The question a machine world presses on us is not whether the machine can make the picture. The question it forces is what our capacities are — what it is we can do, as human beings, that the picture alone never shows.

To see — really see, and not merely look. To suffer, and make something of the suffering. to re-enchant the everyday world. To make a self out of the wreckage. To stand in front of what exceeds us and not look away… These are the shape of a human life lived awake — and they belong to all of us, not only to the ones who paint. Not to the machine, which has no body, no world, no death, and therefore nothing to say about life. The artist is simply a human being like the rest of us — just more determinedly awake, more honest, more unflinchingly in contact with existence, and moved to make. Pointing to capacities that are in all of us.

A few years ago — this book has gone through many incarnations over many, many years — I took a call from the senior commissioning editor at Penguin while sitting in my mother's garden, surrounded by butterflies and the buzzing of bees. The feedback was basically to make it more like a generic business book — case studies, top tips, the usual. I understood. That is what the system needs it to be. But I had waited too long and come too far to compromise. I chose to self-publish — so that this book could be, for better or for worse, exactly what I wanted it to be, not what the system demanded.

My former chief creative officers at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam used to say it directly, about the work: “You do not have the right not to have an opinion.” They weren’t talking about taste. They were talking about responsibility. If the work goes out into the world and does something — to people, to a brand, to a culture — then everyone in the room owns a share of that. And gets to have an opinion.

An editor does not write the book. A consultant does not run the company. But what they both provide is the rigour of asking - what are you actually trying to do, and are you doing it? In this sense, the best editors and the best strategic consultants hold the client to the best version of themselves. The goal is never to make the book sound like the editor, or the brand sound like the consultant. It is to make each sound like the truest version of itself.

The agency side of the table talks about ownership -  clients to feel ownership of the work, how to bring them on the journey, how to make the creative decision feel like theirs. What we are less aware of (or honest about) is what ownership actually requires. It requires skin in the game. Real exposure to the consequences of the choice. And most agency practitioners operate without it. We make the case. We do the craft. We manage the process. The client bears the cost and the risk.