THE NONLINEAR PATH 11: Stop Trying To Be Like Everyone Else
Have the courage to be yourself and create something truly unique and meaningful.
We have enough….. of just about everything.
We have enough technical rain jackets, enough backpacks, running shoes, socks, pants, sweaters, sofas, gear, gadgets, radios, headphones, tvs, bikes, cars, sunglasses, and snacks. We have enough.
We have abundance and we are truly fortunate. We have learned to create a gazillion things and produce them in nano time…and now we are over-stuffed. We have hit the saturation point in which there is very little innovation, just a lot of me-too iteration. We have this because we also have enough yes men. Too many people who do what they are told.
What we don’t have enough of is individuality, new ideas, and people willing to rebel enough to take risks. That’s because risks are super dangerous, to our reputations and investment accounts. We have become risk averse in an effort to maintain a sense of comfort and stability in a rocky world. We want to follow whatever known formula of success we think may work. So we are chasing formulas and likes, dollars and followers, and we have lost sight of any real meaning in what we do and create.
There is an appearance of change in this regard. I see umpteen marketing campaigns from brands I have loved and trusted that tell me about their commitment to the community, people, and the environment.
I see through to the fact that they are doing it because it is the right thing to do in order to drive sales. It is the trend of the day, the formula of the month. They may want to mean it, but most were not driven to do it until it became a thing and customers started requiring it.
These so-called leaders do not have any story of their own…and that is why we are all floating in a sea of mediocre sameness today.
Very few brands are telling these marketing stories because they believe it and live it… from the top down. I know this because I know some of that top management and have watched them in their musical chairs across companies, changing their story to match as needed. I no longer believe a word they say because they have shown themselves too flexible, too moldable to someone else's story. These so-called leaders do not have any story of their own…and that is why we are all floating in a sea of mediocre sameness today.
Save Me Your Managers, Bring Me Your Leaders
We are here today because, as the author Seth Godin often states, we have plenty of managers and few true leaders. What is the difference?
Managers use power and authority to tell people what to do. Management is mandatory. Leadership is voluntary. It is voluntary to be a leader, and it is voluntary to follow a leader. -Seth Godin
Managers keep things running smoothly in the factory, in the organization. We need them. We have churned out plenty of them. Leaders, on the other hand, are not easily grown, trained, or discovered. True leaders are not always in management roles, or even in the top roles of an organization.
True leaders are those who do not blindly follow all the rules, do what has always been done, or wait to be told to do something. Leaders are those who question, sometimes annoyingly, why something is done the way it is or if it could be done differently. They are the people who step up and offer to lead an idea or solution no matter where they are on the org chart. They trade power for responsibility.
As Seth says, managers are GIVEN authority by someone else in power. Leaders TAKE responsibility. They step up and say 'I’ll do that, I’ll take that on, I’ll be responsible for that.'
In my twenty-year corporate apparel design career I have noticed and wrestled with the lack of creative leadership across the industry. We have surprisingly few VPs of Design and virtually no Chief Design Officers. Yet, many companies in this industry employ hundreds, and thousands of designers.
Who is leading these people in their jobs and career growth? Most of them report to managers, usually product managers or directors, people with a business management background at best. Few of them report to someone with a design, creative, or artistic background. And few designers are groomed by a design leader to become future design leaders.
And we wonder why all the products out there are looking the same. A leader takes risks and pushes for something new, but they have to be empowered to do so. This applies to all types of roles, not just design. It is a mindset of leadership, creativity, and innovation which makes the difference. Artists and designers are not the only ones that can have it. They do tend to sit in this mindset more naturally and more often. Their craft is based on it, so they are usually trained in it.
But without design leadership, I am talking about a person trained in a creative profession who is empowered by a company to lead, we end up with organizations filled with young, unformed, unempowered designers and freelancers who cannot push boundaries, who become yes men. We give up on having an innovative edge and undermine the health and growth of our entire industry.
If your organization is having a creativity problem, you’re actually having a leadership problem. You haven’t created the conditions where the human beings who aren’t Senior Vice President of Solving Problems aren’t willing to say “I see a problem and I will lead here. -Seth Godin
I recommend digging into Seth Godin’s Linkedin Creativty At Work course for more: https://www.linkedin.com/learning/creativity-at-work-a-short-course-from-seth-godin/the-difference-between-management-and-leadership?autoplay=true
AI is a new factor, one that is making many sweat. AI will take over many of our current jobs, the same-same, time-consuming, repetitive ones we don’t want. AI will take over the factory and eliminate the need for a factory education.
