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| The Universal Game © Adriana Díaz 2005 |
As a life
coach, a writer, and a visual artist, I crossover many professional and
intellectual borders. So, as I sit down to write a post in my blog,
ThisCreativeLife, I ask myself: What is the difference
between writing for my blog, or writing a post for LinkedIn? My conclusion:
language. I recognize that I make an assumption (right or wrong) that LinkedIn
readers are looking for nouns like success
and advancement, and adjectives such
as profitable and winning. Readers for my blog, I reason,
are looking for nouns such as creativity
and imagination, adjectives like expansive and self-emancipating. I see business energy pushing forward and
upward; I see creativity emanating outward and inward.
Well, it
seems the first paragraph provides a psychological profile about my
baggage regarding the aims of business, and the goals of creativity. There’s an
interesting story beneath that profile, it is painfully self-revealing, but I
am choosing to recount it. It begins with a confession: I started my college life
as a Business Major. (The people who know me best are probably shocked.) I
imagined myself going into advertising, marketing, customer service, or public
relations. Without giving my age too directly, the story requires the awareness
of the times: women, in nearly every field started as a typist or receptionist
and fought her way into more challenging and accomplished positions. (Think Mad
Men.) Being an optimist, I harbored my fantasies of PR and advertising until my
first encounter with a professor from the Business Department. It was supposed
to be an initial guidance meeting. Picture me: I was 18 years old, only months
after my high school graduation. I was so excited by the whole prospect of
entering the world of academia that I began college courses immediately that
summer (Sociology I and Art History). I was an enthusiastic and diligent
student because I loved learning. But in fifteen minutes that Business professor
stripped the excitement right out of me, and with it, he took as much dignity as
he could grab. Whether it was my race, my gender, or my low entrance exam score
that heated his bitterness, I do not know. I only know that he made me feel
lucky to have been allowed entrance into his
office, and I had even been so bold as to sit in a chair. “You know,” I
remember him saying, “we’re not going to let you people in here any more.”
I should probably
explain that my family had not allowed me to take normal college prep courses in
high school because classes like Shorthand, Business Machines, and General
Business were obviously more useful for a girl than Trigonometry (what was
that, anyway?), Chemistry, and Anatomy and Physiology. The practical thinking
of my parents told them that a girl didn’t need those subjects for anything.
And, they were certain that I did not need to go to college, either. What would
I do with that? Their expectation was that I’d get a “nice little job” like a
bank clerk, secretary, or receptionist before I found the right fellow, quit
work, and have children. (We were well past the 1950’s, but I think Latino
families will drag their old world opinions about women into outer space one
day.)
What does
any of this have to do with A Profitable Process for Winning, Advancement, and
Success? Well, the story is about a pivotal moment in a young person’s life when one bad teacher pulled the lever that shifted
her direction for a lifetime. Want to know what the pivotal question was? “How
much math have you had?”
Did my lack
of trigonometry mean that I could never become a creative advertising
executive? Did it mean that I couldn’t have written award-winning copy, or bring
in great profits as a result of my imaginative designs? This professor would
have needed some of that imagination to
even ponder such possibilities, and I doubt he used that noun very often. What
qualities had earned him the position as head of the department, I wonder? His limited personal
character and biases certainly played a part in the job he did that day. How
would an evaluation have looked like, if I’d been able to submit one? The man
failed, the professor failed, and the system failed. F, F, and F. Unfortunately,
the professor had all the power, and the only witness was a deep internal part
of the student, a part that would speak out decades later after a long career
as a teacher.
That professor stood at the door of
the business world like a bouncer at a Hollywood club. He looked down his
bigoted, sexist nose, didn’t even have to check the list, he knew that little
brown-skinned girls were not allowed in his club. They were just husband
hunting, as far as he was concerned. He failed to see academic potential
because his intention had nothing to
do with education or with business, his intention was to burn me, to barbecue
my spirit until I would withdraw not just from the Business Department of Cal
State Hayward, but from the entire college. How did I ever get in there, anyway?
I was certain the word wetback was tucked
inside him, carefully sequestered from his venomous tongue.
At the core
of this story is that question of language: What attracts a reader in LinkedIn
and what attracts a reader to This Creative Life? Language has the power to
draw us together, and it has the power to alienate and separate us.
A
reader looking for the experience of creative freedom, may turn away from an
article about Profitability and Career Advancement. While someone who sees him
or herself climbing the proverbial ladder of success, doesn’t have time for an
article titled Expanding Visual and Spiritual Perspectives. Words are
directional indicators, just like signs steering us along highways and city
streets. We read them, and comply quickly to some (No Smoking, One Way Street,
Do Not Enter) but others are not for the common good, rather they
further agendas of power: Whites Only. No Women Allowed.
Looking
back, decades removed from that defining moment, I see a world that recognizes the
importance of working from both sides of the human brain in all spheres of endeavor:
business, science, and the arts. We see now more interdisciplinary
collaboration than ever before. And it is not by accident that this world is also
more racially integrated than it was on that summer afternoon when I walked
away like a young zombie wondering what could be salvaged of her life. The
Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s Movement which were making so
much noise in those days, actually did change the world. (I wonder if that
professor was still teaching at CSUH when they established a Chicano Studies program on campus.) To get to where we are, young women have fought
their way past an entire army of academic and business world bouncers. There
have been small individual battles and huge nation-wide battles.
In the end,
I seem to have written a post that is appropriate to LinkedIn and to my
ThisCreativeLife blog. What I want to say is, when you see a word that has
meaning to you, take ownership of it, and be responsible for what you make of
it and how you use it. Winning, advancement, success, imagination, profit, expansion and self-emancipation:
Shine your own light onto each one of these words and determine what they mean
for you. Then, read a blog or an article in the Wall Street Journal that
you think is not something you can relate to. Try on words that don’t speak to
you, and find some connection. If we don’t do this, we wind up living in a
divided world: all the MBAs have lunch together, all the poets speak only to
each other. Study something that seems unrelated to your overall vision, and
make it relate. If you have a sense of where you’re going, start walking, and
chart your own course. I am reminded of a quote from the great Spanish poet,
Antonio Machado:
“Travelers, there is
no path, paths are made by walking.”
