Strands of Genius: 8 Secrets to a Fulfilled Life, Workshop Deck, Christmas Comes Early, ELC1
plus: our thoughts on painting by numbers
WRITING FROM | Beersheba Springs, TN
WORKING ON | Stakeholder interviews [Client], SoSG Module, prep for Cohort 1,
LOOKING AHEAD
Aug 21-Sept 5: Beersheba Springs, TN
Sept 5 - Oct: Athens, GA
Sept 15th - October 28: Experimental Learning Community [ELC] 1
:: WHAT’S NEW & WEEKLY GRATITUDE ::
We’ve had a very busy few weeks, for which we are grateful, and equally so for a four-day holiday weekend, celebrating “the labor movement and the social and economic achievements of American workers” by not working.
This week, we’re especially thankful for:
Morgan&Colin, their meal planning, cooking, kindness and company; ribs, burgers, corn, the Kentucky Derby & Hot Browns [delicious] Lovecraft Country [HBO] is brilliant so far, Avengers [PS4], Bishop the dog, a 6.5 mile hike, spotting a copperhead just in time, getting more comfortable with spiders but also a Bugzooka, Vibram Five Fingers shoes [remember the posture thing Faris was on about?], toe socks, Prince Yoga [on Peleton app. It has Dolly Parton Yoga too. So I guess we like Peleton now], sending gifts and you, always you, dear reader.
THE SCHOOL OF STOLEN GENIUS PRESENTS
Out of Office Hours | recurring the 1st Weds of each month
Experimental Learning Community | Sept 15-Oct 28
Mastermind like program for people who are crazy enough to join us in this Experimental Learning Community. Limited spaces. Free for Apprentices of the School of Stolen Genius, $175 for non-Members.
Someone from our ELC will also be the lucky recipient of the Workshop Tactics Card Deck! Including the physical deck itself, a pdf of the cards, and 2 hours of consulting time with the creator, Charles [free shipping worldwide].
More details on what to expect in the ELC.
More details on the Workshop deck 👇
:: THE LINKS ::
WORKSHOP TACTICS DECK
The above mentioned incentive gives one of our brave ELC pioneers the chance to win one, but we have something for all of you. The deck is a “a beautifully illustrated card deck of 54 world-famous agile workshop exercises” featuring techniques conceived by the likes of Google, BBC and IBM + a tool to know which to use when. Thanks to the creator Charles, we can offer all of our lovely readers a 20% discount off the entire order. Use the code GENIUSSTEALSYOU20%, valid until 30th September. [Workshop Tactics]
[As always, don’t hesitate to let us know if you have something you’d like to give away via Strands!]
CHRISTMAS ALWAYS COMES EARLY [IN ADVERTISING]
Faris’ column this month considers the perennial problem of primacy in Christmas communications. Pinterest issued a report based on their research saying that people have begun planning - and browsing - for Christmas earlier than ever this year, because we all need something to look forward to. This leads him to consider how advertising works through and across time, of course, and consider how brands can help customers to dream, and act, more flexibly. (WARC)
THE EIGHT SECRETS TO A (FAIRLY) FULFILLED LIFE
Oliver Burkeman has been writing a column that will “change your life” for more than a decade. For his final one, he sums up the secrets he has gleaned, including why you should choose to enlarge your life over happiness, why tolerating discomfort is a superpower, and why we should become more comfortable with uncertainty. “It’s wrong to say we live in especially uncertain times. The future is always uncertain; it’s just that we’re currently very aware of it”. (The Guardian)
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:: WHAT WE’RE THINKING ABOUT: PAINTING BY NUMBERS ::
Coloring Inside The Lines
Our friends Morgan & Colin sent us two paint by numbers kits as a quarantine pick me up and we’ve set them up on a table and have been spending an hour or two, here and there, dabbing here and there. And you know what, it got us thinking too.
You are no doubt familiar with paint by numbers, but they have an interesting history, especially for those of us interested in ideas, art and commerce.
