The Delights of Distraction 109

If you've been following this newsletter closely, you'll know that a lot of our gleanings from life seep into our business philosophy and  a lot of our business philosophy is derived from our few, hard-won learnings from life. 

One of those aphorisms of life that makes "doing business" hard is that there is rarely one right answer to anything. In fact, there can be many - that happen to be diametrically opposite to each other.

Let’s quote some more eloquent thinkers to better communicate this thought:

“The opposite of a fact is falsehood, but the opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.”

 - Niels Bohr

And here’s Bruce Springsteen’s advice to young musicians: 

“Don’t take yourself too seriously.

Take yourself as seriously as death itself.

Don’t worry. Worry your ass off.

Have iron-clad confidence, but doubt.

It keeps you alive and alert!

Believe you are the baddest ass in town – and [that] you suck!

It keeps you honest.

Be able to keep two completely contradictory ideas alive and well inside of your heart and head at all times.”

When it comes to business, and finessing marketing strategies; this idea makes sticking to a lane particularly hard. As Rory Sutherland, the British megastar of marketing puts it, 

“Once human psychology has a role to play, it is perfectly possible for behavior to become contradictory.

A tax rise can cause you to work less because the returns of your labour are lower, or work harder to maintain your present level of disposable wealth.

There are two ways to sell a product: “not many people own one of these, so it must be good”, and “lots of people already own one of these, so it must be good”.

It always depends.”

The alluring premise about being a relatively smart person is that we assume that if we work and think hard about something, we‘ll have it figured out. But the truth is there is never one right answer. We can over-intellectualize and make projected spreadsheets, but we are at the mercy of a future where infinite outcomes are likely. 

There is a tendency to look back at our relatively slow and non-linear progress of The Wishing Chair over the past decade and question ourselves about taking the less aggressive path. Should we have scaled fast and shipped quick with investor money, instead of taking the time to build insight  into creating lovable products on our own dime in an ever-changing world? These questions end up with us tying ourselves into twisted pretzels, because the truth is that there is no one right answer really. 

And that should set us free. The messy truth doesn’t sell business books, but most of us are throwing all sorts of shit at the wall and making do with what sticks…(secretly praying none of it hits the fan). So here’s to you and your shit and your wall and all that you throw at it -  we hope it makes a gorgeous Jackson Pollock-y masterpiece.

And on to the Viv & Ami book club, one of our favourite things to delight in during the month. At our last meet-up, our wonderful group shared some of their favourite poems, and to our utter surprise, had even written some of their own. The list of poems shared is on our whatsapp group, but if you’d like to read any of them, then reply to this email and we’ll share the links with you.

The book we are reading right now is River East, River West by Aubrey Lescure - which we are going to discuss Mid-August at our next meet in Delhi. If you’d like to be part of it, send us an email and we’ll send you the deets. 

Here are some of our favourite things from the last couple of weeks:

Quotes  :

 Painter and visual artist Chuck Close on inspiration:

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to do an awful lot of work.

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."

Elementary school teacher and author Bruce Coville on love: 

"Nothing you love is lost. Not really. Things, people—they always go away, sooner or later. You can't hold them, any more than you can hold moonlight. But if they've touched you, if they're inside you, then they're still yours. The only things you ever really have are the ones you hold inside your heart."

Poem:

When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks
shouting your name then realizing it wasn't
you but some alarmed pretender, I went on
running, shouting now into the sky,
continuing your fame and luster. Since I've
been incinerated, I've oft returned to this thought,
that all things loved are pursued and never caught,
even as you slept beside me you were flying off.
At least what's never had can't be lost, the sieve
of self stuck with just some larger chunks, jawbone,
wedding ring, a single repeated dream,
a lullaby in every elegy, descriptions
of the sea written in the desert, your broken
umbrella, me claiming I could fix it. 

—Ash Ode, Dean Young

Thanks for reading, and for being here.

With love,

Viv & Ami