In the Company of Women – wisdom and practical advice on the creative life from beloved women artists, makers, and entrepreneurs.
“Mistakes are a fact of life; they are building blocks, stepping-stones, the way we learn new things. Columbus wasn’t looking for a New World, he was searching for a route to spices. All mistakes teach us something, so there are, in reality, no mistakes. Just things we learn.”
In the Company of Women – wisdom and advice on the creative life from beloved women artists, makers, and entrepreneurs, including poet Nikki Giovanni (pictured and quoted above), musician and actor Carrie Brownstein, artist Maira Kalman, designer and radio host Debbie Millman, and media maverick Tavi Gevinson.
Use difficulty as a guide not just in selecting the overall aim of your company, but also at decision points along the way.
Everyone is interesting. If you’re ever bored in a conversation, the problem is with you – not with the other person. It’s all about figuring out what somebody’s really into – what they’re passionate about.
You can’t take care of other people, you can’t nourish other people around you — whether you’re trying to manage a team of two, or a team of fifty, or even writing for an audience alone in your cabin in the woods — if you’re not taking care of your heart. You just have nothing left to give. You would be depleted.
DRT: Do you think failure is a good thing?
DM: I think failure is a necessary thing – I don’t know if it’s necessarily a good thing, because it hurts so much, and it is so painful to go through. But I think it’s critical in understanding yourself, I think it’s critical in being able to defend an idea, I think that it’s ultimately something that can change your life in a very, very positive way – as long as you persevere… If you can learn from your failures and your rejections … it can really make the journey a lot reacher and a lot more meaningful. It also requires you to do better work … it forces you to up your game.
DRT: But how do you know that there’s gold at the end of the rainbow?
DM: You don’t – it’s a crapshoot. But I also think you make your own gold. I don’t know that you find gold – I think you make gold. There’s a really big difference. People that fail looking to find something maybe just aren’t looking in the right place – which is within themselves. If you are looking to make gold, then you can continue to involve yourself in that effort until the gold is manifested.
The biggest entrepreneurial lesson I’ve learned has been that you really do need to follow your instincts.
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Trust your instincts and your moral compass… The deal is: we’re not pious about this. We try hard not to be sanctimonious. This is the way people really live; we just don’t talk about it. I’d prefer to be cynical and not talk about it, and yet, that’s real life.
There’s a relationship that’s easy to imagine but actually incorrect: We often come to the conclusion that in order to make something magical, we’ll need magical events to occur to get there.
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While your intent is pure and your goal is to create magic, the most common mistake is to believe that the marketplace will agree with your good intent and support you. More specifically, that media intermediaries will clearly, loudly and accurately tell your story, that this story will be heard by an eager and interested public and that the public will take action (three strikes).
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You’ll need to work hard to create something magical, and a big part of that hard work is relentlessly eliminating all magical thinking from your projections and your expectations of how the market will react.
Forgive yourself for not being the richest, the thinnest, the tallest, the one with the best hair. Forgive yourself for not being the most successful, the cutest or the one with the fastest time. Forgive yourself for not winning every round.
Forgive yourself for being afraid.
But don’t let yourself off the hook, never forgive yourself, for not caring or not trying.
People always look for excuses. My favorite one is, “Well that’s easy for you because you have a really popular blog.” As if my really popular blog was something I won in the lottery. I had a really unpopular blog for three years in a row where 10 or 20 people were reading it. When I got started in the book business, I received 900 rejection letters. So you don’t look at the end result – at the Richard Bransons and Maria Popovas – and say, “Well they have that thing that I don’t.” They got that thing by showing up. I am really focused on helping people understand that not showing up is a failure of will more than it is a failure of birth.
It’s in the valley of failure that we sow our seeds of success.
The Art of Self-Renewal, a timeless 1964 field guide to keeping your company and your soul vibrantly alive – a must-read as much for entrepreneurs and leaders seeking to infuse their organizations with ongoing vitality as it is for all of us as individuals, on our private trajectories of self-transcendence and personal growth.
A surprising number of people retain from childhood the idea that there is a fixed amount of wealth in the world. There is, in any normal family, a fixed amount of money at any moment. But that’s not the same thing. When wealth is talked about in this context, it is often described as a pie. “You can’t make the pie larger,” say politicians…
What leads people astray here is the abstraction of money. Money is not wealth. It’s just something we use to move wealth around. So although there may be, in certain specific moments (like your family, this month) a fixed amount of money available to trade with other people for things you want, there is not a fixed amount of wealth in the world. You can make more wealth. Wealth has been getting created and destroyed (but on balance, created) for all of human history.