What AI cannot do is generate new unique innovations. As much as we may think Midjourney or DALL-E are creating something new, look with a more critical eye and see they are just regurgitating what already exists… in many unique combinations, in nanoseconds. Sure, great for millions of options, but nothing truly new and groundbreaking. If you can’t see that, you’ve spent too much time floating in the sea of sameness.
The Industrial Revolution + The Factory School System
Now, we would all be forgiven for sailing along, enjoying life on the Sea of Sameness. After all, we’ve been trained and groomed for exactly this our entire lives. So were our parents and grandparents, and we might still be unwittingly teaching it to our children. We would be doing them a large disservice if we indeed are.
Industrialization did roughly coincide with the rise of the modern American school, which took place between 1880 and 1920, the period commonly known as the Progressive Era, which tracked the Second Industrial Revolution almost exactly. -Kerry Allard, montessorium.com
Since the second industrial revolution beginning in the late 1800s, which focused heavily on mass production, our education system has been largely based on the Factory-Model School. This type of education was developed to create the workers needed for factory production, not innovation, and not risk-taking in any way.
The education system as we know it is only about 200 years old. Before that, formal education was mostly reserved for the elite. But as industrialization changed the way we work, it created the need for universal schooling.
Factory owners required a docile, agreeable workers who would show up on time and do what their managers told them. Sitting in a classroom all day with a teacher was good training for that. Early industrialists were instrumental, then, in creating and promoting universal education. Now that we are moving into a new, post-industrial era, it is worth reflecting on how our education evolved to suit factory work, and if this model still makes sense. -Allison Schrager, qz.com
In fact, even modernist design was geared towards this new industrial approach. The great German design school the Bauhaus. “became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify individual artistic vision with the principles of mass production and emphasis on function”.[1]"
Factory School design came right out of the Bauhaus, with a favored Cells + Bells approach to school design in the 20th century.
Efficiency in design was a key determinant of school design as early as the 1920s, with John Joseph Donovan's 1921 seminal School Architecture: Principles and Practices, calling for schools to be "tested in the abstract for efficiency and adequacy."[32] One example of this type of efficient design is the Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany.[33]
A New Way Forward: Rebel With A Cause
Artists have always had a difficult time in our modern education system… because artists rebel. They rebel because they get frustrated with the world, the systems, the people, the ignorance, and the ridiculousness they see. They create as a way to make sense of these things and a way to make whatever change they can affect. Artists do not accept things as they are, and they never should.
This is in direct conflict with how our companies and corporate institutions are run, and artists, designers, and creators within these companies often struggle with being seen as 'difficult'. Or they deal with the depression that sets in after months and years of conforming to fit in and squashing their natural tendencies, tendencies they were actually hired for.
This applies not just to artists, of course. All of us are individuals and have unique gifts and talents to share with our communities, companies, and the world. It is our duty to develop and share them.
This is a relatively new idea in human history, though. We are now post-factory age but have not yet changed our mindsets. Our education system is outdated and is not meeting the needs of our rapidly evolving tech-based world. Corporations, which still run on and rely on the old do-as-your-manager-says factory mentality, are dying dinosaurs. And highly skilled and experienced workers are being laid off during the critical high-earning mid-career earning years before 'retirement'.
Most of these workers have been taught in the factory school style, and are not prepared for the new brand-and-market-yourself gig economy we now find ourselves thrust into. We have been taught to think and act like everyone else. Now we are trying to be our own brand by copying what others are doing. It won’t work.
This is the age of the individual as part of the collective. We must each figure out what we uniquely bring to the table, develop it, and ride it right into the sunset.
The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly… It's All Good, Man
This all comes down to the simple crazy phrase Be Yourself. The work is in figuring out who that is. What are your passions, your values, your story.. the good, the bad, and the ugly… your gifts that make you who you are. For each of us, it’s like our fingerprints. No two are alike. Therefore no one else can offer what you can.
That is both liberating and terrifying. Because it puts the responsibility squarely on each of our shoulders to figure it out, to blaze our own trail to follow, to take responsibility and lead ourselves first. Once we do and follow that path consistently, we can find our thousand true fans, those who also believe, like us, in what we are doing.
That’s your opportunity….is to say what you believe, and see who follows. -Seth Godin
Nothing is more beautiful than watching another human operate in their element. A plein air painter out in a field of flowers, a guitarist playing a beloved song, a dancer moving with absolute freedom, a small child in a puddle of mud. When we are aligned with ourselves and what we love, energy gathers and radiates from us, drawing others into a beauty they cannot quite put their finger on. It brings people to laughter or to tears. It inspires and lights people up.
We cannot capture this energy by trying to imitate another. The only way to tap into that energy ourselves is to be our unique selves.
👏🏼