Soul Shelter

Design is intention, a goal. Likewise, entrepreneurship.

One of my students, an accomplished Irish designer, delivered a stunning presentation during our entrepreneurship class last summer. The experience jolted me. How had he done that?

Clearly it had something to do with the mysterious process called design, and I suddenly realized that my own presentations were, in terms of visual thinking, stuck in the dark ages.

Like most business school teachers, I’d tacitly bought into the deeply faulted notion that when an instructor 1) makes a verbal statement, then 2) shows a PowerPoint bullet of that same statement, what magically results is 3) permanent imprinting of the point upon listener minds.

This widely accepted 1-2-3 PowerPoint fiction is a prime example of wishful thinking. It ignores stark fact: Listeners are far more powerfully moved by visuals than by text (and they remember them better, too).

Just as I was reeling from my PowerPoint epiphany, a friend told me about Presentation Zen founder/writer Garr Reynolds, a tried-and-true Japanophile who, unbeknownst to me, had bought my second book, The Swordless Samurai. I grabbed a copy of Presentation Zen — an extraordinary work — and completely overhauled my entire approach to presentations. I (and my students) remain humbly in Garr’s debt.

I was struck anew by the mystery of design a few weeks ago on a visit to Japan. Though I hardly understand design’s most basic principles, over dinner with Garr in his hometown of Osaka, I grew more convinced than ever that design is deeply connected to entrepreneurship.

Design / di’zín / n. & v. • n. … 3 a plan, purpose, or intention

This I know: Design is intention, a goal. Likewise, entrepreneurship. As my students constantly hear, entrepreneurial action always resolves to a simple question: What is your goal?

Shortly after the Japan trip I found myself in Amsterdam, again marveling at the mystery of design, this time how it’s brilliantly woven into the fabric of everyday life in the Netherlands. I love the way Dutch design shows you what to do without words, or even diagrams.

Take these toilet buttons, for example. Depending on your own, er, output, you know immediately which one to push.

Look at this transaction counter at the Amsterdam Centraal train station. No need for signs, numbered tickets, or obsequious “assistants” to inform you of your turn. When the floor sparkles, you immediately know what to do.

That’s good design. And somehow, that’s entrepreneurship.

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– Feeling humorless lately? Take solace. –

The following appeared in the obit section of a small Western U.S. newspaper.*

It is with great sorrow that Mark Cunningham announces the death of his funnier third-grade self. Those closest to Cunningham (his siblings, parents, and spouse) have long known of his fondness for his younger self. Many a time has Cunningham regaled them with nostalgic accounts of his days at the rear of Mrs. Barbieri’s classroom at Red Glen Elementary: the scrawny chestnut-haired student ensconced at his tattooed desk, surrounded by giggling girls and envious, head-shaking boys.

Cunningham’s current self, it might as well be admitted, is barely funny at all. Those who read his novels do not hesitate to label him downright dour. What funniness Cunningham strives to exhibit in passing moments to his in-laws, distant relations, or current associates, proves diffident and dry, and is often met with laughless bewilderment.

It’s precisely this sad turn of events that inspired the placement of this obituary. Should the following be read by a former third-grade classmate or two — someone who once squirmed spasmodically at the back of Mrs. Barbieri’s class of 1986, tense with laughter that threatened to induce a wetting of the pants — then the passing of Cunningham’s third-grade self might find its proper eulogy in joyful remembrance.

Cunningham’s third-grade self first met with distinction early in the school year — September or October of ‘86, it must have been — at Mrs. Barbieri’s inaugural show-and-tell. Anyone present at that hour will no doubt recall Cunningham’s debut as a witty youthful magician. As the bereaved elder Cunningham recalls, this exhibition involved colored scarves, a deck of playing cards, and a rope of thrillingly erratic lengths. The performance culminated unforgettably: a small red ball, the same object Cunningham had caused to vanish beneath a cup but moments before, appeared in Mrs. Barbieri’s desk drawer to the amazement of the whole class. A young boy’s winsome future could not be more assured in the span of three or four minutes.

For a time, Cunningham lived up to this auspicious beginning. In the remaining eight months of his third-grade career, the funny little fellow grew accustomed to the mantra of Mrs. Barbieri’s third-grade girls — three words wheezed in breathless hilarity: “YOU’RE SO FUNNY!” The triumph of that singular year is most fully attested by the unanimous commentary in Cunningham’s paper-and-paste classroom annual: ‘You crack me up!’; ‘I bet you’ll be a comedian!’; ‘Remember when I sprayed Tang all over my desk because you made me laugh so hard?’; ‘Stay funny, ‘kay?’

