A delicious light lunch or dinner to make at home

Since we have only a month or so to make the most of our local asparagus crop, I figure one could have dinner at the Roadhouse one evening and then make this simple, delicious scrambled egg dish later in the week!

To begin, wash and cut some asparagus spears into one-inch pieces. Heat a bit of olive oil in a skillet, and add the asparagus pieces and a pinch of sea salt. Stir and sauté until the asparagus is soft and golden brown on the edges.

Set a tub of Zingerman’s Cream Cheese on the counter so it comes to room temperature. Do the same with an ounce or so of sliced cold-smoked salmon per person, cut into one-inch squares. 

Meanwhile, crack two to three eggs per person and beat them gently with a fork. When the asparagus is tender, add the eggs to the sauté pan and stir, again gently. Add a good amount of cream cheese (to your taste) and the smoked salmon. Stir again, pulling the eggs that have set up away from the edge of the skillet toward the center. Continue on apace until the eggs are set—you can adjust the cook time to your preference; I like mine on the softer side.

Slide the eggs onto warm plates, and grate on some fresh pepper and add a sprinkle of sea salt. If you like, a few snippets of fresh dill make a great garnish, too. Enjoy with Bakehouse toast or a Zinglish Muffin—or, better still, pile it on one of the Jersey Onion Rolls we’ll be making on a Special Bake this coming weekend! 

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How to weave the six elements of the Hope Star into our daily lives

Positive psychologist Dan Tomasulo says it well:

Hope is an act of courage. When we orient ourselves toward hope, we take actions that align with our most hopeful lives. This effect reverberates across our communities, causing people close to us to embody hope, too.

Still, given the rather shaky state of the world in which we’re living, many people I know are having a hard time staying hopeful. Their anxiety aside, I do believe that more hopeful times are upon us. As journalist Simon Tisdall wrote in The Guardian this past Sunday:

It may not feel like it, but hope is on the horizon.

I take Tisdall’s point. Difficult as it may be to detect, hope is indeed slowly but surely on the rise—which is a good thing. On further reflection, though, I’ll add that the “horizon” metaphor probably isn’t the best. It implies that there’s nothing for you and me to do but wait until hope comes closer. I suggest the opposite: the hope in question is one that we can all be—and, I feel, ought to be—actively working to make happen. Whether within each of us as individual humans, or within companies or countries, high hope levels are a prerequisite for well-being. Hope, I can see now, is one of the main factors that has helped to make our organization what it is. Without it, we would almost certainly have been out of business ages ago. 

Recognizing that hope levels both rise and fall over time is, in and of itself, of great value. We are not, as history teaches us, stuck with the status quo. Henry Giroux, the scholar and cultural critic at McMaster University—quotes from whom both open and close the new pamphlet, “Why Democracy Matters”—wrote in a piece in Truthout last week,

Memory is a form of resistance. A society that cannot remember injustice is condemned to repeat it.

Taking this in the context of the recent Supreme Court decision on voting rights that I referenced last week, it’s pretty clear that we are not in a free-flowing, high-hope period of American history. Historian, essayist, and civil rights attorney Sherrilyn Ifill writes that “Black people went from the pinnacle of hope during Reconstruction to the ‘nadir’ of oppression and disenfranchisement in the early 20th century.” A hundred years later, after April’s Supreme Court ruling, that hope level may have fallen even further for many. Which makes this all the more important a time to invest energy in engaging with the idea of hope. After all, as Ifill emphasizes, the people have the power: “It was the demand and sacrifice of ordinary people—civil rights lawyers and activists who forced change—many at the cost of their livelihood and their lives—whose demands and sacrifices ushered in democracy in our country.” I’m confident we can, and will, do it again. As Tisdall suggests, we are currently winding down an era of low hope and—he and I both believe—entering into a more optimistically oriented one.

Sixty years ago, in his now famous “Ripple of Hope” speech, Robert F. Kennedy described a bit of what we are experiencing today:

There is a Chinese curse which says, “May he live in interesting times.” Like it or not, we live in interesting times. They are times of danger and uncertainty, but they are also the most creative of any time in the history of mankind.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, hope isn’t out of our control—it’s something we have far more influence over than most of us imagine. As I’ve come to understand over the years, hope is not a feeling; rather, it’s both a choice we make and an action we take. As the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, “Hope is the belief that, together, we can make the world better.” I can say without hesitation that I hold this belief—and, as a result, I regularly make the choice to be hopeful and to work every day to turn that hope into a reality. My life is far, far better for it. 

