Love & Work
A notebook about how we work, learn, love and live.
I'm with Cornell West. Hope helps us go against the evidence, which lately is very scary, to create new possibilities. Here's my weekly digest of how we learn to do so.
Happy Friday.
History
Human development happens concurrently, not on a sequential timeline.
Context is everything. This happened at the same time that this was happening.
The British Museum, in partnership with Google, has created an interactive history flyover that lets you see human innovations and discoveries in relationship to each other. It is elucidating.
Website: TheMuseumoftheWorld.com
How We Live
The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us.
"Kevin Birth, a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, is one of a growing chorus of philosophers, social scientists, authors and artists who, for various reasons, are arguing that we need to urgently reassess our relationship with the clock. The clock, they say, does not measure time; it produces it. 'Coordinated time is a mathematical construct, not the measure of a specific phenomenon,' Birth wrote in his book 'Objects of Time.' That mathematical construct has been shaped over centuries by science, yes, but also power, religion, capitalism and colonialism. The clock is extremely useful as a social tool that helps us coordinate ourselves around the things we care about, but it is also deeply politically charged. And like anything political, it benefits some, marginalizes others and blinds us from a true understanding of what is really going on.
"The more we synchronize ourselves with the time in clocks, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. Borrowing a term from the environmentalist Bill McKibben, Michelle Bastian, a senior lecturer at Edinburgh University and editor of the academic journal Time & Society, has argued that clocks have made us 'fatally confused' about the nature of time. In the natural world, the movement of 'hours' or 'weeks' do not matter. Thus the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, the sudden extinction of species that have lived on Earth for millions of years, the rapid spread of viruses, the pollution of our soil and water — the true impact of all of this is beyond our realm of understanding because of our devotion to a scale of time and activity relevant to nothing except humans." - Joe Zadeh
Article: The Tyranny of Time
Related Article: How We Came to Depend on the Week Despite it's Artificiality
How We Live
Let’s talk about what we want to do—and not do—with the rest of our lives.
"Ask yourself this: Who would you be if work was no longer the axis of your life? How would your relationship with your close friends and family change, and what role would you serve within your community at large? Whom would you support, how would you interact with the world, and what would you fight for?
"We are so overextended, so anxious, and so conditioned to approach our life as something to squeeze in around work that just asking these questions can feel indulgent. If you really try to answer them, what you’re left with will likely feel silly or far-fetched: like a Hallmark movie of your life, if you got to cast people to play you and the rest of your family who were well rested, filled with energy and intentionality and follow-through." - Charlie Warzel and Anne Helen Petersen
Article: How to Care Less About Work
Related Article: What If People Don't Want "A Career'?
Design, Research
The symbiotic relationship of research and design
"The symbiotic relationship between research and design is a beautiful one that many people still struggle to make sense of. One confusing design with art might argue that design exists purely for aesthetes. However, if there’s one thing that I learned in design school, it’s that though we pay homage to the aesthetic quality, what anchors everything designers do is that we do it with the end-user in mind. Whereas art, on the other hand, doesn’t care much if people observing Edward Hopper in a dimly-lighted museum understand the reflection of urban loneliness in themselves or not." - Jovina Rahardjo
Article: How Research Builds the Designer
Visual Identity
"The designer of today re-establishes the long-lost contact between living people and art as a living thing."
Color palette by long-time friend and collaborator, Scott Dunlap, for the Communities That Care Coalition.
The headline is a quote by Bruno Munari, the designer described by Picasso as "the new Leonardo". Helping clients to understand visual identity can be very challenging. Most have had very limited experience thinking visually.
So, Matti Tuominen had me at hello:
"1. Start with verbal
"Starting to bridge the gap from strategy to visual identity with verbal means helps the stakeholders align, encourages discussion, and builds a common understanding of the direction."
This is a good article to read if you need a basic guide to co-creating great collective discoveries. His outline and coaching are sound and scalable (meaning, do try this at home).
Article: It’s Not About Your Favorite Color – Moving from Brand Strategy to Visual Identity
Creative Process
The recurring themes in the first cave drawings
"Wandering through the landscape in small bands, sheltering beneath rocks, drinking from rivers, the earliest humans lived close to the nature that surrounded them. They carried out their lives not as if above animals, but one creature among many.
"And yet there was a difference. With their hands they shaped stones into tools, chipping them with an eye to symmetry. From old fires they took lumps of charcoal to make marks on rough cave walls, and on flat stones held in their hands. Their bodies they decorated with shells from the shore, drawing patterns on their skin with reddish pigments, mixed in empty shells. They left signs of life in the shelters they returned to, season after season, generation after generation.
"Around fifty thousand years ago a small band of humans left their ancestral home, the African continent, to wander through the world. From this moment the earliest known signs of a new human ability survive, perhaps already tens of thousands of years old, but only now making its mark on the world—the ability to create images. With a few strokes of charcoal a deer could appear running across a cave wall. Whittling and carving a length of wood or ivory, a lion could be held captive in the hand.
"It was like a light turning on in the human mind." - John-Paul Stonard
Article: On the Birth of the Art Instinct
Creative Process
"A masterclass in facilitation and creative management"
"The first part of Peter Jackson’s epic Beatles documentary Get Back is a masterclass in facilitation and creative management. Paul McCartney guides a stoned, grumpy band through writing, arranging, recording and performing dozens of songs within a short deadline."
Article: 10 Lessons in Productivity and Brainstorming from The Beatles
Oneliners
Article: The Notion of a Personal ‘Carbon Footprint’ was Invented by Ogilvy & Mather for BP in the Early 2000s.
Article: What Google’s Trending Searches Say About America in 2021
Article: Circularity Is the Future — But Getting There Means Facing Some Fears
Playlist
This week Spotify shared a playlist with me that they promised were the songs I had listened to the most in 2021. Cool news: I would play this at a dinner party. After years of banging on the "like" and "don't like" buttons, Spotify has learned me well enough to understand that just because I play one song by Bob Marley doesn't mean that I want to listen to reggae all night. Then let's play something new, then some doo-wop, then some hip-hop, then some trip-hop... yeah. Now how about some cool jazz? Old soul would go well here...
I took the liberty of re-ordering the songs so that the proper vibe was set-up up front. Let's start with the Beastie Boys getting mellow.
Playlist: Spotify Made This for Me, and I Like It. 2021
Image of the Week
The Image of the Week is a close-up photograph of the eye of a Caiman, a lizard found in South America. It was shot by Armenia-based photographer Suren Manvelyan. This is from a series on his Bēhance page. The same page features a lot of other intriguing series, like Cobblers, Hidden Life of Insects, and Priests.
What's Love & Work?
Love & Work is the weekly newsletter by me, Mitch Anthony. I help people use their brand - their purpose, values, and stories - as a pedagogy and toolbox for transformation.
If you get value from Love & Work, please pass it on.
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