Denial

Denial gets a bad rap sometimes, but the right kind of denial, especially when you’re embarking on a new project, can be tremendously motivating. Good denial is a wonderful thing.

Good denial is often the result of inexperience. Good denial doesn’t know well enough to realize what the obstacles are, and that’s why good denial plows right through them.

Good denial is marked by action; it’s a reason to do something, rather than an excuse to stay the same. When everyone else says “it can’t be done,” good denial finds a way to do it.

Good denial should be embraced. I’m most excited about my work when I’m in good denial. If you start looking for ways to get out of denial, you usually end up sabotaging your enthusiasm. At the end of the day, good denial is just an extreme form of optimism.

Of course we can.

My friend Chris has a great story about street-artist Shepard Fairey. Fairey’s portrait of Barack Obama has become a fixture in the highlight reels of the past election. You can’t even talk about his work without using the word ‘iconic.’

Shepard Fairey is on an absolute roll. The man was recently featured on CBS Sunday Morning and the Obama portrait was just installed in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in DC. Last week, Fairey sat on a stage with Lawrence Lessig and Steven Johnson and jammed about remix culture in front of a sold-out New York Public Library crowd.

Photo courtesy of cliff1066

A decade or so ago, Fairey had just emerged from the skate-culture scene and was gaining notoriety for putting up stickers depicting a posterized image of wrestler/actor Andre the Giant and the line “Andre the Giant has a posse.” These stickers were the predecessors to Fairey’s eventual Obey Giant Empire.

In those early days, my friend Chris was in middle school. Chris would see Fairey in the neighborhood all the time, placing the stickers on signs, lampposts and the sides of garbage cans near the school. Curious about the man’s motivations, Chris walked up to him one day and asked bluntly, “dude, what the hell are you doing?”

Shepard Fairey looked back and replied, “you’ll see.”