Again, Jessica Nagy of Indexed totally has my number. (Today’s example is this graphic, “Not Just for Kids”)
As does Bikram Choudhury.
“Never too old, never too sick, never too bad to start again.”
Indeed.
What would you start, if you thought you could?
I hate crowds.
Rather, I struggle to interface with more than one person at a time. (I was going to refine that thought to say only during professional situations – conferences, donor dinners, and the like – but when I examine it I have the same issues at a cookout or a big family dinner, too. So there you have it.)
It’s not the fact that I’m particularly shy, or that I’m afraid of new things. It’s the constant ADD of many of the situations. People! Microphone issues! Four simultaneous conversations, each with interesting words, all within 2 feet of me! Awkward small talk – let me check my phone/email/pda to extricate myself!
Yes, I’m obviously an introvert. But I love people – I would just prefer to meet and talk with them one at a time. I can get a better bead on who they are, what’s important to them, where we intersect when I can focus on just one person. (And I’d also like to think that they walk away knowing who I am in a fuller sense.)
Lifehacker posted an article by Michael Lopp a few days ago about listening, and most of the ways that we don’t do it. I am seriously as guilty as anyone of these errors – jumping in too soon, not asking enough dumb questions, letting ambiguity hang out there in the air – or worse, pushing past it.
I realize that, with pals and such, I make listening a priority…but I don’t often transition that over to my professional conversations. When I do? Those are the conversations that do indeed make me feel closer to a teammate or colleague – they do build trust.
Note to self: more eye contact, more dumb questions, less talking.
I’m going to save the Leadership Intensive recap for another day as, quite frankly, I’m still processing a lot of the information.
Maria Popova, who curates Brain Pickings, came across a letter that Tchaikovsky wrote to his benefactress, Nadezhda von Meck (aside: that might be the coolest name ever, for the record.) about the correlation between work ethic and creativity. She parallels it with a video from Jack White of pop music fame. It’s certainly not a new thought, the slogging through when the Muse blows off your invitation and you’re left with a blank piece of paper, an empty mind, possible even a white text box on a blogging program…
I digress.
I would, however draw some additional parallels between creativity and work ethic and leadership. There’s a great article in Forbes by August Turak, that makes the argument that great leaders also need to be great followers.
In both cases, whether you’re wrestling an idea onto the page or climbing up the corporate ladder, you need to:
I find that #2 can be the trickiest…we can get bogged down enough in our own to-do lists, with our own inner judges that it can be difficult to really watch, listen, perceive. When we take that time, though, don’t all manner of things get easier?
I have thirteen days left in the summer festival season. My plans are to take my own advice (well, to try to anyway) for the next two weeks and apply it to my job. After that I’ll be making an early run at this, as a way to discipline my inner writer. (I got about halfway through – about 25,000 words – last year, before the fall audition travel schedule made the daily quotas impossible. Without that distraction maybe I’ll make it to 30,000!)
Today, if you do nothing else? Just show up.
This weekend reminded my little company of the importance of flexibility. We were about two-thirds of the way through the opening night performance of Don Giovanni when a derecho (a word I didn’t know until Saturday morning) blew through, taking with it our power, our beautiful projections, and endangering the safety of patrons and performers alike.
It was frightening, and heartbreaking: hours and hours of focused work, rehearsals, a set and costumes built from scratch all abandoned in an attempt to shelter from the high winds and horrible lightning. Yet Don Giovanni was not dragged to hell by the Commendatore – rather he remained alive, able to seduce for another day.
Fast forward to the following Sunday – a matinee performance, and one which had been sold out for months. It was a 90+ degree day, and much of the region was still without power. Our theater and offices were also without power, so the performance was obviously not going to happen.
We met at the theater: the box office staff, my boss and her boss, our production manager, the house manager. We grabbed cell phones and computers, and BB brought a mini generator to recharge as we needed. We called the orchestra and cast and crew to schedule a replacement performance, which came together much more quickly than we could’ve hoped. We crafted language for the website and patron emails, and our Web Manager SaM pushed the content out. We pulled up lists of ticket buyers for the show and everyone – even the Senior Vice-President – started calling patrons to let them know that the performance was cancelled. As cars pulled into the lot, people met them to explain the situation.
I know that there were some people we did not reach. I know that many folks – including the entire cast and crew, and frankly the admin & artistic staffs – were supremely disappointed. But rather than saying “oh well….nothing to be done”, we investigated other options and quickly made a plan. That flexibility is one trait that many artistic types have, and I was very happy to have been surrounded by a group of artists and musicians – turned- administrators when the chips were down.
The takeaways? When something unexpected happens (and I think this could apply to both good and bad things), take stock and make a plan. Give that new plan room to grow and morph. Titles don’t matter when there’s a job to be done, and in fact the leaders I revere the most aren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.
Still no power on campus (as of this writing), but we’ll be working offsite in several homes to continue preparations. And we’ll all be crossing fingers and toes that the power comes on in time for tomorrow’s rescheduled performance. (Let’s be honest, having Giovanni still running around is a bad thing, karmically speaking!) Wish us luck!
I am such a fan of people’s stories.
