By Peter Jeff
The Leadership Mints Guy

Here’s an idea to broaden your problem solving skills. Reading time: 2:32

Artist Claude Monet’s  SPRINGTIME Showcases his Mastery of  Shades of Color

        Claude Monet, the impressionist artist, once told a young artist not to pay attention to the objects before him.

         Forget the tree. Forget the house. Forget the field. Forget what everyone else is looking at.

         Concentrate instead  on colors: a little streak of blue here or a patch of green there; a streak of yellow, a dash of blue.

           Leaders too look for an object’s  color more than its current shape or form. They see the potential not merely the object. They see the art –in fact —not an artifact. They are willing to look in different places that others are indifferent to.

          The leaders -seeing more than merely looking– see and do the opposite of what others see and do. They hit em where they ain’t in the parlance of the iconic baseball Hall of Famer Joe DiMaggio

            These leaders focus their thinking where others would never go. And sometimes they even turn their back to a vista that seemed to command the attention of everyone. Except leaders.

           So if you are feeling shunned as an iconoclast for your contrary point of view, take solace. You’re leading a new way of thinking that spawns so many more opportunities and broadens so many more possibilities.

Grandma Moses

Grandma Moses painting

         Take refuge in the leadership thinking of famous artist Grandma Moses.  She would put the easel up on the porch and then have her art student turn their back on the landscape.

          Reflecting on Reflection

            The student would then have to paint the landscape looking only at the reflection of the landscape off the windows on the house.

           And that reflective view –in more ways than one –would inspire more interpretation, more imagination, more innovation rather than simply looking straight at the landscape to capture it on canvas. She said then it would look too much like a photograph. Not art.

          Be like the photographer and author Robert Llewellyn. Look for the elseness. He would frame photo and then revise it, redo it, reframe it.   And REFLECT on it — seeing more than others merely looking.

Today’s ImproveMINT

Look beyond the obvious to keep your leadership thinking in mint condition.

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