TED The power of time off

Speaker: Stefan Sagmeister

00:00
I run a design studio in New York. Every seven years, I close it for one year to
pursue some little experiments, things that are always difficult to accomplish
during the regular working year. In that year, we are not available for any of
our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and
very energetic time.
00:30
I originally had opened the studio in New York to combine my two loves,
music and design. And we created videos and packaging for many musicians
that you know, and for even more that you've never heard of. As I realized,
just like with many many things in my life that I actually love, I adapt to it.
And I get, over time, bored by them. And for sure, in our case, our work
started to look the same. You see here a glass eye in a die cut of a book. Quite
the similar idea, then, a perfume packaged in a book, in a die cut. So I decided
to close it down for one year.
01:15
Also is the knowledge that right now we spend about in the first 25 years of
our lives learning, then there is another 40 years that's really reserved for
working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement.
And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement
years and intersperse them in between those working years. (Applause) That's
clearly enjoyable for myself. But probably even more important is that the
work that comes out of these years flows back into the company and into
society at large, rather than just benefiting a grandchild or two.
02:10
There is a fellow TEDster who spoke two years ago, Jonathan Haidt, who
defined his work into three different levels. And they rang very true for me. I
can see my work as a job. I do it for money. I likely already look forward to
the weekend on Thursdays. And I probably will need a hobby as a leveling
mechanism. In a career I'm definitely more engaged. But at the same time,
there will be periods when I think is all that really hard work really worth my
while? While in the third one, in the calling, very much likely I would do it
also if I wouldn't be financially compensated for it.
02:52
I am not a religious person myself, but I did look for nature. I had spent my
first sabbatical in New York City. Looked for something different for the
second one. Europe and the U.S. didn't really feel enticing because I knew
them too well. So Asia it was. The most beautiful landscapes I had seen in
Asia were Sri Lanka and Bali. Sri Lanka still had the civil war going on, so
Bali it was. It's a wonderful, very craft-oriented society.
03:22
I arrived there in September 2008, and pretty much started to work right away.
There is wonderful inspiration coming from the area itself. However the first
thing that I needed was mosquito repellent typography because they were
definitely around heavily. And then I needed some sort of way to be able to get
back to all the wild dogs that surround my house, and attacked me during my
morning walks. So we created this series of 99 portraits on tee shirts. Every
single dog on one tee shirt. As a little retaliation with a just ever so slightly
menacing message (Laughter) on the back of the shirt. (Laughter)
04:16
Just before I left New York I decided I could actually renovate my studio. And
then just leave it all to them. And I don't have to do anything. So I looked for
furniture. And it turned out that all the furniture that I really liked, I couldn't
afford. And all the stuff I could afford, I didn't like. So one of the things that
we pursued in Bali was pieces of furniture. This one, of course, still works
with the wild dogs. It's not quite finished yet. And I think by the time this lamp
came about, (Laughter) I had finally made peace with those dogs. (Laughter)
05:02
Then there is a coffee table. I also did a coffee table. It's called Be Here Now.
It includes 330 compasses. And we had custom espresso cups made that hide a
magnet inside, and make those compasses go crazy, always centering on them.
Then this is a fairly talkative, verbose kind of chair. I also started meditating
for the first time in my life in Bali. And at the same time, I'm extremely aware
how boring it is to hear about other people's happinesses. So I will not really
go too far into it.
05:45
Many of you will know this TEDster, Danny Gilbert, whose book, actually, I
got it through the TED book club. I think it took me four years to finally read
it, while on sabbatical. And I was pleased to see that he actually wrote the
book while he was on sabbatical. And I'll show you a couple of people that did
well by pursuing sabbaticals.
06:10
This is Ferran Adria. Many people think he is right now the best chef in the
world with his restaurant north of Barcelona, El Bulli. His restaurant is open
seven months every year. He closes it down for five months to experiment
with a full kitchen staff. His latest numbers are fairly impressive. He can seat,
throughout the year, he can seat 8,000 people. And he has 2.2 million requests
for reservations.
06:39
If I look at my cycle, seven years, one year sabbatical, it's 12.5 percent of my
time. And if I look at companies that are actually more successful than mine,
3M since the 1930s is giving all their engineers 15 percent to pursue whatever
they want. There is some good successes. Scotch tape came out of this
program, as well as Art Fry developed sticky notes from during his personal
time for 3M. Google, of course, very famously gives 20 percent for their
software engineers to pursue their own personal projects.
07:20
Anybody in here has actually ever conducted a sabbatical? That's about five
percent of everybody. So I'm not sure if you saw your neighbor putting their
hand up. Talk to them about if it was successful or not. I've found that finding
out about what I'm going to like in the future, my very best way is to talk to
people who have actually done it much better than myself envisioning it.
07:54
When I had the idea of doing one, the process was I made the decision and I
put it into my daily planner book. And then I told as many, many people as I
possibly could about it so that there was no way that I could chicken out later
on. (Laughter)
08:11
In the beginning, on the first sabbatical, it was rather disastrous. I had thought
that I should do this without any plan, that this vacuum of time somehow
would be wonderful and enticing for idea generation. It was not. I just, without
a plan, I just reacted to little requests, not work requests, those I all said no to,
but other little requests. Sending mail to Japanese design magazines and things
like that. So I became my own intern. (Laughter)
08:49
And I very quickly made a list of the things I was interested in, put them in a
hierarchy, divided them into chunks of time and then made a plan, very much
like in grade school. What does it say here? Monday, 8 to 9: story writing; 9 to
10: future thinking. Was not very successful. And so on and so forth. And that
actually, specifically as a starting point of the first sabbatical, worked really
well for me. What came out of it? I really got close to design again. I had fun.
