Two Life Lessons from my Stanford Arts Professor
You might wonder what a tech entrepreneur can learn from a class called “Outdoor Drawing”…
Great people who are compelled to understand the world deeply are everywhere. They derive meaning from subjects as different as can possibly be. That is why out of all the courses I joined at Stanford, “Outdoor Drawing” gave me the most profound insights. Here are the two life lessons, I took away from this experience:
“Work the Whole Page”
While drawing the Memorial Church and other sights on the beautiful campus I often fell into a trap. I would start with the roof of the church in the top center of the page and draw it fairly detailed. My professor then reminded me to always start with a rough sketch of the whole piece before slowly getting more detailed.
I found this advice, repeated so many times, incredibly helpful. Where? For example when building PowerPoint presentations. It is far more important to get the overall story right than the details. I have to think back to my professor every time I catch myself diving into a slide before the overarching story is set.
This idea is so universal, it also applies to e.g. decorating a room.
Everything is a Construct
This one is more philosophical. What we experience as reality is a construct. And while this is a scientific and spiritual fact, it is hard to come up with examples. Here is one: What we see with our two eyes seems like a three-dimensional world. Our brain overlaps two continuous data streams from two eyes which are a few centimeters apart to a single 3D experience. This overlap becomes apparent when you hold a finger in front of your eyes. By focussing on the finger you only “see” the finger as a solid object. The data behind this finger is just ignored despite being present. If you now switch to focussing your eyes on whatever is behind the finger, things change. You suddenly see the finger with ca. 80% transparency and the objects behind it are sharp.
Now back to drawing. What we see is three-dimensional. Yet drawing can only be done on a 2D canvas. To do this, we need to translate the 3D world we perceive into 2D. And doing that is essentially a trainable skill. But it’s hard. If you look around you, your brain turns individual data points from your eyes into concepts like objects, people, etc. But to draw well you cannot draw a concept, you need to (re)create the light data points that will form specific concepts in the brain of the observer. So, I had to learn to perceive the light that hits my retina as just that: color and light. Not differentiating it into foreground and background, a door and a wall. But into brighter or darker spots of colors.
Try to look around you and instead of seeing the laptop you are reading this on as separate object, try to forget that the object ends at the point where the background starts. Try to just see a single colored area (your laptop bezel) next to other colors (the background).
I think there is a philosophical quality to this exercise and thought, too! A few external sensory data points (could also be e.g. sound) get interpreted as a concept. But the concepts we make of things are learned and it is helpful to be able to perceive without immediately interpreting. That is the only way to learn new concepts — or forget old ones (think of fireworks being interpreted as gunfire by people with PTSD). One way to apply this, is to other data, like a scatterplot. If you are aware, that a trendline is just a concept, you may be able to better brainstorm new ways of interpreting data.
There is the famous story of mathematician Abraham Wald. When asked about where to increase armor on American WWII airplanes, the data suggested most hits were taken on the fuselage as counted on the planes when they came back. However, he correctly understood, that this data can also be interpreted differently: many bullet holes in the fuselage could mean, that it got hit more often — or that planes that were hit elsewhere did not come back. Because he did not jump to an interpretation of the data, he understood the core insight here. Thanks to him, they enhanced protection around the engines.
Here is the full story if you want to have a read. Ideally, leave some claps before going there. ;-)
