Calibrating the internal meter for greatness

​Hey there! Happy Monday.

I wanted to share a little creative wisdom I picked up yesterday.

This past weekend, we celebrated my girlfriend’s birthday with a fun vintage store crawl through Atlanta.

One of the stops along the way was this neat little bookstore. We were just casually browsing when The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin caught my eye.

I’m only a few pages in, but I came across something that’s been lodged in my brain ever since, and I wanted to share it with you.

It’s about submerging yourself in great works of art, not to mimic greatness, but to “calibrate our internal meter for greatness.”

Rubin says:

“If you make the choice to read classic literature every day for a year, rather than reading the news, by the end of that year you’ll have a more honed sensitivity for recognizing greatness from the books than from the media.”

A simple concept, but it makes so much sense.

Let’s apply this to creating elevated cinematic content.

If we spend time studying and analyzing outstanding compositions, it naturally teaches us what to look for in our own work—and just as importantly, what to avoid.

We calibrate our sense of what is great by absorbing from the great.

This isn’t about copying what we like.

It’s about learning the creative language that relates to what we want to create. It’s associative.

The more we immerse ourselves in visually stunning work, the more naturally great composition starts to feel like second nature.

It reminds me of the idea that we are the sum of the five people closest to us—except in today’s world, that extends beyond real-life relationships.

With the internet being what it is, we can choose our digital mentors.

The people we learn from and the art we absorb all impact us. We should be intentional about these choices.

This is a concept I’ll definitely be adding to the composition module in my digital course, Short Form Filmmaker, and I hope it helps you too.

Caleb