by tashmcgill | Nov 18, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Travel
You can learn a few things in Las Vegas. More than blackjack or how to play the house advantage. You can learn a lot about being tough, surviving and rebirthing yourself. After all, Las Vegas is a city in the desert, without a water source close-by. Lake Mead is some 45min away. None of the greenery here looks real, its irrigated golf courses and landscaped gardens a far cry from the stark desert ash everywhere else you look.
Amidst the lights and neon signs, the truth of Vegas is a testament to the best and worst of human experience. Here, each rebirth of Las Vegas can be seen etched into the landscape of architecture, signage, history museums and photographs. While new hotels and resort complexes rise up on the dust and ashes of previous monuments, others sit abandoned on the Strip, rusting slowly in the parching desert sun.
This is human. We live out of our history and everything we are becoming is from the context of who we’ve been. My mistakes and my triumphs exist side by side, the evidence of both scattered through stories, opportunities and lessons learned along the way.
The best of us learn how to drill down and find water in the desert. We learn to build our future stories out of and beside the rubble of our histories. We let our darkness live as shadow of the lights.
Sometimes we refurbish. We take the old structures and ways of being, strip them out to bare bones and begin again. New furniture and fixtures make a difference. We can change our habits through careful new architecture and design. Human beings are like houses – we build and design our lives carefully and those that dwell in them should be carefully thought through.
Sometimes we leave the rusting, decaying pieces just within view. Sometimes they are the challenge yet to come, a restoration so complex or unprecendented that we haven’t figured out just how to approach it yet.
Either way; this is a testament to human survival. When we triumph and when we fail – we go on. We begin again, we build more, we stretch more. If we fail but do not persevere, if we do not find another incarnation of ourselves, we do not survive.
Vegas knows this. Her rugged history of men and women escaping taxes and the law is written in the dust of this desert. No matter how many shows, new hotels and great restuarants pop up here – this is a place with a slightly dark underbelly, where people are often looking to lose themselves for a night or a weekend.
But that’s not all that Vegas wants to be – and why wouldn’t she want more? We, as people, are rarely satisfied with the status quo for long. So now, she reinvents herself as a city for the arts, a city for performers, for families, for luxurious and clean escapes.
In this city, rebirth and survival is found through reinvention. But it’s never reinvention from scratch. It’s actually evolution. Core ideas reshaped into new expressions. Take the circus. Once upon a time, circus trains travelled the deserts of the mid-West, slowly fading one by one from railway tracks and then from caravans until people began to say – the travelling circus is dead.
Not here in Vegas. Here, for more than 30 years, Cirque de Soleil has rebirthed traditional circus into a haven for the performing arts community. Gymnasts, dancers, contortionists, divers, fire-breathers – all have found a home in the new Circus that people travel all over the world too. That’s what Las Vegas has become for many – the home of Cirque.
Evolution through history. Future, present and past standing next to one another in a single view. Rebirth and survival.
Perhaps it’s best expressed like this: once, I knew how to live until it no longer made sense. The world around me changed enough I knew I must change too, in order to survive. So I reshaped how I lived in this new world, and found myself building new habits and ways of being. I am still present, still full of what has been but I am newer too. I am a survivor.
by tashmcgill | Nov 15, 2014 | Culture & Ideas
I’m sitting in the airport lounge, listening to a flurry of Mandarin to the left of me and a Southern drawl to the right of me. Their human commonality is they are all loud talkers. I’m a loud talker too, but I love little more than silence and quiet.
It’s one of many contradictions, that I love to make noise as much as I long for the quiet. I know a couple of people who are quiet talkers. It makes me lean in, not only to listen to what they say, but to pay closer attention to them. I like the difference between someone who makes you lean in versus one who makes you lean back.
I’m sitting in the airport lounge, drinking a long black espresso and beside it, a whisky and soda. One is deep, rich and will awaken my senses. The other is light, smoky and crisp but will eventually soothe me into easy sleep. I like to drink them at the same time just to experience the spectrum.
I celebrated my birthday with friends a week ago, because I love to throw parties. A dear friend said to the crowd, ‘Tash manages to be spiritual without being weird.’ Another contradiction.
