Janet Echelman: Sculpting the Impossible

0:00From October 7th to 9th in San Francisco, the Masters of Scale Summit returns. It's where the boldest minds in business, tech, and beyond gather to build the future. And we want you to join us. Hear from the CEO of the New York Times, scientists using cutting-edge technology to find cures, the leader of crypto powerhouse Coinbase, a retired four-star general, and many, many more. They're all on the same stage, and it's not just another conference. It is the gathering for remarkable people. Apply to attend at mastersofscale.com slash remarkable. That's mastersofscale.com slash remarkable.

0:48Hello, I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People podcast. It is March 6, 2024, and today our new book, Think Remarkable, Nine Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference, is now available. And so before we get to our guest, the remarkable Janet Echelman, I'm going to play the introduction that I read for the audio version of the book. This is about 11 minutes long, and then we will get to Janet Echelman, a truly remarkable artist. Here comes the introduction. I'm Guy Kawasaki, one of the authors of the book that you are listening to. The book, of course, is Think Remarkable, Nine Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference.

1:42I'm going to be reading to you a few sections of the book. This is because, quite frankly, the professional voice actor Perry Daniels has a better voice, but there are some sections that are so intensely personal, I thought it would be better if I read them. The first section that passes that test is the introduction. I begin this introduction with a quote from Anne Frank. What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven't happened yet. I included this quote because it speaks of grit and determination and grace and growth. Anne Frank was under terrible circumstances and yet she had this optimism.

2:29What a wonderful thought it is that some of the best days of our lives haven't happened yet. First section of the introduction, think different. In 1997, I was Apple's chief evangelist and I was in the room when Lee Clough of Apple's advertising agency, Shiat Day, presented the Think Different campaign to Steve Jobs. There were perhaps 10 people in the meeting and Lee's presentation took our breath away because it so perfectly captivated the spirit of Macintosh and Apple. Let me read to you the text of the Think Different ad. Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes, the ones who see things differently.

3:19They're not fond of rules. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can't do is ignore them because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world are the ones who do. Wow. I don't know who wrote that text, but holy cow, that is great text. Back then, Apple wasn't doing well. In fact, most of the pundits predicted that Apple would soon go bankrupt. Michael Dell, yes, that Dell, even suggested that Apple return its cash to shareholders and close up shop.

4:07Sticking with Apple in those days was an act of faith and thinking differently. To massively state the obvious, Michael Dell and the pundits were wrong. The Think Different campaign and the iMac line of Macintoshes rekindled the flame and saved Apple. The turnaround that Steve engineered was remarkable, and Apple became the most valuable company in history. It's been a few decades since that meeting. The world has come a long way, but many problems still exist. New challenges have arisen and much work remains to be done. However, there are also great opportunities. Now it's necessary to go beyond think different and go all the way to think remarkable to transform your life and the world.

4:55The big picture. Suppose someone who is twice your age and holds a powerful political office tries to humiliate you. His reason was that you took offense to his insight on who needs abortions. Let's start with the words Congressman Matt Gaetz spoke in July 2022 at the Turning Point USA Student Action Summit. Why is it that the women with the least likelihood of getting pregnant are the ones most worried about having abortions? Nobody wants to impregnate you if you look like a thumb. He offended many people with his statements. Among them was Olivia Juliana. She is a, in her words, queer plus-size Latina activist.

5:42She's in her 20s and she fired off a tweet in response. It's come to my attention that Matt Gaetz, alleged pedophile, has says it's always the odious 5 '2", 350-pound women that nobody wants to impregnate who rally for abortion. I'm actually 5 '11", 6 '4", in heels. I wear them. So the small men like you are reminded of your place. Gates returned fire with a photo of Juliana with a tweet that said, Dander raised. Olivia then turned the controversy into a fundraising effort for abortion rights that raised$2.5 million. She is a beacon to Gen Z and is leading the transition of power to the next generation alongside such as Malala Yousafzai, David Hogue, Greta Thunberg, and Maxwell Frost.

