Before he met Gertrude Stein, Picasso wasn’t eating regularly. In fact, in 1900, at the age of 19, he was living and working in a small unheated room in Paris. He shared it with a friend, novelist Max Jacob. Picasso slept during the day and worked while Jacob slept at night. They burned most of Picasso’s work from those years to stay warm. Eventually, in order to eat more regularly, Picasso moved back home with his parents in Spain. He returned to Paris in 1904. In 1905, he met Gertrude Stein. She introduced him to her connections: the Paris literati, art collectors and art dealers. Money was never again, for the rest of his life, a problem.
As artists, we can tend to introvert, to seek the comfort of our imagination, and retreat into inner worlds. But most of what counts for luck in life, in business, comes from our relationships with others, from our connections. Many artists fail because they fail to build connections. Van Gogh for instance.
Connections are built, and thrive, based on the effort we put into them. Putting aside things like love and wild nature for a moment, which are at the center of my life, I believe in three things:
Focus. The power of focus. Focusing on one subject or one skill for four hours a day gives one power. My life has often lacked focus – I’m fascinated by many things – but I still believe in it. And when I do focus, good things tend to happen.
Surrender. The power of surrender. When things go off kilter in my life, when things don’t go well for more than a day or two, it is usually because I’m not surrendering. Adventurer Will Steger, when I interviewed him in 1994, said to me:
If the goal is really good. If it’s not a selfish goal. If it’s a good goal, I'll usually be successful in it. If it’s a vision, a strong vision, and I have faith in the vision, it will happen. Approaching the vision, putting in all the money and not knowing what is going to happen, I have to give in, give in but not give up. Given that I have faith in the vision that is drawing me, I don't have to push. But I have learned to be persistent with faith and hope.
The power of connection.
A few days after reading the thought offered above — that luck is actually the outcome of our connections — I came across the following from an interview of Kevin Kelly, who was, decades ago, instrumental in the creation of The Whole Earth Catalog and more recently in the founding of Wired magazine.
James Currier: You are a nonstop content producer. You have so many creative projects . . . books, graphic novels, Wired magazine, videos, podcasts. You are creating a network effect of ideas, putting ideas out there into the ether, and then the ideas are coming back to you.
Is that something you have purposely created in your life?
Kevin Kelly: That is a wonderful way to put it. I like that image of the network effects. The way it operates is the more you give it, the more it produces. And the more it attracts giving. It feeds avalanches in that way. That is exactly what is happening. You are wrong that there was anything deliberate about it. I fell into it. But it does work in that way. The more ideas you have, the more ideas it unlooses. The more ideas that it attracts to you. So you have yet more ideas.
That is the secret sauce of this world of network communications. They exhibit these network effects in all dimensions. If you can tap into one, it is wonderful. You can go on quite a ride. It is not only true for ideas but there is a universal truth for giving. If you are a giver, the more you give the more you get. That also is a network effect.
- Kevin Kelly & James Currier, the NFX podcast