(1 min read)
“It’s all about the hum” case study: Data viz of Shonda Rhimes’ 18 minute, 44 second TED talk
(This is part seven in a twenty part introductory series exploring the intersection of frequency, resonance and nuance, first published on Medium.)
(6 min read)
What does it really look like to be singing and saying things few others are singing and saying?
And what is the song anyway?
Showrunner extraordinaire Shonda Rhimes knows a little bit about this. And she tells us all about what it is to be a showrunner, in her 18 minute 44 second TED talk which has clocked over 3.7 million views to date. The TED talk description tells us:
The titan behind Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away With Murder, is responsible for some 70 hours of television per season.
I’ve viewed Rhime’s TED talk, called “My year of saying yes to everything,” at least five times now, as well as pored over the TED talk transcript, and color-coded it.
This is the first time I’m sharing the end result, the data visualisation of something I’m calling “empathic colormapping.”
It looks like this.
Case study: Data viz of Shonda Rhimes’ 18 minute, 44 second TED talk.
This is Shonda Rhimes entire, 18 minute 44 second TED talk — color-coded and knocked onto its side (it runs from left to right).
You can of course listen to the TED talk for yourself, and read the transcript. Well worthwhile. And while it is a review of this work, in honor of the TED platform and her IP, I’m not replicating the full talk here.
However, there is one really notable thread in this talk that relates to our concept of frequency, and it’s something Shonda Rhimes calls the hum.
First of all, Shonda Rhimes explains why she’s in a class all her own — a titan — describing in detail the way she gathers her fans around the campfire to tell stories. And she disillusions us of thinking this is anything like a literal campfire, by clarifying that these campfires are burning all over the world.
These “campfires,” in fact, represent four television programs, 70 hours of TV per season, helping to create hundreds of jobs per program, and balancing a budget of 350 million dollars — all using her magnificent, global brain.
But just when our mathematical-logical synapses are getting a little bit overwhelmed (and yep, pretty impressed) with all the numbers and data she’s throwing at us, she changes her tone to light up other parts of our brains.
“What makes it all so good,” she tells us — this remarkable level of activity and television show production — is “the hum.”
There is some kind of shift inside me when the work gets good. A hum begins in my brain, and it grows and it grows and that hum sounds like the open road, and I could drive it forever.
But more than telling you about what she said about the hum, I want to show you how she hummed it — in vibrant color — through just a few key pieces of her song.
First of all, she uses descriptives to explain this exhilarating abstraction she dubs the “hum”:
Shonda Rhimes: “the hum is music … light and air…”
And, because I’m still refining the exact colored highlighter to use, here are those color-coded words in readable black-on-white for those who might need more visual clarity:
The hum is more than writing. The hum is action and activity. The hum is a drug. The hum is music. The hum is light and air, the hum is God’s whisper right in my ear. And when you have a hum like that, you can’t help but strive for greatness. That feeling, you can’t help but strive for greatness at any cost. That’s called the hum.
And the only problem with exhilarating highs is that they can sometimes be followed by gut-wrenching lows. Shonda Rhimes shares one of her own a little later in her talk:
Shonda Rhimes: “I like that hum, I love that hum, I need that hum, I am that hum. Am I nothing but that hum?”
For this showrunner-extraordinaire, this global-brained titan, everything is humming along…
The nation I’m building, the marathon I’m running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the hum. I like that hum. I love that hum. I need that hum. I am that hum.
Am I nothing but that hum?
And then the hum stopped.
Overworked, overused, overdone, burned out.
The hum stopped.
While in what she calls “the homelessness of her humlessness,” Rhimes comes to a startling realization when her toddler asks her a simple question.
Shonda Rhimes: “…I realize two things…”
And then my Southern waitress toddler asks me a question. I’m on my way out the door, I’m late, and she says, “Momma, wanna play?” And I’m just about to say no, when I realize two things. One, I’m supposed to say yes to everything, and two, my Southern waitress didn’t call me “honey.” She’s not calling everyone “honey” anymore. When did that happen?
The hero’s journey seldom runs smooth and Rhimes’ journey has many more twists to it, but we’re tracking with her as she gets back in touch with the three daughters, the titans-in-training who call this titan “Momma.” It is through them that she comes to some illuminating “aha” moments about the hum.
Shonda Rhimes: The hum is joy-specific. The real hum is love-specific.”
She hums the crescendo of this symphonic piece:
The hum is not power and the hum is not work-specific. The hum is joy-specific. The real hum is love-specific. The hum is the electricity that comes from being excited by life. The real hum is confidence and peace. The real hum ignores the stare of history, and the balls in the air, and the expectation, and the pressure. The real hum is singular and original. The real hum is God’s whisper in my ear…
Then, beginning to wrap up her talk, she closes out with some final notes about this enhanced, expanded, expounded upon hum.
Shonda Rhimes: “My brain is still global. My campfires still burn.”
I said yes to less work and more play, and somehow I still run my world. My brain is still global. My campfires still burn. The more I play, the happier I am, and the happier my kids are. The more I play, the more I feel like a good mother. The more I play, the freer my mind becomes. The more I play, the better I work. The more I play, the more I feel the hum, the nation I’m building, the marathon I’m running, the troops, the canvas, the high note, the hum, the hum, the other hum, the real hum, life’s hum.
