A brilliant man by the name of Kyle Kesterson recommended a book to me at an awesome conference/retreat we both attend called Dent. The book –which was originally self-published in 1998– is called Orbiting the Giant Hairball and it was penned by Gordon Mackenzie, a 30-year veteran of Hallmark.

Mackenzie was a king amongst creative kings. One of his greatest life’s achievements was that he gave people permission to be creative… to be artists. He gave them space to create within a restrictive corporate system (the “hairball”). 
Towards the end of his career at the greeting card behemoth, he earned himself a new job title, “Creative Paradox.” While he earned the promotion, the title itself wasn’t given to him, he created it. This is how he describes it:

“I became a liaison between the chaos of creativity and the discipline of business. I had no job description and a title that made no sense, but people started coming to me with their ideas, and I would listen to those ideas and validate them. When you validate a person, what you’re really doing is giving them power — like a battery charger.”

That was his job, to validate people. I can’t tell you how touched I was by that. I don’t have insider info on Hallmark’s current climate, but how amazing is it that they had a “Creative Paradox” on staff?

The book is great, give it a read. Then, pass it along to a friend.

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I’m traveling to NYC this week (which I’m very excited about! I’ll tell you more about THAT later) and I’ve been reminding SJ that she has her 5th grade portraits on Friday, while I’m gone. I told her I want her to start thinking about what she’s going to wear, how she’s going to style her hair, and stuff like that. Ok, so last night, I brought it up again. She looked at me like I was a little nuts and said, “What is the big deal with these portraits?!”

I explained that it was a way of capturing everyone’s image at a certain time in their life.  I said there would be a class portrait too. She said, “What?! WHO is going to be doing all this DRAWING of the PORTRAITS?” I responded, “No one… these are your school photos, that’s all.”

She looked at me and started laughing, “I thought we were getting PORTRAITS of ourselves drawn on PAPER.” Then we both laughed when I explained that there are different kinds of “portraits.”

We then spent a good part of the evening discussing all the ways she could show up for her fifth-grade portrait session. The one we liked the most was the idea of a “portrait-ception.” She brings in a sketch pad to school and gets her photo taken of her drawing her own portrait… and, of course, the portrait she’s drawing is of her drawing a portrait.

Have a great week, y’all!

— Rusty Blazenhoff

p.s.  Learn more about Kyle (and that incredible brain of his) in this video. He’s demoing Campfire, his super-amazing storytelling app, at iHangar’s big Community Day (SF) on 4/16. By the way, his company has a great name. In fact, it’s Freak’n Genius. 🙂