I’m leaving for the other side of the world to see people I love in places I long for. I’m excited and nervous, hoping it will be all I’m wishing for – connection, richness of experience, deepness of love shared between kindred spirits. I’m hoping that each relationship I cherish will grow richer and stronger and more through the chance to be present with one another.
But I, as always, grieve quietly the absence from others that is required to make those connections possible. I’m full of joy and full of sorrow, albeit momentarily, because I cannot bear to be apart but I cannot bear to stay.
I, like always, am intoxicated a little by the mystery of travelling alone. Wondering who will cross your path, knowing the complete freedom to be and see and do whatever takes my fancy along the way. I am, increasingly, tired of travelling by myself. I find I no longer want to see new places without sharing the experience with another pair of eyes, another set of senses. I like to be alone; I am desperate not to be alone.
And here is the deepest contradiction of them all. I am strong. I have an emotional backbone made of steel. It might be best to say I am grounded; at peace with the vast array of emotion that strikes to the core of the human experience. I can grieve and laugh in the same day, I can (sometimes) stand calm in the face of chaos, I can navigate through the storm.
But oh, how I am soft. Tender and gentle, longing for peace. I have become strong in the face of the storm only because I have faced it for one hundred days. I can bear the stern light of the sun because I have lived in the desert. I can withstand what presses in from the outside because I have been born with steel inside me.
I am soft and I long to yield. I want not to withstand. I want to be comforted, I want to crumple. On the inside, my soft and gentle heart holds to the steel of my skeleton. My vulnerability has slowly been creeping out, slowly losing it’s hold on steel. I like it, I like that it means I need others in that state.
I am a woman of contradiction. Not complicated, just faceted. Never just one, I am one and other.
I am not strong. I’m vulnerable. More than I realise most of the time. I need others to hold me up and take of me more often than I know.
by tashmcgill | Oct 23, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Leadership, Strategy
“You just kind of run on instinct,” he said, “but that has to be validated. People can’t just take your word for it.”
It was a late afternoon conversation with a colleague and I was informing him of progress on a current project. I mentioned that I’d put that progress in a presentation deck ‘because I’ve been told people will take me more seriously that way’. He replied immediately, “Yes, it will help. You just kind of run on instinct, but that has to be validated. People can’t just take your word for it. Other people don’t just wing it like you do.”
While I’m almost certain it wasn’t his intention, I felt belittled. It’s frequently surprising to me, how one little paragraph can leave you feeling so … misunderstood. Instinct is not about gut feelings. Or even feelings at all. We might use that language to express ourselves, but Instinct is a science. Instinct alone is not a complete solution to understanding people or what must be done. It’s a tool that gives insight, but it must be applied alongside pragmatism, strategy and with a dose of compassion if Instinct is to get you anywhere at all.
The subtext of his statement was that instinct is somehow not an equal science (artform) to rationalization. A repeat of the centuries old tension between the Schools of Humanities and Sciences, despite both originating from the foundation. The rational view is that because Instinct is harder to define and quantify, it cannot be as reliable or as trustworthy as the other sciences. Instinct is something more primal than our civilised, evolved selves. This is far from the truth, however.
Instinct is as much as a science as mathematical theory. It is the collective noun we give to layers of distinct and meticulous habit, discipline and skill. It is a finely tuned practice of reading the visible and aural signals that human beings give one another. It is listening for the minutiae and tracing countless details about people, projects, relationships, influences, priorities.
Mostly, it is about understanding and knowing how to observe and engage with people, both as individuals and more challengingly in a room of people. It is about filtering important information from really important information and disregarding the trivial.
The trouble with Instinct, is that it is a science masquerading as a mystery. People with these skills can turn up into a room with little context or history and make enormous progress in single meetings, because they are tuned in to decipher what people want and what people have to give. What appears to be pulling something out of thin air, is actually closer to extracting what was sitting there all the time. Sometimes Instinct just helps you articulate it with people, or for people.
