Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence & having it last in your absence.
—Frances Frei

I’ve been (back) in my role as Design Director at NewSpring Church for 2 years now. From a purely practial standpoint, the team I serve with has produced some great work in that span—a revitalized brand identity, a new website (a newer one is on deck), and better overall visuals, public spaces, interiors, processes and systems. I think it’s the best job ever.

What we haven’t done well is replicate ourselves and train up people within our community to be better than we are at what we do. We run a lean team; everyone on board is extremely high-capacity and more than capable at doing their jobs. But when it comes to specialized roles, work, and projects, we suck at raising up people. None of us would argue that.

In the marketplace, there’s no competitive advantage for me (individually) to mentor others. Mentorship and investing in the next generation can help the bottomline for the company or organization, but unless I’m a partner or shareholder (or just a wildly generous nice guy) there’s no reason for me to take away from my work to help others become better at theirs. In fact, there’s the possibility that by doing so I’ll mentor myself out the door by giving my coworkers the tools they need to take my job. This is scarcity mentality at the core. Survival mode.

But I don’t work in the marketplace. I love working in the church, and we play by different rules. If I “aspire to oversee” an area of our church, I’m supposed to be able to teach. And if I’m a teacher, I have a very specific task:

And [Jesus] gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ…
—Ephesians 4:11–12

Equip. Work. Build. Equip to act, not to sit and watch. Equip the saints, not fill the seats. Help others grow in their gifting, not hoard my own. If leadership is about making others better, permanently, then I have some work to do. And it has absolutely nothing to do with design.

You should probably listen to Esperanza Spalding more than you do.

But we don’t stop [at simply being disappointed]…we need to express it. Vent it. Hiss it and spit it and hurl it like fistfuls of mental manure at the great wall of hey, screw you.

You have but to take a peek in the comments section below…any column, any article on this or any news site whatsoever, to see just how mean and nasty we have become. It does not matter what the piece might be about. Obama’s speech. High speed rail. Popular dog breeds. Your grandmother’s cookies. [It] will be so crammed with bile and bickering, accusation and pule, hatred and sneer you can’t help but feel violently disappointed by the shocking lack of basic human kindness and respect, much less a sense of positivism or perspective.
—Mark Morford, Why are you so terribly disappointing?

Morford doesn’t come to any grand conclusions or offer any fixes here, but that’s one heck of a apt, well-written critique of the general state of additional commentary online. The internet has at once connected much of the world, and unearthed our latent desire to vomit all our personal opinions and loathing at anyone, or at no one.

I hate the internet. I love the internet. My name is Joshua, and I’ve just started to ignore 95% of comments on 95% of websites.

File under: Been On Repeat For At Least A Month. I could listen to Joy Williams sing my grocery list and I would be happy about it.

Piggybacking a bit on Alex Payne’s excellent thoughts* on the iPad I’ve been trying to think about what bothers me about the aforementioned magical device. I understand that I’m not the real market for it; I don’t feel like there’s a void in between my computer and my mobile device needing to be filled. I’m quite device content. But it’s more than that.

At its core, the iPad is a consuming machine, not a creating machine (at least in its currently presented iteration.) Yes, I understand there are quite a few of those 140,000 apps in the App Store that allow people to create and share, but only under very specific constraints. And not nearly on the level that I can with my laptop.

But the iPad is not designed to fill my desire to create, it’s mainly designed for me to consume the creations of others. It will change the landscape of personal computing and find its way into the hands of a ridiculous amount of people who are very happy to simply consume. My hands just won’t be among them anytime soon. I have too much creating to do.

*Alex Payne has excellent thoughts on just about everything. You should read his site.

Saul Bass on why the designer has to care about making things beautiful (because no one else, client included, typically will.)

Mesquite trees are swaying
crooked, still dancing in time.
We’re just here waiting
watching you crawl towards the light…
—Saturday afternoon, 1/16/10

My wife’s grandfather passed away Sunday evening, peacefully in his sleep, surrounded by his children and grandchildren. He was celebrated on Wednesday by way of words, songs, photographs and prayers. And during the last few days we spent in Texas with the family, most of my thinking was occupied with two related thoughts.

