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All of those people who you say are your artistic heroes . . . All of those people who have made such a difference in the world . . . None of those people were ordained. None of those people were preapproved. None of those people were considered all-stars at an early age.
The easiest way to avoid the pain is to lull it to sleep by finding a job that numbs you. Soon the pain of the artist will be replaced by a different sort of pain, the pain of the cog, the pain of someone who knows that his gifts are being wasted and that his future is out of his control.
In the words of Joseph Campbell, you’re doing art “for the experience of being alive.”
Sometimes, courage is the willingness to speak the truth about what you see and to own what you say.
Courage is telling our story, not being immune to criticism. —Brené Brown
You can plan and sketch and curse the system all day, but if you don’t ship, you haven’t done your work, because the work involves connection and the generosity behind it.
it’s not art until a human connection is made. We’re not waiting for you to tell us about your notebook filled with ideas. Tell us about the connections you have enabled and the impact you have made instead.
We’ve been trained to prefer being right to learning something, to prefer passing the test to making a difference, and most of all, to prefer fitting in with the right people, the people with economic power. Now it’s your turn to stand up and stand out.
putatively
At the same time, almost all people believe they are capable of editing, giving feedback, or merely criticizing. That means that finding people to fix your typos is easy. Finding someone to say “go” is almost impossible.
I don’t think the shortage of artists has much to do with the innate ability to create or initiate. I think it has to do with believing that it’s possible and acceptable for you to do it.
most people have been brainwashed into believing that their job is to copyedit the...
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“Cruft”
Revolutions eliminate the perfect and enable the impossible. They also overwhelm us with cruft. The art of moving forward lies in understanding what to leave behind. The simplest plan is to keep it all, to embrace what worked before, and to hide, mostly to hide, from the open vistas of the new postrevolutionary world. It’s so easy to do, and if the world moves slowly enough, you can even do it successfully for a while. No longer. The industrial age, the one that established our schooling, our workday, our economy, and our expectations, is dying. It’s dying faster than most of us expected, and
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What an opportunity. To be among the first to clean it out, to ignore it, to move to a different building altogether. A life without cruft slowing you down, a career with a focus on what you can create instead of what you must replicate.
David McClelland
more than anything else, achievement comes from a culture that celebrates the achievement motive.
The question, as we move from an industrial economy that cherishes compliance to a connected economy that prizes achievement, is this: Are we supporting this shift with a culture that encourages us to dream important dreams? What do we challenge our achievers to do? When do we encourage or demand that they move from standardized tests and Dummies guides to work that actually matters?
What’s the next step? Farmer to worker to manager to professional to commercial intellectual to . . .
The value of information became obvious when TV Guide (the magazine with information about when certain shows were on) sold for more money than the networks themselves were worth. Information about the content was worth more than the content.
our success turns not on being the low-price leader but on being the high-trust leader.
Don’t worry about your stuff. Worry about making meaning instead.
The industrialist is big enough and powerful enough and profitable enough that he can act like royalty. He doesn’t issue decrees by royal fiat; he does it with advertising and lobbying and by offering a huge carrot to anyone who complies.
effluent.
The overwhelming impact of more than a century of cultural indoctrination can’t be overstated. We have embraced industrial propaganda with such enthusiasm that we have changed the very nature of our dreams.
The industrialist needs you to dream about security and the benefits of compliance. The industrialist works to sell you on a cycle of consumption (which requires more compliance). And the industrialist benefits from our dream of moving up the corporate ladder, his ladder.
Industrialization is about eliminating the risk of failure, about maintaining the status quo, and about cementing power. “Too big to fail” is the goal of every industrialist, but “too big to fail” means that capitalism is no longer functioning.
After nearly a century of effort, the industrial system has created the worker-proof factory.
By eliminating “personal” from frontline labor, the industrial system ensures that it can both maintain quality and use ever-cheaper (and ever-fewer) workers.
Just because you’re winning a game doesn’t mean it’s a good game.
