Creative Rebellion Essays: Putting yourself out there
First public reading of “The Art of Creative Rebellion” at The Last Bookstore . Photo by Amir Ebrahimi
In my experience, designers, artists, and writers tend to be an introverted lot who prefer to work behind the scenes. Of course, there are always the exceptions to the rule: Yayoi Kusama is as recognizable as her incredible body of work, Takashi Murakami looks like a character from one of his own artworks and the colorful and sartorially elegant Karim Rashid is as visually recognizable as his astonishing furniture designs.
But, in general, most of my creative friends prefer to just make things rather than promote them. But without promoting your work, it has about as much chance of making it as blindly posting an audio file to SoundCloud and just hoping someone stumbles into it. Of course, you could get lucky like 14-year old Billie Eilish was when she uploaded “Ocean Eyes” to SoundCloud one night in 2016 and woke up to find it had gone viral. But this is the exception, not the rule.
And like my friends, I am by nature an introvert (according to the Myers-Briggs test, an “INTJ” -- the “I” stands for introvert). Introverts and extroverts can appear the same in public, seeming at ease on the stage or at a party, but the difference is that an extrovert feeds off the energy of the people around them and wants to continue the party, so to speak, whereas an introvert can’t wait to get home after an event, be silent and recharge, watch a movie and chill out. Neither is better than the other but introverts need to train themselves to advocate for their work and themselves.
As a child, I developed a debilitating fear of public speaking. It goes back to a time in Japan, when I was nine years old in elementary school and had to give a thank you speech to a room filled with children and their parents. In Japanese. And I was the first foreign student in the 250-year old school’s history. I remember the expectant stares from what seemed like a thousand faces. One of the boys, a bully who often shoulder-bumped me in the hallway, smirked at me as I struggled through some basic niceties. Midway through the awkward speech, I bowed, avoided my mother’s eyes and abruptly made for the exit.
Upon returning to the US, I noticed that the behaviors I picked up in Japan (politeness to a fault, keeping quiet when having nothing of importance to say and self-deprecation) were considered weaknesses or timidity in the alpha behavior of the west. So that confused things even further. However, as I progressed through my career, and was promoted into positions of leadership, both in the corporate sector as well as being a founder of a company, I realized that I needed to quickly become comfortable with communicating with large groups of people and expressing my thoughts.
I learned how to be comfortable in speaking in public and presenting by focusing on two simple things:
Knowing the story I was going to tell.
Being radically myself.
I learned some invaluable techniques from Michael Margolis, author of the excellent book, Story 10X. Michael told me that as long as he clearly knew what story he was going to relate, then it didn’t matter if he fumbled or the words weren’t exactly right. The audience wants a coherent story experience and as long as you give them that, you will be fine. I found this to be very true. When I present, I generally keep my slides very visual and at most have one line of text on the page, if any at all. And then I have bullet notes in the speaker’s notes and use them to riff from, rather than reading from a script. And this works, as long as I have an over-arching theme I’m hewing to. The audience is looking for structure in your speech and as long as you indicate that there is one, they won’t lose interest or become bored.
Regarding the second point, about being radically myself, I learned this the hard way. For a long time, I tried to adopt a public-speaking personality, much like an actor adopts a character for the stage. It didn’t work for me as whenever I spoke in this fabricated character, it felt hollow, empty and without integrity. I was reading from a script I didn’t believe in and through an overly enthusiastic facade that felt false.
Several years ago, I was on stage at a design conference and as I read through the script from a confidence monitor, I decided to go off-script and drop the leaden character I was playing. I simply spoke from the heart (as I knew the story I had to tell) and I spoke through the vehicle of myself. And it worked. I could feel the audience engage and change as I felt myself relax and energy started to course through my body. At the end of the speech, I was shocked to see a line of people waiting to talk with me further about design culture.
Now, the interesting (and somewhat meta) element of being radically myself, is that the character I became on stage was indeed me but an exaggerated slice of me. And in some ways, the person I am when speaking in public is a concentrated version of me, my usually dispersed thoughts focused through the lens of the story that I needed to tell in the time allotted.
Ultimately, speaking in public is a performance. And I felt this in full force when I did my first public book signing and reading at The Last Bookstore in downtown LA on February 27th, 2020. I invited my good friend, Taylor McFerrin, to perform and he performed as I read passages from The Art of Creative Rebellion, a soundtrack to the words. It was a full house and we hadn’t practiced or rehearsed at all. But I felt at ease on stage as I truly knew the stories I was about to tell. And in fact, the extremely personal nature of the words actually made the performance more intense in a way that I never feel when speaking about product design or business. But as I read passages aloud about the power of great creativity to bring people together for a moment, Taylor’s music wound its way through stories about childhood connection to creative source and poetry about the loss of a loved one and reminiscences about the transcendent power of music I felt the audience engage and become one with the experience. In that room, there was community among different people based on a common shared experience that can only happen in a live setting.
And as true to my introverted nature, I was exhausted afterward but had a hard time sleeping. Getting a work into the world is all about exposure. Writing a book is inherently exposing. Then promoting it further exposes you to both praise and condemnation. But without putting it out there, the creative work you’ve made, whether it’s design, art, music, literature, or a startup, will go into the great digital void. It won’t even be a blip on the radar of the attention-deprived and media-saturated masses. But if you do get it out there, you may positively affect someone at precisely the right time in their life. And that may be the most powerful thing we can do in our time here.
Life is short. It’s okay if it’s embarrassing. It’s okay if you screw up. Whatever it is, your work, yourself...
Put it out there.
“Do everything as if it were the last thing you were doing in your life.”
Marcus Aurelius
John
What I’m watching (I know a bit late):
Joker – an astounding performance by Joaquin Phoenix about the origin story of a mentally unstable individual driven insane by an indifferent and aggressive society in Gotham (a stand-in for NYC circa 1981). The tone was very Taxi Driver and it was rather meta to have Robert Deniro appear in both films.
FORD v FERRARI – I’m a fan of the Shelby GT40 that took Le Mans multiple times. The story centers around the relationship between car designer Carroll Shelby and British driver Ken Miles and in true creative rebellious fashion, they run up against the suits at Ford who need, for political reasons, to orchestrate everything they do. This secondary story conflict is something most creative types can relate to throughout their careers.
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