6:37The goal of this book is to help you make a difference, just like Juliana. First, let's define what being remarkable means. It does not mean amassing wealth, power, or fame. There are people who have done this and are not remarkable. And there are people who haven't and are. In my book, being remarkable means that you are making a difference and making the world a better place. However, you are not competing with Olivia, Jane Goodall, or Steve Jobs, although I won't dissuade you if that's your goal. Just know that it's enough to improve one life, even your own, one organization, one habitat, or one classroom.

7:19Being remarkable also means you are a good person. People use words such as empathetic, honest, and compassionate to describe you. If offered the chance, they would love to join your Ohana, the Hawaiian word for the community of people who support and care for you. I can provide the roadmap along with some inspirational examples, but only you can do the work. Being remarkable is neither innate nor conferred. If it were, you wouldn't need this book. Sources I used two sources of information and inspiration to write this book. The first source is several hundred remarkable people. Although they were not necessarily wealthy, powerful, or famous, they all made the world a better place.

8:07They personify empathy, resilience, creativity, and grace. They were guests on my podcast, Remarkable People, and include people such as Olivia, Jane Goodall, Stacey Abrams, Mark Rober, Carol Dweck, Ken Robinson, Steve Wozniak, Margaret Atwood, Julia Cameron, Temple Grandin, and Bob Cialdini, to name a few. The second source is my first-hand experiences. I've been the chief evangelist of Apple and Canva, worked for Google and Mercedes-Benz, and started three companies. All told, I've been a son, father, husband, uncle, brother, evangelist, entrepreneur, investor, author, speaker, podcaster, mentor, ATM, and Wikipedia trustee.

8:56Structure Another quote. This one from Voltaire. 20 volume folios will never make a revolution. It's the little pocket pamphlets that are to be feared. Non-fiction books tend to be a morass of 300 page tomes that extol one idea. I should know. I've written several of them. In this book, however, less is more. And so it is as succinct as possible. There are three parts. Growth, which is about building your foundation. Grit, which is about implementing your aspirations. And grace, which is about uplifting and inspiring. Growth, grit, and grace are necessary to make a difference. I present them in approximate sequential order, but becoming remarkable isn't necessarily linear.

9:47Feel free to jump around the book as your needs dictate. Each part of this book consists of three chapters. Each chapter, in turn, contains sections that explain methods for achieving the chapter's objective. Each section begins with an assessment of who can use the section's ideas. Remember, chapters contain sections and sections contain ideas. I mentioned dozens of individuals in this book. It's unlikely that you will recognize everyone. To help you identify them, there is a list of profiles at the end of this book. In summary, utilizing a free real world examples circa 2023, Think Remarkable is the elements of style, not the Chicago manual of style.

10:36Tinder, not eHarmony. And TikTok, not TED. Let's do this. Making a difference and being remarkable are not easy, but you won't regret trying. When you make a difference and are remarkable, you live a life that matters, reflects your best self and inspires others to be remarkable as well. One last subtle but critical point. The remarkable people I interviewed did not decide one day to be remarkable and then dedicate their life to this goal. Their motivation was outward focused and tactical, save a species, rise from poverty, invent a cool device, save democracy and the like. In pursuing these kinds of goals, they became remarkable, But becoming remarkable wasn't their objective.

11:24This book isn't about how to repackage, rebrand or reposition yourself. My message is simple. If you do remarkable things and make a difference, people will call you remarkable. In fact, you couldn't stop them if you tried. So let's get started. I wrote that in Santa Cruz, California, 2023. Now, I added a little story after that. So, listen to this story. This is a good story. There's one more story inside the story of Lee Klau showing us the Think Different campaign. At the end of the meeting, he said to Steve, I have two copies of these ads. I'll give one to you and one to Guy. Steve, as only Steve would, responded, Don't give Guy a copy.

