The Groove 120 - How to Live with Uncertainty and Still Succeed
HOW TO LIVE WITH UNCERTAINTY AND STILL SUCCEED
You may be the kind of person who, like me, sets intentions before embarking on a project or undertaking a new venture. This is an excellent way of establishing the tone and mood in your work. The problem arises when we try to control every variable along the way. Then we move from “intention” to “fixation” and the results can be far from what we hoped for.
That’s not to say I’m advocating for complete randomness, that’s wildly ineffective too.
As an entrepreneur and business owner, however, I’ve been in the painful situation where I was grasping so tightly and micromanaging every aspect of a project that even though it seemed a success from the outside, the outcome was very disappointing to me.
The antidote to this very uncomfortable state is to be willing to live with uncertainty and to embrace it fully.
And it was precisely the uncertainty of not knowing how things would turn out that made Helen Frankenthaler change the course of abstract art with one experiment.
Have a Vision but Be Willing to Change Course
Helen Frankenthaler photographed by Gordon Parks in New York, 1957.
If you love what you do, you probably have a vision for each one of your projects and for your career. But there’s nothing that leaks your energy and quelches your creativity more than being a control freak. It is one thing to be determined, it is another to hold the universe in a chokehold.
Frankenthaler was a young artist with great ambition working with Cubism and painting with oil on easels as she had learned in school. But then she met Jackson Pollock in 1950 and became quite enthralled by his technique of pouring paint directly onto canvas laid on the floor.
Inspired by Pollock, but fueled by spontaneity and experimentation, she made Mountains and Sea in 1952, a painting that launched her career and granted her the title of pioneer of Color Field.
It was the looseness and freedom that gave her the idea to start experimenting with staining the canvas instead of letting the paint sit on the surface like Pollock did. Frankenthaler poured turpentine-thinned paint in watery washes onto the raw canvas so that it soaked into the fabric weave, becoming one with it.
After a trip to Nova Scotia, she painted light-struck, diaphanous evocations of hills, rocks and water using her breakthrough staining technique. “The landscapes were in my arms as I did it…didn’t realize all that I was doing. I was trying to get at something — I didn’t know what until it was manifest.”
Mountains impact on the Color Field movement has been compared to the importance of Claude Monet's 1872 “Impression, Sunrise” to the Impressionist movement.
Leave Room for Things to Happen
Mountains and Sea, 1952, oil and charcoal on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
There was one more thing that made Mountains such a pivotal work in the history of abstraction: Frankenthaler had left the edges of the canvas blank. All the composition happened in the center of the painting.
Basically, Frankenthaler left breathing room for a breakthrough, opening a blank space where new ideas could oxygenate.
This is such a powerful visual metaphor applicable to any job, career or project because sometimes we become so rigid in our ways that we miss the opportunities and surprises that pop up along the way.
Control-freakness generates exhaustion. Energy contracts and kinks form along the natural progression of what the ideal state of flow should be.
Frankenthaler said it best when asked what she was interested in: “Things that are not overworked, that are in essence light. In other words, the great Cezannes that are not all filled in.”
If you are holding onto something so tightly, filling in every little space, including how each step should unfold, you are setting yourself up for disappointment and atrophying the natural flow of things.
Accept Uncertainty
Frankenthaler’s paintings from 1962 and 1963 in a 2014 show at Gagosian, New York.
Dr. Philip Stutz, a psychiatrist based in LA (who is the subject of a brilliant Netflix documentary produced by one of his patients, actor Jonah Hill), says that uncertainty is one of the three things in life that can’t be avoided. (The other two are pain and constant work on yourself, but those are for another day.)
The minute you accept that uncertainty is inevitable, you will move through obstacles and setbacks with much more ease. Instead of restricting your options, you put yourself in a place of expansion and possibility.
Much in the same way Frankenthaler approached her canvases, Dr. Stutz says that the first thing you need to do is to stop thinking that things are supposed to be certain, that you're supposed to control them.
This only makes everything worse, especially because humans are the most unpredictable of all the living species. You could dot all the i’s and cross all the t’s and your boss, the market or your audience may still not like what you did.
If you picture energy, what is most sustainable: the dense, frantic, unsettling stress of living with a clenched jaw and white knuckles, or the lighter, gentler, albeit at times frightening state of accepting that we do the work, we do it well and we don’t know if it will produce the results that we intended?
Morris Louis, an abstract expressionist painter and a contemporary of Frankenthaler, described Mountains and Sea as, "a bridge between Pollock and what was possible" and I ask you, what could be attainable if instead of strangling your objectives with a tight grip, you rather become a conduit for what is possible.
UNLEASH YOUR CREATIVE GENIUS
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If you’d like to watch it, please register here (it’s on auto-repeat every 15 minutes once you have registered).
HOW CREATIVITY RULES THE WORLD
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TEDX TALK
Have you already watched my TEDx Talk: “NFTs, Graffiti and Sedition: How Artists Invent The Future”?
I share three lessons I have learned from artists that always work for anyone in their careers. Watch it here.