George was one of the most generous employers I have had – in addition to a six figure compensation and having my dream job, free life drawing and sculpture classes, cafeteria with sushi chefs, costume parties complete with indoor luna park, George regularly dispatched gifts to employees. I know for certain that anyone that has ever worked for George, for the most part, has had the time of their lives. The decision to leave Lucasfilm was probably the stupidest thing I have ever done but I had to go and pursue a war of my own, do my own battles and do a Star Wars of my own making.
Speaking of stupid things – being stupid is one of the most important things that will ever happen to you. If you sense that you were somewhat a stupid child – make sure to retain and hold onto that quality. I was personally a stupid child, and lived almost entirely in my head. Later on, when i had to work and create imaginary environments and worlds for large corporations – I felt at home and had no problem inhabiting imaginary worlds for hours on end and could conjure silly and stupid things on the fly. It turned out that was very profitable.
After all Star Wars was a stupid popcorn movie, wasn’t it? It was so much full on silly we didn’t see it coming – and all of a sudden fell in love with it.
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When I first moved to the States I lived in Ohio and had to buy a car. Now, for starters, I had only been in a driver’s seat about three times previously while getting my driver’s license in Europe ( i wouldn’t call that driving ) – my knowledge of cars was limited to general knowledge about a car – front, back and wheels below. With very limited resources and had to buy anything that moved really for around a thousand dollars. Had I not been stupid about it – i would never have bought an adorable, stick shift Audi Quattro 1997 that had the windows fall down while I was driving mid-winter on the highway. If I were smart about it – I would have taken the bus and would have skipped the part with trying to hold the middle of the lane ( not hitting nearby cars ), crying my eyes out while trying to merge into traffic on a bridge between Ohio and Kentucky.
Until this day I cannot touch stick shift with a ten foot pole. So what happened to the silly Audi? Well, owing to the fact that I lived on the border between the good and the bad parts of town – someone slammed into it with full force and then run away ( they never found the culprit, obviously drunk driving in the early hours of the morning ). The Audi got totaled and State Farm gave me three thousand dollars compensation, which i used to move to California and start my career as a digital artist there.
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Speaking of stupid – there is a theory in Japanese and Korean aesthetics where imperfections, accidental damage ( like cracks in pottery ), roughness and irregularity are highly valued. There is the art of Kintsugi and Wabi-sabi.
If you look at the Star Wars universe – it is a well-used world, with cracks and scratches and battle damage. In Wabi-sabi it is called the “appreciation of the ingenuous integrity of natural objects and processes”.. Leonard Koren says wabi-sabi is “the most conspicuous and characteristic feature of traditional Japanese beauty and it occupies roughly the same position in the Japanese pantheon of aesthetic values as do the Greek ideals of beauty and perfection in the West.”
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Stupid is the other side of the Mastery coin. When you are stupid you act without having made the necessary calculations, which is exactly what you do when you have mastered a craft, an art or a process.
This is what Sadhguru says intuition does – allows you to skip the calculations because, in case of mastery, you have accumulated enough information and skills that will enable you to enter a state of flow. Often times you do not have all the data – you do not have all the information available to you. You will need to make decision based on very little information. At the same time you may have not enough time to do the calculations. this is when intuition steps in. Not enough information, and not enough time – ( short of course of hurting yourself of others ) I have always relied on being stupid.
A picnic set !
