Books for Leading as an Artist
If you were at my house right now, I’d ask you everything I could about your life and story and then try to find a book or an article or any text at all that I could send home with you, like leftovers from a big meal that you can heat up the next day and remember all over again what it was like to be together. Books are everything. They are the window into being alive and into becoming the people we want to be.
Words and ideas shift the very maps of our synapses firing. I believe that taking in powerful language can be a big part of change when we come to it with deep and active listening. I know that it’s changed me and that’s why I keep it as a central practice in both my art as a writer and my work as a consultant.
This list is my gesture to you to help you along your way. It’ll be a living record, one that changes overtime as my own priorities and the voices speaking into my work shift and grow.
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Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation by Parker Palmer
“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am. Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.”
“To listen is as close to God’s character as I think we can be,” a spiritual director once told me. And so it seems right that no other book has influenced my work more profoundly than this one. I ready it rather young and then re-found it again in my late 20s, realizing that I had followed its threads for years without remembering. To choose to build my work as if this is true.
Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live by Martha Beck
“The feeling of choked hostility, or numb depression or nauseated helplessness is a sure sign you’re steering away from your North Star, toward a life you were not meant to live. When you feel it, you must change course.”
This book was the first to teach me how to read my emotions. It offered exercises that led me into my own experience and then connected that stimuli to categories of emotions. Prior to this book, I could not tell the difference between emotions that pretend to be each other: was I feeling a gut check that this was a bad idea or simple fear at taking a risk? Was I happy or was I numbed out of my feelings? I had big emotions but didn’t have the language to read them. This book gave me that.
Crossing the Unknown Sea: Work as a Pilgrimage of Identity by David Whyte
“Through work, human beings earn for themselves and their families, make a difficult world habitable, and with imagination, create some meaning from what they do and how they do it.”
Part memoir, part essay collection, part treatise on the nature of work, this genre disregarding book by a poet is everything one could want on the reflection of being a human being in a world that requires work.
The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path To Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron
“Creativity occurs in the moment, and in the moment we are timeless.”
Morning pages are no joke. You write yourself and all your nonsense onto the page and you see yourself. And you start to hear who you actually are and what your life is made of and what it would mean to do it a different way. These exercises will lead you into a new seasons of self-leadership that will invigorate everything.
The Gifts of Imperfection: Let Go of Who You Think You're Supposed to Be and Embrace Who You Are by Brene Brown
“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
Anyone with the perfectionism I’ve faced both hates and loves this book. I pick it up every six-months or so to remind myself of its contents, its ideas, and the path to wholehearted living. It’s only in this that I can have space to work with others, to imagine new ways of being.
Dare to Lead: Brave Work. Tough Conversations. Whole Hearts by Brene Brown
“I define a leader as anyone who takes responsibility for finding the potential in people and processes, and who has the courage to develop that potential.”
She’s good enough to make this list twice. Dare to Lead takes her work in all previous books and translates it into the context of our work and leading others. It’s not a summation but a full application that re-illuminates her work in new contexts.
Bird by Bird: Notes on Life and Writing by Anne Lamott
“Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself, How alive am I willing to be?
How to make things and not get a big head and live a life and take it all step by step. Personal over-read chapters include “Radio Station K-Fucked” and “Shitty First Drafts”. Technically about writing but not really. It’s more about the creative life.
This is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until Your Learn to See by Seth Godin
“But the productive artist refuses to incur an artistic obligation. She acts as though the audience doesn’t owe her anything, and forgiving them in advance gives her the freedom to make the work she needs to make. The flipside, though, is also true. The productive artist must act as if she owes the audience, and in unlimited measure.”
This is only kind of about “marketing” and certainly not about marketing as we’ve known it. Instead, it is about being a servant to your people and doing your work and telling people about it in a way that makes the world a better place to be.
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker
“Gatherings crackle and flourish when real thought goes into them, when (often invisible) structure is baked into them, and when a host has the curiosity, willingness, and generosity of spirit to try.”
A whole book on how to bring people together and make something beautiful of the gathering. The clarity of process and definition Parker offers here is applicable to literally everything we make and create. It’s how we choose to be human together. The insight she offers is so important to anything we make for ourselves and others.
Becoming Wise: An Inquiry Into the Mystery and Art of Living by Krista Tippet
“I’m a person who listens for a living. I listen for wisdom, and beauty, and for voices not shouting to be heard.”
The resulting conversations are rich and deep and say so much about what it means to be human and to live life well. There is no difference between the question of meaningful life and the question of saying something that matters and being heard and making a change and making art and leading well. It’s all in there.