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On motorcycle riding

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I find that riding a motorcycle, just the fact of being a rider, serves as a kind of universal human connector. If you show up anywhere (at a cafe, at a ferry lineup, etc.) in your motorcycle gear, people strike up conversations with you. “I have an antique Suzuki back at home…” “My dad used to ride a Harley during the War…” Things like that just don’t happen if you show up in a car.

As a professor, I am always looking for ways to connect to students, to find common points of interest beyond the classroom. These connections translate into a more human approach to teaching (or at least, so I hope). During my first year of teaching, I was lucky to have a student in my class, who has just joined our kendo club. Just knowing that we share the common interest helped tremendously in establishing the rapport with the entire class. Yesterday, I rode my bike for the first time this year, and several of the students, who came to my office, saw the helmet on my shelf and told me that they also ride bikes.

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On risk aversion

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Adam Grant in his book “Originals” cites recent studies, which show that most successful entrepreneurs start their businesses as side projects. They do not quit their day jobs or studies until the side business is mature enough that it can support a living. In doing so, the successful entrepreneurs hedge the risk of failing in the new project.

There are exceptions, of course, and the individuals who go “all in” into their startups and succeed (Elon Musk with his Tesla company comes to mind as an example) receive the lion’s share of media attention and public admiration. Still, the percentage of failure is higher among such people. Perhaps, their propensity to taking risks reflects on their style of management and communications, which ultimately has a negative effect on the entire enterprise.

And side projects that are pushed alongside the main job don’t have to be small in scope or amateurish. Perhaps more importantly, the hobby projects can be very satisfying even we don’t have goal of developing them into full-time jobs. Just yesterday, I had an opportunity to photograph a heavy metal band, in which my kendo friend is playing a bass guitar. All of the band members have “normal” lives outside of the hard rock world, but when their makeup is on and they go onstage they make a tangible contribution to the community, which is obvious in the reaction of the loyal fans, who gather around them. I personally had a great fun at the concert, mostly just through exposure to an atmosphere that is quite foreign to my typical photoshoot routine. After all, I am not often concerned about being sprayed with fake blood from stage effects while trying to compose a shot.

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Publishing your art

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Our new publication, The Black Light Magazine, is accepting first submissions from artists. This made me think about the benefits of sharing art in general, and the parallels between publishing/exhibiting art and public communication.

Making your work public is an integral part of a creative process. The concept is simple and hardly new, but actually making it a reality is not trivial. A work of art is inherently an expression of something that the artist closely associates with, but exhibiting or performing a piece of art is an equivalent of a public statement. In this sense, publishing your work, as any form of public communication is a skill that can be developed and that requires regular practice.

There are many well-known benefits of showing our creations to other people. Artists, who regularly exhibit, share, perform or otherwise publish their work develop a sense of connection with the audience that becomes activated even at the earliest stages of the process. Publishing our work also allows us to develop an ability to receive feedback, both positive and negative, and use it in a constructive way. And of course, if you create and share something new, there is an exciting possibility to build a community around you and your art (not that being in the centre of it actually matters – often, making a contribution to an existing area is most rewarding.)

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Moving on

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In martial arts, for example, in kendo, the term zanshin (literally, ‘remaining spirit’) refers to the state of being brepared to continue to fight immediately after completing a sword cut. At one seminar, an 8th dan kendo sensei explained that this continuous focus and the abcense of breaks in the present moment awareness is the reason why a match that lasts only a few minutes leaves the kendoka dripping with sweat.

Cultivating this ability is important in other aspects of life, from business to research to creative endeavors. For example, Brian Koppelman, the screenwriter of “Rounders“, “Solitary Man” and, more recently, “Billions,” told in an interview that he and his writing partner began researching the next movie idea literally the following day after “Rounders” was released in theatres. They specifically planned for this immediate engagement in routine work to avoid allowing themselves to marinade in their emotional reaction to either the success or the failure of the movie. In another example, which, incidentally, I heard the same day, Barbara Corcoran, the founder of one (if not the) largest real estate company, said that in her experience, the best businessmen/women are different from their peers in that they can recover from setbacks quicker. These “superstars” do not dwell on their emotional reaction to an event in the past. 

