My brand of Marxism and People Who Need People

 

“I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”

- Groucho Marx

“What professional organizations do you belong to and how are they helpful to your career? What organizations would you like to join?” is this week's prompt.

I don’t belong to any and I have yet to hear of any that spark my interest. AIGA would be an obvious choice, but I’m as fond of obvious choices as I am of organized groups with tithing or fee structures. So, that is to say, I’m not looking to join any in the near future.

Any exclusivity an organization like AIGA claims to offer is rendered mute by its size: 22,000 strong, with dozens of chapters (even in China). It’s hard to see how joining gives me as a design professional any real edge. To quote a member, Christopher Simmons, who blogs for the AIGA site, “If you want to be a brand, I tell clients, you must work from the inside out. A great logo isn’t going to make a shitty product any less shitty, any more than a hard worker is going to make a bad boss a compelling leader. “ And analogously, a membership in a professional organization won’t necessarily make one a better or meaningful designer or anything but $315 less wealthy. Merit and hard work will get me where I want to be, not people who need people, as lucky as they may be. Branding one’s self as “a professional in a design organization” is accessory at best, in my opinion.

I’m not into conventions and symposiums. Unless, hypothetically, I get paid to attend, opposed to paying for: entrance, a yearly membership fee and airfare. I know it’s tax deductable, but it just seems garishly unnecessary.  I’m social. It’s why I pay in excess for drinks and dining in bars as opposed to doing so alone, at home. I understand that advocacy of design is important. But doing so through a club seems like self-aggrandized preaching to the choir, or worse, to 22,000+ preachers.

Another case in point is DMI, which applies directly to me; again, an obvious choice. Design Management Institute bills itself as having, “earned a reputation worldwide as a multifaceted resource, providing invaluable know-how, tools and training through its conferences, seminars, membership program, and publications.” To whom, one might ask. Design managers, of course.

Perhaps I’m too young to appreciate a pillar of design society like AIGA. Perhaps I’m too rugged an individual to appreciate the safety-in-numbers, legitimacy-through-consensus and repetition that organizations like DMI provide. Overall, I’d like an organization to want more out of me than money. I like that in all my relationships.

They say acceptance is the first step.

... never take more than you can handle & always know your dealer.

Hello, my name is Carmella. And I’m a Creative. This is my 12-Step Be-more-Creative technique:

1. I accept I am powerless over Creativity.

2. I believe that a power greater than myself exists. And it is Creativity.

3. I have made the decision to turn my will and my life over to the care of Creativity, as I understand it.

4. I make a searching a fearless inventory of everything, creatively.

5. I admit to Creativity, to myself and to other human beings the exact nature of my creative mistakes.

6. I am entirely ready for Creativity to remove my shortcomings.

7. I humbly ask Creativity to remove all these defects from my work.

8. I continue to refer to the list of all the projects and personal artistic endeavors I have wronged.

9. I make direct amends to such endeavors whenever possible, except when to do so would lack in, or injure the Creativity of my work.

10. I then continue to take personal inventory and when I am wrong, I promptly admit it.

11. Sought through concepting, drafting and revision I improve my conscious contact with Creativity, as I understand it, creating for knowledge of Creativity’s will for me so that I might be granted the power to carry that out.

12. Having had a Creative awakening as the result of these steps, I try to carry this message to other Creatives and to practice these principles in all my affairs.

Don't let schooling interfere with your education - Mark Twain

My most positive and memorable education experience...

    

In my senior AP English class in high school, I was obliged to read The Natural by Bernard Malamud. I didn’t like the movie as a kid, and I sure as hell didn’t like the thinly metaphoric, morally thick book.  Sorry sports fans, it just didn’t grab me. But my teacher Mr. McKenzie loved it. And I loved him. Not in that way. He looked like Mark Twain and is seriously one of the sweetest men on the planet. He introduced me to authors that changed my life and he’s a big part of why I enjoy writing at all. So, I felt kind of bad for hating it. Ungrateful even.

After we read it, he started an open class discussion on what we thought about the book: theme, mood, character development, etc.  He started us off by giving his thoughts, which turned into a 5-minuet dissertation on a book he was passionate about. I was taken aback. He wrapped it up by saying, “… but that’s just my opinion. What do you guys think?” And so help me; he genuinely cared to hear opposing and varying opinions, in hopes to learn something from us. A hope as passionate as the one he had for that lame book. This tempered the negative opinion I gave about The Natural. It didn’t change my mind about it, but I did learn something about trusting the passionate expertise of others while the object in question I find to be crap.

The Odyssey & the Ecstasy- Existentialism & the Zen of Self-Mentorship

Genesis… of a nemesis? A sampling from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel  

This week’s Business Communication blog prompt: “Mentoring-Do you have a mentor? What should you look for in a mentor?”

Instead of giving the short answer, (which, I have a sneaking suspicion is “no”) and facing an abysmal grade as a result, I’d like to protract my answer by exploring the word “Mentor”. Who knows? The protraction might change my answer.

As a noun, mentor is defined as: “a wise and trusted counselor or teacher, an influential senior sponsor or supporter”.  The word comes from a proper name in ancient Greece, a character in Homer’s Iliad. Mentor was entrusted to advise the son of Odysseus in his father’s absence. So there’s a kind of parental vibe about mentor. I had a dance teacher, whom I could consider a personal mentor, in an almost spiritual kind of way. But, I don’t think that’s what the assignment is asking. I am supposing what I’m being asked about is a professional mentor.

I don’t know anyone who does what I want to do professionally.  I have heroes and role models, but mentors seem to have hands-on, personal, technical advisory involvement with their mentorees.  I get regular professional and technical advice from my peers, however and their sterling tutelage I wish I could pay for. But my peers are the opposite of a mentor by definition.

In answering this question I now realize that I’m flying blind, as it were, plunging head long into at sea of the unknown.  My major, my focus and my career aspirations are the products of hope. Elusive hope. Not faith in a mentor. Not yet anyway…  

But, do I need one? Being without the explicit direction of an expert sounds like freedom to me. But then again, the freedom to act has the tendency to produce the fear of failure: angst or dread, as they call it. Kierkegaard figured, in the absence of the absolute control of a creator we would fear letting that creator down, risking hellfire.  Contemporary Existentialist thought maintains that we as individuals are uniquely responsible for the meaning in our lives, the looming fear being our own disappointment. 

So, existentially speaking, we’re all flying blind. Whether you’re in an Iliad phase, journeying forth to make your mark on the world or an Odyssey phase, finding your way home; we’re all on our own. So I guess I don’t feel so left out.  Michelangelo had one. But with a rival like DaVinci, you’d need one... and then some; but, I’m not shooting that high.   

I am elated with the prospect of learning alongside my friends, forging our way ahead into respective creative fields, personal battles of Troy, as uniquely as possible with or without overt guidance.

Zen master Linji said, “If you meet the Buddha, kill him.” The idea here is that a perfected teacher outside your self is illusory and should not only be disregarded but, also destroyed. So I will continue to look inside myself and to the good company I have placed myself in for guidance. And what can I say? I just won't settle for less than perfection.