And the answer is:
Look at the stone and remove everything that doesn’t look like an elephant.
This is obviously a joke: such advice is completely useless when applied to elephant carving. Why? Because the hard part about carving an elephant is precisely to determine whether a given inch of stone looks like it’s part of the final statue. Once you get over this difficulty, the act of cutting the stone is a mere implementation detail.
On the other hand, elephant carving is an excellent technique in situations where cutting the stone is hard and finding the elephant is easy. All you have to do is find huge amounts of stone and be willing to remove anything that does not fit.
I went to a wedding this week-end (stranding a lonely @TheGirlPie in the comments section of this blog, sorry girlie!) and took pictures. Hundreds.
What I could have done: upload all the pictures to Facebook, remove the pictures where people who don’t like to be seen making funny faces are making funny faces and finally tag everyone to validate my social existence through the number of Facebook friends I have.
What I did: remove the ugliest half of the photo album, then remove the ugliest half of what remained, and so on until only a handful of pictures remained. Badly framed or blurry pictures died to bring you this information. In fact, all the pictures that weren’t exceptionally well-framed and well-focused were suicided à la Staline. I uploaded those that remained and again removed all those that looked bad when resized by Facebook.
And then, I removed another batch and uploaded the three survivors here:
Keep in mind that I’m a very bad photographer, with no training or experience or talent. I used a cheap point-and-shoot camera that’s designed to make recognizable pictures of people and things, not beautiful pictures. But the odds were on my side: out of hundreds of pictures, a few had to be good.
All I needed was the time to take hundreds of pictures, and the willingness to throw away 99%.
Sounds easy? Sure.
Have you carved out all the unnecessary lines in your resumé, or are you trying to impress the recruiter with the sheer size of it ? (hint : you won’t)
Have you carved out all the boring text and slow passages of your latest article, book or blog post? Or are you afraid of accepting that the time it took you to write them was wasted?
Have you carved out all the arcane options and awkward features from your software? Or are you in love with your work?
When you’re the one making the stone, carving elephants is simply accepting that most of what you did is worthless and should be thrown away. Being outstanding is throwing away everything that isn’t.
And subscribing to this blog.
Hi. I'm Victor Nicollet,
Also, the comments system has been changed because it made @TheGirlPie sad. Please let me know if you have commenting issues!
(the main change being that you can now reply to someone)
I had this type of experience when building the mobile version of my website. I already had a full version of the site which I thought was as simple as it could get. When I was forced to make it fit on an iphone screen, I realized I could cut out 80% of it and still have a pretty solid product. I still prefer the full version, but being forced to remove features was a great exercise. It helped me understand the difference between the core features and the extra stuff that I wanted, but didn’t need.
Also, I just realized that I wrote about something like this a while back. My main takeaway was that if you can remove elements from software, that’s great, even if it means admitting that you wasted your time building it in the first place. Your final sentence sums that up perfectly.
I do think it’s a two part process. You have to give yourself complete wild abandon to create the rough outline of your creative endeavor. Then you invite your internal editor back from its vacation and let it go to town. It’s humbling, painful, but yet exhilarating to see what’s left after that. You have to trust that cutting the excess will result in something breathtaking.