Courage

I started building my coaching practice a mere six months before the pandemic hit our world. It’s meant that I have had this peculiar experience of creating a new way of living and working during an extraordinarily unstable time. All my usual rhythms were double disrupted. For a while, I found that I was simply pushed and pulled by the needs of the day. I’d lost the clarity of how I wanted to live my life. And although it didn’t serve me, it is amazing how that kind of disruption has its own gravitational pull. It can come to define the atmosphere of your life. It becomes the physics, the normal, of our lives even though it isn’t optimal. To reset, we need to be clear and intentional, I needed to be clear and intentional. So, since November, I have been exploring how I might shape my life in a way that serves me better.

Last weekend was joyful and felt like a good taste of what was close to perfect. Thanks to the wonderful invitation from much-loved friends, Friday night saw us in the theatre watching a Handspring Puppet Company adaptation of Nobel prize-winner J.M. Coetzee’s The Life and Times of Michael K. I first saw the Puppet Company’s work in globally-acclaimed artist William Kentridge’s Ubu and the Truth Commission, way back in 1997. They perform globally, so if they’re ever in your city, you must see them. Your life will be forever richer.

Saturday morning saw us waking late and lazily. We went to the charming Mountain Market that nestles at the foot of Table Mountain. Brunch was delicious and Vietnamese, thanks to Little Vientiane. I bought some cavolo nero and amaranth from small-scale urban farming collective Abalimi Bezekhaya which I added to these crazily beautiful Badger Flame beets and garlic chives from specialty farmer, the Meuse Farm. Our early dinner ended with scoops of Kristen’s Kick-ass ice cream. And somehow the peanut butter and fudge brownie also received the nod as a legitimate pre-sleep snack. It was a fantastic twenty-four hours. Friends, creativity, art, great food, buying from local producers – all the ingredients to make a happy Karl.

/ STRATEGY 

Over the last three weeks, we’ve focused on what it takes to build a sustainable business. We’ve explored excellent execution, strategic cost management, and connecting with customers. Doing all of that take courage and persistence, so today I am sharing the founding story of Dansk International Designs, as the perfect example of ‘do what does not scale’ (see last week’s letter). I first learned about their story in Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers’s Creativity in Business.

Dansk is a distributor of flatware and dinnerware. Theodore and Martha Nierenberg founded the company after being captivated by the work of young European industrial designers and deciding to import it into the US.

In particular, they loved the work of Scandinavian designer Jens Quistgaard. They tracked him down and walked into his studio. He insisted that his flatware designs could only be made by hand. Ted persuaded him that it was worth trying to manufacture it. It became their first line.

Ted covered forty-six cities in two months selling the product, store by store. He built an impressive order book and then their German manufacturer sent them a letter saying that delivery needed to be indefinitely postponed. Their business was at risk. Ted decided to go to the heart of the problem. He reflected “I flew to Germany, stayed there a week, and made some compromises, and they agreed to fill my order only because they knew darn well that I’d be there up until Christmas Eve if they didn’t produce the stuff. So, in order to get rid of me, they put the stuff back into production…”

There’s so much in those few words. He stepped into the problem, he compromised on some detail but was uncompromising on his need to get an outcome. And simply, he went there. Often presence is the most powerful force.

The Nierenberg’s tribulations didn’t end there though. When the flatware got to New York there was a strike, and their cargo could not be offloaded. Ted went with police back-up to the docks to try and persuade the strikers to offload his product. They turned him back. He went back again, and then again. They turned him back, again, and then again. He went home, defeated. Martha and the children weren’t at home. He reached for the whisky and by the time she walked through the door, he said that “I must have had five scotches and was three sheets to the wind”.

She looked at her defeated husband and said, “I’ve got them”. In his sozzled state, he asked, “Got what?” Martha had the flatware. She’d gone to the docks, walked up to the picket line with their two daughters, and said to the stevedores, “These two kids can’t eat unless you get those four cases off the boat…” And so, Dansk Designs began.

Building anything worthwhile takes courage. The courage to knock on a stranger’s studio door. The courage to try something new. The courage to not give up. By the time the Nierenberg’s sold the business in 1985, they had built 31 retail stores.

/ SELF

In my usual fashion, I followed the breadcrumbs from the Dansk snippets in Creativity in Business. I discovered that Martha Nierenberg was a trained biochemist who spoke six languages. Although she had the privilege of being born into one of Hungary’s wealthiest families, she had suffered the trauma of having to flee her home to escape the Holocaust. She lost friends in that devastation and much of her family’s wealth and art were stolen. When she died in late 2020, she and her family were still seeking the restitution of the looted art.

It struck me how often we don’t see the story behind the story. We need to pause and ask. There was her courage on the New York docks. Before that, was the courage to rebuild a life after experiencing profound loss. Throughout her life was the courage to keep persisting to reclaim her family’s heritage.

You can read more of her story here.

All around us people carry stories of courage, stories of persistence, all we need do is pause and be present.

/ SOUL

Last week the words of the late monk Thich Nnat Hanh reminded us that being present to our experience enables us to “touch things more deeply, so that (we) might understand the true nature of what is there” and that when we do so “you are fully alive; you are fully present. You can get in touch with the wonders of life that can nourish you and heal you.”

So often we look to the monasteries and mysticism in search of meaning and mindfulness, and yet, as I discovered this week, sometimes simply pausing, being present and curious, unlocks worlds of wonder.

I hope that your week is one of wonder in which you are nourished.

Karl

PS: If you have a moment, I would appreciate you telling me what you enjoy about this letter by commenting here.