I find it interesting that there are people, especially artists, with a passion so pure, so intense that they spend their life trying to conquer it. Where art is their work. In fact, maybe I don’t find it interesting. I find it enviable. I am jealous of these people’s driving force of passion—a realization I came to while watching television.
In Netflix’s documentary, SkyLadder—Cai Guo Qiang’s art and life are explored—the pinnacle of his career, and the documentary, is the execution of a successful sky ladder connecting “earth to heaven”.
What drives these passions? For Cai, it started with gunpowder and explosions to fireworks to entertainment. A chain of things that ignited into a piece of artwork that did not even last a day—but took over two decades to create. I’m in awe. However, it feels too late for me to find and explore and pursue a passion of such great scale—because this level of passion or obsession seems inherent. But it might not be too late to try to understand these people’s passions–and their origins. The core thought that started it all—and apply it to my work.
In branding there must be a driving force for companies to keep going, keep creating. If we as a company, or branding artists, can get to the core origin of where our client’s brand started, why it started—can we harness it, and leverage it for externalizing? Would the buyers or consumers of these brands be attracted to it?
Take Artifact Uprising for example. A company whose origin is as important, if not more so, than who the brand is today—because while growth and evolution are inevitable, roots remain the same (https://www.artifactuprising.com/our-story). Artifact Uprising’s origin doesn’t boil down to a single instance or moment in time, but was built from a larger core passion. And carefully nurtured overtime, that passion transformed into an all-encompassing purpose that its customers share.
Staying the course requires a core driver. Achievement of which relies on the ability to answer the following: how do you cultivate and harness the power of passion overtime…to inject your brand with this type of unmistakably pure force?