We Are Everyday Artists: Seizing the Canvas of Daily Routine

What is an artist?

Three things define an artist: a point of view, refined craft, and canvas. This is my interpretation, and I'll elaborate shortly. Here’s a thread on ChatGPT for a summary of different schools of thought on what an artist is.

We can be artists in our day to day lives. Parenting can be artists’ work. Leadership can be artists’ work. Yes, artists create plays, music, paintings, and dance - but fine and performing artists are not the only artists there are.

We are all capable of being artists within our respective domains of focus. We should.

Artist = point of view + refined craft + canvas

Artists have a point of view. A point of view is a unique belief about the world and the fundamental truths about it. Put another way, an artist has something to say. A point of view is not necessarily something entertaining or popular, but I mean it as a deeper truth about life, the world, ideas, or existence itself.

A point of view might be and probably should be influenced by the work of others, but it’s not a point of view if it’s copied. To be art, the artist must internalize their point of view.

Artists have a refined craft. Artists must be able to bring their point of view to life and communicate it in a novel, interesting, and compelling way. Bringing their point of view to life in this way takes skills and practice. And it’s not just technical skills like a painters brush technique or a writer’s ability to develop characters, part of the skill of being an artist is the act of noticing previously unnoticed things, or, the ability to connect deeply with emotions, feelings, and abstract concepts.

A refined craft might be and probably should be influenced by the work of others and exceptional teachers, but it’s not a refined craft if it’s mere mimicry of someone else. A refined craft is something that the artist has mastery in.

Artists have a canvas. The point of view that an artist brings through their refined craft must be manifested somewhere. Painters literally use canvasses. For dramatic actors, their canvas is a stage performance. For muralists, their canvas is the walls of large buildings.

However, those mediums do not have to be the only canvas. For a corporate manager, their canvas might be a team meeting. For someone cooking a family dinner, their canvas might be the dinner table - both the food and the surrounding relationships. For a parent, their canvas might be their nightly bedtime routine. For someone just trying to be a good person, their canvas might be their bathroom mirror or journal, where they reflect on how their actions have impacted others.

And for what it’s worth, a canvas doesn’t have to be the center of a performative act. A canvas is merely the medium. Who sees the medium, and its level of public transparency, is an entirely different question.

Examples really bring what I mean to life. I’ve asked ChatGPT to apply the Artist = point of view + refined craft + canvas framework to a handful of people. This link will take you to an analysis of Frida Kahlo, Jay-Z, Steve Jobs, JK Rowling, Oprah Winfrey and others.

We need artists

What I find so compelling about artists is they move society and culture forward. In some ways, people who operate as artists are among the only people who can progress us forward. Why? First, artists operate in the realm of beliefs, which means they can change the deepest parts of people’s minds. Second, because artists bring a novel perspective to the table, they’re people who cut against the grain and challenge long-held norms, by definition. Artists make a difference by making things different..

This is exactly why I think we ought to operate as artists, especially in our daily lives as parents, colleagues, and community members. I believe things ought to be different and better. Kids, on average, deserve better parents. People working in teams, on average, deserve better colleagues and leaders. Communities, on average, deserve a better quality of life.

We are fortunate to be alive now, but there is room for improvement. Daily life for children, workers, and citizens ought to be much better because there is still so much unecessary drudgery and suffering.

Moreover, there is insufficient abundance for everyone to pursue a career as a fine artist or performing artist. Conventional art is invaluable, but not feasible for most to pursue professionally or as a hobby. For most of us, the only choice for us is to act as artists at home, work, or in our communities.

Again, I think examples bring it to life. Here are three personal examples that illustrate that we can think of ourselves not just as parents, leaders, or citizens, but as artists. (Note: my examples don’t imply that I’m actually good at any of these things. It’s an illustration of how one might think of these disciplines as art).

As an artist-parent…

I believe…that I am equal in worth to my children and my job is to love them and help them become good people that can take care of themselves and others. I’m merely a steward of this part of their life, and that doesn’t give me the right to be a tyrant.

Part of my craft is…to reflect questions back at them so they can think for themselves. So if they ask, “Should I ride my bike or scooter on our family walk?” I might reply, “What should you ride, buddy?”