I find it interesting that the concept applies equally to a positive result (completion of a painting, receiving a promotion, publishing a research paper, winning a kendo match, etc.) and a negative one (harsh review of a paper, losing a match, etc.) In either case, as soon as you find out the outcome, it becomes a thing of the past. After that, it is time to move on to the next thing.

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Black light

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My photography partners and I are starting a new publication in the area of fluorescent art called “The Black Light Magazine“. This project is exciting, because the area is new, both in general and for me personally. One experiment that I tried recently is digital re-creation of a fluorescent painting effect. 

Fluorescent paint photographed in a UV light produces images with a distinct glow-in-the-dark look, and I tried to analyze what are the features of this effect, so I could replicate them in a digital painting.

The photographed fluorescent paint or makeup has substantially higher brightness levels, compared to the areas of the image that are not painted. Also, the transitions from bright areas to the dark ones are abrupt. In other words, the tonal contrast is high, but only at the edges of the painted patterns. Inside the non-fluorescent, dark regions and within the the bright paint strokes, there is no significant variation of the brightness levels (i.e. the tonal contrast is low).

In terms of colour, popular fluorescent pigments are “neon” variations of yellow, red and green and their derivatives (shades of orange and yellow-green). The fluorescence effect is based on the pigment material absorbing the light energy at a certain wavelength (e.g. In the UV range, which is invisible to human eye) and releasing it at a different (visible) wavelength. The fluorescent light has a narrow band of frequencies, meaning that there is almost no variation in the color within an individual brush stroke.

Ability to digitally reproduce the glow-in-the-dark effect would be useful from creative perspective, because there are certain types of photographs, where UV lighting (or fluorescent painting, for that matter) would not be practical to implement. For my experiment, I used one of my favorite rugby shots as a reference and sketched over it, sampling the colors from a studio photo of a model in fluorescent makeup shot under UV light. I did the sketch in the ProCreate app on an iPad. For more refined painting in the future, I plan to work on  tweaking the brush dynamics (which is better accomplished in Photoshop) to make the individual strokes more “alive”, i.e. varying in thickness and possibly transparency (although current fluorescent paint do not show a lot of transparency variation) along their length.

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A glimpse of the sacred

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Cal Newport makes an interesting argument in his book “Deep Work” that craftsman mindset is so appealing in the modern days because it provides an opportunity to engage with something that has an intrinsic value. Specifically, the value, the meaning of the craft is not created by us but is already there, in the material, in the purpose of the final product, in the process of creating it, in the setting in which the process takes place. The craftsman simply cultivates a skill of uncovering this meaning through her daily practise.

I am writing this on a ferry on my way to a kendo tournament – the largest annual competition that I attend. For amateur kendoka like myself, there is always a question of whether the shiai experience (which often ends after a single lost match in my case) is worth all the inconvenience of getting there, not to mention the stress of the competition. I was thinking about this again this morning, sitting in the dark, waiting for my ride to the first ferry sailing of the day. I think that the reason we do it (practice kendo and go to tournaments) is to experience The Way (the ‘Do’ in “kendo’). It has an unmistakable flavour of the sacred, something deeply spiritual. Just as craftsmen, we do not need to create the reason to follow the way – it is already imbedded in the process itself.

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Why fiction is better than non-fiction

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Lately, I changed my view of fiction literature from a somewhat time-wasting entertainment to a rather efficient form of teaching. I think the usefulness of fiction stems from human ability to relate to good stories. Perhaps, our liking of storytelling is a result of evolutionary adaptation to quickly and widely spreading information within the society in the most efficient way – a way that employs our capacity to relate to emotional content. We like a good story, and a good story can teach us, in an implicit way, something that would take libraries-full of scientific literature to describe analytically, i.e. by defining every term, concept and rule.

I recently came across an example of this while re-reading Tolstoy’s “War and Peace”. There is an episode, where a charismatic Russian commander (prince Bagrtation) raised and maintained morale of his troops during and uneven battle against French forces that vastly outnumbered the Russians. When receiving reports from his aide-de-champs about the disastrous events that were unfolding one after another in all parts of the battlefield, Bagration created an impression (through his remarks and body language) that everything was going on exactly as he had expected it and that everyone, even the routed units, were doing a good job.

