My Business, My Art

When I was a kid and was asked by adults what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would reportedly answer, “Either a football player, an artist, or a Mormon.”

A Mormon because I thought that was what my dad did for a job. An artist because I loved to draw. And a football player because I loved hitting people carrying a football.

I’m no longer a Mormon and I sure as shit was never going to become a professional football player. For most of my adult life I thought that artist was off the table as well. Until I realized that I have been an artist this whole time. My medium? My canvas?

Business.

I no longer draw. I don’t paint. I’m not musical in the slightest. But I can build things that create value for other people. And that is what artists do. They bring value and joy to other people through their creations.

In his book Shoe Dog, Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, put it this way:

“It seems wrong to call it business.

It seems wrong to throw all those hectic days and sleepless nights, all those magnificent triumphs and desperate struggles, under that bland, generic banner: business.

What we were doing felt like so much more.

Each new day brought fifty new problems, fifty tough decisions that needed to be made right now, and we were always on red alert, acutely aware that one rash move, one wrong decision, could be the end.

The margin for error was forever getting narrower, while the stakes were forever creeping higher. And none of us wavered in the belief that stakes didn’t mean money.

For some, I realize, business is the all-out pursuit of profits. Period. Full stop.

But for us, business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood.

Yes, the human body needs blood. It needs to manufacture red and white cells and platelets, and redistribute them evenly, smoothly, to all the right places, on time, or else.

But that day-to-day business of the human body isn’t our mission as human beings.

It’s a basic process that enables our higher aims. And life always strives to transcend the basic processes of living.

And at some point in the late 1970s, I did too.

I redefined winning. Expanded it beyond my original definition of not losing, of merely staying alive.

That was no longer enough to sustain me or my company.

We wanted, as all great businesses do, to create, to contribute, and we dared to say so aloud.

When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers—making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better—and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is, you’re participating more fully in the whole vast human drama.

More than simply alive, you’re helping others to live more fully.

And if that’s business, all right. Call me a businessman.”

The first time I read that line “...business was no more about making money than being human is about making blood” it stopped me cold. It was such an elegant analogy and describes my feelings about business so poignantly, particularly in the last 5 or so years.

Over the years my focus and attention have shifted to wanting so much more from life. I want to suck the very marrow from its bones, wring every last bit of goodness from its depths. I want to add - in my own narrow and humble way - to the “whole vast human drama.” What does that mean? I mean, for me specifically? What does it mean?

For the longest time, I viewed that aim and business as being mutually exclusive. And I think that put me at odds with what I feel is my true purpose here on Earth. To be an artist.

Who says what type of canvas you have to create on? Who is the final arbiter of who is an artist and who is not? “True” artists may turn their noses up at the notion of a businessman trying to horn in on their territory. Well, excuse me while I go grab a ladder so that they don’t hurt themselves while climbing down off their moral high horse. Art has no master. It has no exclusive domain. That is precisely what makes it art. It is the very subjectivity that defines it as art.

So, my art may not look like the art you are used to. It may not be composed of canvas or of paint or of pencil or of musical notes or of clay. But, goddamn its beautiful.