I watched 10 Masterclass courses in a week and here is what I learned

The ads are enticing and everywhere. And if you are anything like me, they make you immediately suspicious. Maybe you also get the impression that Masterclass is only for Dunning-Kruger dilettantes. Can creative professionals take away practical insights to enhance their work?

Shortest answer: yes.

Without divulging any material from behind the paywall, I'll give you my takeaways from the hours of content I consumed. Over one week, I watched 10 masterclasses covering music, film making, and writing, etc. from start to finish. Below are some generalizations about the creative process that I pulled together from themes that cut across them all.

The Content

Here are the masterclasses I watched in the order I watched them:

1. Danny Elfman

2. David Lynch

3. Hanz Zimmer

4. Werner Herzog

5. Neil Gaiman

6. David Sedaris

7. David Mamet

8. St. Vincent

9. Frank Gehry

10. Jeff Goodby and Rich Silverstein

Each class ranges from two to six hours in total length, broken up over a dozen or more videos. I watched every class on 2x speed except the David Mamet because he talks very fast.

Lesson #1: Work on your thing every day.

"Part of the process is just sitting there and hoping that the train rolls through the station..." - St. Vincent

Simple. The conventional wisdom is that the thing you feed is the thing that grows. Frustratingly simple.

Spend at least an hour every day doing your thing. Not the things that are adjacent to your thing. Not emails and other miscellaneous admin work associated with your thing. Your. Thing.

"Every interruption just is like a knife stab in the middle of a thought. And you gotta start again. You start again. It's horrible. These days, there's interruptions around every corner, almost every second. You have to be somewhat selfish." - David Lynch

Lesson #2: Enforce curiosity and maintain it vigilantly.

A bit of advice which seemed to pop up in several separate Masterclasses was this: ask how you can solve a problem.

The idea being that the focus on solving a problem – of narrative, of character, of getting from one thing to the next – gets your head up from your desk. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, in a different kind of masterclass, present this as a formula: "But...Therefore..." This ensures that ideas are motivated and on purpose.

If you want to be a creative, you have to be creative and not merely a technician. Not a scuba diver, but a shark of ideas.

“If you get stuck, you can ask yourself what your characters want—and that is like a flashlight. It shines a light on the road ahead and lets you move forward. It’s the only question that opens the door to ‘What do you do next?’” — Neil Gaiman

Lesson # 3: Always Be Storytelling.

“Writing a plot is one of the hardest things I ever learned how to do. It’s just hard, because it’s like playing with some unclean substance. And it is, because the unclean substance is your own consciousness.” — David Mamet

Across all the fields represented here— music, filmmaking, architecture, advertising, etc— all of the experts anchored themselves to the practice of storytelling. It's the single guiding principle which triggers art into action.

Lesson #1 is about developing a technical discipline. Lesson #2 gives us a mechanism for constantly expanding that discipline. Lesson #3 gives us is a why that drives both of these things.

Story is the lifeblood of all art, and the discipline we build around both our technique and our curiosity is our toolbox for telling them.

The strength of the story is what keeps you both grinding away head-down at your desk and lifting your head up into the world observing life that is happening.

Conclusions

Is Masterclass worth it? As an online learning platform, Masterclass is worth exploring particularly if your curiosity extends beyond strictly adjacent fields. But I will just never watch classes on cooking or baking or gardening.

Of course, the video lessons were all beautifully shot and edited, but mostly I listened to the content while doing other things. While the sentiments I summarized above are always helpful have reiterated and reinforced, returns on hearing "just work on your thing a lot" diminish in direct proportion to the time they might be taking away from you just doing your thing.