I really enjoyed this New York Times profile on Adam Grant, a professor at Wharton and expert in workplace dynamics. In addition to Grant’s unbelievable productivity (he’s Wharton’s youngest tenured professor), what’s most fascinating about him is his interest in one of my favorite topics, gifts:
Grant’s book, incorporating several decades of social-science research on reciprocity, divides the world into three categories: givers, matchers and takers. Givers give without expectation of immediate gain; they never seem too busy to help, share credit actively and mentor generously. Matchers go through life with a master chit list in mind, giving when they can see how they will get something of equal value back and to people who they think can help them. And takers seek to come out ahead in every exchange; they manage up and are defensive about their turf. Most people surveyed fall into the matcher category — but givers, Grant says, are overrepresented at both ends of the spectrum of success: they are the doormats who go nowhere or burn out, and they are the stars whose giving motivates them or distinguishes them as leaders.
His research is simplified into when he looks at his work: “My responsibility is to be open.” That sounds like as good as goal as any.
I really enjoyed this piece from The New York Times on Kickstarter. I’m in awe of what Kickstarter has been able to do and have been proud to back some very exciting projects. What I really liked about the piece is how it looks at the service through the lens of one of my favorite topics, gifts:
In his book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years,” the anthropologist David Graeber examines our history of debt and money, concluding, in part, that humans do not naturally tend toward impersonal, reciprocal exchange. Instead, exchange usually develops in cultures first as a part of a larger social and cultural ritual. One of the most compelling cultures Graeber profiles is the Tiv of West Africa, who have very particular rules about exchange. For starters, they believe that bringing an economic transaction to full completion is essentially immoral, or at least frowned upon, because it implies that one party doesn’t want anything to do with the other in the future. If a Tiv man or woman gives you a gift, you are supposed to respond with another gift of slightly greater or lesser value. The outstanding debt between the two of you is a signal that your relationship is going to continue. To respond with a gift of equal value would be to say implicitly that you wish to even things out and draw your relationship to a close.
I love this idea that the gift as a connector must always uneven as a way to show this relationship is not over. The debt creates a space to give back, to keep building upon the exchange, to signify that this relationship is not over.
“Creative work is personal. You can’t get away from that. To do better work, you have to put more of yourself into it. It is a simple law of creative conservation. You put something in, and it takes something out of you. The best work, the stuff that takes real time, is exhausting. You move along slowly. Small steps. Little decisions. Maybe 10 or 15 solid decisions today. Maybe another 10 or 15 tomorrow. A long project can literally mean 10,000 decisions before it’s done. It’s an almost imperceptible shuffling of your feet. There is no wind in your hair while the world flies by. You inch-worm your way across 1000 yards of grass, dealing with each sharp edged blade as it comes.”
—Keenan Cummings, Leaps & Steps
There is so much I love about that paragraph.
For a little Saturday morning inspiration, I can’t recommend enough James Victore’s recent talk at the 99% Conference on viewing your work as a gift. Victore spends some time looking at the work he did for The New York Department of Probation (talk about an interesting client!) and how that has furthered his belief that design can help us live better.
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the intern, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”
—Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
Today, my twenty-third birthday, seems like a good a day to stop and reflect on the things that make life worth living. This year my birthday gift to myself is to give more space to the people and things that make life good. Happy birthday to me; may this be the best year yet…
“Most artists are brought to their vocation when their own nascent gifts are awakened by the work of a master. That is to say, most artists are converted to art by art itself. Finding one’s voice isn’t just an emptying and purifying oneself of the words of others but an adopting and embracing of filiations, communities, and discourses. Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void but out of chaos. Any artist knows these truths, no matter how deeply he or she submerges that knowing.”
In February 2007, Jonathan Lethem wrote a brilliant essay called The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism, in which, while writing about the ideas appropriation, influence, borrowing, and inspiration, Latham hid sentences from other works into his essay to further highlight his point and weave together a coherent argument on the idea that all creative works simply borrow from what came before.
The quote above, found in the middle of Latham’s essay, is actually from one of my favorite books, The Gift by Lewis Hyde.
“Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of Things, it is more than kindness which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light the inner folds of the awareness of the spirit. It is the recreation on another plane of the realities of the world; the tragic and wonderful realities of earth and men, and of all the inter-relations of these.”
My friend Sarah Handelman publishes an interesting zine called Not French Cooking. In her words, Not French Cooking is:
[A] zine published by Sarah Handelman that explores relationships with and through food. Inspired by Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, the series addresses ideas surrounding health, nourishment and culinary-based relationships. Each themed issue explores and shares many diverse experiences with cuisine. Everyone is welcome at the table.
In celebration of the holidays, Sarah put together a special issue called Serving Forth which centers around the idea of gift-giving (a favorite subject of mine) and I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute an essay. The idea behind the issue is that each contributor would submit a recipe that would be “given” to someone else. Once the issue is assembled, each contributor has a full cookbook to give to that loved-one.
I wrote a little piece about drinking whiskey sours with my college roommates that turned into a metaphor for craving deeper relationships. Here’s a part of it:
The table brings people together. There is an open chair pulled out for you to sit and take a break from the world you carry on your shoulders. Share a meal, split a drink, break some bread. Share your life with those around you. Share your joys and your sorrows. The world is falling apart faster than we can fix it. Maybe if we all gather around the table together, the world won’t feel so heavy.