12:12Just give me a copy. For me, this was a man or mouse moment that you don't want to look back on and think, why did I wimp out? So I didn't. Right then and there, in front of everybody, I came back with, don't you trust me, Steve? And he came back with, I don't. And I came back with, that's okay, Steve, because I don't trust you either. That probably cost me a few million dollars in stock options, but it was worth it. That's the introduction to the book, Think Remarkable, now available. If you only knew how many changes and edits and redrafts I made to that introduction, you would be astounded.

12:59Now let me tell you about our guest today. Her name is Janet Echelman. She's truly a visionary artist. She's reshaping the interaction of sculpture, architecture, urban design, and more. Her work scaling buildings and city blocks really defy categorization. It's wind. It's light. It's sculpture. Hers is truly an immersive art. When you go through SFO Terminal 2, look up right after the security area and you will see one of her sculptures. Janet's artistic journey took a big fork after she won a Fulbright and went to India. Her painting supplies never arrived, so she had to find some kind of material to build sculptures.

13:47Luckily for us, she was in a fishing village. She noticed the nets. Now Janet is using materials as diverse as atomized water particles and highly engineered fiber that is 15 times stronger than steel. She blends ancient crafts with cutting-edge technology. Her TED Talk, Taking Imagination Seriously, has been translated into 35 languages and has been viewed over 2 million times if her artistic accomplishments aren't enough. After you listen to this episode, I bet you will agree with me that she is a quote machine. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is Remarkable People. And now, here's the remarkable Janet Echoman.

14:35Have you ever thought what would have happened if your paints did arrive in India? That's an interesting question. I suppose my life has many forking points where going left or going right would have led to an entirely different outcome. So I can't really imagine. Maybe I would have been painting. Maybe I don't really have an answer for that, but I'm glad they didn't. I'll tell you in retrospect, it was very painful and difficult having to realize my entire plan could not unfold and having to deal with the possibility of complete abject failure. and starting to experiment with the things that were around me, which started with bronze casting and then that was too limiting.

15:35So I started drilling holes in the bronzes and then tying into them. And then I saw the fishermen and looked at their nets and thought, well, that's a way of creating volumetric form without heavy, solid material and a way to express these moving gestures that I was seeking in a much larger form. And by the way, I had almost no budget for shipping. And so the fact that I could fold up giant nets into a small box and carry it with me on the train in India was a real practical necessity. And did the paints ever show up or the end of story? They did. The funny thing is they showed up like a week before I was leaving India after all three exhibitions had completed.

16:25And I donated them to the art school, the National Institute of Design, where I was teaching. So I thought that was a kind of cosmic laugh. Man makes plans, but God laughs. Yes, yes. So in the Steve Jobs Stanford commencement address, one of his big points was that you can only connect the dots looking backwards. So you would have to say the paint's not arriving is a dot. It's a fork. And then you can connect that to you being desperate, figuring out that you could use nets as an art form. But it's not like you landed in India and said, I'm going to use nets. It was good fortune, let's say. It was an act of desperation.

17:14And frankly, when you think about going backwards and looking at the dots in hindsight, there are a million of these little moments of decision making where something fails. That's not the only time that disaster struck. My entire career is a series of disasters striking and my trying to find the best adaptation at the moment to serve my goals. Okay. Now, you just opened up a really great segue. Tell us about more disasters. We like disaster stories. Okay. I was invited to create the artwork for something called the Biennial of the Americas in 2010, which was being held in Denver. They invited the 35 presidents and prime ministers from all the countries of the Western Hemisphere.

18:11They're all arriving. And they wanted an artist to express the interconnectedness of nations in an artwork. And I designed an artwork. And up to that point in my work, I was using steel armatures that were like bent steel pipes. Think of your roller coaster, like giant steel pipes. But when we went to explore installing this work over the street, it would be far too heavy. There was no possible way to create this, especially with wind and all of the engineering constraints. So it was, you know, dead in the water, my project. And at that point, I was like, well, what if I found a really strong fiber?

