Picasso's "The Absinthe Drinker" 1903

As you or your organization go through your different STAGES, stop and acknowledge the different successes that you accomplish along the way. Don’t just wait for the big end result—you could miss out on some amazing “smaller” masterpieces along the way.

So often when we look at a successful person or a successful organization we tend to think of his/her success in terms of “Ah, she has finally arrived. She is NOW successful.” What we often overlook is that that person’s “ultimate” success probably came in STAGES of success. The famous 20^th century artist, Pablo Picasso, is a good example. “Ultimately,” Picasso is most known for his pinnacle style, Cubism.

In Cubism, Picasso viewed the form, e.g., a human being, in terms of geometric shapes which he then rearranged, camouflaging the forms in the geometry. However, Picasso went through several STAGES in his artistic evolvement before arriving at Cubism. For example, from 1901 to 1904, Picasso’s style manifested a strong sense of melancholy and poetic nuances in what has been called (Read more…)

When is the last time you set out to truly master something? To take something you’ve already been doing or start something new

Mastery: Van Gogh's "The Potato Eaters"

and do everything in your power to take it to the masterpiece level?

You know, we call the Master Artists “Masters” because they did just that with their art: they did everything in their power to become Masters; to take their work to the masterpiece level. When the Dutch Post-Impressionist painter, Vincent Van Gogh, started working on one of his earliest paintings, “The Potato Eaters,” he didn’t just slap some paint on the canvas and call it a day. Instead, he made numerous sketches and studies of the work over an entire winter before creating the final oil-on-canvas painting in 1885. He put a great deal of thought and effort into the work and wrote to his brother, Theo, “I have tried to emphasize that those people eating their potatoes in the lamplight, have (Read more…)