Podcast Transcript on substack | Video on Youtube
My guest today is Andrea Binasco.
Andrea is the co-founder of Sefirot, a publishing house of a few amazing creative tools. They have 50000 users all over the world and I am one of them. I discovered Sefirot through Cicero, their deck of cards for public speaking, and I have purchased all their other decks since then.
Andrea is a teacher, an author and, more generally, a creative. It was beautiful to hear about his creative process, their plans for Sefirot, and test some of our ideas with him.
In this episode, we talk about:
⛽ Fueling the creative process through cards
✨ Insights on the creative process
💥 Linearity and Chaos in the creative journey
Here are my takeaways:
⛽ Fueling the creative process through cards
Sefirot has designed and published a few card decks designed to support the creative process of their users. I particularly resonated with the idea to give people the tools they need to get work done. Like a Montessori facilitator would do, you offer games, and anyone can pick them up and have the entire activity on their own without needing anyone throughout the process. Growth, freedom, and empowerment.
The cards are an educational device because you learn while using them, and they are also useful right from the start because you can deliver the piece of work. You don’t need to get the theory first and then apply it to the actual project you have. You work from the very first start on your project. The wisdom is there, pre-digested for you.
The immediate benefit is that you save time. Your time to actual creation is faster and the overall creation time is less. Most important is that you can bring more of yourself in the process. Because of the format of the cards, the prompts need to be brief. And it gives you larger blanks to fill, and more space to express yourself. They’re just triggers for your intuition.
Because the cards are analog, you also reduce the risk of multitasking: you won’t switch to another screen, window, or tab. And not being online means also less risk to be distracted by someone else and their presence and what it brings of expectations, their ideas, and even sometimes their recommendations. Retreat from the world and do you! Do “deeper you”, “higher you”, whatever you call it, “more you”.
Because the cards are physical, you can use them to change your physical space. It can be on your table or it can be in an entire room using the walls, the floor, the ceiling even if you have a ladder. If you are familiar with the memory palace (aka the Method of Loci), you know that space helps us memorize and recall information, space can help you think as well. You can create zones where you can develop ideas.
We explored two paths forward involving cards as creative devices:
- A room of cards.
Imagine a library made only of decks of cards, structured so you can work on your projects, whatever they are. Hundreds, or thousands of boxes stacked up by intention.
- Table Top Games.
How about a card deck to create an improv scene or create a piece of art from scratch in 2–3 hours?
✨ 10 Insights on the creative process
Andrea creatively creates creative tools, so his perspective on creativity was particularly interesting to me.
Here are the 10 main insights from our chat:
- Challenge your fears of expressing yourself and thinking you will be judged, just play. (Will write about this soon, reach out if you need mental models to combat that fear)
- Blank page syndrome? The decks of cards Sefirot offers are one way to get the juice flowing, you get simple steps and more importantly the first one, you can question/disagree, which means you started.
- Follow your intuition, Do not overthink, and get things done instead. Some things feel they are for you. Some things feel they’re not. And you want to comply.
- Seek discomfort: At the same time, you want to push yourself, do things that are difficult, out of your comfort zone, and don’t become complacent.
- Listen to feedback from others and be data-driven in order to iterate your creation. Don’t get too attached to your creation. Build on the feedback.
- Find balance: your intuition, pushing yourself out of your comfort zone, get getting feedback.
- “Yes, and…”: Build on other people’s creations. Don’t get paralyzed by envy. You will see others delivering beautiful things you wish you had done already, you will be triggered, feel threatened by their genius (FOMO), and want to avoid it or judge it as crap (fear turned into anger). Don’t reject or dismiss their stuff, be grateful that they light a path for you, something you want as well, build on top, “steal” in a good way.
- Wait for it. Just wait for beauty to emerge. Don’t rush the creative process, let it unfold. If you want something truly remarkable, you want bits of magic. You can’t force the magic, you channel it but it chooses when to emerge. Surrender to your inner genius whether you think/feel it as a part of your brain processing insights in the background or a connection to the source. Not everything is a process you can control. Just wait for it.
- Explore many different things to connect what’s not connected yet. Remember why you are exploring and let intuition drive some of the mix and match.
- Go to the root: Extract the best insights from your assemblage. Ideally, you explore the entire territory (for instance, the hero’s journey, character arc, Kishōtenketsu, and all the other ones) and you go to the root, the base concept on which everything is based and you build your creative solutions on top of that base concept.
💥 Linearity and Chaos in the creative journey
Andrea spoke about linearity and chaos in creativity and it opened my mind. I am still figuring out the implications of the dance between the two.
We used to get information linearly. Think about the curriculum at school, from one year to another, from one lesson to the next. Think about TV that was on a set schedule. Think about our computers which could barely handle one task. Today, you can ask chatGPT to summarize what the next school year will be about, you jump from one tab about 3d printing your house in clay to another about the best practices of intentional living…
Just see how the barriers to information have gone down:
- Time: You don’t need to wait for the library to be open or for your favorite program to air. It is always available.
- Space: You can access the content from any country in the world.
- Cost: Most content is now digitized reducing the logistics cost and most of it is free. And if it is not free, there are always options to pirate it. I am not looking at the ethics of it, just the fact information is being liberated all over the place.
- Speed: You don’t/won’t need to read the book cover to cover. You can read the summary. You can ask to be taught something at the level you are by AI.
Andrea spoke about “chaos” when describing the current informative/creative process in opposition to the linear paradigm of consuming/creating we used to live in. This new superpower of accessing information changes the way we think.
Andrea spoke about two paths:
- Supporting people with linear processes in order to make sense of the chaos. You give tools to put structure back into an unstructured world.
- Support people to be more chaotic. How do you help people shake their creative process, integrate topics that seemed completely unrelated, and prompt people to see commonalities, differences, and play.
Sefirot is doing both.
Resources:
- Intuiti: The tool for Creativity used by over 30,000 creatives around the world. A synthesis of Design, Tarot and Gestalt Psychology, by Sefirot
- Fabula for Storytelling, by Sefirot
- Fabula for kids, by Sefirot
- Cicero : Public Speaking Deck, by Sefirot
- Edito : Card Deck to edit your manuscript, by Sefirot
- BAD : Business Aware Design Deck, by Sefirot
- Sefirot, The publishing house of Mateo & Andrea
- Character Arc
- Kishōtenketsu (起承転結) describes the structure and development of classic Chinese, Korean, and Japanese narratives. More about it here.
