An artist, a restaurateur and a business consultant kick off “unlisted” with their thoughts on balance.
In every issue of unlimited, we’ll highlight three to five people featured in the magazine who embody the issue’s theme. The idea of “balance” ties together much of the Sep/Oct 2007 content. We’ve asked Shoko César, Stephen Hayden and Lesley Scorgie to reflect on the word and its relevance to their lives, and used their responses to commission an abstract representation of the word. In the summer of 2008, we’ll invite everybody who’s been “unlisted” throughout the year to join us and our readers at an unlimited symposium in the Rockies.
Shoko César, industrial and graphic designer
Balance is a dynamic consensus. It’s a consensus between yourself and your environment. To create something as an artist and designer, you need to get out of the box, to see society from a bird’s eye view. But you also need to live inside that box to understand it. That’s a conflict, and that’s what you need to balance. You can’t ignore reality – you have to be aware of and live with it – but in the creative process, you kind of ignore a little bit of reality to come up with something beyond reality, because you can’t create something that already exists.
It comes from within you, but designers also have to talk to their clients and compromise. A couple of months ago I created an award for a francophone film festival in Lethbridge. I was in total control of the whole process from beginning to end. The client trusted me, they gave me an opportunity to express myself and find myself. There was no contradiction between the technical process and the creative process.
Stephen Hayden, lawyer turned restaurateur
So many people get it wrong. They think balance means making everybody else happy, which is completely un-balanced, because you’re pulled in all kinds of directions. My wife Joanne Rowe and I have a definition: If the people who we want to love us love us, and the people who we want to respect us respect us, we’ve achieved balance. It’s an ongoing thing. We have a one-year-old and if he grows up with me spending all my days working – which is what I tend to do now – I still have to ensure that he grows up knowing and loving me.
People at the drive-in we own need to respect us. If somebody does something right, you need to have the proper rewards in place. If somebody does something wrong, the proper consequences. And if you do that correctly, they won’t necessarily love you, but they’ll respect your decisions.
Lesley Scorgie, business consultant, author
I used to work 80 hours a week in the securities industry, working for somebody else. I got paid very well, but along with that came the golden handcuffs. I didn’t do much other than work. I’m in the opposite position now. I choose when I want to work, on what projects, and who I affiliate myself with. I took a pay cut, but I’m happy.
I changed my mind on one of the busiest days of my life. I got to the office at 4:30 a.m. and was supposed to speak at a YWCA luncheon. It’s an important organization to me and I had agreed to do this months before. That same day my book publisher was calling, asking for charts and figures, we were fact-checking, and… oh my word! The day progressed and my boss didn’t want to let me go speak at this conference any more. I didn’t quit that very day, but I realized I could do so many more fruitful things with my life and career.
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