FLEX: the modern woman’s handbook. Annie Auerbach
can be done by someone suffering from self-doubt. You needed swagger to say the Earth was round when everyone thought it was flat. You need guts to walk away from accepted wisdom. ‘The difficulty lies not so much in developing new ideas,’ said John Maynard Keynes, ‘as in escaping from old ones.’
CHANNEL YOUR CHUTZPAH
Escaping the ‘old ones’ can be hard because they’ve been handed down to us as gospel. Our parents might have even embedded these ideas in our bedtime stories. And moving away from them makes a statement that you do not need their (or society’s) approval any more.
We can all do this, but what gets in the way is the belief that creativity only lies in the hands of very few select people. The notion that true creatives are artists, misfits at the edges of society or geniuses who are ‘ahead of their time’ is a barrier to creativity. It lets you say: ‘Creativity lives in others, but not in me.’ It stops you being brave and robs you of your chutzpah.
One of the most generous and powerful speeches on this comes from the Australian comedian Hannah Gadsby. In her game-changing performance ‘Nanette’, she takes a swipe at the ‘great men of art’ school of thought, which characterizes people like Van Gogh and Picasso as lone, eccentric geniuses.
Gadsby says: ‘People believe that Van Gogh was just this misunderstood genius, born ahead of his time. What a load of shit. Nobody is born ahead of their time! It’s impossible . . . Artists don’t invent zeitgeists, they respond to them . . . [Van Gogh] was not ahead of his time. He was a post-Impressionist painter painting at the peak of post-Impressionism.’
We’re all products of our time. We all swim in the cultural soup. Our creativity comes from how we respond to it. Bravery, daring, escaping the old ideas – we can have them all. We just need the chutzpah to do so.
‘We all swim in the cultural soup. Our creativity comes from how we respond to it.’
HOW TO CHANNEL YOUR CHUTZPAH
1. Notice the moments when you have been brave in the past. When you owned up to a mistake. Or you called out an injustice. Why did you do it? How did you feel? If you recognize and cherish those moments, you can summon them again when you are in need of chutzpah.
2. Don’t feel self-conscious and let it inhibit your ideas. No one is thinking about you. That sounds a bit sad, but it’s actually liberating. No one is thinking of you! They are too busy thinking about themselves. Remember Coco Chanel’s words: ‘I don’t care what you think about me. I don’t think about you at all.’
3. Work out who diminishes your bravery. Who is your Achilles heel? Who do you always feel sheepish or inhibited around? These people are drains. Instead, try to hang around people who boost your mojo.
4. Done is better than perfect. Obsessing about perfection is navel-gazing and paralyzing. Get it done, get it out, get on with life.
5. If all else fails channel Dolly Parton. She said: ‘Find out who you are. And do it on purpose.’
Then dare, shed the old assumptions – and create.
SUMMARY
Modern life is conspiring to make us into cultural zombies. Creativity is scarcer and more urgent than ever. In order to flex we need to interrogate what we really want, and what we need to change to get it – and to do this we must have the space to think creatively. Creativity is a muscle that needs exercising – think of it as cognitive yoga – in order to dodge the algorithmic monoculture that wants to swallow us up.
So when an idea hits you, let it run. Comedian Dave Chappelle says that for him, creativity involves letting go. ‘If I have an idea, it’s the driver. The idea says, “Get in the car,” and I’m like, “Where am I going?” The idea says, “I don’t know. Don’t worry about it. I’m driving.” Sometimes I’m shotgun, sometimes I’m in the fucking trunk. The idea takes you where it wants to go.’ 9
Let your ideas take you where they want to go. Swim in the cultural soup, read books, react to what’s out there. Listen to people, meet them face to face, empathize with them, look them in the eye and connect with them. Don’t try and be ahead of your time; be of your time and say something different about it.
But, most importantly, trust in yourself, be brave and nourish your own chutzpah. Creativity doesn’t live in the hands of lone geniuses. It lives in us all.
‘Working nine to five, what a way to make a living. Barely getting by, it’s all taking and no giving.
They just use your mind, and they never give you credit. It’s enough to drive you crazy if you let it.’
DOLLY PARTON
I was a director at a global research agency. Six months earlier I’d given birth to my second daughter. I had come back to work after maternity leave and negotiated a part-time, three-day-a-week contract. I’d achieved the holy grail: flexibility. I could look after my baby and three-year-old whilst holding down the job I loved. I should have been triumphant, clicking my heels together as I trotted off into the sunset, swinging a laptop case in one hand and a nappy bag in the other, the clichéd stock image of a working woman.
But, no. It was a disaster. It was one of the most pressurized and stressful periods of my life, peppered with moments when I felt I was failing. Here are some examples:
~ When I left work bang on time and felt my colleagues’ raised eyebrows and disapproval haunt me as I galloped to the Tube station.
~ When I arrived sweating, frazzled and tense to take over from the nanny for the battleground of a toddler bathtime.
~ When I sat on the loo seat and mindlessly chugged a ten-minute Instagram fix.
~ When I worked more, unpaid, than my three allotted days, answering emails on days off and writing reports after I put my daughter to bed.
~ When I frantically tapped out a work email at the edge of the sandpit, whilst my daughter got into fist-fights over buckets and spades.
I remember a poignant news story during this period. The number of playground accidents was apparently on the rise. Kids were falling off climbing frames, being flattened by swings and jettisoned from seesaws. I linked it with the hordes of distracted mums like me, squinting over iPhones on benches at the edges of the playground, trying to reply to incessant requests from colleagues on their days off. My failed flexibility would land my kid in hospital, I was sure of it.
And even if it didn’t, I still felt guilty that those precious two days with my daughter were so un-fun. I was un-fun. I was exhausted, constantly multi-tasking, never focused on the present, mind swivelling to the next task. I was like one of those terrible people at parties who keep looking over your shoulder in case there’s a sexier guest – except I was doing that to my own daughter. And the sexy guest was a boring email about a work meeting. And yet all the time, throughout this period, I felt grateful. Grateful to my bosses for giving me the chance to feel like I was failing in every respect.
I know. Get the violins out. All of this constitutes a ‘First-World problem’. Things were largely OK, and I’m sure my story is no different to any other working parent’s. But clearly, flexibility, as I had it, was a shitshow.
I wanted to understand why it was such a fiasco when I tried to flex my working hours around parenthood. And why are we all so wedded to the nine-to-five, five days a week?
I found, as I will show in this chapter, that it’s not enough to simply convince your employers to agree to flexibility, as I had done. This is just the beginning. The flexible arrangement actually needs to work, too. And that requires new ways of thinking from both the employer and the employee.
This chapter will look at our modern relationship with time and understand why the nine-to-five