Describe the Dream

Fresh from his doctoral program at Princeton, the physicist Richard P. Feynman and his wife boarded a train out west, to an arid scratch of dirt called Los Alamos. It was 1943 and there, Feynman set about making himself a terrible nuisance to all his employers, thwarting their efforts to keep him safe.

For years, he lived in a walled compound where the government censored his mail. He and his wife (who lived just outside) took pleasure in inventing new codes and thereby tortured the mail department’s editors. He discovered a small gap under the perimeter fence used by prairie foxes and enlarged it so he could crawl out to enter the main gate repeatedly without, to the guard's astonishment, ever leaving. He smuggled in a lock-picking set and read the contents of every safe on site.

Feynman the trickster. Photo credit: Caltech Digital Collections

Frustrated, his bosses put him in charge of an impossible problem. He inherited a team of college students trying to produce a formula. Because the project was top secret, nobody could tell them what it was for. They had been at it for a full year. 

Feynman listened for a few minutes, strode to the chalkboard and wrote, “IT’S A BOMB,” then walked out. The students solved the problem in three days.

I don’t love that this is a war-adjacent analogy so forgive me, history student that I am. But I see myself and our team in Feynman, the oddball outsider brought in to help organizations mired in bureaucratic accumulata.

Clients in our world often and quite understandably approach us just like the government did the college students—with briefs and premeditated requests. Everything is on a need-to-know basis and customers are under lock and key. They ask for 20 articles, never mind what they are for. 

But we cannot solve the puzzle until we know how the game is won.

Hence our principle, Describe the Dream. We don’t want instructions from clients. We want a well-defined problem and to hear what they hope happens. What do they want from the reader? How might it affect the world? That unleashes our creativity.

Give us that and as much context as possible—you cannot overwhelm us, I say—and you set our creative minds to their purpose.

Principle

♟️ Describe the Dream

We work best when presented problems to solve because it frees us to set the frame. If the frame is already set, we can only do so much. Always, we encourage the client to describe their dream.

How to apply today’s story

Pick one project and ask for more context. Lots more context. Schedule a coffee and go deep.

In the next issue

Plotting the endgame. 

Inside Fenwick

If Fenwick published a magazine offering work inspiration, would you read it? Would you contribute?

In other news, I’m taking improv classes again and I’m struck by this game: Interview someone as if you are a method actor studying your source. Ask them questions in the first person (“Where was I born?”) and they answer in the third (“You were born in Baltimore”). It will shock you how uncomfortably deep you go in two minutes. What can we learn from this about interviewing?

Worth reading

Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman!, the book. His autobiography is uncommonly concise, irreverent, and unpretentious. 

Efficiency Will Take, Not Give. Jacob was a news correspondent and now runs one of the most important Substacks I know. Worth a follow.

Intercom’s transformation report. Vigorous, clear writing. Intriguing landing page. And interactive, sort of: They allowed a clutch of expert commentators to leave “comment bubbles” throughout the report post-launch. 

Paul Krugman’s note on departing the Times. When your employer wants to dictate the truth, it’s time to go.

CEO agenda. A nice little video series by Bain & Company that shows videos needn’t be long.

Century-grade storage. Good long read.

The year creators took over. The New Yorker. 

Holiday treasures. A smart way to repackage existing goods by eBay.

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