Anyway, back to photography. I don't know how society decides which skills are important or emergent at which period of life, but clearly a ruling had been made, and photography is one of the required skills for modern Millenials. Now honestly, I’m a strong believer in meritocracy, but I just don't think this is fair. Society seem to elevate all the skills that I so terribly lack, and set aside the skills I happen to be good at. The process of choosing which is which seemed utterly random, and sometimes not even consistent. For example. I have a tendency to notice small details about people. It's a skill I continue to practice, and I apply it often. Here we are at a party, and outside the window I saw a girl on the phone, standing still, crossing her arms. If she comes back to the party, I'd watch if she rejoined conversation or busied herself in the kitchen. If she didn't come back to the party and disappeared after the call, I'd watch how she behaves when coming into class the next day.
You might say this means I pay good attention to detail, which sounds like something you'd put in a resume. Unfortunately in real life, people often refer to this as stalking skills, which is painful to hear and impossible to sell on a job interview. People do this utterly wonderful thing where they apply judgment and subjectivity to a technical skill, creating assumptions around them, gradually turning the skill into an adaptive one. That's probably one way to look at the adaptive vs technical skill, although I have no theory to back up this assertion.
I really haven't properly returned to discussing photography. My apologies. My point was that I suck at it. I also really could not understand why people would spend all that money and time on it, buying equipments and taking lessons from professional photographers. Many of the enthusiasts would say they're passionate about photography, even if it has no apparent role or contribution to their overall life goals. It just seemed like an awful lot of financial and emotional capital (my own hobby of people-watching, no matter how polarizing, is at least free)
A couple of years ago, the organization I founded went on a retreat at a beautiful eco-lodge in Sukabumi, West Java. In the three days we were there, we explored the lodge and the farm, planted seeds, chopped a tree, created a bonfire, had long and difficult discussions about where the organization is going. We came home on Monday with an action plan.
On Tuesday, the girl who had brought her camera sent us her pictures, and I realized the action plan was not the most valuable outcome of that weekend. The images were so beautiful that I was haunted by them. Somehow she had captured whatever we were doing in such a vivid way. There was a picture of me planting something on the ground, and honestly it looked so good that I couldn't believe it was me. The skin is smooth, the hair perfect, sunlight reflecting on the leaves, and as I see the picture, I could clearly recall the feeling of that sunlight, and the ground below me. Her pictures were otherworldly beautiful, at the same time so real that it takes your senses back to those moments.
This is the moment where I understood the whole point about photography: when done skillfully, it brings out the absolute beauty in people. An old man walking on the street is ethereal and possess the ability to stop you in your tracks; you just haven't seen it yet. A photographer knows that exquisiteness can be found anywhere, we just need to pay attention and bring them out to be captured, for others to enjoy. It's a gift that photographers give to us commoners, and I finally understood that.
No matter how pessimist we claim to be, all of us have an appreciation of life. Our skills, whatever they are, are vehicles to express that appreciation. Photographers appreciate visual depth. I appreciate how behaviors tell secrets. Architects appreciate the translation of structure and strength, from paper to real life. And so on.
In APLP we learned about Appreciative Inquiry (AI), which puts an extraordinary emphasis in phrasing your questions to leverage the best of people. I’ve used AI before at my previous job, using that structure and values to design a leadership strategy for a national tax consulting company. That experience gave me practical insight about AI, but this realization today pushed my understanding about how AI can be applied. David Cooperrider is one of the pioneers of Appreciative Inquiry, and in his introduction paper he wrote, “Appreciative Inquiry [...] involves a systematic discovery of what gives “life” to a living system when it is most alive, most effective, and most constructively capable.” The words are there, but I didn’t realize that AI can be used to generate positive discussion. Really, this is a massive breakthrough for me and possibly my environment, all of whom just relish in skepticism and enjoy being critical and distanced from everything. I used to think the opposite of “skeptic” is “optimistic”, but it’s not necessarily so. You can be curious, critical, inquisitive about the world, and yet have these traits stem from a deep appreciation of life. I don’t want to become an optimist, or an idealist, but I would definitely want to become appreciative. I want to appreciate life, the good and the bad, the known and the unknown. And I would want everyone to get equally excited about this imperfect, complicated life we have.
So if I ever get that opportunity to start a meaningful discussion, I would ask the following. "Think about what you do now - your job, your hobby, whatever you're working on. Everything you do highlights a certain part of life, inviting everyone else to take notice. What are you highlighting to the world through your work?"
And now that opportunity is here. Aloha GIST.