Such a crowning year, given the peerless light at its peak, throws other years into shadow. As the Samurai of old knew well, the moment of mastery is also the commencement of decline. So it was for Cunningham. Degree by degree, as the boy advanced through elementary school, junior high, and high school, his funnier self grew more timid, more colorless, quieter.

It’s hard to say exactly how such a thing occurs — what decisive moments account for it — but surely the loss of the funnier self is common to individuals everywhere. Cunningham’s mortification at two romantic fractures in his ninth- and tenth-grade years no doubt muted his funnier self all the more, as did his revolt, at age 14, from his protestant upbringing. And surely the young man’s impassioned reading of certain classic literature was of no small account — but such things, in the end, amount to mere speculation. By age twenty, Cunningham’s funnier third-grade self was verily forgotten amidst the clamor of his graver, more ardent, more prepossessing selves.

Still, with characteristic resilience, in moments of relaxation or late-night delirium, Cunningham’s third-grade self would now and then re-emerge with a flourish. On each such occasion, observers were surprised by the short-lived but sparkling delight this sober young man had furnished them. Later, such moments of effervescence became confined to evenings shared between Cunningham and his beloved wife. The most private theatre imaginable. While Cunningham’s newer friends, his in-laws and professional associates remained unsuspecting of the funnier third-grade self submerged within him, his wife was time and time again floored with glee, invariably visited by the toe-curling whimsy Cunningham had once provoked in Mrs. Barbieri’s third-grade lasses.

It was in the course of one such intermittent exhibition last week that Cunningham conclusively noted the moribund state of his third-grade self. Or, it might be said that for the first time he understood how deeply buried this funnier self had become in the course of twenty-odd years, how rarely it now appeared, and what an impossible feat it would be to resurrect this self completely. In that seminal moment, on an evening in his thirty-first year, Cunningham was unmistakably struck with the profound grief that signals the end to a part of oneself, and his wife felt called upon to console the bereft fellow.

Cunningham’s funnier third-grade self is survived by Cunningham in a more current, regretfully more serious amalgam of selves. He grieves alone. His wife is sympathetic. There will be no memorial service, as Cunningham fears he would be unable to muster appropriate funniness. He might accept flowers. He will let you know.

*not really.

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Back to the future in Amsterdam and Japan

Last week I spent a couple of days in Amsterdam to attend a conference on business models and deliver a presentation entitled How Your Business Model is Culturally Imprinted — And Why You Should Care (about which more in a later post).

Amsterdam is wonderful: A city of living history with frank, funny, welcoming citizens, and skinny, happy policemen. Good design is evident everywhere, and businesspeople seem to surf on the leading edge of everything — especially in the mobile telephone sector.

Many of the conference participants were sporting Apple’s new iPhone, and more than a few were either involved in startups working on iPhone applications or serving as consultants to large multinational firms intrigued by the iPhone’s blistering adoption rate.

Watching the twiddling thumbs and the twirling tweets, I was overcome by a sense of deja vu. Where had I seen all this before?

More than ten years ago, it turns out, in Japan.

That’s when NTT docomo, Japan’s leading mobile phone operator, launched i-mode, the world’s first Internet-enabled cellular telephone service. I was a witness, and even experimented with docomo’s prototype 3G model in 2001 (see essay on 3G cat video).

The i-mode service was a smash hit, attracting millions of subscribers its first year. Thanks largely to i-mode, today NTT docomo boasts some 50 million subscribers, an astonishing number for a single carrier in a nation with a population of 127 million.

Here’s what strikes me: From a user experience standpoint, what Apple offers today is almost identical to what NTT docomo started offering more than a decade ago. Like the iPhone, i-mode enabled users to send and receive e-mail and perform a variety of other online tasks using a cellular handset. (Note to Japanophiles: Yes, i-mode was largely a “walled garden” insulated from the Internet at large, and naturally with far fewer services available at the time, but the business model and user experience are surprisingly similar).

Whether Apple took any hints from NTT docomo or not, iPhone architects could hardly have been ignorant of i-mode’s extraordinary, ground-breaking success.

