12 hours in Barcelona El-Prat Airport, "ideas" don't matter that much, a cat fighting a scorpion

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High Thought is an intimate infusion of (high) thoughts that are a mixture of frivolous and (sometimes) profound if I’m lucky. Written with consideration for those interested in the creative process or personal peek behind the curtain into a particularly chaotic brain room.

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12 hours in Barcelona El-Prat Airport

I wrapped up a big job this week with some of my best friends and favorite collaborators. It was a long, hard job but one that makes you grateful and proud on the other side of it when everything is finished and there’s no remaining part of yourself you can give to it.

Anyway, my flight out of Barcelona was cancelled due to a “mechanical issue” and I ended up spending 12 hours killing time in Barcelona El-Prat.

Sunrise, waiting to board my flight right before it got cancelled 🌅

My brain was fried and all I really had the energy to do was watch something. During the pandemic, I got really into MasterClass and while the format keeps changing, I’m still interested in listening to experts in their field talk about the practical, theoretical, and honestly existential things they’ve learned throughout their careers. As someone who used to go every Sunday to see her perform live at UCB in Chelsea in the mid-00s, I was excited to watch Amy Poehler’s class called “Prepare to be Unprepared.” She’s smart and also just really joyful. Some of the things she said in her class really really hit me.

One thing she talked about is that the idea is actually not the most important thing. Rather, the idea can always be made better with the right people and right process. This is something that of course I knew, but had never really thought of as explicitly as the way she put it. As artists, we get so hung up on ideas and originality and working on the singular “idea” that is going to set this particular work apart. But the best idea in the world can be a flop if you don’t focus most of your energy on the process and the people who help you bring it to life. None of us do anything alone. We do it with the help of those around us, support from people who believe in us…however abstractly it may be sometimes. Fresh off this job in Barcelona, it’s even more apparent. The only thing that really matters is who you execute with and how you do it. The rest falls into place because those are the main ingredients that pull you across the finish line.