302: Questions Give Answers
Dear Friends
You know that from time to time, I segue into art and wine. Well, jazz too, and sometimes classic cars, and architecture, and cute critters, and, well, anything that catches my eye.
These three have all appeared here at some point: Ceramicist Karlien van Rooyen, was recently chosen as one of seven South African designers to receive the Maison&Objet Rising Talent Award. Young winemaker Banele Vakele’s Syrah received 97 points in the just-released Tim Atkins South Africa Report, and Lismore Estates was named winery of the year. Their Syrah and Viognier are delicious. We send our congratulations and appreciation – their excellence makes our worlds better.
/strategy
Good questions are an essential pillar of coaching and advisory work, and indeed of great leadership.
It is one of the reasons I appreciated Ezra Klein’s 2023 interview of music producer Rick Rubin.
At one point he says to Rubin, ”A lot of your advice and thinking about awareness in the book, it’s very spiritual, it’s very meditative”, then continues, “… (but) when I follow some of the people on Instagram or elsewhere who are on your production discography… I see them obsessed with self-image… They don’t always seem to be people on the far edge of cultivating presence and awareness… they often seem particularly desperate, in a way, for distraction. So, when you think about the people you’ve worked with, what am I missing in noticing that tension?”
It’s a great question. There are several in the interview. Often the most powerful strategy intervention is a reflection-forcing question – one that holds two insights in tension, not to force a choice but to explore what can be catalysed.
Rubin tells Klein about the inspiration behind Neil Young’s 2022 album World Record.
Young was hiking every day, and while he did, he noticed he was whistling. He’s ordinarily not a whistler, nor, he realised, had he heard these tunes before. He recorded them on his phone. Over time he collected about ten of them. They became the basis of the album.
Rubin comments, “… then when he (Neil Young) sat down to write the words, he wrote the lyrics to all of the songs in two days without changing any words. It just sort of happened. And he said that that’s never happened to him before either.
So, from the beginning — and this is someone who’s been making albums for 50 years — he found an entirely new way to work, not based on him deciding to find a new way to work, not on an intellectual choice he made, but on noticing these whistling pieces are coming through”.
In my experience, this is a massively underused strategic skill: notice what is unusual, uncover what is working, take the time to give it attention, refine it and amplify it. Often the answers are in plain sight, if only we pause to see, and very often, sense them.
The question is simple: what am I not seeing that is already here?
//self
FT interview Ben Okri Talks Taste mirrors the opening of this week’s letter.
Okri reflects, “An indulgence I would never forgo is walking my own path. Even at this stage of my writing life, I still encounter people who try to prescribe what I should write and what direction I should travel in as a writer. I travel my own path. It’s all I can do. Every time that I have been told not to publish a book I have written, and every time that I have followed my gut feelings and published it, I have always had a breakthrough in my work and my life. There is a cost to such a decision: agents might drop you or publishers might refuse to publish the book. But that is part of a writer’s journey. The writer senses something in the air and needs a new form or genre to express it. A point comes when people have to trust the new direction you are taking. And if they don’t, you travel on”.
Caro Freese gave us a brilliant idea. He answered each of the interview’s questions. Here are some of them, so that you can do the same: have fun (I snuck in a few of my answers).
The last thing I bought and loved was…
The best book I’ve read in the past year is… (Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account).
My style icon is… (Okri’s is Miles Davis. A great choice. If I were brave enough, I’d say Sipho Mabuse).
The last music I bought was…
I have a collection of… (do piles of books on being human count?)
The best way to spend £20 is…
In my fridge you’ll always find…
An object I would never part with… (a small painting by the late figurative painter, Matthew Hindley. I bought it to mark the start of my coaching journey).
The last item of clothing I added to my wardrobe was… (a corduroy suit made and designed by Roxanne).
My favourite game is…
Some of my best ideas have come from…
The place that means a lot to me is… (Pfitsch, the Dolomite valley that my father was born and grew up in).
The best gift I’ve given recently is…
A way to make me laugh is… (playful puns).
The artists whose work I would collect if I could are…
The works of art that changed everything for me include…
The thing I couldn’t do without is…
The best bit of advice I ever received was… (keep on keeping on. Consistency compounds).
///soul
Poetry intimidates me, but thanks to Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We Are Briefly Gorgeous, Anne Michaels’ Held – beautiful novels with poetry’s DNA – and Pádraig Ó Tuama’s Poetry Unbound, I, on occasion, find myself teetering on the edge of understanding.
Libyan-born, Cape Town-based, Sarah Uhieda’s debut poetry collection just won this year’s Ingrid Jonker Prize.
With poems named Grief and I Want it, The Name of Home Dies Softly, What to Keep, Home is You and I, and A Fig for Every Absence, Uhieda’s Not This Tender is a meditation on the loss of home and of fumbling our way through the life’s pain and possibility.
In The Name of Home Dies Softly, she writes:
“I don’t recall Arabic,
Only lush lilac vowels and vein,
A skyful of synonyms for sunset
Tangled in the mulberry tree.”
In 17 May 2011, the lines:
“We all learn to eat our grief
In pieces paraphrasing home”.
I loved how A Fig for Every Absence holds the seeming impossibility of being human:
“If I still deserve sweetness, then for every fig I eat, I must let one rot on the counter. That’s the only way to miss you. Not in lack but in a waiting that feels unused.
It is not enough to never feast on fruit again. To forget the taste of sugar is to forget to miss it. No, I must spoon homesickness into my mouth and it must taste unsalvageable. It hasn’t just been a year or two after all”.
All the best
Karl
PS: You can subscribe to this letter here. These are the non-fiction books I’ve read so far this year, and these books inform the core of my coaching practice.