Conformity was easier, safer, and cheaper than diversity.
universitas magistrorum et scholarium—a
Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid. —Albert Einstein
Standardization in the industrial age was not a choice. It was impossible to industrialize without it. Originality and art in the connected age are not a choice, either. It’s impossible to do the work before us without them. It’s impossible to connect without art. The old safety zone is dead. Long live the new safety zone.
The system demanded a high price for its promises of safety and reassurance and gimcracks. It demanded that we give up our voices and accept different, lesser dreams. We traded debt for an SUV, sure, but we also traded independent thought and the ability to stand up and say, “Look what I did.”
The Internet and the connection economy turn the economics of mass on its head. It’s now cheaper and more efficient to make edgy, amazing products for the weird edge cases (who are listening and talking and who care) than it is to push yet another average product onto the already overloaded average people in the middle of the curve.
No, the only path left veers away from safe and heads straight for sorry. Sorry? Yes, the sorry of vulnerability and unpredictability and repeated failure. Combined with the joy of connection, breakthroughs, and humanity.
The search for the right answer is the enemy of art. The right answer belongs to the productivity-minded industrialists, to Taylor and the denizens of Scientific Management. Icarus was told not to fly too high and not to fly too low. But what’s the right altitude? Where’s the map, where’s the safe middle? Art has no right answer. The best we can hope for is an interesting answer.
There are so many places that art and connection are needed, so many avenues that are open, so many opportunities, that no one is boxed out. It’s not about whether we have what it takes; it’s about whether we choose to pursue it.
for the first time in recorded history, it matters not so much where you’re born or what your DNA says about you—the connection economy is waiting for you to step forward, with only the resistance to hold you back.
Our economy has become a giant lottery. Perhaps you’ll get picked to be on American Idol. Perhaps you’ll sue someone and get a windfall. Perhaps you’ll be the one who gets promoted to partner as a result of all your hard work (but maybe you won’t). We celebrate the Forbes 400 and the masters of the universe and the lucky few who have won the corporate lottery, because secretly we are celebrating our chances of winning the lottery as well. Like most lotteries, this is a loser’s game, with the odds against us. What appears to be a meritocracy is actually a rigged game and a wheel of fortune. The
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The alternative, which is the independent creation of art, doesn’t happen overnight. You don’t win the art lottery and get picked and suddenly find all doors open and receptive to your vision and generosity and talent. No, the commitment to art is the return of an ancient habit, one that was relentlessly extinguished for a long time. We can’t suddenly quit a job and then race to find a form of art that will pay off before the next mortgage payment is due. Creating art is a habit, one that we practice daily or hourly until we get good at it. Art isn’t about the rush of victory that comes from
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What matters now: Trust Permission Remarkability Leadership Stories that spread Humanity: connection, compassion, and humility
All six of these are the result of successful work by artists. These assets aren’t generated by external strategies and MBAs and positioning memos. These are the results of internal trauma, of brave decisions and the willingness to live with dignity. They are about standing out, not fitting in, about inventing, not duplicating.
Media is cheap, sure, but attention is filtered, and it’s virtually impossible to be heard unless the consumer gives us the ability to be heard. The more valuable someone’s attention is, the harder it is to earn.
we choose to listen to those we trust. We do business with and donate to those who have earned our attention. We seek out people who tell us stories that resonate, we listen to those stories, and we engage with those people or businesses who delight or reassure or surprise in a positive way.
We embrace the humanity in those around us, particularly as the rest of the world appears to become less human and more cold.
The remarkable is almost always new and untested, fresh and risky.
Management is almost diametrically opposed to leadership.
Leadership puts the leader on the line. No manual, no rule book, no überleader to point the finger at when things go wrong. If you ask someone for the rule book on how to lead, you’re secretly wishing to be a manager. Leaders are vulnerable, not controlling, and they are taking us to a new place, not to the place of cheap, fast, compliant safety.
