#140: Working with artists (and others like them)
I wanted to get straight to business today. I wasn’t inspired to share any particular piece of art, amusing cartoon, wine to drink, or place to visit. I grudgingly decided I should try to find you something, lest you intuit my grumpiness. I guess, like you, I am feeling a little tired.
Realist painter, John Meyer’s The Heat of Summer seemed appropriate for a late November letter and I loved the energy of Daniel Levi’s Swarm. You might be looking back at the year proclaiming. “I’ve been so unproductive”, in which case this cartoon might provoke you to give yourself a break. It’s summer, so it’s bubbles time. Charles Fox’s are my favourite. Eat Out Magazine held its annual awards last week, here are their must-go-to South African restaurants. My perfect pairing would be to head to the West Coast’s Wolfgat in this convertible Citroen DS21. If the day was rainy, I’d ask fine car dealers Crossley and Webb to lend me this Jaguar E-Type fixed-head coupe.
Okay, that was actually pretty cool. It made me smile. Thank you!
/strategy
Matthew Budd and Larry Rothstein remind us that when we communicate, we are, at minimum, “two biological beings who literally live in different cognitive universes”.
Kimberly Elsbach, Brooke Brown-Saracino, and Francis Flynn’s, somewhat blandly titled, Collaborating with Creative Peers is filled with useful ideas for when one of those beings is an artist.
In their formulation ‘artists’ are those that “feel a very personal stake in their endeavors” and who “prefer working independently on projects that they can ‘own’ and in the end will carry their distinctive stamp”.
(A quick sidenote here. This is a bit of a caricature of an artist as many artists are deep collaborators. Still, we’ll go with the image of the artist as the iconoclastic individualist, as a fair whack of them are.)
I know that you can think of people who fit that description. They’re definitely not only in creative roles – they’re very often specialists in almost any domain. They get a kick out of conceptualizing new ways of doing something. They want to control implementation because they know that they know what needs to be done. They’re a tad defensive about feedback. In fact, it is also the stereotypical entrepreneur.
You might just have had a realization about yourself. If you suspect that this is you, there are three indicators.
One, you love producing work that has your unique stamp and you resist having your original vision diluted (sometimes to your own detriment).
Two, you want control over how the ideas are generated, shaped, and executed. That is powerful, it allows for incredible consistency. The shadow? You don’t easily allow others to contribute, or you find yourself overcommitted but still not letting go.
Three, you emphasize the importance of the idea over its commercial return (the authors caution more commercially minded people not to misinterpret this as naivete, but rather as an expression of commitment to creativity).
There are incredible benefits to being this person and having people like them in your business. You just need to know how to work with them, because when you view your work as a deep expression of who you are, it’s hard not to be insulted by even the most well-meaning suggestions. And still, the suggestions might be necessary.
Elsbach, et al, offer four useful tactics.
First, offer broad suggestions. That allows the space for improvement whilst retaining a sense of ownership. If you know that you’re more of the individualistic type, rather than rejecting a specific suggestion, ask open-ended questions and explore what the person was hoping to achieve with their idea. You can actively shape the conversation, take it back into a broader domain where you can co-create solutions.
Second, present your feedback dispassionately. You don’t want to seem like you’re pushing an agenda.
Third, don’t expect an immediate response or buy-in. Give the artist time to process the feedback. Allow them the space to incorporate your feedback together with their own style. If you’re of the artistic type be sure to ask for time to respond. Resist the temptation to say something that you’ll later regret.
Fourth, show respect and like-mindedness. The authors say, “Artists have told us that when someone shows familiarity with their existing ideas and previous work…the collaboration is more likely to be productive”.
I hope that this increases the diplomacy between the different cognitive universes in your business.
/self
You know that I almost never take something from the current news cycle. I figure that most of you would’ve seen it in one shape or another. However, this recent New Yorker interview with Annie Ernaux, winner of this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, was too good to resist.
I haven’t yet read Ernaux’s work, but Alexandra Schwartz’s telling of her story is captivating.
Ernaux’s books are on entirely based on her life. In almost all of them she makes no effort to fictionalize that fact. She uses her life as a vehicle to reflect on being human, on living life in all its complexities.
She reflects that “I never wanted to write for, I write from” and “I am a medium. I feel that I am someone who can transmit things”. Schwartz describes her as “Relentlessly personal in her art”.
She doesn’t conform to standard publishing lengths. Many of her books are slim volumes, a hundred pages or so.
It struck me, yet again, that there are so many routes to excellence. That excellence is about finding your route in a way that fits with who you are.
Ernaux tells Schwartz that she believes that she has fulfilled her destiny, and then softens it slightly, “Not a destiny that was written from the beginning. One that was constructed, bit by bit, of course.”
What a place to be. To know that you’re in your destiny and that you’ve built it. That seems like a useful definition of a good life.
/soul
Abdulrazak Gurnah, was the winner of last year’s Nobel. As with Ernaux, I had never heard of him nor read his work until the announcement. On the one hand, my ignorance embarrasses me, on the other, I am happy to know that there is so much beauty to be discovered.
Gurnah was born in Zanzibar and his work draws from East Africa, its people, its politics, its experiences under colonialism and post-liberation.
In an effort to lessen my Nobel literary ignorance, I recently read Paradise and By the Sea.
In Paradise, Gurnah’s power with language is on full display. Yusuf is given into servitude to pay off his father’s debts. As he travels away from home, not yet knowing this was his fate, he sits awake in the train and “The darkness outside was a measureless void, and he feared that the train was too deep in it to be able to return safely.” He never does return home.
Years later he travels into the interior. The train stops at a station whose companion is a lone Jacaranda tree, “Mauve and purple petals lay on the ground like an iridescent rug”. As they travel into more arid land, “The scattered scrub was formidably gnarled and twisted forms, as if existence was a torture’. And then as they near the great lakes of the interior, “The light ahead of them looked thicker, softer with the burden of the water below” and as they’re transported across the lake, he reflects on their fear and discomfort in the canoes, “Their feet would cross a lifetime of mountains and plains but still retreat hurriedly from the hissing tides which washed their shores”.
In Paradise, colonialism is ever-present, ever-encroaching but has not yet taken hold. By The Sea is from the vantage point of the latter parts of the 20th century. It is filled with the knowledge and despair both of colonialism and democracy’s rapid descent to dictatorship. Here we encounter Gurnah’s political power. This one paragraph will give you a sense.
“Maps made places on the edge of the imagination seem graspable and placable. And later, when it became necessary, geography became biology in order to construct a hierarchy in which to place the people who lived in their inaccessibility and primitiveness in other places on the map.”
There are many more. We should all read his work. It has made me a better human.
I leave you with this final thought from Annie Erlaux.
At 82, she’s a little irritated by the busyness that has been occasioned by winning the Nobel. She complains that they are stealing her old age, commenting “What really interests me about youth is that it’s always the time that you remember later. But I won’t be able to remember my old age. So! I have to live it to the fullest.”
We’re at the end of November, I hope that you’re living life to the fullest. If not, start now.
With love
Karl
PS: Our last letter for the year will be on 11 December.