269. Farm What You Forage

<p>Many people think our hunter-gatherer ancestors lived short and miserable lives. In fact, that’s what most anthropologists thought. Until the 1960s, when they looked more closely at how foragers got by.</p> <p>The way foragers “worked” can tell us a lot about the way we, as creators, work.</p> <h3>Farming gets a lot of output with little effort</h3> <p>No one can be exactly sure when a human first planted a seed to grow food, but this one act was one of the most revolutionary in human history – up there with the invention of fire, or the internet. The agricultural revolution meant humans no longer needed to roam around, searching for food.</p> <p>But, with the innovation of agriculture came some trade-offs. We had to wait for our crops to grow, so we had to stay in one place. But staying in one place didn’t work out-of-the-box everywhere. As anthropologist James Suzman points out in his book, <a href= "https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08817M9SS?tag=kadavyinc-20"><em>Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots</em></a>, the first successful cities sprouted up in floodplains. These areas flooded regularly, and that refreshed the nutrients in the soil, which was a must for successful farming, as crop-rotation hadn’t yet been invented.</p> <p>Which brings us to another drawback of farming. Yes, farming gets you a lot of food with little effort, but eventually your once-fertile soil runs out of nutrients.</p> <h3>Creative “farming” grows ideas into finished products</h3> <p>As creatives, it’s useful for us to “farm.” Plant seeds of ideas. Give them water, sunlight, and fertile soil, and eventually you’ll have a crop of creative products to harvest.</p> <p>I talked in my book, <a href= "https://kadavy.net/mind-management-not-time-management/"><em>Mind Management, Not Time Management</em></a>, about “creative systems.” Cultivating ideas takes time. By working with the cycles of your energy to do short bursts of work, and letting incubation do the rest, you can always have creative products to ship. (I tal