The Groove Issue 17 - The Rewards of Being a Contrarian
Welcome to the seventeenth issue of The Groove.
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THE REWARDS OF BEING A CONTRARIAN
The willingness to disagree, dissent or challenge the status quo, when done for the purpose of generating value in any setting, whether entrepreneurial or artistic, carries the seed of creativity and innovation, with potentially enormous rewards.
Rebels With a Cause
Rebellion isn’t the first word that comes to mind when we look at the work of 19th-century French Impressionist painters. But back then, it was. France’s rigid art world was dictated by the Academie des Beaux-Arts, whose teachers and students focused on realist art that took forever to make and whose subjects were either religious or mythical figures or affluent members of society who wanted their portrait made.
Claude Monet, Impression, Sunrise, 1872, oil on canvas, was one of the paintings exhibited by the “dissidents” in 1874 in a studio located on the Boulevard des Capucines in Paris.
Meanwhile, everyone else who strived to be recognized as an artist and broke the rules of the style of the Academie was considered an outcast with no chance of succeeding at finding patrons and getting commissions, much less to be accepted at The Paris Salon, the super conservative annual exhibition which was sort of an undemocratic modern art fair.
But in 1874, thirty artists who were fed up with those nonsense rules, had the desire to paint differently, and couldn’t care less about realism, broke the expectations of the public and had their first autonomous show not regimented by jurors or the government. They were contrarians to what was dictated.
Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro were among those dissidents who refused to be told what to think and how to execute the materialization of their ideas on canvas. For them it was all about the moment, the light, the colors and capturing the ordinary things of life: a sunset, the river at lunchtime, dancers, people hanging out in a square.
The Impressionists finished their paintings relatively fast, as their brushstrokes were imperfect. As a result, the production of art was forever changed and ramped up from then on. The movement caught its own momentum, lasting 20 years and laying the foundation for the avant garde and for modern art. It did take many years, but many Impressionists enjoyed enormous success and financial rewards. Going against the grain had finally paid off.
Edgar Degas, The Dance Class, 1874, was another painting shown in the same exhibition with thirty other Impressionists who didn’t fit the mold.
Swimming Against The Tide is Where Creativity Thrives
However, the perks of being a contrarian are almost immediately palpable in modern entrepreneurship. Young programmer Kevin Systrom had a safe and stable job; on the side, he was trying to develop a project that everyone told him he was crazy to pursue: a photo-and location-sharing app that applied filters to enhance the quality of the pictures taken on a smartphone. He baptized his creation Burbn. He knew that research supported the upward trend of mobile app downloads, as more people had access to smartphones to the point that some would prefer to invest in one rather than buying a computer.
Soon after, Systrom convinced venture capitalist Steve Anderson to fund the app with $500,000, which Anderson did with two conditions: that Systrom leave his day job and that he find a business partner. Systrom promptly quit his job and called the best engineer he recalled from his days at Stanford: Mike Kreiger, who joined him right away.
Many told them that what they were doing made no sense: another photo-sharing app like Facebook? Another location-sharing check-in like Foursquare? But the two guys went ahead with their original plan, except they changed the name to “Instagram” as a combination of “instant” and “telegram.” In October 2010, these two contrarians launched what would become one of the most downloaded apps in history, the one that revolutionized the way we look at fashion, art, travel, food and the very same world of social media, and which created a whole new space to do business and build brands to anyone who owned a phone.
This is how Burbn looked like when Kevin Systrom launched it in 2010 before changing the name to Instagram.
If You Want The Rewards, You May Have to be a Dissident
When I quit my safe and stable job as a corporate attorney in a big law firm to open my art advisory company, everyone told me I was crazy to leave a career, a great salary, and top benefits behind. Besides, people told me, I wouldn’t survive two years in a field where I was an unknown quantity. But I pressed on, and it’s been 12 years since then. I followed my intuition, my knowledge, and my passion for contemporary art and the preliminary data from the research of the art market I had read.
Not only have the past 12 years been the most creative, fun, and exhilarating period of my life, but also the most financially rewarding despite breaking with the comforts of having a secure paycheck every month and a sizable bonus every year. Life is much more than that and I wouldn’t trade my contrarian views and my entrepreneurial path for anything in this world.
If you find yourself being questioned for your professional choices, or business ideas, or the direction your practice is taking, don’t get discouraged. Stop for a second and reflect on the conviction of how you got to those thoughts. Are you violating laws? Or going against the laws of physics? Other than that, if you feel it in your gut and have sufficient data to know that you will find a market, or sufficient clients or supporters out there to make your project viable, go ahead and be a contrarian. You may strike gold.
Thank you for reading this far. Looking forward to hearing from you anytime.