Or: Fuck yes, and…
During build week at Burning Man, there is a party called the 4:20 Spire. It takes its name from the intersection where it happens and the hour it starts. I was warned, “Wear safety glasses. You don’t have to get in the middle.” I had no idea what that meant, and my experienced friend kept it that way. I went out with no expectations and just a little fear in my heart. What I found was part build, part party, part manic cultural experiment.
We parked a couple dozen feet from the wall of Mad Max-esque art cars surrounding an open field of dust and dirt. My feet carved their way through the jungle of scrap metal cars, bicycles, and people as my mind struggled to comprehend the growing intensity of what I was seeing.
We found ourselves behind a man with a hose, watering the playa. I was unsure of the intent. Then, a burst of energy as a crew bashed together a, a what?, a shack made of trash, which I learned was the 4:20 spire itself. The construction took minutes. Then the whole operation collapsed into a turbulent celebration, a party, probably? I later learned it celebrated the end of the intense build of Black Rock City.
As I tried to label what I was watching, my focus was broken as a large naked man slid across the watered playa and into my legs. He bounced up, gave me a big muddy smile and, quite literally, skipped away. Then, as if beckoned by the mud gods, a group of nude siren-like women tackled a man into the mud and began removing his shoes and the shoes of unsuspecting bystanders. I had brought my bag and my nice hoodie, and since this was the beginning of my trip, I kept a fair distance to avoid becoming a victim and getting covered in mud.
Turning to my left, a man began to use a can of spray paint as a hammer… and it blew up in his face. He jumped up, coated in blue, and smiled at his friends. Real danger drifted in the air, and nobody seemed to care.
Eventually, the chaos started to sort itself into various areas; slices of a pie with the spire at its center. I began my journey at the nude mud wrestling and eventually found myself playing what I can only describe as Fucked-up Baseball. Beer cans were thrown at the batter, who wielded some sort of fabricated “bat.” I found myself holding a board with nails and spikes, a bedpost with bored holes, even a golf club at one point. It seemed the goal was to bash the beer can and spray the crowd with as much debris and alcohol as possible. Fuck yes.
After the baseball adventure, I spied part of our crew across the circle and made my way through the center of the shit show. We found a ragged puppet we called “Fucked Up Elmo,” who took great offense to the name and introduced himself, but I couldn’t understand him. It served us pickle juice in one cup and some sort of alcohol in another. We took shots.
The danger of being in the center materialized as a group of trash goblins wrapped us up in an orange “trash fence” and dragged us closer to the center. I managed to escape only to find that a sneaky gal had tied my bag to some rope and had begun literally reeling me in. I escaped, but not before receiving a quick high five and a kiss. WTF?
I’ve recalled that afternoon, trying to process it. It felt familiar and very foreign at the same time. The thought I keep returning to is “Fuck yes, and…”. This idea of the 4:20 spire only happens because a group of skilled, energized, and deliberate people made it happen. They said fuck yes, let’s go.
This experience is actively reorganizing how I think about my own work and is prompting the question, “Why has this creative energy never been available to me?”
My “Fuck Yes… and”
I went to Burning Man to fabricate and install art for my friend Calli. I spent four weeks building a covered wagon for her piece called Dusty Heart Tumbleweed Soul, then drove out for build week to install it. Then I stayed for Burn Week to help maintain and man it.
On the Playa, our days were simple. Somebody on our crew made breakfast on a rotation. We held a short meeting. We rode out to the piece and worked through the heat and the dust toward a handful of goals.
An example of a fuck yes during the week: On the last day before inspection, we discovered we had forgotten protection for our propane tank. We had no time, no obvious material, and only the tools we had with us. We took apart a wind block we had built to haul the piece into the desert, and I designed the structure and led the build. One of the crew cut a stencil that was supposed to read FLAMMABLE, but it came out FLAMABEL. We named the structure Flamabelle and installed it.
That is a small story that holds some truth to what I’ve been missing. A problem surfaced, but nobody spent energy blaming. Someone with the relevant skill came forward. The rest of the crew supported the fix. The mistake became an inside joke, and the whole sequence took about three hours. I have watched organizations spend three months accomplishing less.
I diagnosed the wrong failure.
For years I’ve carried a private theory about why my most ambitious work never fully landed. The theory was that I needed to be better. Better at pitching, better at building buy-in, better at translating my ideas so others would follow.
I got measurably better at all three, but the outcomes did not change. I remained a person with more ideas than collaborators.
I have come to believe my theory was wrong.
Ideas are seeds. The people around you are the soil they get planted in.
A good seed in poor soil produces nothing. It’s easy to conclude the idea was wrong, or that it was pitched badly, or that you’re not the leader you believed yourself to be. All three conclusions are possible, and all three let the soil off the hook.
I spent years diagnosing seed problems, but I had a soil problem.
I built a fragile system.
For four and a half years I ran a nonprofit as its executive director. My intention going in was straightforward. I wanted to put more resources in front of makers so they could take on bigger projects and trust themselves to work at a larger scale. I wanted to enable the solving of big problems and support bold solutions.
By the time the organization was stable enough to attempt the ambitious work, I had no hours and no energy left. I built a machine that ran on me, then wondered why I couldn’t take advantage of it.
The problem was that I assumed the leaders I had assembled would share my ambition; I assumed they were good soil. However, several of them argued directly against the shared goal: they removed their own expected outcomes, skipped meetings, and, one by one, the structures I had put in place to make larger thinking possible fell apart. (Unfortunately, this experience is common among nonprofits.) I misread my soil for years. I kept proposing and expecting someone to step up and say, “Fuck yes, and….” But nobody said “Fuck yes, and…” and it took years for me to notice.
When good soil says yes, it means it.
When good soil commits, it takes on its portion and steps up, usually taking on a little more than was offered. This process builds capability and possibility. It helps to build systems and shares the burden of the aspiration. Good soil does not need to be managed. Good soil asks for help early, and it sees through to the finish. When it gets stuck, it tells collaborators immediately, and it cleans up the mess.
The list of people in the world that bear this mark is remarkably rare, and I have repeatedly accepted much less because someone was well connected, or simply already in the room. Nobody put those people in my soil but me.
So I am changing my sequence. I used to start with the idea and then go looking for people to help carry it. Now I start with the people. I have come to believe there are simple tests for finding out whether a person’s word and their action are the same thing. If I find myself spending energy convincing people to do the work they’ve already agreed to, I have my answer, and I intend to believe it.
Two weeks in the desert did not hand me a strategy; it gave me a standard. I know what good soil feels like now, which means I can recognize its absence, and I am finished mistaking that absence for a failure of my own persuasion.
By extension, I want to be good soil so we can commit to something bigger than all of us.