<p>When you're a creator looking for ideas, daily life moves with tooth-gritting slowness. The best you can do is to get better at knowing where to find ideas that will improve your writing</p><p>If you don't know where you're going, where should you look?</p>

Driven by Compression Progress

<ul><li>Maps can be useful, even if they're inaccurate</li><li>The New York City subway map distorts and compresses the landscape in additional ways. For eg, it only shows the main streets above ground, and it makes them look straighter than they actually are.</li><li>Central Park looks like a square, even though it's much more of a rectangle</li><li>At the cost of accuracy, most of the city’s details have been removed so passengers can focus on getting to their destination</li></ul>

But Distorted Maps Can Be Useful

<ul><li>A map is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness."</li><li>Rene Magritte highlighted this phenomenon in his famous painting "The Treachery of Images". Below his painting of a pipe are the words "Ceci n'est pas une pipe," which is French for "this is not a pipe."  As he’s trying to show, it’s a representation of a pipe. </li></ul>

The Map is Not the Territory

<ul><li>Collect more experiences and spend time processing them by writing and talking to friends</li><li>By sitting down to make sense of their existing ideas instead of trying to invent new ones, writers at their computer mold the wet clay of experience into a shape</li><li>When they succeed, their stories are well compressed</li></ul>

Experiences become shareable creations

<ul><li>The authors argue that people make sense of the world by making it simpler and more beautiful-by making compression progress</li><li>By doing so, they compress large data sets into elegant deliverables which are easy to share and remember</li><li>Einstein once said that things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler</li></ul>

2008 Cornell University paper called Driven by Compression Progress suggests an answer

<ul><li>Pablo Picasso showed the same process of compression in concrete form. In the image above, Picasso aims to capture the essence of a bull but ends up with a collection of simple lines that illustrate the outlines of his beloved animal</li><li>Had Picasso started with only a small number of lines, the final rendition wouldn't be as pure. It wouldn’t have had the right rhythm or proportions between lines. Only by going through the process of compression can he find the ultimate distillation of a bull. </li></ul>

Driven by Compassion

David shows why compression is the root of expression and how to improve your writing with compression. Read here.