I teared up the first time I walked into the Sistine Chapel.
Of course, I’d seen pictures of it online, but seeing the real thing was something else. There was something about the way the frescoes were painted, the sheer scale of it, and how everything worked together that was at once overwhelming and beautiful. People who say that “beauty is subjective” probably haven’t seen the Sistine Chapel in real life. There’s a reason why its been celebrated for hundreds of years.
We often underestimate the role of beauty in our work. Michelangelo transformed paint and plaster into a work that could inspire wonder, move hearts and simply express what quality looks like. It’s easy to see beauty in domains like art, poetry, music, and even sports. For example, the New York Times described watching Roger Federer play as a “religious experience“:
“Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty”
Source: The New York Times
No matter what our profession, there’s something inside of us which desires to create beauty in our work. To concretely put into expression what it means to have perfection and quality in our labour.
But not all of us are artists, poets, or sports professionals. Many of us spend our days on Google Slides, Excel files, and Microsoft Outlook. Can beauty exist even among the fluorescent lighting and thick carpets of our knowledge work?
Beauty in Knowledge Work
Let’s face it: Most presentations are boring. But once in awhile, we come across a client pitch, an annual review, a management proposal, that – dare I say it – moves us.
What makes a piece of knowledge work beautiful? I’m still exploring this, but two elements come to mind: Harmony and doing it right:
Harmony: I once sat in on a client pitch. After it was done, they told us that it was “the best proposal they’ve heard all year”. It was a simple deck – 15 slides in total – but the few elements that were in there simply worked. Sure, it followed all the usual best practices: Focus on the client’s challenges, not your own solutions. Distill the points into simple narrative. Follow design principles on your slides. But more than that, there was a certain harmony in how the elements were blended together that made it beautiful.
Doing it right: I’m writing this in Tokyo, where I am gratefully savouring Japanese food, which is my favourite cuisine in the world. The Japanese do things right, especially their food. At dinner, we observed a chef create the perfect tamagoyaki by painstakingly adding layer upon layer of egg, in a traditional makiyakinabe (square cooking pan). It was slow and inefficient, but it was beautiful to watch.
Investment management is often the last place you’d expect to find beauty, but I came across the lovely quote from Jim Simons, the founder of Renaissance Technologies on how he approaches his work:
“Pretty much everything I’ve done has had an aesthetic component, at least to me… what’s aesthetic about it is doing it right. Getting the right kind of people, and approaching the problem, and doing it right. And if we feel that we’re the first one to do it right, that’s a terrific feeling, and it’s a beautiful thing to do something right.”
Source: The Composer Manifesto
The Inefficiency of Beauty
As knowledge workers, we’re constantly faced with the temptation to get through our to-do lists as quickly as possible. Yet, this constant drive for efficiency can sometimes hamper our ability to produce beauty in our work.
Creating something beautiful is often slow, frustrating and inefficient. For every compelling pitch, there were probably dozens of crappy first drafts. For every groundbreaking research piece, there were probably plenty of failed experiments. And for every brilliant strategy, there were probably years of failed plans.
Take the domain of writing, for example. Scardamalia and Bereiter observed that advanced writers tend to take longer than novice writers to produce a piece of writing. They get stuck, experience writer’s block, and struggle far more than beginner writers. Yet of course, they are also much more likely to produce a masterpiece.
I once had to deliver a pretty low-stakes presentation, which would not affect my targets or deliver any tangible short-term results. I could have simply thrown a few slides together in and be done in 30 minutes. But I spent almost two days honing the narrative, refining the arguments, and coming up with more compelling examples. It was definitely way too much time spent on it, when I could have allocated my time towards “higher ROI” tasks.
Initially, I got frustrated with myself (“why the heck am I spending all this time on this thing that doesn’t really matter?”). But it was only after reflecting on the idea that producing quality takes effortful practice, that I became okay with this supposed inefficiency.
Maybe it’s okay that we spend a little longer working. Maybe it’s okay that we’re not as effective or efficient as we’d like. I’m not talking about working harder for dumb reasons like “hustling”. But sometimes, when we know that we’re trying to create something better, we just have to accept that it’s a slow, plodding, and painful process.
Michelangelo took five years to paint the Sistine Chapel. Our knowledge work might not be anywhere close to a work of art, but it’s an avenue for us to grow, to build, and to express the beauty that our hearts long for.
We just need to be a little more daring in putting our hands on that creative till, and a little more patient.
