Valuable business/life insights from a big artist

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.”

Mix it up to spark personal growth and innovation

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.”

How do you think?

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?

Fight the funk with your own inspiration board

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.