19:01Couldn't I make a grid like an X, Y axis and then pick up a point anywhere I needed to create the shape I wanted? And I went searching and I found an incredible fiber, ultra high molecular weight polyethylene, that is more than 15 times stronger than steel pound for pound. So it was really light. It's what they used for the Mars rover to tether it. And suddenly, this complete disaster of not being able to build my steel armature to hold my sculptural form became this whole door opening into a new experience, being able to bring very lightweight sculptures all over the world. They pack up into a little bitty box and then they unfurl and they are tensioned into the buildings and infrastructure around the work and the space.

20:00And one of the exciting things is that now I can suspend artwork above streets, cars and people and bicycles. All of life can be moving underneath these works and they're literally laced into the fabric of the city. And I'll add one thing, which is it's an environmentally sustainable approach because the city is already built. We've invested so much energy and carbon in all the things that we already have. So if I can create art that can just lace into the pre-existing structure we have, I'm not adding or using any new carbon. I'm literally using what we already have. But tell me at the completely tactical level.

20:55So you're staying in Denver and you see this problem. The steel is too heavy. Now, did you go to Home Depot and look for this magical material? How did you actually find this material? Oh, that's a good question. I'm a big researcher. So it was clear that the project was dead in the water. and I started calling and asking experts and friends and asking friends to recommend other friends and like talking to everyone. It turned out this is a fiber that is, I mentioned, is used in space, but it's also used in climbing ropes. And turns out it's taken me years to learn how to work with it because while it's really, really strong and light, it's not strong against ultraviolet rays.

21:46So I have learned how to braid a sleeve to physically protect it from sun, ways of working with it over the years, but not for that first time. It's the power of people that solves the problems for me. I ask my friends and they connect me to more people and maybe a little bit like being a reporter or something. It's like I'm investigating a question and I just go as far as I can, never giving up. That's a lesson in being remarkable in itself. I don't know, indefatigable or just bullheaded is probably what my family would say. But I really won't give up. And I do believe that if I just keep exploring and thinking and taking it apart and putting it together again, that I will find an unexpected solution.

22:45And that might come from being an artist because the practice and the way I learned it was, I would start a drawing or a painting and And if it wasn't good, I'd tear it apart and put it back together, turn it upside down. There's a practice of deconstructing and reconstructing in art that I think has been helpful to me in other challenges in my work. Going back to the prior, the word I was looking for, embedded energy. The approach of lacing these completely fiber soft sculptures into things we already have, the skyscrapers and highways, that is using the embedded energy that we have already invested to create new cultural environments above our heads.

23:40That's great. Do you know who Angela Duckworth is? I don't. I've heard the name, but I can't place it. is a MacArthur Fellow. And she won it for her work in the topic of grit. So what you just described is a pretty good definition of grit, that you encountered this problem with steel structures, and you wouldn't give up. And you asked all these friends and friends of friends, and you found the solution as opposed to packed up and went home. I appreciate your calling it grit. For sure, my family would call it bullheadedness or stubbornness. I just won't give up. But it is combined with a belief that I might find light at the end of the tunnel.

24:29I do typically believe that if I keep going, keep taking it apart and putting it together again, keep getting new ideas, keep asking questions that will lead me somewhere. And I think the key is if I can keep myself open to where it leads me, that is usually what will render a positive outcome. If I'm stuck on the way I frame a question as very linear, if I thought, how do I make steel work as an armature? How do I find a way to have this heavy thing? That would never have led to any surprising new solutions. I really had to open up the whole frame of the question. And that has opened up a whole new trajectory for my work.

25:24And it's opened up places that it can go and scale in the city to go 750 feet over water and highway and pedestrian lanes. So that would never be possible if I were using these incredibly heavy structures.

25:57Janet, you are just a quote machine. You're a talented interviewer. Okay. Now, while we're on the topic of grit, walk us through the tactics and the real world situation of what's the process of getting approval and permits for sculptures that are the size of a building. Surely there must be some people who are going to say that your nets are going to capture birds and kill them. Or there's got to be somebody who's going to say something negative about what you're doing. So how do you get past the government permit process and all the bullshit to put up your sculptures? First thing, people always are concerned that it will hurt the birds, and it doesn't.

