In his book, “Creativity, Inc,” Ed Catmull goes through the story of Pixar and shares business and life lessons with the reader. In one chapter, he talks about drawing and how artists see the world.
See the world is an important aspect of an Artist’s craft that most people don’t get. They think an Artist draws, but we all can draw. The problem is that when most people draw, they use a pre-defined mental model of what they are drawing to guide them while an Artist uses what they see.
He goes on with several examples, but the one that I thought was really good was about drawing a lake. Most of us, think of water as being blue, so when we go and draw a lake, we make the water blue. Then when you step back and look at the drawing you will likely say, “That is not the color of the lake!”
If you take a sheet of paper and make a pinhole in it and use that to look at a lake, you will see that the lake has browns, greens, yellows, blacks and occasionally there is a reflection of light that is bright white. The Artists sees that naturally, but most of us have to use the pinhole to “sample” the colors and understand that the big picture we see is made up of a whole set of colors that our brains don’t recognize separately.
Even the “white” that we see with the pinhole is not really there, it is a reflection of sunlight, but without it you can’t express that the lake’s surface reflects light. That reflection is something we all see when we focus on it, but it does not make up our “model” of a lake.
This concept isn’t just applicable to lakes or drawings. Most of our experiences in life and how we interact with them are based on a model or framework that our brain builds to help explain the world. If the brain did not do that, every single event in a day would consume us. Imagine having to think about every single step you take to walk to the kitchen. You would never get there! So, the model is a good thing that helps us make it through the day and life, but it can also make us blind to what is really in front of us.
Learning to “turn off” the default mode of your brain is essential for your personal growth and growing your business because it helps your understanding of what is and is not working. Yes, you can achieve a “steady” state of operation where things work and life and the business makes money, but will it stay that way forever? More than likely it will not! At some point you will have to check in on it and make adjustments. Those adjustments can only happen when and if you see where the model is not working and a new model is needed.
That kind of reflection is what separates the leaders of business from the owner that is simply focused on “going to work” every day. If you see your business like a job, the model most people use when describing their daily work, then you will treat it and everyone in it like the typical employee rather than a founder or entrepreneur that wants more than just a paycheck.
Learn to see as the artist does. Learn to see what is there and not be fooled by the model of what you think is happening.
Gramatges Consulting 