A once-successful now-failed genius musician/record producer is at a bar. It’s deep into the night and this is not his first drink of the night, nor the first bar he’s gone into tonight.
A girl with a guitar sings a solo. Just the guitar and her voice. Kind of reluctantly. But she’s pretty good at the song.
Everyone - including the girl - hears just the vocal and the guitar.
This genius record producer hears not just the vocals and the guitar but an entire 4-piece accompaniment: drums, piano, cello and violin.
This scene appears in a movie called Begin Again.
The reason I’m writing about this scene is two-fold.
One: before this scene plays out, the same scene is shown from the general perspective where we - the audience - hears just girl and her guitar and nothing else. It’s beautiful but it’s plain and kind of bland. After a few minutes of the movie, the same scene is played but this time from the record producer’s PoV. His visualization comes through to us.
Two: the capability to visualize the final picture even before the first note, the first letter, the first sketch is made.
The more you think about it, the more it is clear that the only geniuses that have made it through and emerged successful are the ones capable of visualizing the whole thing even before the thing started existing in other people’s minds and then persevering through to put shit together to create the thing.
There’s an old function celebrating K. Balachander (he was the chief guest there). In it, Cho speaks about K.B - their days working together on Cho’s plays, K.B directing a couple of them before washing his hands off Cho and his comic troupe because they were too funny and irresponsible.
There’s just one reason why this interview stuck with me.
Cho says, describing K.B’s talent, that K.B would visualize every single element of the movie - every frame, every scene, every camera movement, every edit - even before he started shooting the first scene. “He’d see the whole movie in his eye, frame by frame, even before he starts the movie.”
Another genius, another Zeus-level capacity to visualize.
In college, we were assigned who I can only imagine to be a lousy professor to teach us Sanskrit grammar. This guy was recently awarded some kind of an award too but this wasn’t for his knowledge but for his association with an organization (Sanskrit Bharati) which propagates Sanskrit throughout the country.
But we were also assigned - for poetry - another professor who should have been the guy assigned to teach us Sanskrit grammar because he was this epic genius who understood Panini - the father of Sanskrit Grammar - way better than anyone I’ve met.
There was this one thing he’d always say whenever his talk grazed onto grammar and grammar-related topics (which they did often, given that the man was passionate about the holy grail of Sanskrit’s grammar - Panini’s definitive book, Ashtadhyaayi). He’d say, “Panini visualized the entirety of sounds of the Sanskrit language… he visualized every miniscule detail and was able to build the links.”
If you read up on how Sanskrit grammar is codified, you’ll find yourself doing a double-take. It sounds humanly impossible to have codified the language into simple rules with exceptions. There are so many permutations and combinations and it all matches up. Perhaps this is why many Indians believe that Lord Siva came down to reveal the secret of the system of sound to Panini.
But I digress.
The point to note is visualization. There’s a reason my professor said Panini was able to visualize the entirety of sounds. Panini was an undeniable genius. And what made him the genius was his ability to visualize a thing he was about to create in exquisite (and perhaps excruciating) detail long before he created it.
It’s like everyone was actually working backwards - first they conceive - in painstaking detail - the thing they want to create and then go about creating it brick by brick. All the time, the visualization is intact.
In the Jobs biography by Isaacson, I’m not sure if he explicitly mentions Steve as visualizing things this way but by the time you’re done with the book, the imprint of it in your brain is the idea that Steve was a fantastic visualizer. He was able to conceive of full-fledged ideas many years before they existed. He spoke about cloud computing in very clear terms in late 70s - about 30 years before it became a reality.
I read, a long time back, a process followed at some big company. I think it was Amazon.
Before they build a product, they would first write the press-release for the product/feature as if it was going to be published in the newspaper tomorrow. They’d detail every major feature of the product in the PR.
This exercise was to approach the whole thing backwards. You visualize and figure out all the corners of the product - which is what helps you write a complete PR - and then start working backwards to build the final product.
What a beautiful thing - to be able to visualize in complete detail something that doesn’t exist yet.