How to Get Unstuck

Guy Raz Newsletter – July 4, 2024

Back in the early 1970s, music producer Brian Eno was trying to figure out how to help artists (and himself) get unstuck in the studio.

At the time, he began to experiment with actions and ideas that forced him out of his comfort zone. He would write down prompts on cards and then randomly select one each time he felt blocked.

For example, a card might say “Work at a different speed” or “Try Faking it” or “Look closely at the most embarrassing details and amplify.”

By the mid-1970s, Eno and a friend, artist Peter Schmidt, turned these prompts into a deck of cards and called it “Oblique Strategies.”

Eno used the deck to help push David Bowie and Mick Ronson to reach their creative potential during the production of Bowie’s legendary Berlin trilogy albums: Low, Heroes and Lodger. (For example, the cards might say “switch instruments” and Bowie would pick up the bass, Ronson might take lead vocals, Eno would hop on the drums, etc…)

Eventually, these cards would play an important role in the s…