141027 Unafraid
The woman of DARPA
A TED talk featured a woman from DARPA who said great things only come when
people are unafraid to take risks. If you ask yourself, “What would I attempt
if I knew I could not fail?” This must get at the heart of the creative process
artists brag about and sometimes achieve.
Or, in my case, when a person thinks that they cannot fail, it is a sign of
being demented due to having an underactive thyroid, i.e., Hashimoto’s disease.
For example, look what happened when I tried to transform the printmaking major
at the UW School Of Art into a multimedia major. I failed.
Yet, I was so sure that I could not fail in the face of all the indicators
pointing to the surefire plan that if you mixed traditional, old-time
technologies such as printmaking with new technologies that were becoming
useful as artistic tools you’d have a great, sustainable program.
Fail I did. I didn’t take into account all the classical signs of a failing
school. Today, there is no printmaking major at all—only a smattering of
electives art students can take. If art students want to use new technologies
they major in a design field. They can take printmaking as an elective, but it
is printmaking of the 1970s and disconnected from video and computer graphics.
I failed at the UW; but the woman from DARPA pointed out that when you
fail, it means you over-reached yourself. You went beyond what you were capable
of, which often means you are one of those innovative and—and perhaps—courageous
people who do great things in the span of a lifetime. It means you’re
risk-taker.
During the course of her talk I thought to myself, “If I knew I could not
fail, I would continue my plan to start the Seattle Printmakers Center.” And so
I will. The DARPA talk also taught that I might fail, so—with the wisdom of
years on my side—I must ask, why would I fail? What could possibly be wrong
with my idea?
The key to success of the Seattle Printmakers Center is not only the plan
itself but also the people who move the project forward. One of the internal
goals of the center is to create jobs for people who love prints, printmaking
and printmakers. It’s a proposition to connect people in and around the domain
of printmaking—old and new—with jobs because there is a market for things that
are printmaking-related.
The people are important, and I make a practice of meeting people locally,
face-to-face, and around the world via the Internet. For example, locally I go
to meetings where I am most likely to find individuals who understand the need
to integrate technology in business—including arts, education and culture. A
week ago I met several students from the UW Foster School of Business at one of
these meetings.
As I thought about them, for some reason I thought of a story about a guy
that went to work for General Electric—a new hire taken on for a high position
in the company. Despite the title he would have, he was handed a broom the
first day on the job, and directed to sweep up around the plant floor. “Starting
at the bottom,” you might say, when he was hired for a top position.
That story originated about two or three generations ago and while it’s
true that GE is still a great company, word is out that even big companies can
fail—like Sears and big banks. The possible reasons are listed in a book
titled, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” which I started reading the same day I
watched the DARPA woman telling me, “Imagine what you would attempt if you knew
you could not fail.”
I contacted one of the UW students because I have been signaling the UW Foster
School of business for years, hoping to get some help in determining the market
size and best strategy for my quest—a quest which will occupy me for the next
ten years and is the development of the Seattle Printmakers Center. Given what
I see as the ways this center will be self-sustaining within six years, I
wonder if the UW students have got what it takes.
Do they consider what they would attempt if they knew they could not fail?
Are they risk-takers, sufficiently gutsy that they would come and talk with me
for an hour and get at the kernel of the Seattle Printmakers Center, and how
the sip-and-print industry ties in its development?
I confess I am skeptical so far. All my efforts at getting help from
students and former students from the UW have failed to show meaning. It is as
if the failure I experienced back in the 1980s was a sign that it shall always
be so that the UW, despite its size and apparent capacity for R&D, teaching
and services, is not what it is cracked up to be.
But, I want to give the concept every chance, because while I can’t fail to
achieve what I am about to do, I need help.
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