The Future Belongs to Those With Something to Say

Todd Henry [00:00:02]:

Hey everyone, welcome to Daily Creative. My name is Todd Henry. So in 1972, an Italian pop singer named Adriano Celentano released one of the strangest hit songs in music history. It was called Priscilla, Colin and Sin-Sin-Sou-Sou. And if you hear it without knowing anything about it, you might assume you're listening to an American singer performing in English. The rhythm of the language sounds like English, the cadence, sounds a lot like English. The phrasing sounds a lot like English. It has the unmistakable quality of someone singing words that you don't quite understand but somehow feel like you should.

Todd Henry [00:00:39]:

There was just one problem: it wasn't English. In fact, it wasn't any language at all. Celentano had deliberately invented a series of nonsense syllables designed to mimic the sound of American English. He was fascinated by the way that English sounded to Italians who didn't speak it, and he wanted to create a song that captured the experience of hearing a language without actually Understanding it. And somehow against all odds, his experiment worked. The song became a massive hit, reached number 1 in Italy. A song that didn't actually say anything became incredibly popular because it sounded like it was saying something. I wonder if many creative pros, many of us who are making things, are approaching our own version of Prissing Kalinin Sinsein Su Sol.

Todd Henry [00:01:22]:

Let me explain. First of all, Fluency is not meaning. This is what I call the posturing trap. We're living through an extraordinary moment in which our devices can produce almost anything we ask. If you type a prompt, any LLM can respond to an email, spit out a strategy or a presentation or a marketing campaign. It can develop a speech or an image or crank out a dozen ideas before you've finished your first cup of coffee. And increasingly, the output doesn't just look competent, it actually sounds competent. It has the cadence of intelligence, the cadence of intelligence, but there's a difference between producing something that sounds meaningful and actually having something meaningful to say.

Todd Henry [00:02:04]:

A beautifully written paragraph can contain no original thought, just like a polished presentation can communicate with no real conviction. A clever strategy can simply rearrange familiar ideas that feel vaguely like something we'd choose, but is actually just mimicking popular and staid advice. We can create work that has all the external signals of quality while quietly removing the very thing that makes quality possible, which is a human being who has wrestled with an idea long enough to develop a perspective on it. That's the part that concerns me. We are removing the wrong kinds of friction. These new tools that we're using will almost certainly make us more productive, no question. But the danger is that they might make us so productive that we stop honing and defining our own positions and intuition. We remove the friction that is the work, not just the friction that's in the way of the work.

Todd Henry [00:02:57]:

This means we can produce work that sounds fluent without actually meaning anything of substance, just like the nonsense song. So that's the first thing. Fluency is not meaning. This is the posturing trap. The second is the struggle gives the meaning. This is what I call the plateau trap. Now, the strange thing about creative work is that the part that we most want to eliminate because it's uncomfortable is often the part that makes the work valuable. The blank page, the terrible first draft, the conversation that goes nowhere, the 20 bad ideas that we toss out before we have a good one, the afternoon spent fruitlessly staring at a problem with nothing to show, the uncomfortable question someone asks in a meeting that forces you to reconsider an assumption that you've held for years.

Todd Henry [00:03:43]:

None of those things feel particularly productive in the moment, but They're often where our best and most insightful and most intuitive thinking happens. If we use technology to remove every moment of friction from the creative process, we may accidentally remove the very friction that produces insight. Now listen, I'm not arguing we should reject any of these new tools. Quite the opposite. We should use them aggressively where they genuinely help us. Let them handle the tedious friction that's in the way of the work, but not the friction that is the work. We should be careful about outsourcing the parts of the process that are supposed to change us. The goal of creative work isn't merely to arrive at an answer.

Todd Henry [00:04:25]:

It's to grow into the kind of person who can see something that wasn't obvious before, to hone our intuition and our judgment, to become someone different as we do the work. The process is the product. In creative work. So that's the second thing. The struggle gives the meaning. This is the plateau trap. We hit a plateau, we stop evolving, we stop growing. The third is that standing next to the work is not doing it.

Todd Henry [00:04:55]:

This is what I call the proximity trap. This is why I think human-led intuitive work will become even more valuable in the years ahead. I believe that genuinely human work will begin to stand out more and more because it will contain a point of view. A perspective, a productive passion and authenticity, showing skin in the game, right? Conviction, taste, judgment, unique experience, and some scars. It will feel like somebody actually thought about this. And that's the irony of Celentano's strange little song, right? The words were meaningless, but the idea behind the song was actually meaningful. The nonsense was actually communicating something real, what it feels like to hear a language you don't understand. There's real meaning in that.

Todd Henry [00:05:39]:

It actually impacted people. Because it was created by a human. And that's an important lesson for all of us. We have more tools than ever for making things that sound like they mean something. So our responsibility is to make sure that they actually do. Use the tools. Just don't let them do your thinking for you. The future won't belong to people who can produce the most.

Todd Henry [00:06:03]:

It will belong to the people who still have something worth saying, and to those who have done the thinking necessary to say it. Okay. Thanks so much for joining us. If you'd like all of our interviews, which we have a ton of interviews in full, you can get them at dailycreativeplus.com. Just go there, enter your name and email address, and we'll send you a private feed where you can listen to all of them. My name is Todd Henry. If you'd like information about my books or my speaking events or more of these episodes, just go to toddhenry.com. Until next time, may you be brave, focused, and brilliant.

Todd Henry [00:06:37]:

We'll see you then.