My canvas…is every little moment and every conversation I have with my kids.

As an artist-leader at work…

I believe…our greatest contributions come collaboratively, when we act as peers and bring our unique talents together in the service of others.

Part of my craft is…creating moments where everyone on the team (including our customer) has time to speak and be heard - whether in groups or 1-1 behind the scenes..

My canvas is…team meetings, 1-1 meetings, and hallway conversations where I am in dialogue with colleagues or customers.

As an artist-citizen…

I believe…we will reach our ideal community when there is leadership present on every single block and community group.

Part of my craft is…find new people in the group and ask them to lead something, and commit to supporting them.

My canvas is…neighborhood association meetings, conversations while walking my dog, and the moments I’m just showing up.

We can be artists. Even if we can’t paint, even if we can’t dance, even if we can’t write poetry - we can be artists.

How we become everyday artists

The hard question is always “how”. How do I become an artist-parent or artist-leader? This is an important and valid question. Because these ideas of “point of view” and “craft” are so abstract and lofty.

What has made these concepts practical to attain is starting with my mindset. We can act as if our environment is a canvas.

So no, the team meeting at work isn’t just a meeting - it’s a canvas. And no, the car ride to school isn’t just 15 minutes with my sons to kindergarten or daycare drop off, it’s a canvas. These are not ordinary moments, I need to tell myself that I’m an artist and this is my canvas.

Because when I treat the world like a canvas, it goads me into considering what my point of view is. Because what’s the use of a canvas without a point of view? The existence of a canvas persuades me to form a point of view.

And when I think about my point of view, it nudges me to consider and hone my craft. Because what’s a point of view without the ability to bring it to life? Once I have a point of view, I naturally want to bring it to life.

Treating the world around me like a canvas is both under my control and the simple act which snowballs me into practicing as an artist in everyday life.

If you think being an everyday artist has merit, my advice would be to pursue it. Just start by taking something ordinary and make it a canvas. Because once we have a canvas and take our canvas seriously, an artist is simply what we become.

Photo by Anna Kolosyuk on Unsplash

The potential of Government CX to improve social trust

Several times last week, while traveling in India, people cut in front of my family in line. And not slyly or apologetically, but gratuitously and completely obliviously, as if no norms around queuing even exist.

In this way, India reminds me of New York City. There are oodles and oodles of people, that seem to all behave aggressively - trying to get their needs met, elbowing and jockey their way through if they need to. It’s exhausting and it frays my Midwestern nerves, but I must admit that it’s rational: it’s a dog eat dog world out there, so eat or be eaten.

What I realized this trip, is that even after a few days I found myself meshing into the culture. Contrary to other trips to India, I now have children to protect. After just days, I began to armor up, ready to elbow and jockey if needed. I felt like a different person, more like a “papa bear” than merely a “papa”. like a local perhaps.

I even growled a papa bear growl - very much unlike my normal disposition. Bo, our oldest, had to go to the bathroom on our flight home so I took him. We waited in line, patiently, for the two folks ahead of us to complete their business. Then as soon as we were up, a man who joined the line a few minutes after us just moved toward the bathroom as if we had never been there waiting ahead of him

Then the papa bear in me kicked in. This is what transpired in Hindi, translated below. My tone was definitely not warm and friendly:

Me: Sir, we were here first weren’t we?

Man: I have to go to the bathroom.

Me: [I gesture toward my son and give an exasperated look]. So does he.

And then I just shuffled Bo and I into the bathroom. Elbow dropped.

But this protective instinct came at a cost. Usually, in public, I’m observant of others, ready to smile, show courteousness, and navigate through space kindly and warmly. But all the energy and attention I spent armoring up, after just days in India, left me no mind-space to think about others.

This chap who tried to cut us in line, maybe he had a stomach problem. Maybe he had been waiting to venture to the lavatory until an elderly lady sitting next to him awoke from a nap. I have no idea, because I didn’t ask or even consider the fact that this man may have had good intentions - I just assumed he was trying to selfishly cut in line.

