Look it up on the Internet sometime: how to manage people. It’s something business and corporation interests obsess about:

How to Manage People Who Don’t Want to Be Managed

Managing Difficult People

Don’t Manage: Lead

Be the Leader That People Follow

Step by step, independent people move forward. With persistence, they find themselves in unusual, beautiful places. Lady of the Lake, art print from Steve Henderson Collections

The essential theme revolves around a power in charge who is pulling, prodding, pushing, nudging, pressing, herding, and manipulating people into doing things that they probably don’t want to do. Because, if they wanted to do these things, and these things were worthwhile and good, people wouldn’t need so much convincing.

Intelligent, creative people do not need to be herded, like sheep, into thinking and doing interesting, meaningful things. They do, however, need to be coerced — subtly or forcibly — into performing meaningless, dull, prosaic, boring tasks that do not satisfy the human drive to use our skills and talents for the betterment of others, but are very necessary for the efficient and profitable running of a business or an empire.

The greater the creativity and intelligence — which corporate business needs for innovative products that sell, movies that “entertain,” or effective military weaponry — the greater challenge in controlling the people responsible for developing these products. Hence, the proliferation of articles on managing people.

The artwork, Lady of the Lake, illustrates the mind and mindfulness of the creative individual. She walks her own path. She continues steadily, persistently forward, one step at a time, with the ultimate goal of going someplace intriguing, interesting, a bit magical, and well worth being in.

She doesn’t mind that she doesn’t look or act like everyone else, because her goals are not to be treated like a member of  “the masses,” but to live — although it will be challenging to do so — as a free individual, a human being in all her uniqueness, and not a machine, or a consumer unit, or a nameless, faceless employee.

Deep inside her, in a place that is remote and inaccessible to the outside, external forces of business, commerce, consumerism, materialism, propaganda, peer pressure, and coercion, are her thoughts. And our thoughts — our ability to reason, to question, to analyze, to wonder, to imagine, to plan — are what keep us free.

So . . . how do you manage thinking, creative people?

Ultimately, you don’t.

Thank you for joining me at This Woman Writes. Posts complementing this one are

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