Make it new

The wonderful, horrible prospect of starting over

Once I worked in television, with one of my heroes. We were building a new digital station together, with the theme of literature in all its forms. Budgets were tight, but we believed in our mission. I was so young and so blessed to be involved in a media start-up. Yet when it was launched, and we turned to the forever-operations of the thing, a weird feeling popped in my stomach.

I spoke to friends about this low hum of anxiety and they worried for my mental health. Wasn’t this television station a hybrid of everything I loved? Logically, yes.

wasn’t our logo amazing?

Seven years later, I found myself in a similar situation. I was a newspaper columnist, writing for my local daily and sometimes the national chain. It was constantly fascinating, with thrice-weekly jolts of success or failure. I had a relationship with thousands of readers. Then the low hum of anxiety returned.

Another seven years passed. I was co-founder of a consulting company, Story Engine, with customers at home and around the world and the greatest business partner imaginable. When one of our clients, the Australian state of Tasmania, needed a CEO to launch the project I had helped build, moving my life and family across the world to do something no one had done before seemed like an obvious, yet frightful, choice.

but the Story Engine logo is genuine sweetheart

Seven years after that initial consulting work, I am – as I write this – entering my final week as CEO of Brand Tasmania, which has been the honour of my working life.

To paraphrase what many people have said in the last few months… it’s the perfect job. Your team is amazing. The work is so inspiring. What the hell is wrong with you?

here I am thinking about, talking about, and selling Tasmania, my job for the last 5+ years

I have been lucky to do meaningful and rewarding work, nearly always with people I admire who come to be lifelong allies, co-conspirators, and friends. My theory is that stories aren’t just in our media, our games, our products and places, our religions and politics. They are wired into us.

Narrative is the most powerful force in human communication, the foundation of culture and the instigator of action. It’s always about choices and changes. Big choices, big changes. For some people it’s three years. Others seven. Or maybe we find ways to make changes from within, doing the same thing in new and thrilling ways.

he didn’t exactly plagiarize “make it new” but Pound didn’t coin the phrase

Ezra Pound used the phrase, “Make it new” to inspire himself and his fellow modernists. But as often as he’s credited with the phrase, it wasn’t his invention. It is at the heart of what it means to be human. Michael North, author of a fascinating book Novelty: a History of the New, suggests Pound picked it up from studying Confucianism. There was a ruler in China, in around 1500 BCE, who had “make it new” written on his washbasin as a daily challenge.

Artificial Intelligence, the roots of a 21^st Century American colonial empire, the ugliness and degradation of social media, the ubiquity of mullets, a new job, a new home, a new relationship, there is always something terrifying about what comes next. Yet every corporate guru and self-help author is driven by a central theme: be open to that new thing. What does every organization long to be? Innovative, even just for the sake of it.

But choices are choices. What do we leave behind, when we take these risks? Comfort, ritual, mastery, people and places we love. All the moisture in our bodies, from crying so much. It’s easy to hunger for the new, when you are running away from something. I suspect that’s rare.

Making it new, in art and business and life, should be painful. And it always is.