They were invented by an artist called Dan Robbins, while working for the Palmer Show Card Paint Company, as a way to sell more paint. [Already awesome.]
He believed he ‘stole’ the idea from Leonardo Da Vinci:
“I remembered hearing about how Leonardo da Vinci would challenge his own students or apprentices with creative assignments. He would hand out numbered patterns indicating where certain colors should be used in specific projects such as underpainting, preliminary background colors or some lesser works that did not require his immediate attention.” - Dan Robbins’ wrote in his autobiography
[but art historians dispute this, as there seems to be no evidence to support it.]
The kits launched in 1951 with the tagline “Every Man a Rembrandt” in a post-war USA where an emerging middle class suddenly found itself with leisure time. It took a couple of years to take off, but by 1954 Palmer had sold 12 million sets and decided to rename itself Craft Master. The company went bankrupt shortly afterwards, unable to keep up with demand, and other companies began to produce kits.
As the fad grew in the 1950s, it created an immediate backlash from the rarified art community, who saw the kits as mechanical reproductions by hand, inherently unoriginal and somehow diminishing the value of ‘real’ art. In a sense, this was a precursor to the broader discussion about the nature of art that occurred in the 1960s, where pioneers like Warhol embraced reproduction and popular, commercial culture. He was looking mechanistic approaches to art and painted a ‘Paint by Number’ series in 1962.
Paint By Numbers was challenging to the art establishment because it created questions about the nature of art, of who is and can be an artist, questions that Marcel Duchamp had also forced the art world to face. Can reproductions be art? How does art transform inspiration? Is art the reserve of artists who get featured in galleries, or something for everyone, as Robbins and Warhol believed?
When you use a paint-by-numbers kit, you see a ‘whole’ broken down into its components, simplified, exposed in a way, and you get a scaffold upon which you can learn your craft. That reminded us of templates and frameworks and check-lists and learning tools, anything which we use to create something that is then hidden beneath. Do we judge a painting differently if it’s a kit? What if we aren’t told it is? In 1952, an amateur painter in San Francisco entered an art competition and and won third place with one of Craft Master’s kits. Is that a scam or an artistic exploration in its own right?
We enjoy the the unanswerable question “What is Art?” as a conversation topic. We love art, and we are enjoying our new pastime. We might even show you how they turn out, but there’s no hurry. As with a jigsaw, the pleasure is in the process, which is perhaps the most important thing that you can learn from Paint by Numbers. As a metaphor, we are often told to ‘color inside the lines’ by people who want us to obey the rules, written and unwritten, and to ‘not color inside the lines’ by people who want us to think outside the box [of paints?] if you can forgive the mixed metaphors. Paint by Numbers even seemed to inspire or prefigure a shift in modern art throughout the 1960s towards simple colors and shapes, and today adult coloring books are [were] very fashionable. Like paint, ideas can blend into each other - the lines on the pain-by-numbers canvas can’t be seen once the paint has dried.
:: AND NOW… HAVE A GREAT FALL ::
If we can ever be of help to you, even outside of a formal engagement, please don’t hesitate to let us know.
rockON,
faris & rosie & ashley | your friends over at geniussteals.co
@faris is always tweeting
@rosieyakob hangs out on instagram
@ashley also writes for deaf, tattooed & employed
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It's called Genius Steals because we believe ideas are new combinations and that nothing can come from nothing. But copying is lazy. We believe the best way to innovate is to look at the best of that which came before and combine those elements into new solutions.
Co-Founders Faris & Rosie are award-winning strategists and creative directors, writers, consultants and public speakers who have been living on the road/runway since March 2013, working with companies all over the world. Our Director of Operations is nomadic like us, our accounting team is based out of Washington, our company is registered in Tennessee, and our collaborators are all over the world. Being nomadic allows us to go wherever clients need us to be, and to be inspired by the world in between.
Hit reply and let’s talk about how we might be able to work together :)