Regardless, here’s the point: Other cultures can offer remarkable hints to inform our own entrepreneurial efforts. And today, a Japan struggling with new sorts of ground-breaking challenges — a declining population and the world’s oldest workforce among them — can offer to astute outsiders a glimpse of the future in sectors such as food products, health care, and, of course, always-stunning consumer electronics.

Next week: Design and entrepreneurship

Postscript: To be fair, with respect to the iPhone’s extraordinary design and user interface, i-mode developer Takeshi Natsuno commented in an interview that the i-phone “… cannot be produced by Japanese manufacturers. Never.”

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Me: So tell me again, what was it like?

Resident Baby: The place I came from?

– Yeah. Like, was it dark back there or full of light?

RB: You don’t remember? Didn’t you come from the same place?

– Well, yeah, everybody did.

RB: But you forgot what it was like?

– Everyone does, after a while.

RB: Really? You mean, I’ll forget too?

– I’m afraid so.

RB: Why?

– (shrug) It’s part of growing up.

RB: How long do I have?

– Hm?

RB: Till I forget.

– Uh, dunno. Nobody really knows when it happens. Personally, I suspect it happens with speech. A child learns language and forgets the other things. The earlier stuff. The mysteries. But that’s just a hunch. No one knows for sure.

RB: (thoughtful) Hmm.

– You look worried.

RB: What do you expect? You just told me I’m fated to forget where I came from!

– Maybe so, but you can describe it for me now, while you still remember. That way, even when you forget, I’ll remember.

RB: And you’ll remind me?

– Yeah.

RB: But wait a minute, how can you trust what I say? I mean, we’re not even really having this conversation. I can’t even talk yet, after all.

– So… what, you’re saying this is all in my head?

RB: Well…

– This discourse of ours, it isn’t even real?

RB: Well…

– Cause that hurts.

RB: Well, I’m just saying, I can’t even talk yet, so…

– You’re wiser than you know, kiddo. Can you just trust me on that? You’re a teacher.

RB: A teacher? I am?

– Yep, simply by being your bright-eyed, curious, squishable self. You can’t even help it. It’s just the way you are.

RB: (considering) Wow…

– So tell me, what was it like out there, before… You know, before the womb and all that?

RB: Well… (closing his eyes, thinking back) It wasn’t really dark, but not light either. …It was, like, all blues and pinks.

– In the womb, you mean?

RB: No, before that. It wasn’t really warm, but not cold either. There were, like, spots of light, maybe.

– Like stars?

RB: Sort of. Maybe.

– Could you hear anything? Were there sounds?

RB: It was silent. Wait, no, maybe there was, like, a hum.

– Did it all feel like water? Or more like air?

RB: Umm… It was a very settled feeling, I think. Peaceful.

– Wow.

RB: Pretty nice, huh?

– Yeah.

RB: But you know what?

– Hm?

RB: I’m glad to be here now.

– That’s a nice thing to say.

RB: No, but I mean it. Like, here we’ve got cookies, sippy cups, fuzzy blankets, storybooks, strollers, the park, the zoo…

– Mm. Simple pleasures.

RB: Yep. Those are what it’s all about. Those, and more complex pleasures when you’re older — symphonies, good novels, mango chutney. But it’s the same idea.

– So you came from where you came from in order to enjoy all those things?

RB: And to help you do so.

– I see. OK, that makes sense.

RB: Yep, but I also came to do this.

(Resident baby climbs up and gives me one of his irreplaceable Resident Baby hugs)

– Hey, thanks!

RB: I’m a baby. It’s what I’m all about.

– Well, I’m glad you’re here — and glad you’re glad to be here.

RB: Happy Father’s Day, Daddy.

– Yes it is. Happy and peaceful.

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- Rediscovering the power of raising one’s hand -

Jim Carrey’s latest movie, “Yes Man,” was playing aboard my return flight from Tokyo to Portland last week. I was busy working and left the sound off, but every few minutes glanced up to enjoy Carrey’s antics — and in so doing was reminded of the power of raising one’s hand.

“Yes Man” is based on British author Danny Wallace’s book by the same title about the life-changing power of responding positively to opportunity. In the movie, Carrey plays a stuck-in the-status-quo schlep whose life is transformed when he dogmatically follows the advice of a self-help guru who advocates saying “yes” to every request, personal or professional.

In the film, Carrey indiscriminately agrees to perform any task requested by anyone, and ultimately is richly rewarded, both personally and professionally, for his volunteerism. The message is simple: it’s better to say “yes” than “no.” Those who volunteer get ahead.

