#180: Embrace Your Inner Weirdo

“…exclusion levies emotional, financial, social, and other costs that affect not just those who are excluded, but those who exclude and work to keep that exclusion in place. The more inclusive a society, the more it is perceived as a just society; and just societies are safer for everyone. Simply put, the pursuit of inclusion is in everyone’s interest”

David Moinina Sengeh

Good morning friend

You’ll notice that today’s letter starts with the same quotation as last week’s.

Research tells us that leaders are 9 times more likely to be criticized for under than over-communicating, and in this moment, indeed given humanity’s history, it seems important to keep repeating David Sengeh’s words.

It’s been a while since I have shared Cape Town or art news, so we’ll start there today.

In the transition from our city to our rural home we spent 6 weeks in the heart of the city’s hubbub. During that time the Labotessa Boutique Hotel became our home away from home. We loved it and are delighted that they were named Africa’s Leading Design Hotel & South Africa’s Leading Design Hotel in the 2023 World Travel Awards. It’s a well-deserved accolade.

I first met Lukhanyo Mdingi when he was a waiter at Clarke’s Diner (a great breakfast, beer and burger spot). Today, he is an acclaimed designer and last week was selected as a finalist for the prestigious Amiri Prize. Aside from being hard-working, talented, and driven, he is one of the nicest people I have ever been blessed to meet. If you love fashion, you will love his work.

And last, I’ve fallen in love with Nanako Kume’s pencil shaving lights.

Now, let’s embrace your inner weirdo.

/ strategy

One of the peculiarities of life is how often we do what we think we ought to do rather than what we know will work for us. It happens in all sorts of ways. We chose paths of study that we think are appropriate. We make career choices based on what we think is the right thing to do. We prevent ourselves from doing things because they’re ‘not done’. All along the way, we limit ourselves.

Oftentimes we make these decisions based on our interpretation of what the world expects from us. Yes, there are instances where we’re explicitly told to follow a path but quite often, we whittle down our choices all on our own. We anticipate resistance and we diminish ourselves.

The ADP Research Institute’s global engagement study says that only 16–17 percent of workers believe they can use their strengths every day at work. Simultaneously, other representative surveys show 72 percent of workers saying, ‘I have the freedom to modify my role to fit my strengths better.’ There is space in our work lives, but we don’t take it.

Marcus Buckingham described this as an “attitude-behavior consistency problem—we know we can modify our roles to fit ourselves better, but most of us simply don’t”.

June Cohen’s Spark and Fire interview, Embrace Your Inner Weirdo, with Pixar director Domee Shi brings this to life. If you’re feeling a little down, listen to it. It is an instant counter-depressant.

Shi is Vice President of Creative at Pixar. She was the first woman to direct a feature film, Turning Red, at Pixar on her own. Her short film Bao won an Oscar. She’s the youngest person to be invited to join Pixar’s famed Brains Trust. Yep, she’s a superstar.

Shi describes the process of developing Bao (remember, it went on to win an Oscar):

“Bao is about this lonely old Chinese lady who gets a second chance at motherhood when one of her dumplings comes to life as a giggly little dumpling boy. And she nurses it, she raises it, she feeds it, and she has to learn to eventually let it go. And I always had this image in my head of the mom eating the dumpling.

I pitched it to Pete Docter (Pixar’s Chief Creative Officer). He was so intrigued by the ending that he encouraged me to pitch it to Pixar.

One or two co-workers questioned if the ending where she eats the dumpling would be too dark, and I was like, ‘Oh no, maybe this is too weird and edgy for Pixar.’ So, then I quickly changed the ending.

The ending that I pitched was the mom ends up making dumplings all night long. And in the morning, she wakes up, and they’ve all come to life, and then she just lives happily ever after with a house full of dumplings”.

She diminishes herself. She anticipates an unwelcoming world and whittles away her creativity. She returns to bland.

Thankfully, Docter was in the room, and he says, “That’s not the version that you pitched me. Her original ending was so cool and weird. You should come back a week later and pitch the original ending because that was the thing that made it.”

Shi reflects that “His excitement in that weird idea gave me a lot of confidence. There’s an audience for my weirdness”.

Courage is hard. We naturally shy away from failure. Great leaders help others to have the courage to believe in themselves.

Docter did this, he enCOURAGEd Shi to embrace her inner weirdness and in doing so opened a path that ended in an Oscar.

// Self

Serendipitously one of my clients sent me this E.E. Cummings quotation earlier in the week.

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves, we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

(Thanks Matt!)

/// Soul

You might think that embracing your inner weirdo is selfish. The contrary is true. Everyone around you is desperate to be themselves, to explore their paths. If you do so (and do so successfully), you give them the courage to try.

At the end of the interview, Shi says of her film, Turning Red, “It means so much to the 13-year-old me. I don’t think I would’ve ever imagined watching a movie that has characters that deal with the very issues that I’m dealing with, issues of being an immigrant kid. Also, Asian girls can now just point to this movie when they pitch to their parents, ‘Hey, I want to go to animation school.’ And they’ll be like, ‘There’s no future there.’ And then they can be, ‘Look at the people that made this movie.’ Because I didn’t have that”.

She says she learned “There is an audience for these types of stories, and there’s space for people like me in this industry. I can just put my ideas out there and see what the reaction is, and then I can always reel it back later. Shoot for the sun, and then you can land on the moon”.

I love that. “I can just put my ideas out there and see what the reaction is, and then I can always reel it back later.” That is my wish for you. Put your ideas out there. See what the reaction is. You can always reel it back later, there is no reason to start with less. Embrace your inner weirdo. Be you.

All the best

Karl

PS: You can subscribe to this letter here and read more about Pixar here, and more from the fantastic Spark and Fire podcast here.