Interestingly, it wasn’t until my fourth book on leadership—The Power of Beliefs in Business—and many years of teaching through ZingTrain that I had even an inkling of how vital hope is in making what we do possible. My naivete on the subject was not, I now realize, uncommon, so I was fortunate that hope happened to come calling. For whatever reason, it seems I was ready to receive the message. 

My personal journey with hope calls to mind the Nobel Prize–winning Peruvian writer Maria Vargas Llosa, who shared in a 1990 conversation with The Paris Review: 

As far as I’m concerned, I believe the subject chooses the writer. I’ve always had the feeling that certain stories imposed themselves on me; I couldn’t ignore them, because in some obscure way, they related to some kind of fundamental experience.

Vargas Llosa’s statement makes me smile. For a long time, I labored under the widely held assumption that the writer would, of course, be in charge: authors determine what they’re going to do, and the essays, novels, poems, and plays they produce follow suit accordingly. The truth of the matter, though, is that it’s impossible to really know. Did I decide to study hope—or did hope quietly find me when I wasn’t even looking for it? 

If, for the moment, we run with Vargas Llosa’s intriguing idea, then it was my good luck that hope—like humility, democracy, dignity, beliefs, and other concepts now close to my heart—had the generous consideration to choose me. Which means I carry the responsibility to spread the word—to teach and practice, as best I can, all the positive things that having hope makes possible. I’ve written far more about this topic in Secrets #44 and #45 in The Power of Beliefs in Business. What follows here is a briefer application of the key elements of that learning, updated for 2026.

One of the first things I discovered after hope called my name is that, without it, very little good happens in the world. As obvious as this may sound, it’s unfortunately not broadly understood. In the metaphorical organizational ecosystem model I’ve been working on for many years now, hope is akin to the sun. It’s essential to good living and good loving of any sort. And though it tends to get minimal attention in many contexts, what I’ve learned—and continue to learn—tells me that it should be the exact opposite. Hope is a subject we should be teaching to every six-year-old. We all need it, and we can all do it; there is nothing to lose and so much to gain. There is really no reason I can come up with not to make the active building of hope a fundamental part of our organizational activity.

In the trying times in which we find ourselves, hope becomes all the more critical to our existence. Headlines bounce back and forth, commentators speculate, and most people simply go about their daily lives without reflecting on hope one way or the other. And gradually, lacking the active engagement it requires, hope dims. Yet it does not, as I’ve learned over the last 10 years or so, have to be that way. We can, with a relatively small amount of effort, make hope a high priority. History professor Ruth Ben Ghiat, a global expert on authoritarianism, makes a strong case for action: 

Hope is an essential part of anti-authoritarian strategy. It is the antidote to a deadly fatalism, to what Eric K. Ward calls the Other Big Lie: “The idea that we have already lost. … That we are helpless and hopeless in the face of all the bad news.”

Having studied it, written about it, and practiced it extensively for more than a decade, I know firsthand that higher levels of hope lead to greater resilience, more openness to change, stronger collaboration, better health, and increased happiness. So, given that it truly costs nothing, helping to make hope happen would seem to be the way that any effective leader—or, for that matter, any engaged person—would want to go.

As has been true with my work around regenerative study, I learn more about hope with each passing year. And the most inspiring example I’ve found of late comes from a wholly unexpected source: the early-20th-century Chinese scholar Lu Xun (pronounced “Loo SHWUN”). Born Zhou Shuren in September 1881 to an impoverished scholarly-gentry family in Shaoxing—a city famed for its amber rice wine and located near Hangzhou, home of Dragon Well tea—Lu Xun is widely regarded as the founder of modern Chinese literature. 

