Get Shouty

I love the following story:

One of Frank Gehry’s first buildings, was a shopping mall, The Santa Monica Place. It was rigidly geometric and pale pink. He played it safe for investors and went LA-style. He hated it.

Meanwhile, as a direct creative outlet, Gehry went full out Gehry on building his own home. Envision sloping roofs, curvaceous windows, jutting peaks. Think: wacky and wildly organic.

The night of the grand opening of the Santa Monica Place, the president of the real estate company that had hired Frank was at Gehry’s home for a dinner party:

Real estate Exec: What the hell is this?, he said to Frank, looking around Gehry’s house, awestruck.
Frank: Well, I was experimenting, playing with it.
Exec: Well you must like it if it’s your house. You like it, right?
Frank: Yeah. I’m happy with how it turned out.
Exec: So then…the building you just did for us…you can’t possibly like that.
Frank: You’re right, I don’t.
Exec: Then why’d you do it?
Frank: Because I need to make a living.
Exec: Well stop it. Don’t do that kind of work anymore.
Frank: You’re right.

They shook hands that night and decided to quit everything they were working on (they were employing forty people at the time.)

“It was like jumping off a cliff,” Gehry says. “It was an amazing feeling. I was so happy from then on.”

I love the insight that being risk adverse can hide your light and shorten your horizon. Sometimes the value of compromising your vision is too high a cost. While you might have to pay the piper to follow your dreams- the dance you subsequently do may just reward you beyond your expectations.

When was the last time you did something for nothing other than it’s magnificence: it’s impossibility, the daunting nature of the task and the sheer spectacle of human endeavour? For passion alone? And how might this relate to the Passion Economy?

Oh yes: I’ve recently seen Man On Wire. Do. Yourself. A. Favour- see it.

Philippe Petit: To me, it’s really so simple, that life should be lived on the edge. You have to exercise rebellion. To refuse to tape yourself to the rules, to refuse your own success, to refuse to repeat yourself, to see every day, every year, every idea as a true challenge. Then you will live your life on the tightrope.

Last year I went on Dangerous Art Fun Travels to Spain. (I often have  daft adventures). Big on my list were magnificent, impossible structures: the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Both these constructions bend your head and make you  marvel. What binds the two buildings together for me, even if they were dreamt of over a hundred years apart,  is a passionate vision fed by the same source: that what is does not dictate what can be.

Philippe Petit: It’s impossible, that’s sure. So let’s start working.

What I think bring all of these three together in context of the Passion Economy is that none of them are possible to achieve alone. To experience their wonder you need to go through the entire journey of imagination into implementation- how, HOW, did they enlist others to make these visions real?

In Sketches of Frank Gehry Sydney Pollack and the architect talk about the collaborative creative process:

Talent is condensed frustration- that the world is not how you see it and the creative drive is to make it so

The building blocks of the Passion Economy are individuals. Talented individuals. Talented frustrated individuals white hot and waiting for an output to pour their condensed frustration into and smelt a new thing. And we live in a creative age with a huge creative class. How would it be if we could connect the passions of our creative  consumers and address their frustrations? Facilitate, educate and promote their inherent talents as members of the connected age to make a difference?

In my piece for the eBook I say:

The opportunity for brands in this space is to be and build the bridges between needs and resources for people. Between people and what they want now, and what they want the future to be. To claim ownership of a need, build a sustainable purpose, engage, enlist, inspire action and make this action a habit.

But would this work for an organisation? Is passion enough of a marketing attraction to justify it? Ellen Di Resta elaborates in her piece how:

Passion is connection. It’s human nature to seek others who share our values, and people are constantly evaluating the subtle cues that hint of such a connection

Gavin Heaton knows the magical power of passion:

In a world where business, marketing and yes, even advertising, has desaturated language of all meaning, the magical word can restore our purpose—and in so doing—transform our private and professional lives.

Perhaps passion can make magical things happen, make people believe that we could make adifference, then stand back and be in awe…of ourselves.

*Thanks to Mike for identifying some juicy salient points in each author’s piece.