Why One Who Paints is Better than a Painter
In the world of productivity there are small shifts of mindset and lenses to look through to work like and become our best selves. Here, I’d like to get into why doing is better than someone who is a doer.
In this article, I’d like to discuss:
- Why people say and do different things
- Why verbs beat nouns when it comes to getting things done.
- A small, but mighty shift of mindset
People Say & Do Different Things
At the forefront of customer discovery, Steve Blank has worked to understand how to best pull useful and honest information out of potential customers to know how to iterate on and build products and services people will actually use.
In a dramatization based on Blank’s experience, Steve presents how not to interview people for honest answers. He asks a woman what food she typically eats and she replies “I mostly eat lots of produce and vegetables.” But Blank knows that people say one thing, yet they do another. Hence he asks the same woman “what did you eat mostly in this past week?” She says “well I ate pizza last night, I didn’t eat the rest of the day, the day before that I ordered fast food…” and you get the picture.
But how do we step away from all the talk and actually do as we preach?
A Verb-Based VS Noun-Based Mindset
If you are asked who you are, you’re likely to describe yourself using adjectives or past experiences, but do these things actually define you? In eastern ideologies like Zen, these ideas like referring to yourself as a painter are silly. A painter is a symbolic version of the self that doesn’t actually exist. In Zen, only the present moment exists and so you can be painting in the present moment. But that doesn’t make you a painter later on.
Why is this relevant? Because our noun-based labels destroy us.
Today, if one wants to be a great tennis player, it’s very easy to buy a nice racket, shoes, clothes, and a ball. Once that’s been done, maybe you show up to one or two practices and being someone who’s played tennis, you could call yourself a tennis player. Applying that label puts a person in a state of comfort as though they’ve made it from being nothing to a tennis player. Dust off your hands, folks. The work is done. We made it. Right?
The Small Shift Towards Thinking in Verbs
Author, Austin Kleon’s book Keep Going, describes how we never “arrive” at a title so we need to let go of thinking we will. Being a painter for example, is a consistent process. It is less of a straight line from nothing to painter, point A to point B. Rather it is more like a never-ending circle where we continuously do work. Looking through that lens is how we can be more productive and happy because we are living out the self we would otherwise dream to be.
