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 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.
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.
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.
A company logo is intended to convey a distinctive identity, but achieving this on something that would be printed on something as small as a postage stamp or as large as a billboard is not trivial. Perhaps, it is not surprising that distilling the principles of a good logo design to a concrete recipe is challenging. After all if it would be easy, everyone wold be a great logo designer. Still, some basic principles can be discerned by studying the common features of famous logos.
Well, I didn’t do anything revolutionary, but I did actually went online to browse through recent guidelines on presentation. The main change that I implemented as a result was to abandon pointing out every element of each slide, as I described them with a laser pointer – a habit drilled into me and my lab partners by our academic advisor, who was widely considered a near-god-level standard of everything, including presentation skills, in our research area. Instead, I completely eliminated text from the slides, and let them change in the background, in the style of Ted talks.
Of course, assigning a dollar figure to a piece of art is a tricky business, which is influenced by many, often irrational factors, such as fashion or political conjecture. Still, I believe there is at least a grain of rationalism in the idea that what is useful is necessarily valuable. For photographers, for example, capturing human emotions and commemorating life’s milestones is an obvious way to be useful to other people. This why, among the variety of possible niche genres, portrait and wedding photography is considered as the most straightforward way to start making money.
I am writing this post on the plane on my way back to Victoria from Milan, where I was attending a PhD defense and presenting a seminar on using flow visualization in fluid mechanics research. Usually, I try to combine these kind of work trips with photography, but taking some time between work to go on photo shoots. The last time I did this with a particular focus was during a trip to Shanghai.
Perhaps, what makes us like the contrast is our inherent striving for balance. When we are viewing a high-contrast image, we are being taken on a roller coaster ride along the range of hues and grayscale values, and we find the sensation of the loss of control entertaining.
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