Why is it that salespeople sometimes have that ‘pull it out of thin air’ appearance? Why someone thinks I’m ‘winging it’ in a meeting room? Because the science of instinct is rarely a visible one. It’s mapping the details of what you see and hear at a million miles an hour, against what you already know and what you understand people want. It’s about seeing the connections, visible and invisible. It’s the observation that will tell you who the powerful people in a room are. Observing how they engage and interact will teach you how to approach, gauge and influence them. In the same way no-one is born with fully-formed speech, you cannot expect to have good Instinct, if you do not practice and craft the skills required to execute it. You cannot simply ‘turn up and perform’.
Most rational sciences you can teach to people with formulas and technical examples. But how do you teach someone to see or teach them to listen? Really, how do you? I have tried to explain how I am listening and observing in a room. It gets too complicated far too fast, but I understand that I must come to understand it, if I am to explain it.
How do we explain it?
There are all sorts of words for instinct. We call it intuition (I am highly intuitive on the Myers-Briggs scale), awareness, being tuned in. The more spiritual you are, the less rational and scientific your vocabulary for instinct is likely to be. Words like prophetic and healer appear. And while some people are wired with empathy, to read and respond to emotions and circumstances around them, the truth is sometimes the most emotionally disengaged have the best instincts around. Divulged of their own emotional entanglement to a situation, they can comprehend the information in front of them most appropriately.
When we make decisions because we ‘feel it was right’, often that means we have layered in our own conscience, our fears or agendas, our hopes or our risks. Instinct is collecting clues and paying close attention to where they map together and belong.
Spiritual abusers and manipulators are often masters of Instinct, seeing exactly where vulnerabilities exist to be taken advantage of. Many false spiritual leaders have enjoyed how instinct masquerades as mystery, in order to propagate their own mythology.
Instinct Is Fallible
Lastly, if anything solidifies instinct as a science, the sheer fallibility of it does. The finest instincts can be taken by surprise, miscalculate the signals and falter when it ought to stand firm.
So you train and develop your instincts in every setting, the same way you would to go to war. Work them, stretch them, test them. Recognize that you are a practitioner of a science and Instinct is something you should work hard for.
Then, one last thing. Respect those who have invested time and energy to fine tune their instincts. It’s not a strength that stands alone but when added to your talent pool, it can make a difference. When someone says, ‘that person has good instincts, let’s get them on the team,’ it’s because they know how to close a sale, how to progress a job, how to bring people together and how to listen well. They decipher the fantasy from the reality. You need them, even if it feels like their science is a mystery to you.
by tashmcgill | Aug 19, 2014 | Culture & Ideas, Leadership, Strategy
I was talking with a recent design graduate the other day. They were talking about how they were never going to ‘sell out’ by working for a big corporate agency. Their philosophy was pretty simple – as far as they were concerned, working for a big agency would mean working on big client accounts that would always be driven by money, not by the integrity of the art.
I hear this all the time – first from cynical Generation Xers and now from optimistic Millennials. And every time, it frustrates me to see intelligent, smart and talented people constraining their own potential to influence amazing creative work and see demonstrable change. Here’s why the graduate is wrong and you should consider encouraging more people to ‘sell out’. (more…)
by tashmcgill | Jun 20, 2014 | Community, Culture & Ideas
“Criticism, you are
a helping
hand,
bubble in the level, mark on the steel,
notable pulsation.
With a single life
I will not learn enough.”
Pablo Neruda remains one of my favourite poets. Beyond the schoolgirl days of Sylvia Plath and Shakespearian sonnets – Neruda was writing so politically, so astutely of his time and space that it’s nearly impossible to call him anything but a political writer.
His prowess is equal only to his capacity for immense failure at times – epic screeds of verse that would never make publication in today’s world, but in the reading and comparison of such, create the wonder of the times he landed his composition so eloquently right.
As a writer, criticism is often captured with red pen edits in my life. As a speaker, the crowd goes quiet. As a member of communities and a family – it comes in loud voices, arguments, discussions, silences and facial expressions that do not bear dissecting. Where do you face criticism? Your boss, your colleagues, your lover or your children? (more…)
