HOW THE MATH OF CREATIVITY WORKS

MY EIGHTEEN YEARS OF MAKING EVERYTHING I CAN

Somewhere around two hundred and fifty unique guitar pedals carry my initials JHS across eighteen years of catalog. Current lineup, discontinued, rare, hand-paints, modifications, artist collaborations, color variants, revisions that kept getting better. If you strip the variants and count only the original circuits, the number lands somewhere around a hundred. It’s hard to count them all but my estimate is close.

Of all of those, six or seven have paid for everything. Eight if I am being generous.

Things like the Morning Glory, Colour Box, Angry Charlie, Muffuletta, Bonsai, PackRat, the 3-Series line as a whole, and the Notaklön. A small handful of pedals that carried the entire company on their backs while the rest of the catalog did its job — to add a bit of margin across the market and exist long enough for me to find out which of the new pedals were going to carry the company on their backs.

I could not have told you, in 2008 or 2012 or 2019, which ones would be the heroes — nobody could have. The Morning Glory was a personal reinvention of a classic circuit I made because I could not find what I wanted to play. The Colour Box was my Everest, a four hundred dollar DI stompbox that everybody I trusted told me would probably never sell. The Muffuletta was the origin of my obsession with collecting vintage pedals. Not a single one of these ideas arrived with a sign on it that said this is the one, but each one began to teach me a very important thing about making:

You only find out which ones are the ones by making everything you can and not looking back.

This truth is something that most creative people I know struggle to understand about their work, business, and about living a life that produces anything at all. They look at the winners and assume the maker had something magical. They assume there was a master plan, a perfect strategy, a sense of which perfectly planted seed would become the oak that rose above the tree line. In reality, there was none of that — there was a person planting handfuls of seeds because that is the way that the math of sowing seeds works. Some grow. Some don’t.

Luckily, there is some science underneath this concept that helps explain things in a more concrete way. A psychologist named Dean Simonton spent his entire career counting the output of composers, painters, and inventors, and he found the same pattern in all of them. He called it the equal-odds rule. He showed that quality is a function of quantity, and that the stretches when a creator makes their best work are often the same stretches when they make their worst. These two seemingly opposed realities somehow rise together. Picasso created tens of thousands of works and most of us can maybe name five. Edison held one thousand and ninety-three patents — most of them were dead ends. When an associate pitied him for years of failed experiments on his storage battery ideas, Edison said, “Results! Why, man, I have gotten a lot of results! I know several thousand things that won’t work.” That is not a famous man being humble. That is a man who understood exactly how the math of equal-odds works.

I have made a few thousand YouTube videos over the last decade and a handful of them have connected on a mass scale that I never could have predicted. An early video of me wearing a white lab coat and pointing at a whiteboard with a stick explaining “Loud Is More Good” exploded across the algorithm. It genuinely shocks me that 1.2 million people love that video. It was just me being me — being silly but having fun and mostly reenacting my hero Alton Brown, who I love to watch describe food in a way that amuses me. There was never a plan to make a viral video. The plan was simple: make that week’s video.

WHY YOU NEED BOOST PEDALS - 2018

A later episode about an old guitar pedal called the Bad Monkey sent chaos across my industry. It transformed a forty dollar pedal into Reverb.com listings for ten thousand dollars, countless memes everywhere, it sparked a chain reaction of response videos by other creators, arguments on forums, and put my thoughts about this overlooked and picked-on pedal in places I never expected. I didn’t know it was that video when I filmed it. I was having fun. It was a Tuesday. I knew it would poke the bear a bit, but when we wrapped filming that afternoon, I vividly remember thinking it would do “okay.” I had no idea how big the bear really was.

My book Made On Earth For Rising Stars was six years of digging through a story that I never really understood until the end. There were probably fifty moments in those six years when I was sure I had wasted years of my life chasing a thing that wasn’t going to work. As we began to wrap the project up, Jack White appeared in the final hour, and Third Man Books published it. People all over the world are reading their copy and posting about it every day. We have now sold thousands of copies of a $50 book that weighs more than a coffee table. All I knew was to work on the idea and to push it toward whatever it needed to be. It was supposed to be my third book behind two other transcripts that had made it much further down the line. My plan for publishing my first book never happened and what did happen was way more interesting than my plan. I could have never drawn out the sequence of events that led me here as an author and I’m glad it has happened the way it has. I kept going and it eventually became what it is. The key here — I kept going.

