One of my favourite photographers of all times is Irving Penn.
I’m particularly drawn by a clean and simple image of his; three forms, one on top of the other. A knob of burrata, a tomato, and an olive. Anyone could have shot this. It is simple, clean and easy. It’s almost boring.
It’s also one of these ideas that you’d wish to have thought first. Except you didn’t. Because it is not the simple composition that caught your eye. What interested you is something that you didn’t realise even after your brain forced you to look again. The reason why you looked again are the subtle layers of meaning in a single shot that your brain craves to interpret.
I don’t know if Penn’s intention was to trigger something in particular with this still life shot. The first impression is that the burrata, the tomato and the olive make such a beautiful stack. Then you realise why this makes sense, because they indeed are the pillars of the Italian cuisine. They compliment each other in each dish that they’re used, thus the connection - one on top of the other - at this composition. And then there’s that other perspective where they become archetypes and represent the colours of the Italian flag.
Penn is one of the twentieth century’s most distinguished practitioners of the time-honoured genre of still life. And this didn’t happened overnight. For more than forty years he followed the venerable tradition of great Dutch still life painters and established his personal style after countless hours of experimentation and practicing his craft.
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I put things on paper - or digital paper - to make them real in a way. My mind is a labyrinth full of vague concepts, ideas and questions that I haven’t sorted out yet. Writing things down makes me realise how my brain works, how I formulate opinions, how I react to things and why.
The creative process always fascinated me because there’s no right way to create. To think and to act as a creative escapes control. What happens between the first spark of an idea and the final result I can’t quite explain most of the time. On the other hand, in order to achieve goals that will lead to results I need to have a process that keeps me focused from distractions along the way. And this very process consists of parts that are tested and need to be repeated again and again until they become second nature. Aristotle said, excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
I believe that there’s this genius, amazing, super simple, boring concept of reaching success and that is to repeatedly follow successful, safe steps that other in the past experimented with. That’s it. The reason why we refuse to accept something like this is that we’re bored. The whole thing is immensely boring. It is plain simple and leaves no room for interpretations and excuses. Do the same thing over and over again? What’s the fun in that?
And so we search and search for success at other exciting, yet irrelevant places. And we take great pride of mistakes that we do and we suffer, but that’s what progress should look like, right?
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To repeatedly do things is not boring. It’s eye opening. While keeping your focus on one thing at a time, you change, the way you see things change and you act on this by the great advantage of having a clear direction, thanks to the process. And you become an expert. Acting repeatedly is really hard actually. You lose faith after a while cause things aren’t exciting, there’s no fast progress or amazing immediate results. And that’s nerve racking. Especially in a society that trained us to crave for results and gratification overnight. That’s the secret. If you persist on doing the small right things for you, or for your business everyday, there’s a point where everything starts to change. First you notice tiny differences, little progress on what you did over a long period of time. But this progress starts to flow and grow and become bigger and bigger before it goes massive. That is the point when everyone turn their heads on you and say that you were lucky and an over night success. Yeah, right.
Be boring. I know I will. because I want results, and because I’m tired of trying to reinvent the wheel.
Music to listen to while reading this post: https://youtu.be/XXKh50tgnGw
Taste: Toffee Caramel Latte, Bitter Chocolate Biscuit
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Image: Irving Penn Foundation