Diverse Data

Do you see forest? Trees? Or soil?

The absorption of visual context over a period of time by a group of people provides a creative direction beyond words. Deciding what stays and what goes is less important than who organizes input and who chooses the organizer.

The brain organizes for survival — what is poisonous, what is love, what is a threat, what is delicious. Experience can teach you success and happiness, but also racism and shapes of fear. Those lessons are difficult to erase especially those from early development. That’s why you know the words to 10,000 songs from middle & high school and 1000 songs after.

Forcing yourself to absorb new data as the world evolves and you must focus — housing, transportation, voting, parenting, diet, exercise — is not easy. A year neck deep in the color teal or inclusion or hemp may be foundational or passing for you, but if you don’t go in deep they will never change you.

And you should change. You should see the context in moodboards or stories or friends and freeze them. And then start again. And build them with others to argue priority, importance, value and potential.

A picture is valuable. A picture of pictures is context. Don’t just save the good drawings. Don’t just share the good poems. Don’t just collect the wins. Those are for your portfolio.

Your creative brain — independent or collective — enjoys seeing the forest and the trees. The pile of dusty Polaroids. The binder of bad sketches.

The real talent is finding the needle in the haystack.

Sometimes it’s the needle in the pile of needles.

But the pile is important.

Who helps create those piles shapes the future.

Good things.