Looking back on his life’s work, I see that Lu Xun actively studied Chinese history, not just for the sake of knowing it, but rather with an eye to building a positive future on its foundation. In the spirit of Henry Giroux’s remarks about memory, he wrote in a 1906 essay, “There is no achievement of today that is not tied to the heritage of the past.” Like many writers in our own tumultuous time, he dealt with a great deal of social upheaval, as China made the challenging transition from ancient autocratic kingdom to modern nation-state. After the last empire fell in 1912, Lu Xun told the American journalist Edgar Snow, “Before the revolution we were slaves. And now we are the slaves of ex-slaves.” Snow, who saw the country as his “second home,” valued Xun’s work enormously, calling him the “key that taught me to understand China.”

Lu Xun was one of the first Chinese authors of his era to actively engage in political protest through his writing. His intellectual horizons had been expanded by his experience studying medicine in Japan and his wide exposure to Western literature, including English, German, and Russian authors. In 1918, inspired by the work of the Ukrainian-born Russian writer Nikolai Gogol, Lu Xun published the essay “Diary of a Madman” in a progressive Chinese journal called New Youth that promoted individual freedom, democracy, women’s rights, egalitarianism, and a down-to-earth approach to literature. Later, in 1930, he became a leader of the League of Left-Wing Writers, working tirelessly to combat oppression. Lu Xun argued that “whatever a revolutionary person writes is revolutionary literature”—making his long list of writings just that. He was greatly loved by China’s artistic community, and when he died of an asthma attack in 1936 at the age of 55, over 7,000 people marched in his funeral procession. 

Throughout his writing life, Lu Xun regularly challenged the status quo, examining things that often went unquestioned and opening people’s minds to new ways of seeing. He used his work to illuminate what was going on around him, advocating for change with his pen. Lu Xun belonged to a movement of artists who pushed back against authoritarianism and fought for dignity, hope, and human rights. He was a radical in many ways, from embracing anarchist beliefs to being the first writer in Chinese history to publish his love letters. As Andrew Higgins wrote in The New York Times last month, 

Lu Xun made his name a century ago as a coruscating critic of traditional Confucian culture, foreign bullying and the grandiose pieties of Chinese despots old and new.

Lu Xun’s grandson, Zhou Lingfei, told the Times that his grandfather’s “aim was to help the Chinese people stand up and rise above their circumstances, not to blindly copy the West or pander to prejudice.” 

Hope, of course, underlies all of Lu Xun’s proactive work to make the world, and Chinese society, a better place. And while many people today have pulled back from such commitment, he shows us that it’s only our efforts that will make hope happen. The absence of hope, Lu Xun understood, creates indifference—what he called “shouting into an abyss,” which “generates … a peculiar hollow sense of desolation.” In a 1921 short story entitled “My Old Home,” he wrote,

… hope cannot be said to exist, nor can it be said not to exist. It is just like roads across the earth. For actually the earth had no roads to begin with, but when many men pass one way, a road is made.

As fraught as the global situation might seem these days, Lu Xun’s wise words are a powerful reminder—for me, for you, for anyone—that our collective dedication to building hope is what will make it so. And this is my call to all of us to amp up and ramp up an ever-more-hopeful reality. The more hope we create together, the more positive outcomes are almost certain to emerge. 

Progressive business writer Carol Sanford, whose thought-provoking books and essays in the first quarter of the 21st century in many ways parallel Lu Xun’s in the first quarter of the 20th, writes extensively about what it means to be an effective regenerative leader. Hope, as you might guess, is an integral component. In The Regenerative Life, Sanford explains: 

The role’s core value is to make hope possible. Hope becomes the ability to see another’s path or possibility when the path we are on becomes closed. Hope dies when we can see no way out or forward. This is because it is a core aspect of what it means to be human. We all want to have an effect on our worlds and to change what we see needs changing.

One of the many beautiful things I’ve learned from studying—and striving to embody—hope is that we can all contribute to this work in small but mighty and meaningful ways. In the words of Lu Xun, “When many men pass one way, a road is made.” I invite you to join me on the road to hope, and a more positive future for everyone.

Having spent so many years working with ZingTrain’s Maggie Bayless, I’ve seen how important it is to take lofty concepts, like hope, and turn them into practical, teachable, and repeatable action steps. Accordingly, “Secret #45: A Six-Pointed Hope Star” offers a simple, approachable framework that anyone interested can put into practice! The six “points of the star” are what we need to do to raise hope—in our colleagues, our children, our fellow citizens, and ourselves.