Reflecting on this throughout the rest of the 15 hour plane ride, it clicked that this toy example of social trust that took place in the queue of an airplane bathroom reflects a broader pattern of behavior. Social distrust can have a vicious cycle:

1. Someone acts aggressively toward me

2. I feel distrust in strangers and start to armor up so that I don’t get screwed and steamrolled in public interactions

3. I spend less time thinking about, listening to, and observing the needs of others around me

4. I act even more aggressively towards strangers in public interactions, because I’m thinking less about others

And now, I’ve ratcheted up the distrust, ever so slightly, but tangibly.

The natural response to this ratcheting of social distrust is to create more rules, regulations, and centralize power in institutions. The idea being, of course, that institutions can mediate day to day interactions between people so the ratcheting of social distrust has some guardrails put upon it. When social norms can’t regulate behavior, authority steps in.

The problem with institutional power, of course, is that it’s corruptible and undermines human agency and freedom. Ratcheting up institutional power has tradeoffs of its own.

—

Later during our journey home, we were waiting in another line. This time we were in a queue for processing at US Customs and Border patrol. This time, I witnessed something completely different.

A couple was coming through the line and they asked us:

Couple: Our connecting flight is boarding right now. I’m so sorry to ask this, but is it okay if we go ahead of you in line?

Us: Of course, we have much more time before our connecting flight boards. Go ahead.

Couple: [Proceeds ahead, and makes the same request to the party ahead of us].

Party ahead of us: Sorry, we’re in the same boat - our flight is boarding now. So we can’t let you cut ahead.

Couple: Okay, we totally understand.

The first interaction in line at the airplane bathroom made me feel like everyone out there was unreasonable and selfish. It undermined the trust I had in strangers.

This interaction in the customs line had the opposite effect, it left me hopeful and more trusting in strangers because everyone involved behaved considerately and reasonably.

First, the couple acknowledged the existence of a social norm and were sincerely sorry for asking us to cut the line. We were happy to break the norm since we were unaffected by a delay of an extra three minutes. And finally, when the couple ahead said no, they abided by the norm.

We were all observing, listening, and trying to help each other the best we could. In my head, I was relieved and I thought, “thank goodness not everyone’s an a**hole.

It seems to me that just as there’s a cycle that perpetuates distrust, there is also a cycle which perpetuates trust:

1. Listen and seek to understand others around you

2. Do something kind that helps them out without being self-destructive of your own needs

3. The person you were kind toward feels higher trust in strangers because of your kindness

4. The person you were kind to can now armor down ever so slightly and can listen for and observe the needs of others

And now, instead of a ratchet of distrust, we have a ratchet of more trust. Instead of being exhausting like distrust, this increase in trust is relieving and energy creating.

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At the end of the day, I want to live in a free and trusting society. If there was to be one metric that I’m trying to bend the trajectory on in my vocational life - it’s trust. I want to live in a world that’s more trusting.

This desire to increase trust in society is why I care so much about applying customer experience practices to Government. Government can disrupt the cycle of distrust and start the flywheel of trust in a big way - and not just between citizens and government but across broader culture and society.

Imagine this: a government agency, say the National Parks Service, listens to its constituents and redesigns its digital experience. Now more and more people feel excited about visiting a National Park and are more able to easily book reservations and be prepared for a great trip into one of our nation’s natural treasures.

So now, park visitors have more trust in the National Park Service going into their trip and are more receptive to safety alerts and preservation requests from Park Rangers. This leads to a better trip for the visitor, a better ability for Rangers to maintain the park, and a higher likelihood of referral by visitors who have a great trip. This generates new visitors and adds momentum to the flywheel.

I’m a dataset of one, but this is exactly what happened for me and my family when we’ve interacted with the National Parks’ Service new digital experience. And there’s even some data from Bill Eggers and Deloitte that is consistent with this anecdote: CX is a strong predictor of citizens’ trust in government.

And now imagine if this sort of flywheel of trust took place across every single interaction we had with local, state, and federal government. Imagine the mental load, tension, and exhaustion that would be averted and the positive affect that might replace it.

