Welcome to Operation: Human, a weekly newsletter consisting of prompts and insights designed to develop your imagination.
Issue 37: On Ming Smith's Eye for Flash, Finding Optimism in The Gold Rush, and John Deere's Commonsense
01. Intuition
Ming Smith, Grace Jones (1970s)
What detail surprises you in this photograph?
What struck me was the flashy sunglasses.
Can you use that detail to imagine a story? Why did she choose those particular glasses? Why at night? What does the room look like, feel like, from behind them? How do they effect how she interacts with everyone around her?
Congrats, you've just sharpened your intuition, which is your ability to identify emerging possibilities.
P.S. if you're in Ohio, Ming Smith's seriesTranscendence is featured in its entirety for the first time at the Columbus Museum of Art through January 26th. I absolutely loved it.
First name / Reader, , would you like to be featured in an upcoming issue?
The Gold Rush is full of Lucky Twists, a narrative invention that makes you optimistic, boosting your resilience.
There's no reason things should go right for Chaplin's tramp, but they do…repeatedly.
As Angus describes it, The Tramp is "an impoverished doof who bumbles through a Klondike snowstorm into a stroke of fortune: a warm cabin where the Tramp meets a prospector who's made a lucky strike. From here, more fortunate Twists ensue, making the Tramp filthy rich" (Wonderworks, p. 118)
Lucky Twists remind your brain that life can break right without warning or cause. You just have to be there to enjoy it.
So you get better at identifying what you feel and why.
So we have a reference library of literary works to help you alleviate hard feelings when they hit and to flourish by building up stores of positive emotions.
You can learn more about the narrative techniques that boost your optimism in chapter 7 of Wonderworks.
03. Commonsense
How to Create Career Stability
Imagine you have nine children. What matters to you is that your income remains stable.
For a long time, it does. You're well-known and well-respected as a blacksmith in the same East Coast villages where you grew up. Your business thrives.
Until, suddenly, it doesn't. Business slows and bankruptcy looms. You decamp to the Midwest, where a sparser population and growing farm tracts mean blacksmiths are in high demand.
Your outsider knowledge clues you in to another reason why Illinois farmers need your help. Back home in Vermont, the soil is sandy and loose, quick to lift and fall from the textured teeth of cast-iron plows. But here in Southern Illinois? Clay soil clumps and sticks to plows, breaking their teeth, and repeatedly grinding progress in the fields to a halt.
The Midwest, to you, is a promised land of endless repairs to be made.
If you chose Option B, you have the kind of commonsense that could make your name as well known as John Deere's.
Commonsense is your ability to match the newness of your plan to the newness of your environment.
For Deere, different soil called for different plow material. Having worked in his father's tailor shop as a young boy, he knew highly-polished steel needles were both durable and moved smoothly through fabric, even highly-textured fabric that tends to grab. Could the same concept apply to sticky soil?
He polished the steel of a broken saw blade, stuck it on a plow, and plowed. The heavy, clumping soil slid right off the smoother surface.
Within a few years, Deere was producing more than a thousand plows annually and we all know where his company went from there. Financial stability was no longer a concern.
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