There is a fantastic talk on the 99u site by Mark Eckō titled “Embrace the mess”
Entrepreneur, media mogul, and designer Marc Eckō tell us that, if we’re not careful, we can let others label us and define our career, robbing us of our natural potential. The solution?
Stand up for yourself!
It’s a great talk, one of those that I listen to second by second, making lots of notes almost leading into a full transcript of the talk. Somewhere halfway the talk, it seems there is a book about this by Mark Eckō titled “Unlabel: Selling You Without Selling Out”. I bought it right away after this talk. I have no credits for any of the ideas in this blog post. It’s just a transcript. It’s just some re-ordering of somebody else’s great ideas.
Mark Eckō has 3 messages for you:
- Embrace the mess
- Create wealth that matters
- Be an Un-Label
The talk starts with the famous quote by Thomas Edison “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration”
99% perspiration as if
You manage the PAIN of the grind
You embrace the RIGOR
Your hard work is THE HEART of genius
1% inspiration as if
Inspiration needs to be dosed carefully
Inspiration is ROMANTIC and perhaps distracting
And IDEATION can be a rabbit hole
You are so busy
You are so busy grinding
You are so busy perspiring
That perhaps we have forgotten to imagine
Are you’re an entrepreneur, or a creator and an artist?
Sometimes we think being an artist/creator
Is indulgent
Self-indulgent
About self-philosophical people
That get dressed in all black
Lean back
And get moody,
And self-loathing
Sloppy and right brained
Or maybe this is just not for you?
Maybe you loose some of that swag or that freedom?
Where when you were in second grade
You would just raise your hand and say:
YES! I am an artist!
Some think that this notion of creator/artist is divine
And we struggle with that
We believe there are a holy war between creative and art and commerce
This inhibits us in our relationship with our art
So I challenge you folks who don’t necessarily fancy themselves as artists
That just because you can not manipulate paint, sculpture or music
Doesn’t mean you should not problem solve like an artists
Learn to embrace the messiness of creation
Give yourself more than the 1%, chill-on the dosing, ok?
Numbers don’t lie, but they don’t always tell the truth
We are obsessed with accounting,
Accounting for our money, our grades, our wins, losses, time, likes, followers, fucks, KPIs, the quarter, page views, etc
Count count count
Quit counting
Big data matters
But Being human even matters more
You can’t loose sight of the qualitative intent
Qualitative excellence cannot be hacked
Wealth that matters cannot be counted
One used to say “perception is reality, you have to control the room”
But no,
Reality is reality
We try to give a taxonomy to everything
The perceived versions of ourselves
We focus on the outside only
Attempting to remain in fashion
Hopefully from value to the skin
Instead of skin to the world
Fash-ion: group of people acting together
Fas-cism: a way of organizing a society rules by dictatorial controls, a very harsh control or authority
The gospel of streetwear
All these gatekeepers in my office
A BLIV-IT
I was so busy to round off my edges
I was so busy assigning so much value to this 3rd party infrastructure, these gatekeepers,
Divergent ideas breed independence
I was looking for their approval
And letting me frustrate by this
When you ask for change
It is going to be with friction
It’s going to be work
Perhaps you going to ask for enemies
Apologising for your square edges does not make sense
Gatekeepers breed groupthink
How much energy in my life did/will I give to those gatekeepers?
Don’t loose sight of the GOAL-keepers
Who care more about what you are making
Even care about how you make them FEEL
When you refuse to be labeled
Suddenly you play by your own rules
Not theirs
When rules start to look like BLIV-IT s
Defy them
Measure yourself up to your own standards
Versus the gatekeepers’
Abstract and often irrelevant compliance metrics
Just saying:
There are some compliance standards
That are rather old
And not really relevant anymore
No one has a monopoly on validation
It’s about your body of work
The talk resonates strongly with me.
Because it resonates with who I am deep inside.
I feel like the artist/creator in his atelier below.
Thinking– Creating – Sensemaking.
The messy space of creators
Not the clean-desk policy of clerks
Away from the counting
The accounting
The efficiency
And making the numbers
And much closer to being human
Taking time
Let emerge
And creating uniqueness.
Without the GATE-keepers
But with the GOAL-keepers.
