On Decorating Knowledge With Words And “Unlearning”
I read a great quote by the artist, Jean-Michel Basquiat the other day that went, “Art is how we decorate space. Music is how we decorate time.”
I love this idea of “decorating time.” It also fits into my belief around how once a piece of art is released to the world, it doesn’t belong to the artist anymore. The art itself gets to live its own life with new people. New people who can use it to decorate their walls, their time, and their minds. The audience gets to project their own meanings onto it and make it “theirs.”
I was thought about this quote and wondered where writing fits in. So added to it:
“Art is how we decorate space. Music is how we decorate time. And words are how we decorate knowledge.”
I’ve been doing more podcasts recently to start promoting my book, Productivity Is For Robots, and have been getting questions along the lines of, “What do you want people to learn from this?” Or, “What are the ‘take-aways’ from this book?”
These are pretty standard questions. Good questions. But I’ve struggled to answer them. And I wasn’t sure why…
Then it hit me: I didn’t write the book to teach anyone anything…
I wrote the book because I want to help people unlearn.
I don’t want to give my readers “take-aways”… I want to help them take-away the dogma and the programming they’ve collected. I want to help people peel away the layers and return to what they already know to be true, but cannot admit to themselves.
My book is about reconnecting with our human nature to live creative and meaningful lives. To escape the toil and the terror of being another cog in the hustle and grind machine.
But my job isn’t to “teach” you how to be a human. My job is to decorate the knowledge that already lives in your heart and soul in a way that you’ll want to put it in your mind. I don’t want to teach you, I want to inspire and remind you. I want to decorate the room in mind with the ancient wisdom already have inside of you.
There are a lot of great books out there that teach and provide NEW knowledge, and maybe I’ll write one day. But for now, my mission for this book is to help you shed the layers of bad knowledge. To remove the decorations that have grown stale and held you back, held you down, and kept you small.
Productivity Is For Robots is about reuniting people with old truths long forgotten. The truths buried beneath productivity dogma and programming.
It’s here to help you excavate your humanity. Pull back the layers, unlearn, and re-align. To give you the lessons that you already know to be true, but just need someone who knows how to decorate.
Thank you for reading. More articles at https://coreymccomb.substack.com
