Change The World

If you have 17 minutes to spare and even if you do not, I would ask (ok, beg) you to please watch Seth Godin’s TED talk about the state of our educational system and how we might rethink things.  As someone who deals with empowering creativity and bearing witness to that creativity, I can only say his talk reminded me of why I am here.

A thumbnail summary:  Seth argues that our educational system is based on the needs of an industrial society gone by.  In the industrial society, we needed workers and consumers.  Workers needed to obediently do what they were told without questioning much.  The better and more specific they were at doing their tasks, the cheaper the product could be made, the more money the industrialist could make.  We also needed consumers — the goal was to have your own home and stuff to go in it.  Car in every driveway, turkey in every pot, that kind of thing.

But along came the digital age and turned everything upside down.  We do not care about obedience, just invention.  Creativity not perfection.  With the sum of human knowledge at our fingertips, the point is not to remember any of it.  Instead, it is about using it to move further faster.

Clearly, a disconnect if there ever was one.  So Seth asked (and asks) the question:  what is the purpose of education?  Start there and then see what is necessary to inspire our children to thrive in our modern world.  I will not reveal them here, but Seth’s eight ideas/solutions are wonderfully brilliant and in almost direct opposition to the way things are done now.

I drew parallels to creative business.  After all, you are the gatekeepers of today and tomorrow.  You define what Seth is talking about.  Creation, at base, challenges everything, opens our eyes to something other and brings us ever closer to a different (and hopefully) higher state of being (nee consciousness).  You are dream makers and dream keepers.  And yet if I asked most of you what you, your art and your creative business’ purpose is, many would give me a terrific corporate answer – to serve our clients well, to deliver a great product, to provide employment.  Good stuff, just not a purpose.  No, your purpose is to change the world.  Specifically how you change the world is up to you (i.e., transform lives with your flowers, spread joy with your music, reveal the beauty of sharks with your installations).  Yours is the responsibility and, yes, obligation to show us the barely possible and the previously unthinkable.  I would suspect that when you live in your head as an artist, you wholeheartedly agree.  Then your business head takes over and you go back to the industrial age and you do what you are told, what the business textbooks and MBA blah blah blahs tell you to do.  Except it will not work anymore, just like our educational system.

Creative business is different from other businesses.  Yours is about relationship first and foremost.  Crafting how the relationship is to go to give you the best chance to change the world.  You cannot do that if the focus is on margin and metrics.  Art is irrational.  We do not need it to live, only to be alive.  How you put a price tag on what it means to be alive has to be done with an understanding that it is connected to something other, never a thing.  More specifically, it has to be related to the very idea that you are about to change the world, one client at a time.

I am not saying for a second that you should not pay attention to formal education.  You might have gone to school to hone your art, learned wonderful technique there and from glorious mentors.  However, you did it so that you could break those rules to chart your own.  Same same with your creative business.  Learn everything you can about sales, production, accounting, legal, marketing, social media, etc. so that you can ultimately chart your own course.

To draw a specific parallel to Seth’s talk, if your purpose and that of your creative business is to change the world (and it is), then acting like a factory, a corner store, or law firm, to use a technical term, sucks.  It deprives you and your clients of the framework necessary for you to do your best work.  My mission, my purpose is to help eliminate that disconnect, to have creative businesses honor that they are about changing the world, communicating the impossible so that it will become inevitable.  What’s yours?