Hi Friend,
 
Once upon a time, a young girl growing up in a rural mountain village decided she would become an artist.
 
Her parents weren’t pleased. They had a different plan for what their daughter's future would look like. So the little artist's mother would snatch the paper from her hands whenever she caught the child drawing. 
 
One day, this little girl noticed that the sunlight coming through the window cast shadows on the opposite wall. But the shadows didn’t look like the flowers they belonged to. They looked like dots. Red dots on the wall and climbing up toward the ceiling.
 
The little artist wondered at the strangeness of it all. What if, she wondered, those dots were everywhere?
 
When she was ten, the artist drew this portrait of her mother.
Portrait of her mother by Yoyoi Kusama, drawn when she was ten and featuring her signature polka dots.
(Her mother, it seems, had become more selective about what she threw away.)
 
Last year, that little girl, now 95, was the top-selling contemporary artist in the world due to sculptures, paintings, and installations that feature— you guessed it— dots.
Yayoi Kusama art installation fearing black does on pink illuminated background.
By Lizzy Shaanan Pikiwiki Israel, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115133391 
Yayoi Kusama spotted (😉) something surprising and used that vision to change the future of art. 
 
Today is the third of our newsletter series devoted to 5 Daily Practices for a More Creative Life.
 
Practice #3: Spot the Exceptional Information.
 
Exceptional information is an exception to a rule. It reveals that more can happen in this world than precedent suggests. And when we double down on it— by making the exception the rule—we change the story of the future.
 
For Van Gogh, the color yellow was exceptional information. His peers used very little yellow in their work, but to Van Gogh yellow had a certain unique power. So he used it generously and with passion. Now his wheat fields and sunflowers are the first thing people the world over think of when they think of art. 
 
Kusama and Van Gogh provide visual examples of spotting the exceptional and doubling down on it, but the movement is consistent among all great innovators. For Madame Curie, for example, the exceptional was radiation seeping from a supposedly indivisible atom. Now electrons power our world.
 
For Steve Wozniak, the exception was the Altair 8800 microcomputer he saw at the first meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club on March 5, 1975. What others dismissed, Steve could imagine transforming the human/tech relationship. That's the origin of the device you're reading on right now.
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The Yellow House (The Street), Vincent Van Gogh, Arles 1888.
Does your exception need to transform the world? No. In fact, you can’t anticipate if it will. But spotting the exceptional changes your story. It grows your understanding of what's possible for you and for the world at large.
 
Now that you’re getting more specific and focusing on action, you’re probably already noticing more things that surprise you in the world. These are your bits of the exceptional. 
Next week, we dive into perspective-shifting. 
 
In the meantime, here's an episode of Revisionist History in which Angus and his former screenwriting partner, Gary Goldman (Total Recall, Big Trouble in Little China), talk to Malcolm Gladwell about their adaptation of Philip K. Dick's “The Variable Man.” It's a story in which the main character is himself a piece of exceptional information. 
 
Thanks so much for reading,
Sarah
 
P.S. Missed an issue? They're all available in our archive.
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