The Power of Outsider Thinking

Do you ever feel like an outsider?

Feeling like an outsider does not mean there's something wrong with you. An outsider is not a strange person without friends. Instead, they are someone who challenges accepted values and perspectives. It's an advantage to look at the world from the outside. An insider adopts the accepted standards, an outsider changes those standards.

The education system teaches you to think conventionally, however, brilliant work is always unconventional. There is enormous pressure on us to get academic qualifications and merge 
into the system. As a result, people who produce excellent work are often underachievers at school or university. They were impatient with memorizing facts and then regurgitating them. Their instinct is to act—to get out there and make stuff. The skill they don't teach you at school is how to think for yourself. That's why the self-taught often produce fresh, innovative work.

You Are Your Best Teacher

Everything was against Eileen Gray. In the 1920s, you needed strict qualifications to become an architect. Men strictly controlled entry to academic courses. Gray refused to accept the cards dealt her. No one in the system would 
help her, so she helped herself. Gray rolled up her sleeves, picked up a hammer and nails, and made her vision a reality. The challenging situation brought the innovator in her to the fore. She taught herself the skills an architect needed from books and evening classes. Gray realized that other architects' work was predictable because they were insiders keeping to the design rules of the profession. The prominent architecture firms repeated the same old designs and practices. She realized if she did things differently, she'd stand out.

The Solution Is to Act

Gray didn't study architecture at university. Instead, she learned for herself by making buildings and furniture. She taught herself whatever skills she needed: leadership, mathematics, legal skills, architectural drawing, electrical home wiring, engineering, and more. Gray went down in the history of design as a pioneer of the Modern Movement because her unique working process differed from trained architects. She started by making chairs and tables. Gray's Occasional Table, designed in 1927,
 is still a bestseller because it embodies her unique attitude and principles. She used the latest materials, a tubular steel base and a glass top, to create a multipurpose and adjustable table that was both modern and classic. She made them with her own hands.
They existed. She proved that the solution is to act when things are against you. Her furniture and architecture became significant because it was new and different and reflected her feminine, free-flowing, spontaneous attitude.

Eileen Gray: the solution is to act.

Source: Rod Judkins

Imagine someone without training to build a house from scratch: attracting the finance, producing detailed plans of electrical circuits, plumbing, and structural form, and then making it. In 1926, Gray began building a house near Monaco. It was called E-1027, was a white beacon of enlightenment, jutting out on pillars from jagged rocks, with substantial horizontal windows and an open facade. E-1027 immediately attracted international recognition as a masterpiece, and commissions flooded in.

Gray sold the house and moved on to other projects. Her success annoyed architects who had spent years studying at university and working as apprentices. The great architect Le Corbusier admired E-1027 and frequently stayed there to study and learn from it. He became jealous and resentful. In 1938 he vandalized the walls with cubist murals of naked women, deliberately violating Gray's express instructions that E-1027 must be left free of any decoration. Architecture critic Rowan Moore called it a man asserting "his dominion, like a urinating dog, over the territory." Gray's confidence to think and act independently had infuriated the architectural establishment.

Learn by Doing

1. Learn by doing because your best teacher is experience. If you're thoroughly dedicated and study something deeply, you can teach yourself whatever you need to know. Gray worked phenomenally hard, and she was on the site of E-1027 every day for three years.
2. If you don't know how to do something, don't seek instruction—try to work it out for yourself first. It will make your work more original.
3. Adopt an outsider attitude. The insider is a cog in a machine. An outsider creates their machine.

This article is based on a chapter from the book Make Brilliant Work by Rod Judkins.