Month: February 2016

There is a lot of talk out on the Internet about how to achieve the best results in life and in business by having the right approach, everything from building the most useful habits to internalizing the best thinking strategies. There are exemplars, and those who can seemingly discover their patterns and articulate them for a wider audience, those who would be the beneficiaries of these new power tools. But it’s the exemplars, and those who model the patterns, who benefit most of all, since the further you get from the original model, the less precise and the more mainstream it becomes.

That’s not to say that people have not benefitted from unusual trainings and books with ideas about how this or that exemplar did what they did. But there is a difference between being the originator of a set of thinking and behavioral patterns, and those millions who later pick them up and add them to their tool box. Be careful when casting aside one’s organically grown sets of tools and beliefs, those learnings that have taken your life up to the moment to develop, for some other set of contradictory patterns, expecting some magic carpet ride into graceful living and career growth. Take it from someone dumb enough to find out for himself.

But there were a pair of books I read during the 1980s, and a couple times since, written by an artist Gianfranco Baruchello and art critic Henry Martin, who went to Italy to interview him. They were How to Imagine: a Narrative on Art and Agriculture and Why Duchamp: An Essay on Aesthetic Impact. Both books gravitate around the influence of Marcel Duchamp, not only in regard to 20th century art, but also in the way his ideas have bled outward into the very meaning of objects and processes that we take for granted today. The whole way we think of innovation, for instance, would likely not be what it is without Duchamp’s somewhat outrageous experiments during the early 20th century.

Baruchello is an artist, a painter, who was somewhat of a disciple of Duchamp, but who had also had become a farmer, utilizing a number of ideas he had derived from his explorations of Duchamp’s inventions. These were, oddly enough, extremely practical adaptations of the ideas of an artist who was generally categorized as a Dada artist (who set out to destroy civilization by poking fun at mainstream art and the gravitas of its historical accretion), but also a conceptual artist, whose work was largely a series of questions, puzzles and language games.

One thing Baruchello said that stood out for me, was he would regularly look in the mirror and ask, “have you been Duchamp today?” It was his way of asking himself, not only whether he has thought outside the box, but whether a leap outside even the construct that created boxes was a possibility.

When I say that Baruchello was a farmer, I don’t mean that he grew one particular crop, the way most farmers of the 20th and 21st centuries have, in order to optimize production. He grew a variety of things, and kept animals as well. He was attempting to break the mold, to create new systems of farming and animal husbandry, and at the same time recreate farming practices of previous era, while using modernist aesthetics to make it work. It was quite a task to take on, and he actually did make it work, at least for a time.

The whole “have you been Duchamp today?” thing became a practice for myself and a colleague, who is himself an artist, and somewhat of a Duchampian. We would continually asked each other Baruchello’s “have you been Duchamp today?” question, half as a joke, whenever we found ourselves in a particular sticky situation or rut, something seemingly unresolvable or unpleasant. This would often help us pop out of the situation for a moment and see things with more of a fresh outlook.

But the main thing we did that perhaps made a difference for both of us, was that we forced each other to submit creative work to the other, some sort of strange piece of writing (I, playing the part of the poet) or drawing each day, something that took perhaps only minutes to produce. And of course, this was all in the spirit of Duchamp, and would demand some sort of disruption of our regular thought processes to produce, very often something preposterous and of little artistic merit, but something well worth the making.

It was a practice that flourished and grew in our lives in numerous ways, as well as creating energy, enthusiasm and lubrication enough for us to forge ahead and produce value for multiple decades, and likely helped us to survive multiple organizational changes and cutbacks, while others who had followed a much safer and saner approach to career growth, of gathering certifications and MBAs, fell to the wayside, ended up being less resourceful, and it showed.

