A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Entrepreneur

The art of moving the world forward.

I heard an interesting story about a storyteller.

James Joyce, the Irish literary icon, was happily living in Trieste when his sister arrived.

She told young James two things. The first, was that their father demanded that James come back home to Dublin.

The second thing she told him was that there were no cinemas in Ireland.

Joyce loved going to the movies. And Trieste was a bit of cinema paradiso boasting some 21 theaters.

You should also understand that back in the first decade of the 1900s, cinema and movies was a new technology. A bit like the Netflix or AI explosion of today.

As the story goes James agreed to leave his beloved Trieste, but he left this quirky, Italian-speaking part of Austria with an idea. An idea to bring cinema to Dublin.

In fact, he shopped and pitched his idea to various venture capitalists and took the boat home to the port of Dun Laoghaire armed with seed money and a founder’s zeal.

What’s fascinating here is that James Joyce was no business man. He was a writer. An artist.

Yet his instinct revealed a problem. And his rational side found a solution.

And sure enough, on December 20th, 1909, James Joyce opened the Volta Cinema on Mary Street. The first cinema in Ireland.

I heard this story from the Irish economist David McWilliams. McWilliams shared this anecdote to a bunch of us at the most recent TBWA global management meeting in Dublin.

McWilliams’ point was that creativity and commercial activity can very much be connected. And artists and entrepreneurs share many characteristics. In fact, McWilliams might argue that every entrepreneur is an artist. And every artist, an entrepreneur.

To take it a bit further, he teased out those traits saying that both artists and entrepreneurs…

“…Want to express themselves.

Want to do something differently.

Want to create something better than what’s ever been done before.

They are disruptive.

They live in the theater of risk.

They want to change the world...”

He then went on to remind us all that if allowed to flourish, these types of folks lead to economic prosperity. (He cited the Dutch of the 1600s and Ireland of the late 90s and 2000s.)

I’ll cite Madison Avenue of the 1960’s when Bill Bernbach, a creative person, lead a company and an industry into a creative (and financially-rewarded) revolution.

I’ll take it one step further and ask you? What do you see that others can’t see? What’s an idea you have?

You see, Mr McWilliams drilled home the point that economic problems (and other challenges) won’t be solved by “charts and maths.”

But rather it’s creativity and the artists who see the invisible.

And the creatives among us who drive the world with intuition and ambition.

Data, AI and all things rational have their role and place.

But we can never underestimate the power of the person who dreams ideas in the clouds and throws three spread sheets to the wind.

Image: Personal iPhoto; Museum of Literature, Dublin