Breaking habits by getting weird: The secret to creative thinking with Warren Schulteis
As a part of our quest to champion purpose-driven entrepreneurs across the world here is the story of Warren Schultheis, the second of our Humans of Happy Startups Series.
The Happy Startup School team first met Warren when he joined us, and a small group of change-makers, at our annual event in the French Alps — Alptitude — back in May 2016…
Warren Schultheis
Artist, Creator & Principal Designer at Vox Media
Based in California, USA
Tell me about how you came to be an artist & designer, Warren.
My mother was an artist, and my father a designer. Actually they were both a lot of other things too, but the real point is that we were an unconventional household — and I was exposed art and design at a young age. Drawing very quickly became a happy meditation for me — and maybe just as often a refuge from most normal kids who I tended to feel shy, or uncomfortable around.
I went on to study fine art and social anthropology in college, and soon-after began selling my paintings for a living — which I (initially) thought was a dream-come-true.
I can’t say my current self loves the work I was doing back then, but the paintings were selling!
But the act of ‘doing what I loved for a living’ was massively soured by the business end of it. The patrons and gallerists expectations got in my head a bit (I was 23 and hadn’t established good boundaries). My solution was deliberately divorcing my fine art from the market — in order to be able to get weird and let my work evolve without outside influence. It (happily) took a turn for a more conceptual skill set and better, more interesting work.
Since I was already creative and visual, and cared about messaging, language and people, I got into design as an interesting but undeniably commercial way to support my newly private studio practice. The two things were able to grow and improve on side-by-side but on necessarily separate tracks.
So I guess you could say that NOT doing what I loved most for a living was one of the best things I ever did.
For the next 9 years, I ran a small citizen media startup, and my own web/identity design studio (using my father’s old business name, The Graphic Vendor), for 9 years, until one of my clients (Vox Media) offered to hire me full time, where I’ve been for the past 4.5 years working on all kinds of interesting projects.
But throughout, I’ve been happily making and curating art.
Sounds like creativity is in your DNA :) If somebody was struggling to ‘think more creatively’ what advice would you give them?
Get weird. Break your habits. Act like an idiot. Take notes.
Make multiple versions of the things you like, so you can make bizarre variations. Solve a problem your way, and not how you think someone else want’s it solved.
For me, staying up late was a great way to get to the ‘weird place’ where my normal, self-editing mechanism wasn’t functioning properly.
Great answer! What’s your favourite story since you began working on creative projects?
AH! Too many years working on creative projects!
One of my favorite things stemmed from confusion I had over something very (seemingly) mundane:
The city I live in, Santa Barbara, is known for being very beautiful — and it was due to vote on an initiative (Measure B) that would reduce the building height limit on any new construction from 60 feet to 40 feet. At stake on one hand (according to some) was the visual character of the city and the future of our tourism industry. At stake on the other was limiting construction on much needed high-density projects that would help alleviate the often crushing cost of living here. But that wasn’t very clear at the time. No one seemed to understand what was at stake — including myself.
So, knowing almost nothing about curating, I convinced 10 or so art friends to whip up artwork themed on ‘Measure B and the future of Santa Barbara in 100 years’. I called the show SUPER SANTA BARBARA (a sort-of nod to SUPER STUDIO).
A friend and I got the local Museum of Contemporary Art to donate their space (which was only available during a small window 2 weeks away) to the project, and blasted out press releases — hoping to hell that the artists would create work worthy of the overly-confident press we were sending out — with only two weeks to do it.
There were so many places it could have gone wrong. I was terrified that no one would turn up. Or that everyone would turn up and that the work would be bad. Or the beer sponsor would fall-through. Or the museum would get cold-feet.
Most of all, I was worried that my idea was dumb. That maybe combining contemporary art, futurists and an actual local political issue was not a good idea, but instead a great way to make a mess of something.
Well, the show actually happened (thanks in large part to a wonderful community of artists and friends)! The work was excellent! It was packed with happy smart people! (I was told by a museum board member that they almost never got attendance like that at their own events!). The press liked it! It started needed conversations about something confusing that was boring, but important. A few people actually thanked me and said that they voted, and were better informed!
It was a very empowering moment for me, and opened the door to me being able to curate another SSB (themed on Net Neutrality) the next year, and then ‘real’ show at MCA, and then another down in LA. Then I was asked to be on the MCA’s board of directors.
More importantly, it made me feel like I could do something a little ‘off’, that made sense to me, and that people might also connect with it.
All that from a normally disregardable late-night moment when I said,
‘fuck it, Im going to do something weird’
What a great story. I bet you have many more to make and share.
Can you tell me & readers more about the desk light you’re working on? is there a name for it yet?
Yes, but it is still nameless!
Without getting into too many details, I’m working on a small multi-purpose smart-light as a side-project — mainly just to flex different parts of my brain than I normally do.
It’s been a great crash course in physical prototyping, product design, playing with new materials and learning to code for Arduino. I can’t wait to have a simple, practical, and beautiful thing that I’ll have built from start-to-finish.
Oh, and finally taking the crowd-funding plunge will be educational too, if I can manage to do it smartly. Thankfully I have a few smart friends to harass for advice.
Hopefully, you’ll hear more about it soon!
Can’t wait to hear how it progresses.
Ok I ask this to all of our Humans of Happy Startups, what 3 things make you feel really good in life?
- Spending time with my family.
- Spending time in my studio.
- Spending time traveling and experiencing new unusual things.
- Spending time watching Star Trek TNG reruns.
- Spending time destabilizing subspace tachyon pulses and fixing warp-core inefficiencies.
That’s not 3 things Warren! You artists break too many rules ;)
Finally, what are you seeing as a challenge for you right now? And where can we find out more about your work?
Hm.. Though I’ve lost zero interest in the types of things that I’ve historically loved doing (art, music, strange media projects, surfing, etc), they’ve been out-maneuvered by my desire spend my free time playing with my 2 year old. This may resolve organically when he starts spending more time at school, but right now, I feel like a boring (but very happy) dad.
Here’s my personal links:
Website: http://wsao.net
Dribble: https://dribbble.com/sleeptest
Art-slant: http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/show/132511-warren-schultheis
At The Happy Startup School we’ve been helping others like Warren build on their creative talents to launch successful, happy startups. If you enjoyed this post, please click that little green heart and follow our Humans of Happy Startups publication.