A huge fan. And not just of the final product, but of the whole ongoing process: the passion, the struggles, the discernment, the adventure of a new path, the satisfaction of recommitting to a routine or activity that brings comfort. But I’m finding that folks often apologize for the process…for leaving their original passion, for floundering before finding the new avenue.
Quite frankly? Those messy moments are so very telling. I am also a HUGE fan of those creative messes.
I remember being called into a meeting at my HVAC job, where my bosses quite generously offered me an opportunity to advance to their sales team. I had no real knowledge of the business, had a limited background in the science and technology behind the product, and while I enjoyed the office and the challenge of educating myself about widgets and airflow and humidity (and also learning to RTFM) I was pretty sure that I didn’t belong there. But I really didn’t know what I wanted to do…so I stammered my way out of the meeting, letting them know how flattered I was to be considered. I slept on it, and shortly thereafter tendered my resignation to finish my teaching certificate.
It was a messy situation, a snap decision, but ultimately it was the right thing.
Do I regret my widget days? Not at all – I learned how to function in a linear, masculine office, figure things out on my own before asking (and to also not be ashamed when I needed to ask), and speak my mind plainly and clearly. But I also didn’t realize that my (wholly unformed)dreams didn’t jive with my circumstance until my bosses showed a willingness to invest in me. It was a catalyst, a get-off-your-butt-and-make-a-choice moment.
I’ve referenced Danielle LaPorte before, but this posting is a theme that I think bears repeating:
You don’t need to burn the dock to push off your boat.
You don’t need to dis’ how you’ve done things in order to do things differently.
There’s no need to criticize the past to validate the future.
But we do.
She goes on to say that honoring the path that got us to -or even past – the messy part is a vital part of our own story. And I would heartily agree.
Celebrate the mess, my friends!
My friend Claire (she is my new go-to for great books – her mom is a librarian, and she’s supremely well-read.) turned me on to Marci Alboher‘s book One Person/Multiple Careers: A New Model for Work/Life Success.
Now, I’m not usually a highlighter of books: when I find something interesting, I’ll either stick a piece of paper (gas receipt, junk mail, business cards…even twist-ties and rubber band serve on occasion) in the pages of a hardcover, or, if the book is mine and a paperback, I’ll dog-ear the page. (Book purists, I apologize.) So I took the book to the gym, to motor through some reading while on the elliptical.
Here’s what the poor, poor book looked like after an hour:
You can tell that I’m finding a lot of value in this particular tome. I’m tempted to just copy all of the bits and pieces that ring true to me, but we’d be here all bloomin’ day.
The most liberating takeaway is one that flies in direct opposition to what many of us have been taught: the concept that we don’t actually need to specialize for a lifetime in one discipline and ignore everything else that we enjoy in order to find success. For some people there are parallel tracks; others commit to a discipline for a number of months/years, and then either leverage that knowledge or skill set into a different career or turn that single-minded focus towards another discipline that they’re interested in. But all of the permutations are valid, and frankly very interesting. And it’s not much of a surprise to see a high number of artists and musicians’ stories represented within the pages.
There are strategies for finding your ‘slash’ (or, rather ‘slashes’ – why stop at one?), interspersed with real-life case studies of folks who have successfully explored both parallel and sequential tracks.
It’s worth the read, I promise! (And thanks, Claire, for the recommendation!)
One of the great things about school in the arts is that, at an amazingly impressionable and optimistic age, we’re suddenly surrounded with people interested in the same things were are – but who often have wildly different backgrounds and preferences. Conversations can traverse light years, bouncing from pop culture to Nietzsche to a musical theater melody to dreams to memories to expectations in mere minutes. We’re consuming information and putting it together almost as nimbly as we did as small children…navigating the way our worlds worked, learning how to communicate. And the more disparate influences we have? The more interesting our projects become.
I find myself nowadays using that interest in a million things to multitask just to get the mundane things completed. Work, laundry, feeding myself and my family and making sure All Of The Things get done. Creative? Only in the ways I save a few pennies or streamline my errand running or trips up the stairs. (Yawn. I might’ve just bored myself to sleep.) So I’m drawn to this graphic note by Nick Cave.
I started googling the names I didn’t know (and I’ll be honest, I have many many more to go) and wondering whether the smudges were made by condensation from a glass? Tears seem too sentimental, but maybe?
I’ll be honest, I thought that I was going to contrast this idea with this OpEd piece in the Times written by David Byrne’s daughter Malu, a glass sculptor (!) and jewelry maker. She writes about needing to leave the city to really access her creativity. And I thought here! Here is an example of conflicting advice! The constant barrage of cross-pollination versus quiet inspiration. Genius!
But that wasn’t so much the focus of her writing.
She says that in the city there are too many distractions; the amount of non-creative work needed to sustain an artistic lifestyle; the cramped spaces; and the constant stimulus allow for very little time for reflection or incorporation. She is seeking out a new area from which to create, to find her individual voice.
So, she’s not running away from the connections, but is running to find a space in which to process them…in which she can actually create.
A crowded page. A bucolic landscape. Why not both?
Indirect Routes 