WITH HOWARD DAVIS IN HIS BROOKLYN APARTMENT - 2019

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I have taken over a million photographs. I keep maybe two percent of what I shoot. Two percent. The other ninety-eight percent is considered education. Those unusable photographs are the cost of admission for the two percent that get seen. Some of that two percent has been published in books, photographic essays, and magazines. When I press the shutter, I never know which frames are those two percent. I just take the picture and then I keep taking pictures. The act of photography in itself is very much a discovery process for me. I am never sure of the outcome but I know there is an outcome that I cannot see.

We experience success in hindsight and anyone who tells you otherwise is a liar or extremely lucky. Don’t depend on either.

I have written essays here on Substack that I was sure nobody would care about. One of them was a slightly depressing tariff piece about how hard it is to manufacture my guitar pedals in this new American economy. It got picked up by the Associated Press, Fortune, Bloomberg, SPIN, and Billboard inside of a week. I did not know it was that essay when I hit publish. I was not even sure that I should hit publish. Others, like my piece on how a Kentucky farmer named Wendell Berry saw the current tension between creativity, technology, and ethics decades ago, have gone on to be read 100x more than other pieces that I thought for sure would be hits. I wrote that essay between flights and only hit publish because it was Sunday and my 5pm deadline for myself was a few minutes away.

My expectations for my work are almost always hilariously wrong. It has become a rewarding surprise though — to discover what works and what doesn’t. It is now part of the process.

I have spoken on stages, recorded podcasts, built weird gadgets, taught classes on YouTube Live, spoken to classrooms, written thousands of unseen sentences, photographed endless scenes, started a nonprofit with my wife in a small Missouri town. Some of this has landed in an impactful way but most of it has not. The math of what actually works does not care about you or your opinions of the math. It only cares about the ratio. It reveals itself later and in ways that you cannot predict. The math is heartless but it is real.

I believe I have learned from everything I have made. I have obsessively adjusted my approaches and products. I have improved everything all the time. But it is still math, and the reality is that if you do not put things out there, you have fewer chances. Both are true. In the last twelve months I have released more than a pedal per month while making what I know is some of my best stuff, but I still cannot tell you which of them will be the ones.

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I want to say something extremely candid to any of you who are trying to make things:

You cannot know which thing matters until after you make the thing. You cannot taste-test your way into the future of your best work. You cannot focus-group what you make into a success. Make more things without apology and later you can figure out what worked.

Most of you stop making things way too early. You make ten of something, nothing hits, and then you decide that you do not have what it takes. Ten is not enough. Ten is not even a sample. Ten is nothing. The people you admire most, the ones whose work feels somehow inevitable — they made hundreds of things that you never saw on the way to the thing you did.

We do not get to know in advance. That is the price of being a maker. Stop trying to produce successful products and start making what is burning inside of you to make. Make it all. Every single thing you have the energy to make. Become annoying with your ideas and your passions. Put them on display. Pull them out of your mind where they are safe from ridicule and failure and place them front and center so that the audience can judge. Be proud of them and then, right when people have an opinion, move on. Start the next thing. Let that audience decide if what you have made is useful while you move on to the next new possibility. That’s it. These things we make are all possibilities, not guarantees. Stop looking for a promise of acceptance and instead, accept the burden of maybe. It is a beautiful burden. Stop looking for permission to make what you know is trying to erupt from inside you. When you do this, when you let go and press on, you will find a freedom that is unstoppable.

The compounding of our attempts gives us something that cannot be bought. The years of our work are supposed to add up to something we can lean on. Our audience is supposed to be strong enough at some point that we do not have to keep buying our way into other people’s audiences. It takes time to get there and there are no shortcuts. You have to stop paying rent and decide to take on the mortgage. That is the deal you sign up for when you decide to keep producing for eighteen years instead of giving up at year three. Success in my case has been simply this: not stopping.

You cannot know which pedal will be the one that resonates with the world until you make all of them, and the only way to find out is to find out.

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If you enjoyed this, consider grabbing a copy of my new book Made On Earth For Rising Stars: The Story Of Electro-Harmonix. Every sale matters. It tells my publisher and distributer that people like you care about books like this. Also, my content here is always free, but if you subscribe with any payment, 100% goes to my local non-profit art center where we teach kids music and art for free. www.arthousegrandview.com