Financially, seen over the long term, it was actually successful. Because of the
improved quality, we could ask for higher prices.
09:31
And probably most importantly, basically everything we've done in the seven
years following the first sabbatical came out of thinking of that one single
year. And I'll show you a couple of projects that came out of the seven years
following that sabbatical. One of the strands of thinking I was involved in was
that sameness is so incredibly overrated. This whole idea that everything needs
to be exactly the same works for a very very few strand of companies, and not
for everybody else.
10:04
We were asked to design an identity for Casa da Musica, the Rem
Koolhaas-built music center in Porto, in Portugal. And even though I desired
to do an identity that doesn't use the architecture, I failed at that. And mostly
also because I realized out of a Rem Koolhaas presentation to the city of
Porto, where he talked about a conglomeration of various layers of meaning.
Which I understood after I translated it from architecture speech in to regular
English, basically as logo making. And I understood that the building itself
was a logo.
10:44
So then it became quite easy. We put a mask on it, looked at it deep down in
the ground, checked it out from all sides, west, north, south, east, top and
bottom. Colored them in a very particular way by having a friend of mine
write a piece of software, the Casa da Musica Logo Generator. That's
connected to a scanner. You put any image in there, like that Beethoven image.
And the software, in a second, will give you the Casa da Musica Beethoven
logo. Which, when you actually have to design a Beethoven poster, comes in
handy, because the visual information of the logo and the actual poster is
exactly the same.
11:28
So it will always fit together, conceptually, of course. If Zappa's music is
performed, it gets its own logo. Or Philip Glass or Lou Reed or the Chemical
Brothers, who all performed there, get their own Casa da Musica logo. It
works the same internally with the president or the musical director, whose
Casa da Musica portraits wind up on their business cards. There is a
full-blown orchestra living inside the building. It has a more transparent
identity. The truck they go on tour with. Or there's a smaller contemporary
orchestra, 12 people that remixes its own title.
12:12
And one of the handy things that came about was that you could take the logo
type and create advertising out of it. Like this Donna Toney poster, or Chopin,
or Mozart, or La Monte Young. You can take the shape and make typography
out of it. You can grow it underneath the skin. You can have a poster for a
family event in front of the house, or a rave underneath the house or a weekly
program, as well as educational services.
12:45
Second insight. So far, until that point I had been mostly involved or used the
language of design for promotional purposes, which was fine with me. On one
hand I have nothing against selling. My parents are both salespeople. But I did
feel that I spent so much time learning this language, why do I only promote
with it? There must be something else. And the whole series of work came out
of it. Some of you might have seen it. I showed some of it at earlier TEDs
before, under the title "Things I've Learned in My Life So Far." I'll just show
two now.
13:24
This is a whole wall of bananas at different ripenesses on the opening day in
this gallery in New York. It says, "Self-confidence produces fine results." This
is after a week. After two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks. And
you see the self confidence almost comes back, but not quite. These are some
pictures visitors sent to me. (Laughter)
13:53
And then the city of Amsterdam gave us a plaza and asked us to do something.
We used the stone plates as a grid for our little piece. We got 250,000 coins
from the central bank, at different darknesses. So we got brand new ones,
shiny ones, medium ones, and very old, dark ones. And with the help of 100
volunteers, over a week, created this fairly floral typography that spelled,
"Obsessions make my life worse and my work better."
14:30
And the idea of course was to make the type so precious that as an audience
you would be in between, "Should I really take as much money as I can? Or
should I leave the piece intact as it is right now?" While we built all this up
during that week, with the 100 volunteers, a good number of the neighbors
surrounding the plaza got very close to it and quite loved it. So when it was
finally done, and in the first night a guy came with big plastic bags and
scooped up as many coins as he could possibly carry, one of the neighbors
called the police.
15:09
And the Amsterdam police in all their wisdom, came, saw, and they wanted to
protect the artwork. And they swept it all up and put it into custody at police
headquarters. (Laughter) I think you see, you see them sweeping. You see
them sweeping right here. That's the police, getting rid of it all. So after eight
hours that's pretty much all that was left of the whole thing. (Laughter)
15:40
We are also working on the start of a bigger project in Bali. It's a movie about
happiness. And here we asked some nearby pigs to do the titles for us. They
weren't quite slick enough. So we asked the goose to do it again, and hoped
she would do somehow, a more elegant or pretty job. And I think she overdid
it. Just a bit too ornamental. And my studio is very close to the monkey forest.
And the monkeys in that monkey forest looked, actually, fairly happy. So we
asked those guys to do it again. They did a fine job, but had a couple of
readability problems. So of course whatever you don't really do yourself
doesn't really get done properly.
16:31
That film we'll be working on for the next two years. So it's going to be a
while. And of course you might think that doing a film on happiness might not
really be worthwhile. Then you can of course always go and see this guy.
16:49
Video: (Laughter) And I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm alive. I'm happy I'm
alive.
17:13
Stefan Sagmeister: Thank you. (Applause)