Welcome to the Action Digest, where we build momentum faster than a downhill skier in fresh powder.

A glimpse at the action we’re bringing you this week:

• 🎵 A behind the scenes look at Taylor Swift’s creative process reveals the danger of diving into the details too soon

• 📱 A rare visit to Apple’s design studio exposes a pattern for refining designs people love

• ✍️ We learn one of the biggest traps creatives fall into when they start working on a project from a world-leading design expert

P.s., you can check out editions 1-27 here in case you missed them, including insights such as the mindset that helped an entrepreneur build seven different billion-dollar companies, how Steve Jobs cultivated great creative taste, and why success might be much closer than we thought possible.

Seriously, there are some gems you’ll appreciate in these earlier editions ;-)

1. Work fast but don’t rush the details

Taylor Swift was once asked how she wrote her 2019 pop-hit, Lover. 

“I’ve never really been able to fully explain songwriting,” Swift confesses, “other than it’s like this little glittery cloud floats in front of your face, and you grab it at the right time, and then you revert back to what you know about the structure of a song in order to fill in the gaps.” 

The glittery cloud that inspired Lover rolled into Swift’s mind unexpectedly. “I was in bed,” she continues, “I was in Nashville, I got out of bed, I think it was really late at night, and like stumbled over to the piano.” 

Swift started recording a voice note on her iPhone and said, “OK so I had this idea, obviously I don’t know the verse, or whatever yet, but I have a pretty cool, really simple, beautiful, chorus idea called ‘lover.’” 

We then hear Swift play the simple melody of the chorus of Lover on the piano.  

“What did you have in your mind?” the interviewer asks, “Was it the title? Was it a lyric? Was it a melody?” 

“It was ‘Can I go where you go? Can we always be this close?’” Taylor replied. 

Armed with those simple lyrics, and a basic tune, Swift hopped on a plane to start working on the song in her studio the very next day. Once she arrived, she started hashing out the finer details with her producer. 

First up: which instruments to use. “I don’t see it as piano,” Swift says in a behind the scenes video of her recording session, “I think it’s that kind of dreamy… guitary… throwback… but not like camp throwback.” 

She figures out how to sing specific parts, such as the “walkdown” on the key lyric “You're my, my, my, my Lover,” admitting, “I was trying to figure out what the hell was going to happen there.” 

And she refines the final lyrics: “In the studio I’m obsessively going over every lyric and making sure that’s what I want the final lyric to be. So I’ll be over in my notes just like—sharpen that, hone in on that.” 

By the end of that day, the full song was finished. 

Notice how Taylor worked fast but didn’t rush the details. Taylor brought Lover into the studio as a low-resolution “cloud:” a simple melody, a simple lyric, a feel for the song. Through a series of explorations in the studio, the finer details such as instruments and specific lyrics gradually came into focus. 

This gradual arc of creative refinement seems to crop up whenever you look at the world’s most successful creative processes…

2. We iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations

Jony Ive was once asked how he and Steve Jobs came up with Apple’s iconic products. 

“It didn’t start with drawings,” Ive revealed, “it started with conversations.” “From nothing, you tentatively start to build something, but with words and with what you can visualize.”

From there, the process would move into Jony Ive’s top secret design studio. This is where Ive would create dozens of cheap models to further refine their vision. 

As Steve Job’s biographer, Walter Isaacson was granted rare access to Ive’s studio. “On this day,” Isaacson recalls, “Ive was overseeing the creation of a new European power plug and connector for the Macintosh. Dozens of foam models, each with the tiniest variation, have been cast and painted for inspection.”

Ive explained that “much of the design process is a conversation, a back-and-forth as we walk around the tables and play with the models. He [Steve Jobs] doesn’t like to read complex drawings. He wants to see and feel a model.” 

The resolution of these models were high enough to facilitate feedback yet low enough to allow new versions to be churned out on a daily basis. “There are no formal design reviews, so there are no huge decision points. Instead, we can make the decisions fluid. Since we iterate every day and never have dumb-ass presentations, we don’t run into major disagreements.” 