Carrey’s movie reminded me of a recent personal experience of the power of raising one’s hand. In fact, as this message hits inboxes, I should be 30,000 feet over Canada en route to Amsterdam — thanks to raising my hand.

It started a few months ago when I became intrigued by the Business Model Innovation Hub, a kind of crowdsourced book writing project led by author Alex Osterwalder.

Alex was releasing “chunks” of his new book, Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game-Changers, and Challengers, to Hub members for review and critique. I was familiar with Alex’s work from his Ph.D. days, but Business Model Generation goes beyond academics — it’s simple, elegant, and practical.

So, like some 400 other volunteers, I signed up and began reviewing the chunks.

I loved the content, which is close to my own work on business models. As I read, I started to see a way to contribute to Alex’s project. So I raised my hand and volunteered to edit the book.

Alex accepted my offer, and though I expected nothing, was immediately offered compensation. A month later, Alex told me he had “a surprise.” His team would fly me to Amsterdam and put me up for a pre-book launch Knowledge Fair. Sweet deal.

It was a lesson in forward motion: To get ahead, raise your hand and volunteer for work you care about enough to perform unpaid. The more you volunteer for projects that matter to you, the closer you move toward work you love — and toward compensation connected to your true vocation.

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– Soul Shelter’s on site Web-prescription representative, Dr. Soul, directs you to four irresistibly inspiring and thought-provoking readings –

1) Author Anthony Doerr on “looking for validation in a wired world.”

What I am loath to articulate, to even contemplate, is that checking e-mail or tinkering around on Facebook or reading snippets about Politician A on Blog B is not about making money at all but about asking the world a very urgent question.

That question is this: Am I still here?

…. What did I do today that will still retain its original meaning two hundred years from now? Might it be better, and more lasting, merely to walk home right now, and open the backyard gate, and lie down in the grass?

A second very fine essay by Doerr can be found in…

2) The Book of Dads: Essays on the Joys, Perils, and Humiliations of Fatherhood.

The Book of Dads is a brand new, thoroughly inspirational volume featuring twenty engrossing personal essays by some of today’s best writers. Looking for a terrific Father’s Day gift?

Writes editor Ben George in his introduction:

I wanted a collection of essays that reaches for what it means to be a father — from beginning to end. In what ways, for instance, was it different to be a father than a mother? What did it mean to be a good dad versus a bad dad? And why did there seem to be so much talk, and so many books, about motherhood, but not that much discussion, at least as far as I could tell, about fatherhood? (Witness, for just one example, the supposedly gender-neutral magazine Parenting, whose subtitle, unsubtly, was until very recently What Matters Most to Moms). It couldn’t be that fathers just weren’t interested in fatherhood — the practice, the difficulties and the gratifications, the way it redirects a man’s life — not according to the conversations I was having…

3) Have our finest universities “forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers?”

William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, provocatively ponders the question in The American Scholar. 

How can I be a schoolteacher — wouldn’t that be a waste of my expensive education? Wouldn’t I be squandering the opportunities my parents worked so hard to provide? What will my friends think? How will I face my classmates at our 20th reunion, when they’re all rich lawyers or important people in New York? And the question that lies behind all these: Isn’t it beneath me? So a whole universe of possibility closes, and you miss your true calling.

4) Author Catherine Blyth thinks about silence.

Our noisy culture is unbalanced by the view that good communication is all talk. At a gap in conversation, few of us pause to consider silence’s virtues: we’re too busy panicking how to fill it.   The quiet person threatens, because he acts as a verbal laxative on us.

Accept Dr. Soul’s best wishes for a bright, healthy, soul-expanding summer.

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- The difference between striving East and striving West -

Two and a half weeks in Tokyo and Osaka have given me the opportunity to ponder the meaning of work. No, let me rephrase that — these two and a half weeks have slammed me with the non-stop nature of work in Japan: leave the house at 6:30 a.m., return home at 10 p.m. or later, and make sure you dress sharp.

Work, the noun. In Japanese it’s shigoto, written using the two kanji characters below:

Each character can be read separately as the verb tsukaeru. Tsukaeru means “to serve,” in the sense of subordinating oneself to the goals of a superior — or to destiny itself.