It could be truly transformational, not just with what we believe about government, but what we believe about the trustworthiness of other citizens we interact with in public settings. If we believe our democratic government - by the people and for the people - is trustworthy, that will likely help us believe that “the people” themselves are also more trustworthy. After all, Government does shape more of our. daily interactions than probably any other institution, but Government also has an outsized role in mediating our interactions with others.

Government CX is a huge opportunity that we should pursue, not only because of the improvement to delivery of government service or the improvement of trust in government. Improvement to government CX at the local, state, and federal levels could also have spillover effects which increase social trust overall. No institution has the reach and intimate relationship with people to start the flywheel of trust like customer-centric government could, at least that I can see.

Photo by George Stackpole on Unsplash

Artists Must Wander

There are, roughly speaking, three types of bands. Any of the three is a legitimate way to make a living as a musician, but they’re different and require different skills and mindsets.

To be successful at any, we must choose and know what we’re signing up for. The biggest mistake we can make and the surest way to be average is to not choose.

The job of a tribute band is to be as close to the original as possible. At a tribute band’s show, the audience very explicitly doesn’t want anything new. The whole craft of being a tribute band is mimicking, with intense fidelity, what has come before. To be good at this, we have to listen, with unrelenting meticulousness, the artist we are paying tribute to. The key question for a tribute band is, “does it sound like the original?”

The job of a cover band is to play hit after hit, across artists and genres. Cover bands take the songs people like and play the hell out of ‘em. To do this requires great musicianship and an ability to find the balance between preserving the original and putting just enough of a twist on it to make it feel new and exciting. Cover bands have to be good at listening not to the original artists, but to the audience in front of them. Their key question for a cover band is, “does it sound like something the audience wants to hear?”

And then there are those bands who want to be artists. The job of this last group is to be new, to be original, and to bring a new point of view - catching lighting in a bottle, if you will. To be an artist, an original artist, is an entirely different proposition than being a tribute band or a cover band.

To be an original artists requires wandering around lost, often for significant periods of time. An original artist has to find the songs that only they can write and only they can sing. Original artists cannot listen, too much, to what’s come before them. Instead, an original artist needs to listen to their own voice and to the rhythms and melodies out in the world that nobody else is hearing yet. The key question for an original artist is, “What does my voice sound like?”

I think we underestimate, still, how much our culture indoctrinates us to avoid wandering. We have curriculum and an education system. We have college majors with specific requirements. We have board exams and certification tests. We have career plans and linear project plans. In the corporate world, we have competitive benchmarking and the application of “best practices.” We’re told, ‘Don’t recreate the wheel.”

All these things, in aggregate, seem to just scream sometimes, ‘Wandering is bad! Bad boys wander! Those who wander are lost!”

To be original artists, we have to unlearn this indoctrination and replace it with a new belief, “Not all those who wander are lost. On the contrary, if being an original artist is what we choose to be - wandering, to where it is quiet enough to hear our own voice for the first time, is the surest way forward.”

Photo Credit: Unsplash @yvettedewit

We Need To Understand Our Superpowers

Surplus is created when something is more valuable than it costs in resources. Creating surplus is one of the keys to peace and prosperity.

Surplus ultimately comes from asymmetry. Asymmetry, briefly put, is when we have something in a disproportionately valuable quantity, relative to the average. This assymetry gives us leverage to make a disproportionally impactful contribution, and that creates surplus.

Let’s take the example of a baker, though this framework could apply to public service or family life. Some asymmetries, unfortunately, have a darker side.

Asymmetry of…

…capability is having the knowledge or skills to do something that others can’t (e.g., making sourdough bread vs. regular wheat).

…information gives the ability to make better decisions than others (e.g., knowing who sells the highest quality wheat at the best price).

…trust is having the integrity and reputation that creates loyalty and collaboration (e.g., 30 years of consistency prevents a customer from trying the latest fad from a competitor).

…leadership is the ability to build a team and utilize talent in a way that creates something larger than it’s parts (e.g., building a team that creates the best cafe in town).

…relationships create opportunities that others cannot replicate (e.g., my best customers introduce me to their brother who want to carry my bread in their network of 100 grocery stores).

