Last weekend I saw this sign on Brian Beattie’s recording studio door pointing the way to Valerie Fowler’s art studio. (Brian told me the musicians he works with find it pleasantly encouraging.) Almost too perfect, considering I’m working on illustrations for the book inspired by my talk, “How To Keep Going.”
A few days ago I suggested “What do you want to learn?” as a replacement for the question, “What’s next?”
One response I saw could be summarized as: “Ok, fine, but if what you want to learn isn’t tied in to your career somehow — if your boss doesn’t see value in it or if you can’t squeeze value out of it for your customers — it’s not professional development, it’s a hobby.”
Sometimes I don’t even know where to begin.
First off, I’m trying to imagine Thoreau or Leonardo limiting their interests to “professional development.”
Second, I am so tired of hearing “hobbyist” and “amateur” thrown around as pejorative terms. It’s such a lame, macho move. God forbid we ever do anything for pleasure or love.
On top of that, there’s a long history of amateurs making huge contributions to their fields of interest. A recent American Masters, for example, tells the story of how bombshell actress Hedy Lamarr helped develop a crucial technology for wi-fi and GPS. (I write more about the amateur spirit in Show Your Work!)
As for the importance of hobbies, it’s well known how many great thinkers practiced an art or a craft or some kind of tinkering outside of their profession. Take Hedy Lamarr, again, as an example: She kept a little lab on set during filming, and her fascination with how remote controls worked made her think that maybe you could control torpedoes the same way.
Setting aside the importance of hobbies and the amateur spirit, what worries me the most is this faulty idea that you should only spend time learning about things if they have a definite “ROI.” Creative people are curious people, and part of being a creative person is allowing yourself the freedom to let your curiosity lead you down strange, divergent paths. You just cannot predict how what you learn will end up “paying off” later. Who’s to say what is and what isn’t professional development? (An audited calligraphy class winds up changing the design of computers. Etc.)
This is the trouble we often have with schools, of course: When education is seen as an investment, we decide what students should be spending time on based on what is shown (or believed, rather) to have a return on investment in the marketplace.
As Milton Glaser says, sometimes personal development and professional development are at odds. What’s good for business is not always (not often?) good for your soul. There’s always a balance between making a living and making a life.
The lives of great thinkers teach us that learning is the verb of life. The trick to lifelong learning is to exercise your curiosity as much as you can and to let it guide you where it wants to go. To pay attention to what you pay attention to. To not worry too much about where things are going to lead. To learn for learning’s sake, not because it’s going to get you something, necessarily, but because you have faith that the things that interest you will help you become who you need to be.
Your interest and your desire and your instincts are your compass. They show you the way.
It’s a hard thing to internalize, but once you do, it’s one of the most powerful things. It sets you free.
A group of graphic design students at Serra i Abella in Barcelona, Spain made this video inspired by the 10 points in the Spanish edition of Steal Like An Artist. Bueno!
In the NYTimes this week, there’s a feature on “procrastibaking.” It’s a form of what I call productive procrastination — avoiding work by working on something else. (More in Steal Like An Artist.)
The piece includes lines from Grace Paley’s poem, “The Poet’s Occasional Alternative,” found in the collection Begin Again:
I was going to write a poem
I made a pie instead it took
about the same amount of time
of course the pie was a final
draft a poem would have had some
distance to go days and weeks and
much crumpled paper
Later in the poem: “everybody will like this pie… / many friends / will say why in the world did you / make only one / this does not happen with poems.”
I’m reminded of Beverly Cleary:
I like writing in the morning while baking bread. I used to bake bread while I wrote. I’d mix up the dough and sit down and start to write. After awhile the dough would rise and I’d punch it down and write some more. When the dough rose the second time, I’d put it in the oven and have the yeasty smell of bread as I typed.
I never realized how much baking was about precision (as opposed to cooking, which is more forgiving) until I lived with a baker. Then I found out that the easiest way to become a better baker is to buy a kitchen scale and start measuring ingredients by weight.
Baking is also a wonderfully sensual activity, in direct contrast to so much so-called “knowledge” work — your hands in the dough, little tastes, the smell taking over the whole house. (If you want to make a place smell like home, bake some chocolate chip cookies…)
Photo above courtesy of LaRay’s
This morning I browsed the Austin Public Library’s fantastic zine collection (highlights: Nathaniel Russell’s Fliers and Jillian Barthold’s Scenes From Big Bend) and this afternoon the 5-year-old and I made a zine using Bruno Munari’s Plus and Minus transparencies that I picked up in Milan last year and lines from the APL’s events flier. Pretty fun day.
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