try to do any more than that, and you will burn out / produce atrocious quality work. And Stephenson talks about this later on in his post:

I first understood the Cow Milking/Cud Chewing dynamic in the mid-1980s. Prior to that I was consumed by the Protestant Work Ethic and tried to write 8 or more hours a day. This didn’t work out very well—I spent a couple of years toiling over a manuscript (never to be published) that was an incoherent mess.

The other important concept he writes about here is the concept of cud chewing - keeping the bovine analogy, you can’t milk a cow for 2 hours and then lock her up in a shed for the rest of the day. She needs to be allowed to graze (i.e. consume content) and chew cud, which will then get processed into tomorrow’s milk.

So if you are in a creative profession, it is also necessary to plan out the “cud chewing” part of your day so that it feeds in to tomorrow’s creativity. Maybe it is reading. Maybe it is talking to people. Maybe it is analysing data. The kind of cud you need to chew is strongly based on the kind of milk that you are producing.

Now I’m starting to think that in respect of my current venture, I’ve possibly been spending too much time milking (designing algos, and building an AI that can analyse data by itself) and too little time chewing the cud (actually analysing data, talking to people, etc.). Need to reprioritise.

If you are in a creative profession, how do you define your “milking” and your “cud chewing”? And how optimised is your cud chewing to your milking process?