On a recent evening, finding myself with some time to consider the true meaning of shigoto, I lingered at the bookstore nearest my adopted home to peruse a book entitled Nan no tame ni hataraku no ka? (What Purpose Work?). In it, author Kitao Yoshitaka explores and compares Japanese and U.S. work ethics.

In the U.S., Kitao writes, work is about fulfilling one’s personal aspirations. For most businesspeople, the goal is to raise one’s worth as measured in money, then periodically resell oneself to a new employer at a higher wage. Job-hopping, in other words, is the path to further achievement and greater status.

Like most stereotypes, this view has some basis in fact.

The Eastern conception of work differs, says Kitao. In Japan, work traditionally meant striving in accordance with one’s destiny, dedicating oneself to serving the public good. In other words, it’s not about you.

A decade of living in Japan and dozens of visits over the past twenty years has convinced me that — with many, many individual exceptions — Kitao’s view of the difference between working East and working West is spot on. His point is that growing Japanese acceptance of the Western (meaning U.S.) work ethic is altering the nature of work in Japan — and not for the better.

He’s right on that point, too. Nonetheless, a fundamental difference remains. That owes, in my view, to the individualist nature of Western societies, and the collectivist nature of Eastern societies. Even in today’s Japan, most people remain oriented more to the collective — the family, the organization, the nation — than to the individual self.

Noting the clock ticking towards nine, I bought Nan no tame ni hataraku no ka? and exited into the night, to ponder, in the day’s final free hours, the difference between striving East and striving West.

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– “As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls.” — Steven Pressfield

The War of Art  by Steven Pressfield dispenses no-nonsense, read-it-in-a-day advice for anybody striving to channel their creative juices into a floodtide of productivity. In brief, snappy chapters titled clearly for easy reference, Pressfield calls it like he sees it:

Most of us have two lives. The life we live and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

“Resistance” becomes Pressfield’s keynote. You’ll get his drift if you’ve ever wished to finish a creative project (or start one, for that matter) only to succumb to procrastination and self-inflicted guilt. Resistance is the nattering, excuse-making voice in our heads that keeps us from quieting down, focusing, and getting to work.

Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. …To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be. If you believe in God (and I do) you must declare Resistance evil, for it prevents us from achieving the life God intended when He endowed each of us with our own unique genius.

Here lies my one significant quibble with Pressfield’s book. I find his terms, though helpful in a wake-up-call kind of way, to be a bit extreme.

For isn’t Resistance sort of … necessary to creativity? Rather than seeking to wholly suppress and kill Resistance, isn’t the artist’s task to tame it and train it to one’s service? (”Resistance sparks the flame,” goes the old adage.)

For me, the edict “You must declare Resistance evil” sets up a false duality that seems a little Manichean. I personally favor John Dewey’s more nuanced outlook on the very same subject (Resistance and the Artist) in his 1933 book Art As Experience:

Since the artist cares in a peculiar way for the phase of experience in which union is achieved, he does not shun moments of resistance and tension. He rather cultivates them, not for their own sake but because of their potentialities, bringing to living consciousness an experience that is unified and total. … The moment of passage from disturbance into harmony is that of intensest life.

In other words, without Resistance, how could we know artistic success? (More Dewey in an upcoming post.)

Nevertheless Pressfield’s central point is sound. “It’s not the writing part that’s hard,” he observes, “What’s hard is sitting down to write.” And the perspectives of The War of Art are frequently salutary. For instance, I love this bit:

As artists and professionals it is our obligation to enact our own internal revolution, a private insurrection inside our own skulls. In this uprising we free ourselves from the tyranny of consumer culture. We overthrow the programming of advertising, movies, video games, magazines, TV, and MTV by which we have been hypnotized from the cradle. We unplug ourselves from the grid by recognizing that we will never cure our restlessness by contributing our disposable income to the bottom line of Bullshit, Inc., but only by doing our work.

The War of Art gets somewhat New Agey for my tastes toward its close, but it nevertheless serves like all good books of the “Inspiration” genre to affirm creative expression.

Creative work is not a selfish act nor a bid for attention on the part of the actor. It’s a gift to the world and every being in it. Don’t cheat us of your contribution. Give us what you’ve got.

That is a message of inestimable value to artists striving in a culture that all too often instills shame in answer to creative enterprise. Even those entities that ostensibly nurture the fledgling artist (e.g., university MFA-programs) can be tacit accomplices in this shame game, for they inadvertently suggest that only a degree, or firm “career track,” can dignify the artistic attempt.

