One of the things I have enjoyed the most about my life is that I have found all of the things that I have done deeply interesting. This has caused perplexity in onlookers; having started out by going to art school, it’s hard for some to picture that I might enjoy business operations consulting today. One of the things that people often say is, “That doesn’t seem very creative to me.” That is not how I see it: creativity is not limited to the making of artworks, and indeed, thinking creatively about one’s daily life makes every minute and hour intellectually interesting.
Long after I’d recognized my way of thinking – that everything is interesting – I was exposed to William Blake’s poem Auguries of Innocence which is (in my opinion) dreadfully and ponderously long. However, the first stanza is what everyone thinks of with this poem and it’s wonderful; it really aligns to my point of view:
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
To me it goes along with Rudyard Kipling’s poem If which I have always loved and aspired to – especially in the penultimate lines
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run. . .
Alas, Kipling determines in the very last lines that having all those wonderful virtues makes one a “Man” which does rather stick in La Calavera’s craw. But never mind that – it repays a read on a regular basis regardless of your gender persuasion. It opens your heart.
The things I’ve been given to think about by diverse circumstances so far in my life – drawing, and letterforms, and type technology, and marketing (actually the least interesting), and market research, information systems, outsourcing, and publishing books, do seem on the surface to be dissimilar. But they all fit into a logical continuum to me!
Earlier in my life I thought that type and type technology was the very best job I ever had – I could work with so many very talented artists and technical people, solving problems that touched the whole world through the printers we were supplying that went into every office environment on the planet. I’ve tended since then to see the problems placed in my way in a greater and greater perspective (doubtless annoying those around me considerably and they have let me know this!)
However, in a very complex world where everything touches everything, and where change in every form at every level of human endeavor and interaction seems to happen faster and faster, it is in some ways inevitable that everything would be present even in work problems which seem contained and localized.
And so, now that I spend considerable effort to think about outsourcing management and publishing books, they too have become fascinating universes in their grains of sand. With a few words you can see it too. For example, never before in history have so many companies performed the work of other companies – and people are not prepared psychologically or from an historical management training perspective to deal with this new world, so they struggle greatly with this paradigm. And books (especially what we are calling White Endpaper Books) are in the early days of disappearing as paper entities, following the complex digital trail that we already lived through with open format type, with music, and with movies. So how do we ensure that the books we care about, books with intrinsic visual and production value, survive this devastating upheaval? These two types of change have ripples throughout global society. And so they are quite deep problems that take the great intellectual effort of many people to navigate. It is so interesting to be part of the thinkers in these fields.
You can see it: the universe is in my grains of sand. It keeps things very interesting! And I keep filling my minutes with all these interesting thoughts – because I don’t know when there won’t be minutes any more.
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