If you’ve ever felt like you’re stuck in a rut, and that every day is an endless routine in which you wash, rinse and repeat, then you are not alone. It comes up pretty regularly in coaching sessions, and people want to break out of the daily drudge and often think of doing so in terms in which their current life is set on fire. That only radical change would be able to release them from their funk.

When you’re facing ennui and are bored it can be really hard to take those couple of steps back, and recognise the skills and mastery that you’ve developed in those routines. It’s also pretty likely that you started the routines because you had some enjoyment in doing that work and gained gratification from it.

I bring to mind Andy Warhol, who, when he first moved to New York made a living painting clothes, shoes and other items for catalogues. This was production line work, which would inspire Warhol’s studio (which was known as the “factory”) and was also the testing ground for him to hone his artistic and illustration skills. 

It’s a theme that is explored and expanded on in John Cale and Lou Reed’s tribute to him and his career “Songs for Drella”. Warhol never liked his nickname, bestowed on him by Ondine, which was formed from the grafting together of Dracula and Cinderella.

There’s some great lyrics on the album which highlight Warhol’s work ethic.

On Open House there’s the wonderful couple of lines:

“You scared yourself with music. I scared myself with paint.

Drew 550 different shoes today, it almost made me faint.”

Then rendered more explicitly in the song that followed in which Reed recounts being castigated by Warhol for not pulling his finger out – 

“Work”.

No matter what I did it never seemed enough

He said I was lazy, I said I was young

He said, “how many songs did you write?”

I’d written zero, I’d lied and said “ten.”

“You won’t be young forever,

you should have written fifteen, It’s work!”

It was that very work ethic which he took from that early stint in advertising into his real passion, art and film. That relentless drive took what he’d learned in terms of the commercialisation of mass production, Soup tins, Brillo boxes, art screen printed and produced at scale. None of this could have happened without that early experience. He emerges from the era as a genre defining artist, but did so by magpieing the good and the relevant of what he’d learned and turning it to what he actually wanted to be doing.

In the corporate world this has been rebadged as ‘transferable’ skills, but the underlying truth is that if you throw yourself into the things that you’re doing, even if they aren’t where you’ll eventually end up, it will very rarely be wasted time. 

Bumping out of that rut, when you’ve gleaned all you can, or being alive to the chance when a better opportunity comes along, can be tricky if inertia or demotivation has fully taken hold. And it’s here that I think I’ve seen the coaching be at its most effective. Taking stock, and finding the steps to evolve towards where you want to go, laying the foundations and working out how it can be integrated into your life as it is, sets you up to take the best of what got you there and prepare for the challenges that you’re still to face.

Warhol’s prints are still being made and sold, some guys in Belgium obtained the silk screens and have been producing open edition versions of many of the works under the title Sunday B Morning (with a blue stamp on the back allowing you to sign it with your own name). In this way Warhol, a bit like Dali who, before his death, signed tens of thousands of blank sheets of paper, brought some of his legacy back to the mass production which inspired it.

So when you’re doing your thing for the umpteenth time this week, it might actually be the springboard towards where you’re wanting to go.

Now, time for some dinner. Anyone for Tomato Soup?