Apple’s products have historically seemed to be the result of magic. But they are in fact the result of a tried and tested process that underscores every successful creative endeavor. It begins with rapid, expansive, and low-resolution ideation, followed by a gradual narrowing of the scope of possibilities, all the while sharpening the resolution with each iteration, until the final, polished outcome emerges. 

While this approach may seem natural, it is anything but…

3. Never, ever, convey a degree of confidence or commitment beyond where you are in the process

When Bill Buxton isn’t leading research at Microsoft, he teaches master’s students how to design things people actually want to use. 

Students are often alarmed by the warning that Buxton gives them at the start of the course in his lesson on sketching designs. 

“The first thing I say when I come into a class,” Buxton explains, “is I say ‘I take marks off for good work.’ And the students are all trying to say… ‘What? What are you talking about?’ ‘No, no,’ I said, ‘really.’ ‘If you bring me really good work, I'm gonna fail you. And I don't care how good it is. The better it is, the more I'm gonna fail you. This is a class on sketching and if you had time to do that one beautiful rendering, you had time to do 10 variations.’”

Adding too much beauty and detail at the start of the process, before you’ve had a chance to explore, is a creative deathtrap as far as Buxton is concerned. Early sketches should be messy, quick, and plentiful. They should be low-resolution, like Taylor’s cloud, and Steve/Jony’s conversations. 

“The whole point of the early phases of design,” Buxton continues, “is to make sure that when you start off with a blank piece of paper, that you not only get the design right, but you get the right design. And if you have not just explored every possibility at every step on every decision along the way—you are probably going to have the best product that's a failure. Beautifully engineered. Gorgeous to look at. And it's a failure. And by the time you're halfway down the process you find out it's too late. You can't go backwards and refactor and start again. You're done. The most important part is that early phase of the project. That's when you have the lowest burn rate for your clients. That's when you have the time to experiment and take these chances. And so what you can do by sketching is you can get way further down the process without [actually] going down that process because you're working at such a low level of fidelity that all you can see are the essential concepts.”

This is something that Scott Belsky has become attuned to while leading teams at Behance, Adobe, and beyond. “I would often need to abruptly stop a product or design review that went straight into the details with a question like, ‘wait, what’s the zen of this product?’ What I meant with this question was: what’s the ‘cool’ of this product? And what problem are we ultimately trying to solve?” This line of questioning helps teams zoom back out to explore the lower resolution aspects of a product before becoming fixated on higher-resolution details too soon. 

And when Jeff Weinstein, the product lead at Stripe, was asked how he gets things done at a massive company, he also stressed the importance of starting with low-fidelity exploration. “Not [with] Figma initially,” Weinstein says, “but just like… Sharpie. What is the unconstrained perfect solution to this burning problem? And that’s, you know, Pixar style storyboard. You don’t need to be a designer. You can just draw like stick figures on a piece of paper.” 

Pay careful attention to the fidelity of your tools and the resolution of your designs and ask: is it appropriate for the phase of the creative process that you’re in? 

• Are you ready to obsess over the lyrics or should you be exploring simple melodies at the piano? 

• Are you ready to write code or should you be jotting down approaches in your notes app? 

• Are you ready to create mockups in Figma or should you be sketching messy doodles on scraps of paper? 

“How you render,” Buxton concludes, “should never, ever, convey a degree of confidence or commitment beyond where you are in the design process.”

4. Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage

When you study the world’s most prolific creatives, athletes, business leaders, etc, you see the same pattern over and over again.

Working with a bias towards action is the ultimate competitive advantage.

That means always knowing your next move. And it means building a habit of turning your ideas and notes into action steps.

The Action Method product line, designed by a research team devoted to optimizing productivity, was made to optimize working with a bias towards action.

Each page includes a dedicated Action Zone that encourages you to stay action-oriented.

That means getting more done, seeing more results, and feeling more satisfaction.

You can pick up or replenish your supply here. 

We’ll leave you with this…

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