Who Moved My Cheese?

I read this book last night, my friends mum lent me it along with a few other books designed to help entrepreneurs and businessmen get the most out of life. I started reading at about 22:00 and finished by 23:00. I think I learned a lot from it, although to some extent it felt like it was stating the obvious.

Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life, published in 1998, is a motivational book by Spencer Johnson written in the style of a parable or business fable. It describes change in one's work and life, and four typical reactions to said change by two mice and two "littlepeople", during their hunt for cheese. A New York Times business bestseller since release, Who Moved My Cheese? remained on the list for almost five years and spent over 200 weeks on Publishers Weekly's hardcover nonfiction list.

There are two ways I make money. The first is through design, both graphic and web deisgn, where I create an invoice for an agreed amount and ask for the first half before I start a project and the other half when all the work is completed. The other way I make money is through producing music, both for myself under Toys With Knives and through producing other bands in the studio, where I use what I know about sound engineering to make them sound better.

About a month ago, the computer in my studio's motherboard fried. This means that for the last month I've been working a lot differently than how I usually would. Much like in the story, I'd become secure working with the tools I had at hand (Photoshop, Ableton Live, Pro Tools ect...) instead of considering work without these tools an option. As a result, my habits have changed. For the design work I've been doing, since it has been harder for me to gain access to a computer, I've spent much more time planning my work, and really thinking about the work I want to do rather than the usual trial and error approach I usually take to my work, where I try out new ideas on-the-fly as I'm working on a project. I guess, putting more care into the work I do has meant that I'm finding the work I do more intresting. Because it's much easier to pour your personality into a project when you care about it, the results have been greater, meaning my quality of work has improved.

The other massive change to my workflow is music. Usually what I'll do, is I'll have some free time where I try out song ideas on a synthersizer or guitar and then I'll record that into my studio PC and add layers until I have the outlines of a song and then I'll go back and fill in all the transitions. Not having the chance to record every idea I think of means I've had to rely on my musical memory a lot more. So my songwriting style has changed. Instead of the loop based, disco influenced music I was making a couple of months ago, my songs have been turning out to be more complex. With many layers all there in my head, but none of it down, it gives me freedom to change things before I write stuff down as notation by hand. Writing music by hand differs from plugging in MIDI notes because you really need to think about the relationships of one note to another rather than the individual sounds that each key makes on a synthersizer, or each fret on a guitar makes. Of course, to get some of the fiddlier virtuosic bits of guitar down takes more time than just recording it improvised, but this itself helps me what works and what dosen't musically.

The White Stripes use only 3 different musical elements at any one time in their songs. Usually vocals, drums and guitar. Due to Jack White's obsession with the number 3.

I'd seriously reccomend thinking about your creative ideas, and getting a good idea of what you're going to do, and when you're going to do it before you actually get down to starting any official work. Also, depriving yourself of technology can sometimes be a great thing, especially for musicians. Jack White of The White Stripes limits the amount of musical elements in any song to 3. This usually includes vocals, drums and guitar. Holy Fuck decided to see what would happen if they only used cheap vintage analog hardware and recorded it on the fly in one take to see if this kind of restiction would help the creative process. This minimal kind of thinking is really healthy if you're finding having too much stuff in the way of the ideas you really want to develop and put forward.

If you have any further thoughts, send them to me on twitter.