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WSJ. Magazine November 2013: The Columnists

WSJ. asks six luminaries, including Mindy Kaling and Nassim Taleb, to weight in on a single topic. This month: Innovation

Nick Cave
Nick Cave

"I've always been a maker. Even as a kid, I'd get hand-me-downs, redesign them, try to find my own identity. It was just creativity through innovation with surplus materials. For me, the body is a carrier. I'm a messenger, and I think of myself as a messenger before I'm an artist. In my studio, when I finish a piece, I know when it's done because all of a sudden there's just this breath. We photograph the work and then it goes into the receiving room. After it's picked up, I never, ever see it again. Ever. The only time I might see it is when I install it in a show. And I turn around, look back and say goodbye. It's a really weird thing. But it goes back to being a messenger. I'm here to deliver these deeds through this medium. I don't have ownership. What I'm doing when I'm looking back is looking to make sure that I delivered the message fully. And then I move on."

—Cave is a performance artist, sculptor and dancer.

Nassim Taleb ENLARGE
Nassim Taleb
Nassim Taleb

"If you look at the history of innovation, you discover that the process is much less intellectual than you might think. Less rationalistic, in the sense of being derived from the top down. Much less dominated by schools. And, typically, driven entirely by tinkering. Tinkering is just people doing what they like to do. The results come and often they don't even recognize them. It's not purposeful—often the result has nothing to do with what people start with. You look for India, you find America. If you want a breakthrough, don't specify where you're going. In the long run, the more randomness, the more you're going to be helped. I have no plan when I wake up in the morning. I have absolutely zero idea where I'm going. The minute I'm bored with something, I move on to something else. Life is too short—I follow stimuli."

—Taleb is a statistician and author of The Black Swan and Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder.

Ann Patchett ENLARGE
Ann Patchett
Ann Patchett

"I wouldn't wish any more innovation on fiction than has already arrived. With some things, we try to improve, improve, improve, and then we realize it's not better. I've done that with recipes so many times. You mess and mess with it, making it better, and then you go back and make it the first way again and think, Actually, that tastes a lot better. My dog—nobody's going to improve on this dog. The innovation of the family pet? It's not going to get any better. Bookstores: still absolutely the best way to buy a book. My husband has lots of classical vinyl records, and there are days when I come downstairs on a weekend morning and he's playing Shostakovich, and it's really lovely. You can have the iPod playing while you brush your teeth all you want, but to come into the living room and hear that record on the turntable—it's deep."

—Patchett is an author whose latest book, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, is out this month.

Dr. Luke
Dr. Luke

"There are a number of ways for innovation to happen. Collaboration is one. Another is just searching for greatness. Early in my career, a well-known manager told me that a hit song is like a million right decisions in a row. There are so many things that can throw it off. You have to have a little bit of an insane drive to get there. With music, a lot of days you start out pretty much uninspired. And then, all of sudden, you're inspired. I spent three hours noodling around with nothing, and then one minute this idea came—boom! Lightning in a bottle. But then you're like, okay, now where do I go from here? Producing it is a lot of trial and error. You might spend another three hours trying out wrong things, wanting to give up and then—boom— another idea happens. I usually just keep trying. I'm very stubborn. It's easy to write a good song, but it's hard to write a great song."

—Dr. Luke is a music producer and songwriter, who has worked with artists such as Katy Perry and Rihanna.

Mindy Kaling ENLARGE
Mindy Kaling
Mindy Kaling

"The hardest thing about comedy is when you can sense the effort, and you are repelled by it. When you have a group of comedy writers in a room, it's weird, because your job is to be funny, but it can't show too much effort. When we get to a funny area, we're talking about a heightened, documented conversation that we're having with our funniest friends. We have to shut off the parts of the brain that make it something we're stressed about, like work. It's all about observation and interactions, but I don't need to go to an art exhibit or Burning Man to get an idea. In fact, it's just the opposite. The more I run errands or do chores, the more inspiration I find. I get more out of filling my car with gas, getting it washed and returning some stuff to Best Buy than I would going to the library. So much of writing is repeating back into the script a funnier version of the thing you've just experienced."

—Kaling is a former writer and actress on The Office and the creator and star of The Mindy Project.

Christina Tosi ENLARGE
Christina Tosi
Christina Tosi

"One of the ways I hang on to creative or innovative ideas is by being a lunatic about notes. I have a desk, a laptop, notebooks, loose papers littered with Post-its, notes written on the backs of business cards, even written on cardboard ripped from a box. I always try to organize the process so I feel like less of a lunatic, but oftentimes something just bursts out of my head and I know if I don't capture it immediately, it will disappear. So I embrace the craziness and grab whatever is closest—which is sometimes a Sharpie in someone's apron or a pen in someone's ponytail—and scribble on whatever is close by. But at the same time, when it comes to innovation, there's a beauty to limiting yourself: backing yourself into a corner to force your creative mind back into itself until it implodes into something exponentially greater than it once was—kind of like nuclear energy."

—Tosi is the chef, founder and owner of Momofuku Milk Bar.

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