The first is a Steinbeck quote from East of Eden — “When a man comes to die, no matter what his talents and influence and genius, if he dies unloved his life must be a failure to him and his dying a cold horror.” L.V. died loved, and I know of no other way to say it than this: dying loved is something special, important, and to be envied. This is a good way to go.

The second is the simple fact that when I die, whether that finish line be distant or fast-approaching, no one will likely say, “That Joshua Blankenship, what an amazing designer he was. His contributions to the visual landscape of the world will be missed.” These are not the legacies that most of us leave. I will not be remembered for teaching someone how to properly kern type*, I will be remembered if I treated them with dignity while I did it. I will not be remembered for having an amazing website, I will be remembered if I was an ass about it when I talked to others in similar environments. I will be remembered (or forgotten) by people, for how I interacted with people. I will not be remembered for pixels, no matter how meticulously I craft and place them on your screen.

This thing that I invest so much time and effort and hard work into is short-lived. The occupation/hobby monster that devours up half of most days in action and thought is fleeting at best (much to the unwelcome and necessary whittling away of my ego) and all-consuming at worst (much to the detriment of the people and relationships that will be my legacy.)

All that to say, I am and will always be passionate about design and writing and creating. I want to become a better version of myself in all these areas, for the rest of my life. But more than that, I want to live in such a way that I am missed when I go. I want to continually, wisely invest my time where I can have the missed-when-I’m-gone kind of return.

*Assuming I ever learn that lesson myself, of course.

Believe me, I understand and embrace the inherent hypocrisy of writing about this on a website with my name in the URL, but here we go anyway:

I am all for everyone having a voice, I just don’t think everyone has earned the microphone. And that’s what the Internet has done.
—Aaron Sorkin

I fear that most contemporary people are answering questions not because they’re flattered by the attention; they’re answering questions because they feel as though they deserve to be asked. About everything. Their opinions are special, so they are entitled to a public forum. Their voice is supposed to be heard, lest their life become empty…this in one paragraph (minus technology), explains the rise of New Media.
—Chuck Klosterman, Eating the Dinosaur

To piggyback on Klosterman’s quote, I think most of us in Western culture feel owed attention. If you were born in the developed world after, say, 1985, and have access to the internet, chances are you’ve always had a platform of some variety—even if it’s “just a Facebook page.” You can communicate to more people from your cellphone in one instant than most people might have interacted with in their entire life 100 years ago. And you’ve been able to do so for a large part of your life. But to what end?

no one is responding to my tweet is something wrong with my beloved twitter [at] this moment [or] have you all forsaken me?
—@marthastewart

Even celebrities aren’t immune. “Listen to me! I am a unique and beautiful snowflake!” Sharing often becomes something akin to seeking identity in the act of being heard—as if the things we write and make and share have no worth until someone places worth on them by responding. But if no one listens, or at least we perceive a lack of attention, we often angrily shake our metaphorical fists at the sky, robbed of the attention that we are due. We deserve to be known, right? We must be validated by being heard. We are special. We are snowflakes.

The problem is, no one owes me anything. No one owes me a microphone or a platform. No one owes me their ears, their eyes, their time. Those things are valuable, each assaulted on a daily basis by an almost inescapable culture clamoring for our attention. They’re not automatic. Not owed. Not entitled. Not easy. You might have a microphone, but that doesn’t mean you have anything to say, or that anyone will listen.

And even if what we do grabs someone’s attention for a season, we have to understand how fickle modern audiences are. If I base my identity on having and holding your attention, I forget who I am as soon as you forget to pay attention to me. Being heard can’t be our motivation for speaking. Being responded to can’t be our motivation for sharing. Being discovered can’t be our motivation for creating.

Tuesday, February 2nd at 8:00pm. The beginning of the end.