Chris Sacca's Creative Flywheel

The muses aren’t always amusing. They can show up with all sorts of noise. Why would inspiration work any other way?

So when Chris Sacca tells Jackson Dahl (in their brilliant Dialectic conversation), “Anytime I have a really strong reaction to something, that is a clue that we should do something,” I’m nodding in real time and thinking more about it days later.

There’s a through line here about finding inspiration I can’t shake. You have to fall in love with finding it. It’s a habit, and it’s not necessarily a comfortable one.

Of course it showed up in an unexpected place, too. That’s the magic of every episode of Dialectic. You probably don’t expect creative tips when you’re thinking about founders who love the English language and magic tricks as much as researching nuclear fusion, but hey, maybe you should?

Sacca was talking about meeting with his team after they met with this guy, Augustus Doricko. Augustus (which, great name, where’s my Lonesome Dove friends) is/was known for his mullet, working in front of a giant American flag, and unironically quoting the bible.

Not very silicon valley (ha!).

The team comes back from this meeting and is like, “THIS guy is just a little too big for his britches. The s*** that was coming out of his mouth was absolutely crazy. The ambition might be way out over his skis,” and that makes Chris and his co-founder wife Crystal stop in their tracks to say, “No dessert for you. Stand up right now and immediately go back to that meeting!”

Why is a weirdo giving off bad vibes a muse?

Because a muse elicits a feeling worth exploring.

“If we invest in normal people, all this money is going to go away. The alpha is in the f***ing weirdos. Immediately go back there.” The team protested. “Yes. He’s literally trying to make it rain. That’s exactly WHY we need to go talk to him.”

Now, they could've written a check based on spreadsheets and pattern matching. But instead, they had to remember else something first - and this is pretty easy to forget, especially with success - that the weirdest signal is often the truest one. 

Mullets and bibles and American flags in a venture portfolio make no sense on paper and they only make perfect sense in curiosity-inducing daydream land.

There’s magic in the discomfort. There’s magic in the inability to pattern match what might not even be a pattern right in front of you. You have to fall in love with surprise.

So the Saccas ended up backing him. With the approval of the team. They all needed a moment to remember their job was to intuition hunt wherever potential surprises were appearing.

Creative work is never any different.

I’ve written about creator flywheels before, but never from this perspective. It made sense this morning in all of a heartbeat.

Because just like Sacca, you know that when something feels weird, it’s the muse talking.

Once your curiosity is triggered, it’s time to get creative with it. And once a round of thinking is done, the real habit is to get back out there and search again.

The other Gus, my favorite Gus (McCrae), gets the last word, in another outlandish reference to the joys and dangers of all sorts of surprises (and memorable lines): "Well, the first man that comes along that can read Latin is welcome to rob us, as far as I'm concerned. I'd like the chance to shoot at an educated man, once in my life."

Go find your equivalent Augustus.