It doesn’t feel like we’ve been listening for more than 18 minutes when she closes out her talk with an invitation to play. And it’s a relief to discover she has much more to say for those of us who resonate— including another TED talk on the future of storytelling, a book-length meditation on her remarkable “Year of Yes,” and a Masterclass on the intricacies of writing for television (the link points to her 1:48 minute official trailer).
But right here, right now, Shonda Rhimes has shown us — on several nuanced levels throughout this TED talk and in resonant tones that will speak to different people differently — just a few ways to channel our song, to dance our dance, to play in a globe-sized sandbox.
And to find our hum while doing it.
There is of course more to say about the color-coding — this empathic colormapping concept. This is barely the beginning .
But we might bask a little longer in that hum and save the empathic-intuitive underpinnings for another day.
(This is part six in a twenty part introductory series exploring the intersection of frequency, resonance and nuance, first published on Medium.)
Sketch July 2018
(5 min read)
“The best stories and novels lead the reader not to an explanation, but to a place of wonder. How do we know that? Because the books and stories and poems that mean the most to us are the ones we want to read again, to re-experience and reconsider.”
— Peter Ruchi, A Muse and a Maze
The intangible qualities of our favorite books is something most of us don’t have to think much about. But if we’ve been lucky enough to experience what Ruchi describes as “a place of wonder,” how do we repeat the experience? How do we find that place of wonder again?
My best guess is that these kinds of books and stories — the ones that lead us to a place of wonder — come across our radars in tragically random fashion.
In some ways, the question of “the best stories and novels” is answered for us. It has to be. Tens of thousands of new books are published each year (is the number knowable?) Thanks to the democratization of publishing, those numbers are sure to grow exponentially.
And I’m not forgetting that many of us obtain our knowledge — discover a sense of wonder — almost exclusively on alternative channels (hello Google, Youtube, Wikipedia, Netflix and other existing, national, and still-in-development monolithic challengers).
Because there’s so much noise in the datasphere — all that noise on all those different channels — we get really good at:
Because there’s so much to skim through, we have no choice but to rely on word-of-mouth and happenstance, returning to a few reliable sources, media outlets and cultural curators, but mostly leaving it up to algorithms to decide what we might be interested in on those multiple channels.
Cultural curator Maria Popova has devoted a great deal of time and energy seeking out those kinds of “books and stories and poems that … we want to read again, to re-experience and reconsider.”
In one particular infographic published on Brainpickings.org, she created what she called a visual taxonomy to “dismantle the magic of enthralling prose” especially in regards to science writing, where she proposes “the stakes are even higher” because “the standards of truth and beauty are such that the precise and the poetic must converge in order to yield both comprehension and enchantment.”
Infographic credit: Maria Popova
Popova first defines in those outer rings, the important foundational requirements for an effective transference of knowledge:
Explainers make information clear and comprehensible. Good textbooks are the work of good explainers.
Elucidators go beyond explanation and into illumination — they transmute information into understanding …
Then she gets to the golden chalice, the glowing core, of the characteristics of certain kinds of writing:
Infographic fragment: Maria Popova
Enchanters do all of the above, but go beyond the realm of knowledge and into the realm of wisdom. They don’t work merely toward superior levels of understanding, but toward a wholly different order of meaning…
She expounds:
Enchanters bend the beam of illumination through a singular lens that furnishes something richer and greater than the sum total of knowledge — a kaleidoscopic view of previously hidden layers of reality, or an integration of previously fragmented insights and shards of awareness. The result is nothing less than a firmer grasp of one’s place in the universe, producing in turn a transcendent enlargement of being.
It seems that Popova is proposing that we — at least some of the time — would rather be enchanted than merely informed or even equipped.
My theory, from ten years of dedicated reading and seeking and searching, is that while we appreciate explanations and elucidations, while we’re delighted by novelty and moved by the emotional (in books and other media) a good many of us would swim in a heartbeat towards a frequency that spoke of “a transcendent enlargement of being.”
It lights up all the best parts of our brains.
So long as it’s from a trustworthy source.
We long to enter into a state of wonder, guided by an artist or innovator who has invested a great deal of emotional labor to create something worthy of our time.
But how do we even begin to “dismantle the magic of enthralling prose”?
How do we even begin to untangle the wildly subjective nature of our unique receptivity to different signals? And the difference between our own receptivity and that of our reader’s?
How do next-level communicators enhance their unique frequencies with the magic of resonance and nuance?
And why even try to unravel these things?
I have been asking some really big, audacious questions for the past few years as my personal literary pilgrimage evolved into something much bigger than myself.
Some of the research has led to observations similar to the above, that books that come across our radars can fulfill needs for explanation (good) and elucidation (great) or enchantment (good plus great, and much more).
And because my research has been around big idea nonfiction (not solely science writing) as well as reader-focused nonfiction — this is one way I’ve come to visualize the good and the great frequencies:
But the stakes are higher. It’s easier than ever to get lost in the noise.
So what of enchantment?
What of wonder?
How might we evolve our understanding of “the magic of enthralling prose”?
How might we harness even more resonance to connect with those we seek to serve?
Big questions that might take a lifetime to explore.
(This is the fourth in a twenty part introductory series exploring the intersection of frequency, resonance and nuance, first published on Medium.)