Iconoclastic playwright David Mamet, in his wonderful 1997 book True & False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor, excoriates such sham authority, and extols artistic self-reliance. (True & False is a resource of wisdom and solace for any kind of artist, actor or not.)

It is not childish to live with uncertainty, to devote oneself to craft rather than a career, to an idea rather than an institution. It’s courageous and requires a courage of the order that the institutionally co-opted are ill-equipped to perceive. They are so unequipped to perceive it that they can only call it childish, and so excuse their exploitation of you.

If the value in The War of Art is how it galvanizes the artist to get working and keep at it, the value of True & False lies in its authoritative philosophy about the creative life. Mamet continually vindicates the artist in his or her headlong impracticality. I’ll leave you with the following passage which does just that.

Read Pressfield and Mamet and be inspired. Work and be well.

The best advice one can give an aspiring artist is ‘Have something to fall back on.’ The merit of the instruction is this: those who adopt it spare themselves the rigor of the artistic life. … Those with ‘something to fall back on’ invariably fall back on it. They intended to all along. That is why they provided themselves with it. But those with no alternative see the world differently. The old story has the mother say to the sea captain, ‘Take special care of my son, he cannot swim,’ to which the captain responds, ‘Well, then, he’d better stay in the boat.’ … Those of you with nothing to fall back on, you will find, are home.

(Thanks to Chris at the The Art of Non-Conformity for alerting me to Pressfield’s book)

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“Life is 5% what happens and 95% how you react.”
Kanye West

I’m in Tokyo for a couple of weeks, working on my doctoral research and seeing family and friends between interviews and writing sessions. The other day I enjoyed dinner with Brad, a longtime buddy who’s been in mobile communications for some ten years. He lost his job a few months back, and wanted to talk about life, work — and going solo.

“I went to see a recruiter about a month before I got canned,” he said over a Club sandwich at a basement café in Omotesando. “I told him, ‘I know I’m going to get the ax, and want to see if I can find something preemptively.’

“The guy looked at me like I’d sprouted green dreadlocks. ‘Don’t quit your job now,’ he urged. ‘Nokia just let 60 people go, and a bunch of them are showing up here. Stay put as long as you can!’

“Two months later, that recruiter’s company closed down, and he himself was out of a job.”

As I listened, I tucked into my maguro tuna garlic steak. Outrageously good. Brad continued.

“That mindset — that your well-being and success depends on an organization — just blows me away. Now that I’m older, I see how I’m the one creating value, I’m the one who makes things happen.”

He went on to detail the events leading up to losing his job, his anxiety over continuing to provide effectively for his wife and children, his unforeseen excitement about being forced to pursue career and personal goals closer to his true self.

Reflective, Brad returned to his sandwich. I told him I got his drift about the “dependency mindset,” and that it often results in too much work time spent resolving conflicts unrelated to operations. Turf battles, personality clashes, political struggles. Those things are a huge part of salaried employment.

“In fact,” I said,  “most office jobs can be done in three or four concentrated, uninterrupted hours of real work or day. It’s the attendant nonsense — plus meetings, administrivia, and commuting — that claims the rest of employee time. The key challenge of blowing all that off and going solo is securing the steady income of a conventional job: the relentless salary that rolls in month after month.”

Brad began describing possibilities for his new, non-employee career. He’d already secured a temporary gig with a mobile content consultancy, enough to carry him through the following month, and now he was looking at combining three part-time opportunities that might equal or even surpass his previous income — all the while letting him focus on areas of greater personal interest, minus the commute, conflicts, and constricted hours of conventional employment.

“I’m starting to see how losing my job has pushed me to a new level of awareness about the nature of work,” he said, bright-eyed. “When you put yourself out there, things start to happen. If you make ten tries, one or two might work out. Make 20, four or five might work out. It’s not like you make ten tries and nothing happens.”

I nodded, recalling my favorite takeaway from Rich Dad Poor Dad: The amount of revenue coming in is directly proportional to the number of communications going out.

Brad paused. “I don’t know why any of this should come as a surprise, but somehow my thinking has changed.”

Time for an epigram, I decided, and quoted from a new book by Kanye West: “Life is five percent what happens and 95% how you react.”

Brad kept talking, and I kept listening. As we parted, he thanked me profusely for the “energizing discussion.” I nodded with a smile. He had energized himself. He’d lost a job, and now was reclaiming his life.

