The biggest thing we have in common is our differences...
Ever wondered if brilliant artist are born, because most people can’t draw? Ever wondered if billionaire entrepreneurs have something in their DNA most others are missing? I still remember the art class that changed me from drawing stick men to producing mini-masterpieces.
I was ten years old. My parents had sent me and my sister to a friend of theirs who was an art tutor. In the very first session she taught us something called “negative space”.
She told us most people aren’t good at art because they let their left brain do all the seeing. They see a person and draw what they think a person should look like, instead of what’s actually there. I looked at the little stick man I had just drawn and was convinced there was more to it than that.
She then gave us a picture of a person to draw, but turned the picture upside down. She asked us not to draw the head, but the spaces between the head and the lamp, the wall, the window, the shoulders. She asked us not to draw the arm, but the spaces between the arm, the table, the bowl, the hips. When we were finished, we hadn’t drawn things. We had drawn all the spaces between things. We turned our pictures the right-way-up, and found all the things were perfect.
I fell in love with art. I fell in love not with things, but the spaces between things.
When I became an entrepreneur, I found great entrepreneurs used this same skill. They didn’t start a business or create a product as a thing. Instead, they looked at other businesses and products already existing within their market. They looked at the spaces between them. This is where all the opportunities lay. Within their masterpiece, they wouldn’t design a product. They would draw the space between their passion, their value, their customers, their competitors, their partners. When complete, their product was perfect in the picture.
I don’t believe artists and entrepreneurs are born. I believe they have just learned to see differently, and any of us can learn this too - when the fabric of this magical life we live becomes visible.
This is mastery of context over content; mastery of seeing differences. Nature hates a vacuum. In art, nature fills the gaps with beauty. In business, it fills the gaps with money.
In entrepreneurship, it fills it with both.
What happens when we become masters not of things, but the space between things? Give it a go. Have a look at the fit between your business and your best customers, your partners. Where are the gaps too big, not elegant or smooth enough? What can you change today to increase the attraction?
Let go of all the things, and turn your life into a living masterpiece.
“I don’t paint things. I only paint the difference between things.” - Henry Matisse
