So why is a 2005 TED presentation on a comic book evangelist appearing on a housing-oriented blog? I first saw Scott McCloud’s presentation online about a year and a half ago and, for a variety of reasons, it stuck with me ever since. He is obviously a very bright man (I’m a sucker for smart), a highly skilled and engaging presenter and funny to boot. I have a lot to learn from him. His overall presentation is fascinating but it’s the message he presents at 5:42 in his talk that relentlessly bangs around in my brain:
Learn from everyone.
Follow no one.
Look for patterns.
Work like hell.
[ted id=432]
His first principle, Learn from everyone, seems evident. But I think in practice it’s difficult being truly objective while learning, refusing to label people or practices and stick them in a certain box as we have the human tendency to do. We quickly screen into bins labelled ‘goofy’ or ‘crazy’ or ‘guy with the bad haircut’ and easily miss the grains of ideas that can be tweaked to fit our needs. The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins is a personal example. I still can’t read the book without feeling off put by the language and style. Yet I know there are a number of useful learnings that can be extracted and repurposed in a form that I find more useful and palatable. Really, I need to get over myself.
Cloud’s second principle, Follow no one, dovetails with the first. It’s okay to selectively choose what is useful and to disagree with, challenge or discard the rest. Again, as a human trait, I think we want to find heros and prophets – people, reliable or otherwise, who will tell us what to do and how to do it – and put them up on a pedestal. We want to forget that people are human beings with foibles, attractive and unattractive personality traits and the fallibility that is inherent to all of us, without exception. It’s called the “Tall Poppy Syndrome”: push people up, then cut them down when they get too tall. We tire of the popular and cruelly discard them for the Next Big Thing. And so we see this cycle publicly played out daily in politics, sport, entertainment, business, education and community. I am not immune to beguilement, by people, ideas and possibilities, and so Cloud’s second principle acts as a personal touchstone as I move forward. I think it’s an enormous challenge, and lifelong work, to inform ourselves as individuals, find our paths as a subset of the whole, and to practice the art of discernment. In fact, the two key traits I wish for in my children, and I strive to help them develop, are empathy and discernment. Everything else is icing on the cake.
It’s the third principle, Look for patterns, Cloud cites as being “where visions of the future begin to manifest themselves.” I think of it as where the magic happens, when the puzzle pieces of a problem or new idea start to fit themselves together, as of their own free will. The principle, starting with the verb “look,” appears to be activity based, suggesting doing and employing a variety of action-based verbs. But I would argue that the patterns begin to emerge naturally as a result of the learning from everyone (and everywhere) and the distilling and discernment of that knowledge. I’m not even convinced that really great ideas can be birthed at will. For me, at least, ideas emerge as epiphanies, most often while bathing (!), after jawing on a problem for some time. I find that the value in general learning and discernment of the first two principles, which looks a lot like time simply spent “looking around,” is often overshadowed by my need to accomplish something or to meet specific goals. I want that adrenalin rush of achievement. When I’m asked by casual acquaintances what I’ve been doing since I graduated from Algonquin College last May it’s hard not to rattle off a list of work completed on my house and provide a progress check list of activities that I outlined on my website. It’s a lot harder to say that I’m “looking around”, taking the year to get my own house in order, literally and figuratively; going out and cold calling people and organizations that I think are doing interesting work on the shelter puzzle so that when the patterns emerge I know who I want to work with; revelling in the delights of my family; and that I’m figuring out what a useful human being looks like and ensuring the path I choose – choose, not passively fall into – is where I want to be for the next ten or twenty or thirty years. I can’t say, yet, what exactly I’m going to do or become, but I can say that some very interesting patterns have started to emerge. Oo-rah.
Principle four, Work like hell, is both true and untrue. I think it’s true that tenacity and focus and often sweat and blood are critical to the success of a venture, the shear willingness to keep putting one foot on front of the other. But I also think that busy work, filling a schedule with endless tasks for the sake of feeling productive, is a terrible waste of our precious, finite time on this earth and, ultimately, deeply unsatisfying. Again, the patterns that emerge and the discernment required to evaluate those patterns is critical in determining what real work is required to make an idea fly in a useful way. There’s no shortage of popular literature that expressly explores this subject.
So when I call you up and say that I’m interested in what you’re doing, that I think my skills and ideas may be a good fit with what you’re trying to achieve and that I’d be glad to buy you coffee sometime, don’t think I’m a total weirdo. Whether we end up working together or not, now or in the future, I can at least guarantee you an hour of energetic and challenging conversation. And I hope you will discern that to be a fair and desirable trade.