26:45That's the good news. I've been building sculptures for 20 years now, and we have never had a case of a bird dying as a result of falling into the net. It turns out the things that injure birds in terms of meshes are small, stiff mesh like deer netting. That's a danger for birds. And also things that are transparent like glass in a skyscraper. That's dangerous for birds because they can't see it. My sculpture is different in every way because, first of all, birds can see it. It's soft and flexible, so it's moving in the wind. And in fact, if you're trying to keep birds away, say the seafood restaurants in Florida, where my large sculpture is located, the way they keep birds away is they put like kite tails up.

27:37And by having something move in the wind, that really enables birds to see it immediately. But we've had all kinds of protests and PETA and the Audubon Society, all because they think it might be a danger to birds. But they haven't, in fact, looked at the record. And we consulted with engineers, environmental engineers, and now we understand why the work is safe with respect to birds. Okay, but not just birds, but how about the permit process? You can't just go to downtown Denver and put up something like this over the street. Like, how does that work? Well, there is a process. It takes patience and forethought and a lot of collaboration.

28:24But the truth is, I also think there's some goodwill. And there are always circumstances where people say, no, no, no, no. But somehow in my life, people have given me a chance. And once you've done it once and you have a track record, almost every city, the first answer is no. Often it's like they're concerned that people in their cars are going to look up, be distracted and have an accident. And it turns out people don't. But there's always a concern that having this artwork suspended above a major highway or a street is going to create pandemonium. So I think it's hard to get your first break.

29:12In every regard, my first large sculpture in a building, my first large sculpture over a major street and thoroughfare, each of these things is difficult the first time. and I don't know, maybe it's that I recognize they're not going to trust a visual artist like myself. So I bring in my fabulous colleagues, these brilliant structural engineers and aeronautical engineers. And so I do reach out. We were just doing a piece in Germany, in Munich in a historic place, the Odeonsplatz. And here it was a surprising obstacle. It was the fire marshal who said no. And let me tell you, we'd all been working many months.

30:02Everything was go. And suddenly the fire marshal says no. And I then went and I found a fire specialist engineer and we worked through each question and it turned out I had to take further laboratory tests. I already had fire lab tests on each material in my sculpture, each type of fiber, but what in Germany, they made me weave all the different ones together in the quantity and method that I use them. And then the entire apparatus had to then be tested by the laboratory. And luckily it passed because we were already past the deadline where we had to say go. And my life is not without anxiety.

30:52I think actually one of the job requirements to do what I do is to be able to tolerate anxiety and risk because I'm trying to do things that have never been done before. and it's uncomfortable. Let me tell you, it's not comfortable for me either, but I have to find a way to calm myself through each of these difficult moments because there are lots of them. And it may look effortless when you are in a city and one of my sculptures floating above you, oh, how easy, how does she do it? But in fact, there are just a million challenges. There are hundreds of times people say no, and I have to find a way around it.

31:39Okay. So now you open up another line of questioning, which is, how do you calm yourself? You have a great smile. Our listeners can't see your smile, but it really is a pleasure to be asked questions by you guys. How do you calm yourself in the midst of all this aggravation and the fire marshal and all this stuff? What's your secret to calmness? Oh my goodness. I'm not sure. I play Scrabble on my phone. I don't know. It's such a good question. I will go take a walk when I'm feeling really stuck. And also my studio is right next to my house and I often will come down and start cooking. I chop a lot of vegetables.

32:29You'll see me. I'm having a really thorny problem at work. If I'm down in the kitchen at lunch, chopping onions and celery and carrots, making mirepoix, you know, cooking is somehow calming. And maybe it's the transformation of one thing into another. Seeing my chopped onions become transparent and tasty. I don't know. I'll think on that. If I can come up with something else, I'll, what do I do? Yeah, I take a deep breath. And I don't know. In the end, I just believe in my vision. I can't explain that. That's why you're an artist, right? Yeah. I will say what drives me as an artist is creating something that I myself want to be underneath.