Wealthy Family
During coaching sessions, or informal chatting, it happens quite often to discuss the importance of coming from a wealthy family, which is seen as an absolute advantage for pursuing the creative career one wants. It seems that a wealthy family is all one needs to have in order to start a successful profession in the arts. I would like to question this assumption.
Being wealthy helps to get into the best schools, master courses and it might even allow the person to finance his or her own projects: if you have the money to fund your own production, say a book, an exhibition, a film, what else can you ask for? Family wealthy also provides you with the social links that one needs in order to become a well-spoken, networked, high-status cultural producer: in short, if you belong to a rich family, you will have access to powerful people, which can go a long way, as everybody knows.
It will give you not just more means, but also good habits, psychological finesse, travelling, and also traditions: well-established roots, family identity, a sort of model ‘how to stay and move in the world’. If you come from a rich family, you’ll become someone quickly at ease within the environments where decisions are made. Unfair, but true.
Now, what possible advantage could one get from NOT belonging to this category of people?
First, one has more motivations to get out of a disadvantaged situation, and more drive to achieve his/her goals: if you come from a poor environment, you don’t already have what you need, and you are more willing to commit to get results. Basically, you have more of that ‘primary energy’, which you cannot get anywhere if not in real need of something. The disadvantaged person knows very well that nothing will happen if s/he doesn’t make it happening. No fear, no scary about anything. Do not underestimate this strength.
Secondly, paradoxically, the poorer enjoy also more freedom to make his/her own choice, because no tradition to follow exists. You can easily see that if a family has a long and important tradition of lawyers, doctors, entrepreneurs, etc., the pressure put on financial value and social status is so high that will be a problem if someone wants to become, say, a photographer, or a graphic designer. The demands to keep up that ‘family value’ will override any natural inclination of the subject. There is too much to loose, from a risky choice that departs from the tradition.
A third, fundamental aspect: the disadvantaged person might not be attached to any particular location in which his/her family lives, precisely because s/he has nothing to loose: having anything specific which anchor him/her to the family place, will provide the flexibility to search the locations offering the best possibilities. It will be easier to head for the places where the natural inclination might get fulfilled, either through study or work.
So, back to our coaching sessions for artists and creative people: take the assumption that a wealthy family is important in career-succeding with a grain of salt: to start advantaged, is not always better.
Failure
Since it makes uncomfortable, failure among our contemporaries has no space. No room for development. No room for address. Failure –in other words– should not exist, according to the present society. Do we feel the same? We shouldn’t, of course. Theoretically each of us allows a margin of failure in life. But maybe not this time, we tell ourselves…
We feel that if we fail here (and now), we could jeopardize our future credibility. For instance, from where I stand it’s impossible to talk about failure in a positive sense, nor develop a notion of failure, without suspicion for whom is reading and/or approaching me.
We set our expectations on a high level, and we don’t even consider the possibility of not achieving them: and this works also for the expectation in the others. If I say to you than this space about coaching creative people could be a failure in pursuing its goal, you get immediately on-guard.
Hence, what is important in any activity, professional or personal, for duty or leisure, for ourselves and the others, is to attempt to dispense with the error-phobia that envelop us in a perennial mist. Not only we are scared of failing, in physical and mental terms, sometimes we even set up mechanisms of self-censorship. We don’t even allow ourselves to think we could fail, and things could go wrong. What does exactly mean things could go wrong?
When we expect something from someone else or some situation, we want to enjoy the most of it. We get ideas; we plan them, put to work and enjoy the results. Still, the possibility to fail is not harming anything. Failure is a precious space where we can stretch our boundaries and experiment with another dimension of living. In this sense, failure is a vital component of our experience of life.
I bet most of you feel now the urge to ask why should we fail? It’s not that we should fail in order to live better. We should simply allow ourselves the space, the mental dimension, of failure. We live in a win-win society, where one cannot afford to step into something wrong. For instance, we cannot bear the thought to lose our time following someone or something, which in the end disappears and leave us alone. This can happen in love as well as business.
In our deeds we invest feelings, time, money, and precisely because it’s an ‘investment’ we expect something back. A return, some results. We cannot conceive an action freed from expected effects, freed from the obligation to avoid errors. It hurts us to see and to think about our failure. We can bear only someone else’s failure. And we don’t want to be that someone else.
There’s a school of thought arguing that there’s no right to fail, but a duty to experiment. Fine. Does it mean that an experiment cannot fail? Why do we take away the word ‘fail’? We fail in studies, jobs, loves. We fail permanently, as well as succeeding. In writing these lines, I’m probably failing to communicate exactly my thoughts to you, completely or to some extent.
I fail a lot, as well as not. And I fail sometimes because I’m overly generating, and couldn’t fit everything in place and in time. Other times because I wasn’t able to carry out a commitment, or didn’t feel like, and my project, or task, collapsed on itself for obvious lack of will, time and resources. Other times again, I fail because I initiated something already doubtful, and it went worse and worse.
And in some occasions I managed to successfully complete something totally different from what I started. Is that a failure?
Trust
It’s true that life sometimes is both painful and simultaneously rewarding, especially in moments where you feel lost, or stuck, or somehow put in a corner. Painful for the experience (a loss, a feeling of inconclusiveness); rewarding because, in the end, is what pushes us towards some choices (even the non-choice is a choice). I’m not sure, as I have read in an online forum (nettime.org, precisely), that this has to be realized at the expenses of trust. Trust in ourselves, and in the other.
A life centered on the trust in the self, would be challenging, difficult and fascinating at the same time, but how far could we go in this sense? What would be a human without the environment around, which include her/his similar? Isn’t the idea of only first-hand experience a bit too privileged?
Everyone of us has the possibility to choose among a range of solutions, for work and life: not only in the professional approach (the way one can ‘sell’ her/himself in life, or not) but also regarding information (what you want to become, through reflection, info-gathering and coaching, for instance), and distribution of this information (the context, restricted or enlarged, in which you want to act). True, I’m probably talking for the Western society, with all the ups and downs – not so sure if the majority of the world population can do the same.
In doing the above, trust in the other is simpler, and more human. I doubt all the time in my work practice and personal life, but at the same time I do trust people I have chosen to have around, or I share a life with. If I have to distrust everyone and everything, I would get stuck in my own thoughts. Is it really something wrong in trusting? I don’t want to get too transcendental (I know the term itself might rise some eyebrows), but isn’t all this also a matter of love? Do we have to confront each other and everything around us all the time to claim we are ‘free’?
Curatorview [Alfredo Cramerotti] 
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