…empathy is having the deep understanding of customers and their problems, which lead to innovations (e.g., slicing bread instead of selling it whole).

…capital is having the assets to scale that others can’t match (e.g., I have the money to buy machines which let me grind wheat into flour, reducing costs and increasing freshness).

…power is the ability to bend the rules in my favor (e.g., I get the city council to ban imports of bread into our town).

…status is having the cultural cachet to gain incremental influence without having to create any additional value (e.g., I’m a man so people might take me more seriously).

We need to understand our superpowers

So one of the most valuable things we can do in organizational life is knowing the superpowers which give us assymetry and doing something special with them. We need to take the time to understand our superpowers, as individuals or as an organization, so we have the best chance to create surplus.

And once we have surplus - whether in the form of time, energy, trust, profit, or other resources - we can do something with it. We can turn it into leisure or we can reinvest it in ourselves, our families, our communities, and our planet.

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Addendum for the management / strategy nerds out there: To put a finer point on this, we also need to understand how asymmetries are changing. For example, capital is easier to access (or less critical) than it was before. For example, I don’t know how to write HTML nor do I have any specialized servers that help me run this website. Squarespace does that for me for a small fee every month. So access to capital assets and capabilities is less asymmetric than 25 years ago, at least in the domain of web publishing.

As the world changes, so does the landscape of asymmetries, which is why we often have to reinvent ourselves.

There’s a great podcast episode on The Knowledge Project where the guest, Kunal Shah, has a brief interlude on information asymmetry. Was definitely an inspiration for this post.

Source: Miguel Bruna on Unsplash

Measuring the American Dream

In America, during elections, we talk a lot about policies. Which candidate is for this or against that, and so on.

But policies are not a vision for a country. Policies are tools for achieving the dream, not the American Dream itself. Policies are means, not ends.

I’m desperate for political leaders at every level - neighborhood, city, county, state, country, planet - to articulate a vision, a vivid description of the sort of community they want to create, rather than merely describing a set of policies during elections.

This is hard. I know because I’ve tried. Even at the neighborhood level, the level where I engage in politics, it’s hard to articulate a vision for what we want the neighborhood to look like, feel like, and be like 10-15 years from now.

Ideally, political leaders could describe this vision and what a typical day in the community would be like in excruciating detail, like a great novelist sets the scene at the beginning of a book to make the reader feel like they’ve transported into the text.

What are you envisioning an average Monday to be like in 2053? I need to feel it in my bones.

Admittedly, this is really hard. So what’s an alternative?

Metrics.

I’m a big fan of metrics to help run enterprises, because choosing what to measure makes teams get specific about their dreams and what they’re willing to sacrifice.

Imagine if the Congress and the White House came up with a non-partisan set of metrics that we were going to set targets for and measure progress against for decades at a time? That would provide the beginnings of a common vision across party, geography, and agency that everyone could focus on relentlessly.

This is the sort of government management I want, so I took a shot at it. If I was a player in setting the vision for the country, this would be a pretty close set of my top 15 metrics to measure and commit to making progress on as a country.

This was a challenging exercise, here are a few interesting learnings:

• It’s hard to pick just 15. But it creates a lot of clarity. Setting a limit forces real talk and hard choices.

• It pays to to be clever. If you go to narrow, you don’t have spillover effects. It’s more impactful to pick metrics that if solved, would have lots of other externalities and problems that would be solved along the way. For example, if we committed to reducing gun deaths, we’d necessarily have to make an impact in other areas, such as: community relationships, trust with law enforcement, healthcare costs, and access to mental health services.

• You have to think about everybody. Making tough choices on metrics for everyone, makes the architect think about our common issues, needs, and dreams. It’s an exercise that can’t be finished unless it’s inclusive.

• You have to think BIG. Metrics that are too narrow, are more easily hijacked by special interests. Metrics that are big, hairy, and audacious make it more difficult to politicize the metric and the target.

Setting up a scorecard, with current state measures and future targets would be a transformative exercise to do at any level of government: from neighborhood to state to nation to planet.

It’s not so important whether my metrics are “right” or if yours are, per se. What matters is we co-create the metrics and are committed to them.

Let’s do it.