I believe that this scene, which took Tolstoy a couple of pages to describe, might be worth a couple of shelves of modern non-fiction books in a bookstore’s “Leadership”. This battle scene is a succinct description, through an example, of a fairly complicated leadership principle, rooted in stoicism (another fashionable non-fiction area these days): faced with the circumstances that were beyond his control, Bagration did not let them alter his way of relating to his men.

I am sure that this leadership approach can be very effective in the far less dramatic circumstances of everyday lives of most people (in the first-world countries, anyway). From coaching a kendo team to leading a research group to directing models during a photoshoot – projecting confidence and remaining calm is undoubtedly a useful skill.

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Being a tactful nonconformist

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“Inwardly, we ought to be different in all respects, but our exterior should conform to society.”
— Seneca the Younger, “Moral letters to Lucilius”
Following our own way while not offending others (which, I think is a good thing in majority of everyday circumstances, not when fundamental principles are at stake) is a tricky business. I think it was Seth Godin, who expressed this idea very eloquently: we need a compass and a place to go to, but the road there does not have to be a straight line.

Emulating others, particularly those that work at the cutting edge of our fields is a powerful technique. In fact, Seneca, whom I quoted earlier, also said that “best ideas are common property”, not to encourage plagiarism, I suppose, but to warn us not to reinvent the wheel just for the sake of not following in someone else’s footsteps. The challenge then is not to lose sight of the big picture and to keep thinking independently.

My four-year-old daughter is very much into playing LEGO, and I find that it is a good illustration of the balance between following instructions and letting your imagination run wild. You need to accumulate some basic techniques and understanding of principles but building a few sets “by the book”, but the most fun happens when you set the manual aside and build something uniquely yours.

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Not giving others what they want

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In any creative endeavor, it is important to take an initiative rather than to be led by the situation. In kendo, this concept is summarized in a maxim ‘Bogyo no tame no bogyo nashi’ (No defense for the sake of defense). In a modern economic context, Seth Godin differentiates between spending one’s life ‘on the offense’ and ‘on the defense’. The difference is between seeking to change other people (through our work and our interactions with them) and willing to be changed to accommodate the views or desires of others.

Taking initiative does not necessarily imply being selfish and insensitive to others. On the contrary, the active attitude requires situational awareness. From a creative perspective, being on the offense means not giving the audience (the clients, the sponsors, the opponents, the reviewers, the critics, etc.) what they want and expect. Instead, we should strive to give them what is authentically ours, what represents our vision and our style.

Doing so is extremely difficult by definition, not only at the initial stages of one’s career, when we lack credibility and authority, but at any time. The inertia of the convention is a great force. But not seizing the initiative is simply not an option. Staying on the defense may be easier at the given moment, but it would not lead anywhere (good) in the long run.

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Claiming an idea

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“Each day acquire something that will fortify you against poverty, against death, indeed against other misfortunes as well; and after you have run over many thoughts, select one to be thoroughly digested that day.”
— Seneca the Younger, “Moral letters to Lucilius”

I have been listening to Seneca’s letters, recently published by Tim Ferriss in an audiobook form. Naturally, a book that survived such a long test of time is full of gems that are universally applicable. For example, the issue of the balance between depth and breadth on one’s studies is something that comes up in my personal experience in academic research, photography and kendo.

Seneca points out that there are too many books out there for a single person to be able to read. Instead of chasing after every new author, he advises to “fall back upon those whom you read before”. The goal is to engage with the classic ideas, to understand them deeply in order to be able to reliably apply them in daily life. By the way, it is interesting to note that in Seneca’s time philosophy was, apparently, an applied discipline.

I think that Seneca’s approach is a useful guideline for information consumption in the modern world, where we are bombarded with much more data than we can hope to process: learn something new every day to stay current in your field of study, but claim one idea per day as your own. In other words, become so deeply familiar with the idea that you can not only explain and defend it, but also to know its range of applicability.

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