You see, Duchamp wasn’t the kind of innovator who was going to argue about what kinds of images one was going to paint, what kinds of perspectives to invite into the painting, or how to apply the paint to create a sense of difference and energy, like the Picassos, Van Goghs or Kandinskys of the time. Nor was he deciding between painting and sculpture. The questions he began asking were on a whole other level: why paint at all? Why not just call this urinal “Fountain” and sign it R Mutt, instead of his own name? What’s in a name, anyway, and what is art?

When I hear about the folks who are prescribing specific methodologies to manage innovation, I go back to Duchamp for relief. Yes, Picasso was an innovator, because he followed particular impulses, but Duchamp shook the things up and changed the art world in ways that have changed it permanently. Picasso may have awakened trends and opened our eyes, but Duchamp gave birth to a new world.

Tesla, the man, was a Duchamp, and Elon Musk, the creator of the Tesla car, among other things, is perhaps a Picasso. Those of you trying to decide which methodology to follow could learn from either one of them. And for those of you who are still trying to decide which cert is going to provide you with a skill base that’s going to make a difference, or who are looking for an easy, paint-by-numbers approach, fine, get your certs, but don’t stop there. Those skills are an arbitrary set of ideas constructed to provide mere competence – please aspire to more than that.

Don’t afraid to be strange, and follow your impulses into less frequented areas of thought, things that seem foolish or a waste of time. Make your own path, have fun, make meaning. Ask yourself now and then “Have I been Duchamp today?” And find out for yourselves why that may be of value.

The skills and finesse one needs to do just about any job well are about all one needs to do just about anything. The difficulty is in figuring out precisely what that anything might be. That’s where we all get stuck, except for a odd few people who either because of some weird luck or insight, or perhaps even mental derangement, do something different, and in a way that may be almost shocking to most of us, perhaps even inspire self-loathing for not doing the same.

There is a lot of talk about how they are the true leaders of the world, the makers, who steer the course of history in ways even our political leaders cannot, and we often wonder how they got that way. What one thing did they have to their advantage that other did not have? Family money? An amazing mentor? Very often we find there’s no one answer.

When you look for what may have made the difference, it surely wasn’t certifications or any kind of well-trodden path in pursuit of mere competence. It’s more likely they weren’t following anything that resembles common sense at all, but uncovering a path as they went, picking up their skill set and ideas as if by a chaotic trust in their own enthusiasm. And perhaps it was all mere luck, since for every Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, there are likely thousands of others we’ve never heard of, with perhaps equally good or better ideas, but who never bumped into the right people, or whose experiments failed and and never succeeded, who went unnoticed for other reasons. Perhaps it’s just that they didn’t play dirty enough, didn’t have the enormous charisma and socio-pathological traits to bring their work to the attention of millions of people.

You can take a number of these masters of reality and reverse engineer how they got where they did by digging into their personal histories. There are endless reams of books claiming to have the power to help you attain, at least in part, the cognitive prowess of Leonardo DaVinci, Nikola Tesla, Einstein, all the iconic masterminds of the past centuries. You are taught to practice visualizing the way time passes when riding on a photon at the speed of light (which is generally the speed photon’s travel at), or how to build and run objects in one’s head. And all of these things are great practices, I honestly believe they could help you become more intelligent, but one does not become Einstein by repeating what Einstein did. Einstein, of course, may have done similar exercises, though what he did that led him to inch out and away from the masses who were essentially doing the same thing, was he followed his own curiosity and questions into unknown regions most of us don’t ever consider traveling.  But how did he know to trust those impulses, and how do we learn from his experience.

Maybe we don’t. Or maybe it’s more obvious than we think. The poet John Keats observed something very interesting about William Shakespeare, something he believed was the essential trait of his greatest, and something that I try to keep in mind whenever I find myself asking that last question. It is what he called Negative Capability, or an ability to be “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.”

And though living in that kind of ambiguity seems the opposite of what science teaches us, as well as our hunger for certainty, for measurable results and answered questions, it is that extended state of unknowing that scientists and innovators alike tend to live in. And it is something to keep in mind when conducting ourselves through our careers as workaholic makers of change, as well as the minutia of our every day choices.