I wrote it in honor of good friends but feel like it was actually a gift to myself. It feels like something I needed to write. We have friends on Facebook, followers on Twitter, and contacts on Google+, but these things don’t make me feel any less alone. We need deeper, more meaningful relationships in our lives. Some of my happiest moments were spent with good friends, good conversations, and good drinks. This essay is about that.
So, thanks to Sarah for asking me to participate and I hope you go read my entire piece and check out the entire issue (even if it’s just to try the amazing digital unwrapping). There are some great holiday recipes.
I was recently asked by Sarah Handelman, a contributing writer for Design Bureau if I’d be willing to answer a few questions for her Dialogue column. The interview has now been published and is available to read in its entirety here.
Sarah asked some great questions and really got me thinking about some things I hadn’t thought about before. One topic I really enjoyed discussing was criticism on the web and how it can become a gift. I said:
In Lewis Hyde’s seminal book The Gift, he writes about the idea of gift-giving within community. The entire community is exchanging gifts, to each other, constantly passing them around and making them agents of change that expand the reach of the community. I think that’s how Dribbble has created a community where design criticism and feedback can act as gifts. The entire community is exchanging feedback. In turn, designers can provide better design to a larger audience.
That’s just a small sample, but I hope you read the entire thing. I had a blast doing it and a big thanks for Sarah and Design Bureau for including me in the series.
I’ve been thinking about Stefan Sagmeister’s 2002 piece How Good is Good? from Typotheque a lot lately. The end, quoting Chip Kidd’s The Cheese Monkeys, is especially great as he equates graphic design to gift-giving:
Winter Sorbeck, design teacher and fictional main character in Chip Kidd’s new novel The Cheese Monkeys, says at one point: Uncle Sam is Commercial Art, the American Flag is graphic design. Commercial Art makes you BUY things, graphic Design GIVES you ideas.
If I’m able to do that, to give ideas, that WOULD be a good reason to get out of bed in the morning.
Frank Chimero:
[T]he value of design is less established by the quality of the work, but rather the presence of the audience. They’re the ones that imbue value to what we do and determine whether or not we are successful. Design is meant to be seen, to be considered, to be interacted with and used. Each one of those things creates an experience, so in its essence, it’s the job of design to make meaningful, memorable experiences for people.
See also: The Value of Design
I’m currently working my way through the terrific book Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Things One Sees, a biography and series of interview with the artist Robert Irwin by Lawrence Weschler. I’m finding myself marking it up all over and finding lot of passages resonate with me and my approach to design.
There is a great interview over at Design Bureau with two of my favorite designers, Frank Chimero and Rob Giampietro, discussing one of my new favorite websites, The Mavenist, and the conversations drifts to one of my favorite topics, gift-giving. A great quote from Rob:
In terms of design, gift-giving is a useful structure. For one thing, gift economies create a different kind of value than pure monetary value. So when designers are asked about “monetizing” design, it’s good to invoke a gift metaphor to counter this. When you put good things out there, good things come back, and they may take both monetary and non-monetary form. Much of design is given away, either physically (like a business card) or digitally (like a website) or even experientially (like a slide talk). All of these are design and many are free, but all have great usefulness and value. Their value comes partly from their aesthetics, but aesthetics, as we know, can be highly subjective. Gift-giving gives us a criterion other than aesthetics to evaluate design. It shifts the emphasis in design discussions away from the production of forms by practitioners and toward the production of actions by recipients.
And then Frank adds:
The form of things matters only in so far as they have a good intent. I’m not convinced that design can rise above its content, because it’s so subservient to the message it’s communicating and the effect it has on its audience. The thing that merges design so eloquently to the process of gift-giving is the fact that one person is hiring another person to make something for a third person. The designer and the client are working together to create something for someone else.
Seth Godin:
Attention is a bit like real estate, in that they’re not making any more of it. Unlike real estate, though, it keeps going up in value.
I think your attention is one of the best gifts you can give. Whether it’s to your family, to your friends, to your craft, to the companies you care about, your attention is a limited resource. Give it to things that are most important.
Michael Formica on being present:
So, how do we stay present? The first thing to recognize is that, try as we might, we really can only do one thing at a time, so we ought to do that thing wholeheartedly. Most of our time is spent in the past or the future, rather than the present moment. What we end up doing is passing through that moment on the way to somewhere else and, in doing so, we miss the moment. That’s how life ends up passing us by - we do it to ourselves.
Rehearsing - and that’s all we’re doing is rehearsing — the past is problematic because it’s something that can’t be changed. It’s done, set in stone, immutable and immovable. Certainly we can change our relationship to the past, but staying there is simply ruminative and, for some of us, baldly destructive.
Anticipating the future is also problematic - even futile — because, no matter how much we’d like to convince ourselves otherwise, we can’t really control the direction in which things will go. We can set an intention, true, but, in the end, the universe has a way of deciding.
Being present, being here, being available has a been a sort of mantra of mine for 2011. It’s way too easy for me to get consumed by what still needs to be done and things coming up in the future that I miss out on right now. It’s a daily quest. It’s something I have to work on. It’s something I need to remind myself daily.
I’m doing it for myself but I also want to be present for those I surround myself with. I don’t want to miss something—a special moment with a good friend. I think being present with those you love is a giving yourself to them in that moment. Forgetting you exist to be fully present with someone else. It’s a gift.
Gift. Present. It’s the same thing isn’t it?