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– Here’s to “being inactive with confidence” –

“When I do [my] first draft, I shut the lights off and pull a stocking cap over my head and eyes, and I’m typing blind. It’s the old paradox that you see by blinding yourself.” – Novelist Kent Haruf

I’ve heard lots of different writers tossing around a particular little quote. I’m not sure who first said it, but it’s been variously attributed to Joan Didion, W.H. Auden, and Saul Bellow. Here it is:

I don’t know what I think until I see what I say.

Writers cherish this epigram because it gets to the mysterious heart of the creative process. Often we sit down to our work at a loss for ideas. We find, at such moments, that we must relinquish control, step back, and welcome the surprise of whatever comes through.

Whether you’re a painter, songwriter, or creative thinker of any kind, your process of creation will be the same in one important respect: it will require surrender.

Surrender to what? Oh, to the uncontrollably slow, fabulous percolations of imagination, memory, mind, soul — or, in strictly psychological terms, surrender to the untraceable workings of the unconscious.

Because I’m chest-deep in labor on a new book now, I muse upon these matters daily. The unconscious is a rascal, but I’d be lost if I didn’t surrender and let it do it’s rascally thing.

I love this passage from Annie Dillard’s darkly whimsical volume, The Writing Life:

On plenty of days the writer can write three or four pages, and on plenty of other days he concludes he must throw them away. These truths comfort the anguished. …Most writers might well stop berating themselves for writing at a normal, slow pace. Octavio Paz cites the example of ‘Saint-Rol Roux, who used to hang the inscription, The Poet is Working, from his door while he slept.’

For all of us it’s true: we do much of our work while lying asleep — or while standing in the shower, or sitting behind the wheel en route to our day-jobs. Always, little cogs keep silently turning. Some rich mineral water seeps up through the strata to surface as a glimmering idea.

Ernest Hemingway famously described his working method as a revving-up of his subconscious. As soon as heard the engine’s purr he stopped working and let it run on its own. So, paradoxically, when he left his desk his real work got started.

I always worked until I had something done, and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. …I learned not to think about anything I was writing from the time I stopped writing until I started again the next day. That way my subconscious would be working on it and at the same time I would be listening to other people and noticing everything, I hoped; learning, I hoped; and I would read so that I would not think about my work and make myself impotent to do it.

One must go to the desk, of course, and regularly; nothing will happen if one doesn’t. A regimen is important because it primes the pump. But just as important is surrendering one’s conscious efforts, letting the spout at the back of the mind burble free.

These words of Andre Dubus, one of the twentieth century’s greatest short story writers, remind me that not thinking about one’s work, like Hemingway, is a discipline as indispensable as going to the desk in the first place.

I gestate: for months, often for years. An idea comes to me from wherever they come, and I write it in a notebook. Sometimes I forget it’s there. I don’t think about it. By think I mean plan. I try never to think about where a story will go. This is as hard as writing, maybe harder; I spend most of my waking time doing it; it is hard work, because I want to know what the story will do and how it will end and whether or not I can write it; but I must not know, or I will kill the story by controlling it; I work to surrender.

“Art is long,” wrote Henry James. “If we work for ourselves of course we must hurry. If we work for her we must often pause.”

Indeed, one must be patient. One must surrender to the slow fruition of thought, image, ideas. Rilke called this “being inactive with confidence.”

And if we reflect, we see that this practice applies to many aspects of life. Essentially, it’s the practice of faith. Surrender, stillness, and trust: all are religious disciplines. T.S. Eliot talks about this religious quality of creativity, and even equates one’s creative actions with one’s destiny:

Some men have had a deep conviction of their destiny, and in that conviction have prospered; but when they cease to act as an instrument, and think of themselves as the active source of what they do, their pride is punished by disaster. …The concept of destiny leaves us with a mystery, but it is a mystery not contrary to reason, for it implies that the world, and the course of human history, have meaning.

Stalled as it may seem at times, our work has a meaning and an order. If we care about what we do, if it is real to us, and if we approach it with discipline and surrender, it will germinate night and day — and cannot fail to blossom and surprise us.

(This post is reprised from Soul Shelter’s Year-One archives)

You may also enjoy:

“Unleashing Ideas: a Four-Fold Approach”

“What’s the Big Idea?”

“In Praise of Physical Spaces”

“Making Money: the Right and Wrong Questions to Ask”

“Hazards of Career, Rewards of Vocation”

“Know Your Gift“