What can an artist teach us about working across mediums, pushing boundaries, the importance of failure, enjoying the process and innovation? A great deal, it seems, based on this incisive obituary in today’s IHT by Michael Kimmelman on Robert Rauschenberg.
Excerpts:
A painter, photographer, printmaker, choreographer, onstage performer, set designer and, in later years, even a composer, Rauschenberg defied the traditional idea that an artist stick to one medium or style. He pushed, prodded and sometimes reconceived all the mediums in which he worked.
The process — an improvisatory, counterintuitive way of doing things — was always what mattered most to him. “Screwing things up is a virtue,” he said when he was 74. “Being correct is never the point… Being right can stop all the momentum of a very interesting idea.”
Here’s an illuminating snippet from today’s IHT about the importance of forging new habits to foster personal growth and innovation:
“… Brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks.
Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.”
Here’s an insightful if depressing snippet via WWD this week about the psychology of shopping:
“The irony is when times are tough, people often become more victims. They may take themselves deeper in a hole and keep spending. They rely on shopping is a quick, easy coping mechanism instead of doing the hard work to dig in and fix what’s really wrong.” Terrence Shulman, founder and director of the Shulman Center for Compulsive and Theft Spending.
Much has been written about our hyper-consumptive culture and its possible long-term, negative effects on both individual well-being and that of society at large…
Here’s something funny: blogging makes me think about Shakespeare. Well, not exactly… but it does make me think about being a better writer.
When I first started blogging a year or so ago, I used to agonize over each post, even printing out drafts for a rigorous self-edit.
As you know, I’ve moved on, routinely blasting out posts after a quick scan or two (I don’t think I’ve printed anything in six months).
My hope of course is that the whole experience (writing included) is better this way — more natural, heartfelt and flowing (even with a typo or too).
This is the blogging way… The hours I once spent agonizing over meaningless edits, I now spend reading, scanning the web and hopefully, creating my own stories.
I also try to put more thought into each post, before I start writing (you seem surprised?). Which brings me back to Shakespeare…
Yes, they are; we, as humans, crave/need them for meaning and context.
A while back, you might have heard a story now and again around the campfire… odds are that it was a good story, and that you remembered it, and re-told it to keep it alive.
Today, countless stories come in over the transom every second… new brands, e-mails, RSS, TV, random people on the street.
We so desperately want to hear them, at least the good ones, craving that meaning and context again, so we try to process it all.
But we cannot. Even if we read for 24 hours straight, we would catch about .0000001% of the day’s dump (I heard yesterday that 150,000 blogs are created each day).
So, of course, it’s absurd to even try.
By all means, we should be on the lookout for good storytellers, but we should limit your intake and make time - lots of time - to create our own stories, with friends, family, co-workers…
There’s a lot of media buzz around Dan Pink’s new book, ‘The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need‘, a career advice book, presented manga-style.
My friends and I are brainstorming on where to go for vacation. The beach? The woods? A road trip? We’ve narrowed it down to three choices, all very different.
Soon it’ll be time to decide…
The cultured whip-cracker among us has posed an excellent question to help forge consensus: “which place is most likely to inspire us?”.
All of a sudden, sitting on a beach for a week doesn’t look so hot…
(David Whyte touches on this in one of his CDs. He says something like: “the answer to exhaustion is not rest, but the whole-heartedness”.)
Something to consider next time you go on holiday…
I used to be much more of a linear thinker — how to get from point A to point B in a straight line, marching down the bullet-points on a page, taking a single line of attack to find a solution to a problem - you get the idea. Maybe it comes from my experience as an investment banker coming out of college?
About a year ago, as the daffodils were breaking in Central Park, I left a heated board room on Park Ave, descended 30 floors, and walked a dozen blocks north to my favorite French bistro in the city.
I had one thing in mind: to have a long, lazy lunch.
By the time the poulet cajun landed on my table, accompanied by some tasty white wine, I began to imagine how I might occupy myself in the year ahead…
I would slow down, start writing a blog, read some important books, focus on having better conversations and work on a few projects with people I respected and admired (I wrote down three names).
A year’s gone by, so it’s time for a gut-check. How are things going?
So far, I’m pretty happy with the results. (I’ve learned that striving for perfection is pointless).
So tonight it’s time to savor the fullness of the moment, because as sure as I hear that garbage truck clanking and groaning outside my window, I know that NYC will remain a school of unpredictable, hard knocks.
How often do you have a bad day at work? A few times a month? More?
I think a few times a month is normal, but anything more than that - e.g. long drawn-out periods of negativity and tail-chasing is clearly not a good place to be.
But we’ve all been there. Oh yes, we have.
Borrowing a page from graphic designers, here’s a simple, effective method I’ve stumbled upon to escape that hell: create your own inspiration board.
By this I mean a page/space where you keep track of the most inspiring people, things, places, ideas, moments you’ve experienced over the past year or so.
Are you leading your own life, or the life you or others think you should be living? Do you belong or feel abandoned?
These are the gnawing questions put to us by David Whyte in much of his poetry and writing.
Not your everyday cocktail chatter, but important questions nonetheless! How does one begin to frame an answer?
Mr. Whyte, not one to abandon us, throws a life-line:
“Every courageous life is lived in the grit and difficulty of existence. Dante says ‘in the middle of road of my life, I awoke in a dark wood where the true way was wholly lost.’ A beautiful authentic line and one of the reasons that The Comedia has been such an abiding classic through the centuries of western literature is because it is incredibly sincere. He is not basing his knowledge on all-knowing competence. He’s basing it on investigative vulnerability. He doesn’t say to you he has these three rules, these seven laws. He says you know one day I just stopped telling myself all the things I’d been telling myself and I stopped needing to know all the things I’d been needing to know and I just actually started paying attention to things as they seem to be in their own voices.
I’m lucky to have a few close friends who live/breathe the art & culture scene.
They’re constantly inviting me out to see new work, which I appreciate very much, because good art/culture always inspires me.
Like yoga, cooking, or a brisk walk in the woods, art/culture offers a doorway into self-awakening or consciousness, making it easier to stay centered and leave behind what Peter Russell calls the “hum-drum of daily existence”.
In this vein, I offer you a 30-second journey: a short clip by one of my favorite emerging artists, Robert Olsen.
How did I find out about Mr. Olsen? A tip from one of my friends. And no, I don’t own any of his work, yet…
You are currently browsing the archives for the Self-actualization category.
Welcome to the Ripaste!
We're now posting a couple of times a day. To get a daily serving of IBC, you can receive our content by Email or RSS. If there's no new content, you won't be sent anything. Isn't technology wonderful ...
1 Comment | 
Entrepreneurship, Self-actualization | Tagged: art, artist, change, creativity, culture, failure, innovation, process | 
Permalink
Posted by Oliver
