Stuff: A Portrait

A woman was strolling along a street in Paris when she spotted Picasso sketching at a sidewalk cafe. Not so thrilled that she could not be slightly presumptuous, the woman asked Picasso if he might sketch her, and charge accordingly.

Picasso obliged. In just a few minutes, there she was: an original Picasso.

"And what do I owe you?" she asked.

"Five thousand francs," he answered.

"But it only took you three minutes," she politely reminded him.

"No," Picasso said. "It took me all of my life." - Harry Beckwith, Selling the Invisible

At face value, that's a story telling you perhaps you're not charging enough.

You add up all the moments Pablo didn't think enough of his drawings, all the experiments and discarded drawings he tossed out as 'garbage', perhaps he daydreamed he should go into investment banking instead, and then there was the time wasted with patrons whom abandoned a portrait project midstream or any number of other zigzags along the path to that moment in Paris when the woman walked by.

You end a seven-year romantic relationship and one of the thoughts that cross your mind is "I've just wasted the last seven years." You're the first employee at the venture-backed start-up and a year later you are hauling home the laptop as severance. Yet another project is a bust, a no-go. It doesn't end in customer's hands. Or if it does, it's not long before it's acquired and ultimately squashed. Another countless number of months of sweat and toil and brilliant imagination was all for nought. Nothing to show for it, you say.

But if you've poured yourself into each of those moments you have never wasted anything.

Today I had another lesson in the impermanence of things. It led me up to right here now and who I am right now. Not a waste. Not a loss.

I have been preparing all my life to be ready for my purpose. It doesn't instantly appear, it unfolds and unfurls like a blossoming (a real shy one, ok) flower.

I wasn't ready any earlier. I couldn't commit fully to anything - the big aha was I realized nothing had felt like what I ought to be doing. Although I could only recognize at first what it wasn't and not what it was. It was difficult to move straight ahead, go full speed forward when one doesn't know what direction that would be.

The questions that most people ask in the search for identity, real self, etc. are very largely "ought" questions: What ought I do?...

What I have learned is that ultimately the best way for a person to discover what he ought to do is find out who and what he is...

"Become what thou art!" The description of what one ought to be is almost the same as the description of what one deeply is." - Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature

There is some equivalence with these "ought" questions and stuff/things. They sure seem like the tangibles, no? The real deal.

Some days I think I could have shaved off a few years...but I'm not so sure. I feel as if it's all a record-setting monstrous jigsaw puzzle that's been like a background hobby I've dabbled in for so long. And now whole sections have been coming together - even at times in one fell swoop - but the puzzle has been mostly been constructed one piece at a time as they fall into place when a pattern finally emerges or I see something I hadn't noticed before in the shapes and colors of my life.

I work in high-risk innovation for the most part. It doesn't always work out as planned. There is no permanency in things. In stuff. Probably we sense this about stuff over time and it has less appeal. I sincerely doubt there is any software code or for that matter anything I've ever worked on - any single tangible asset - that is still being used.

That used to sadden me. I envied my friend that built huge corporate campuses and data centers. Things she could drive past years and years later and point to. They were still standing. Well, maybe unoccupied.

And what remains? What remains is the ripple effect. How I affected someone's life, what I learned, what I shared, how they touched my life, if I was true to them and to myself...this is all that remains years and years after the product has come and gone. And probably all that matters.

This stuff versus substance debate is happening in the marketplace too. Perhaps we know that a moment shared with a special person in our life watching the sun slip into the horizon is more tangible than a new pair of blue jeans. Perhaps we take something more permanent in those few moments where we reside in our imaginary island as we drift off and melt into the massage table that we can't touch in a designer handbag. If I were writing ad copy, which I don't, perhaps I'd say intangibles are the new tangibles. They're solid.

Stuff - that would include jobs - come and go but those intangibles can be constants.

Framing the portrait it's only fitting to end with Pablo.

Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone. - Pablo Picasso

Comments

[hugh macleodh]

"But if you've poured yourself into each of those moments you have never wasted anything...."

Ouch. Too true. Beautiful. Well done ;-)

[Lisa Haneberg]

People struggle and resist taking the journey because the results cannot be guaranteed. In doing so, they miss the growth and experience of the journey. For those of us embarking on new ventures of our own, your words are both sobering and moving.