James Joyce and Joey Ramone
I like to recommend Dublin as a travel destination because unlike other European capitals there is nothing there you have to see or do so you never end up paying through the nose to stand on some unbearably long line. That said, even though there is nothing you have to see or do there is still lots to see and do and one fun stop is the James Joyce Centre on North Great George’s Street. It was there that I first encountered one of Joyce’s famous notebooks.
Joyce, you may know, is the author of Ulysses, which is generally considered one of if not the greatest novel of all time. It’s a wonderful, albeit dense, book, and if you do the work to understand the references and inside jokes, it is in spots wildly entertaining. Part of that work can be reading The Most Dangerous Book, a more recent nonfiction publication that delves into great detail about how Joyce came to write Ulysses and handled its many censorship battles. The reason that book is interesting is because the story of how someone comes to create a masterpiece is often more interesting than the masterpiece itself!
So what of Joyce’s notebooks?
Joyce was an inveterate notetaker, filling notebooks with one-liners, short anecdotes, and references that he later wanted to use in his work. What he then did was methodically deploy those in his drafts, crossing them out in crayon as he did so so he could tell that he had used that note already in something. What the exhibit I saw at the Joyce Centre did was connect the crossout to the usage and the reason that stuck with me is because I didn’t expect a creative genius to use such a simple, rote, and structured process.
Speaking of, I was at the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, and had the chance to see a Ramones setlist. What was similarly interesting about that was not only did the setlist include the songs that the seminal punk band would play in the order they would play them, but it also included how long each would last and what Joey Ramone, the lead singer, would say in between songs including their trademark “1-2-3-4s!” (be sure to click that link). Here I thought all of that energy was improvised (isn’t that the ethos of punk rock?), but it was, in fact, scripted.
People and organizations tend to resist structure and process and have lots of good explanations for doing so. But I would argue that structure and process are necessary for a person or organization to achieve greatness. The reason is that greatness requires being able to do something well over and over again and the only way to reliably do that is to have a sustainable process to fall back on. This is why Joyce had his notebooks and the Ramones their setlists. Those resources are what enabled them to go out into the world everyday and try to do something amazing without having to start over each day from zero.
Because if someone had to do that daily, achieving greatness would be at the very least exhausting and potentially impossible.
– By Tim Hanson