Josh Allred's Blog

In 1765, a French General named John-Baptise Gribeauval was obsessed with streamlining the process of repairing guns. The idea was if you could switch out different parts of a musket seamlessly, you could keep costs down.

Thomas Jefferson observed what was happening with Gribeauval and came back to the US advocating for an interchangeable parts system.

Fast forward to the turn of the 20th century, Henry Ford began to perfect this system of automation with the assembly line.

As a result, instead of hiring workers at $1.50 per day, Henry Ford was able to hire his people on $5 per day—making us all extremely rich. And for a while, it worked, until it didn’t.

The problem with building a system on interchangeable parts is that it eventually led to interchangeable people. Factory owners began to have the edge and could hire the lowest skilled workers to get a job done.

Every day, this system of interchangeable parts and people becomes more and more automated. While this frightens many individuals, there’s also this door that is opening.

Just like 200 years ago, when we left the farm for the factory, we now have more time on our hands to do work that matters. We don’t need to focus on plowing a field or fetch water from a well to quench our thirst. We now don’t need to focus on spreadsheets. We can focus on helping people that need our help or make something that needs to be made.

We are at the doorstep of something great and something daring. Again.

The question is: What are you going to do when it’s your turn?

Everyone is afraid to stand up against Goliath.

But I am also convinced that Goliath is afraid of us too.

That’s why the record industry went out of their way to sue small time torrent downloaders and why Wal-Mart undercuts everyone around them.

Someone, eventually, knocks Goliath down. We are just waiting for you to show up.

Real power is not what you can bench, but your capacity to do.

At the beginning of our lives, we did all sorts of things for free. That changed once we got older and decided to go to work. Once we get paid to do something, we don’t want to do it anymore because it’s our job.

So why would we spend (interest word, spend) our time doing something just because we got paid?

Wouldn’t we better spending our time doing work we love, even if we don’t get paid?

Your work is not defined by how much money you make. If it did, that would mean that the CEO of the company you work for brings 380 times more value than you do.

No, work is more than something you do by the hour. It could be measured by the difference you make, the lives you touch, the people you heal. Or it can be defined by the change you seek to make.

You could be paid in community or maybe you get paid in the satisfaction of helping someone who needs to be helped.

Recently, I was invited to give feedback for a workshop a friend of mine is developing.

During one of the activities, one of the participants expressed that she wanted to be a CEO for a billion-dollar company and have a social impact component.

It’s quite rare to find a Fortune 500 that tries to make the culture better. Fortune 500’s don’t become Fortune 500’s by solving world hunger, they do it by generating profits.

If the goal is to be maximize the return for shareholders, to squeeze the machine for another buck, it changes our attitude.

Impossible to serve two masters. It’s a trap, that many of us fall into:

Once I get mine, then I will help those around me.

But that’s not how generosity works. When you feed the network, the network turns around and feeds us back.

Repeatedly, we wait until conditions to be perfect for us before we lift others. Yet, we don’t need to be in charge, we don’t need more authority, we don’t need a bigger paycheck to care.

Caring is a posture we can start today.

(It’s rare to find someone all sudden become extremely generous with their money once they get rich. Money amplifies behavior/character, not change it.)

The only medium in art that counts is action.

The brush strokes, the keys, the words we use is just a way to express our actions.

The form can change.

The intent stays the same.

It turns out, that the fuel engines for the Space Shuttle couldn’t be larger than 4 feet and 8.5 inches wide.

Why?

Because that was the width of the rail line between Utah and Florida.

That width was determined a century ago by a few laborers who came over from England to help build the US rail system.

Before that, their predecessors in Europe built lines to fit along the paths made by horses and carts.

So, why 4 feet and 8.5 inches?

Because that is the width Romans built their roads.

As Adam Morgan and Mark Barden have pointed out, these rocket design features today have been shaped by a Roman road engineer 2,000 years ago.

This is the power of lock-in. We rely on the persistence of features without second thought.

We know that there are faster methods to type than the QWERTY keyboard but the pain of learning a whole new system isn’t worth the advantages.

A meter stick is just a bar hung on a wall in France—all design features that we live with today.

Deciding which boundaries to work with and which ones to break, is a choice that each ruckus makers gets to decide.

Rock climbers like to remind each other that if you’re not falling off the routes, you’re not pushing yourself hard enough.

Sound advice.

Do you only take projects that will work 100% ahead of time?

When was the last time you did something for the first time?

What was your last major flop?

Are you waiting to be told what to do next?

If it’s been a while since you failed, you’re not trying things that are hard.

It’s another form of hiding.

Stretching is what leads to growth.

We are more than a resume.

What you do can’t be condensed into a list of hard-skills on a single sheet of paper.

Yet, when people ask what we do, we insist on saying that we are accountants (or dentists or clerks…).

No, we are artists.

How long are we going to ignore the call?

The call to action.

The call to make a difference.

The call to help someone who needs to be helped.

The call to do the thing that you must do.

No one ever feels qualified to make art. There isn’t enough reinsurance to protect us. A bigger badge isn’t going to help, and neither will another degree.

We always feel unprepared for our moment to stand up and speak out.

If you are going to lie and say that you have no voice, no good ideas, I will show you someone who’s afraid to share their art.

Everyone has a voice in them, ready to sing.

Many are called, few will answer.

Jackson Pollock was one of the most influential artists of his generation.

What many don’t know is that he had an older brother named Charles. Charles Pollock was a painter, not an artist.

Charles insisted that his work be like his mentor, Thomas Hart Benton.

And if you look at a Thomas Hart Benton (left) and a Charles Pollock (right), their work is nearly identical.

Approaching Storm by Thomas Hart Benton, 1938

The Harvest – South Carolina by Charles Pollock, 1930’s

Without a doubt Charles had put in the hours it takes to master a brush. But what he lacked wasn’t technical skill—it was guts

The guts to try things that might not work, to strain the boundaries of what’s possible, to show us how he sees the world.

And that is why no one remembers Charles Pollock.

There isn’t enough shelf space in all the museums of the world to hold the amount of art that is available to us.

Yet, we continue to insist on defining art as only paint on a canvas that we can hang on a wall.

Museums don’t define art (or good art for that matter), we do.

Art is anything we do as a human that brings emotional labor to make a connection.

No one chooses to go to the DMV, we have to go to the DMV. If you can find a DMV clerk that is delighting the people around her, I can show you an artist.