The Six-Pointed Hope Star: An Ode to Solar Power for the Soul

1. Shine light on more positive futures. The emphasis here is on the plural. People with higher hope generally can see more than one positive future in front of them. Folks with lower hope, by contrast, usually see only one—and if/when that future falls apart, they tend to give up.
2. Support people seeking multiple routes to get there. Again, the focus is on having a number of different paths by which we might attain the future we hope for. Individuals with only a single path to get where they want to go are far more likely to become disappointed and give up hope when that path doesn’t play out positively. 
3. Show people how much they matter for who they are, unrelated though that may be to their jobs. This one is very commonly missed within the modern workplace, where, in the face of industry and technology, individual humans are often made to feel irrelevant. High hope leans in the other direction, toward a (work) world where everyone matters.
4. Help people see how much their work matters. People who do pointless work lose purpose and, over time, also lose hope. When we know that our work makes a meaningfully positive difference, our hope levels rise. 
5. Show off the small steps. Big successes nearly always start small. Lower-hope individuals tend to wait for the “home run” that never comes, while higher-hope folks understand that it’s a series of small victories strung together over a long period that lead to rewarding results. 
6. Show them the larger whole of which they’re a part. Everyone wants to be part of something greater than themselves. This is one of the key components that makes any thriving organization what it is. 

All six of these, I’ll point out, add up to create the scenario for which Lu Xun advocated: many people pushing forward caringly toward positive outcomes to inspire hope. As he believed, momentum builds over time. And it strikes me that Lu Xun’s writings essentially fulfilled the six elements of the Hope Star for a Chinese populace struggling to get its sociopolitical footing during turbulent times in the early decades of the 20th century. 

My challenge to myself, from the day I began exploring all this, was to do my best to apply the six points of the Hope Star for everyone I work with. I have not, I know, gotten it right every day. But it does give me a framework to aspire toward, one that’s easily tracked and, with rigor, relatively easily implemented. Don’t get me wrong—it takes work to make it happen—but at the end of the day, the effort is well worth it. Writer and activist Gloria Steinem made a related point in a commencement speech at Wesleyan back in 2022: “Hope is a form of planning. … [J]ust remember that what you do every day matters—what you say, what you encourage, what you oppose, what you imagine …”

If you’d like another take on how to make hope happen, here’s some wisdom from the Marginalian’s Maria Popova:

Along the way of life, I have discovered three things you can almost always do in your darkest hour that almost never fail to recover the light:

Learn something.

Help someone.

Feel it all.

These three practices also, I believe, build a road of hope!

And again, if there were ever a time for fostering hope, this is it. Hope is, without question, an effective antidote for autocracy. As Ruth Ben Ghiat writes, 

Authoritarianism breeds fear, through the use of state repression, but also cynicism that can shade into nihilism. If nothing matters, and nothing will ever change, then far fewer people will be willing to risk everything to fight for a more just society. It is easier to submit, whether that means staying silent about the persecution of your compatriots or about negligent state policies that result in mass death.

Authoritarian leaders are pushing for the “re-education of Americans to put aside hope and accept the status quo,” she adds, evoking what the late, great University of Michigan psychologist Chris Peterson came to call “learned helplessness.” People are trained to prefer passivity, to wait for the autocrat to announce “brilliant” next steps. Here in the ZCoB (Zingerman’s Community of Businesses), we have long worked to go in the opposite direction—to create an organization in which everyone learns to act like a leader, to think for themselves, and to challenge the status quo where they feel it’s appropriate. Hope, as Ben Ghiat observes, is a prerequisite for making this happen—“an essential part of anti-authoritarian strategy.” Or, as social worker Paul Shattuck puts it, “When hopelessness is a form of oppression fabricated and promoted by those in power, choosing hope is a radical act of resistance and rebellion.”

To be clear, having hope does not mean embracing the idea, to quote writer Rebecca Solnit, “that everything was, or will be, fine.” Rather, hope’s power lies in its embrace of openness and possibility, and in the willingness to do the work to make that possibility come alive. This is, I see now, what Lu Xun devoted his own life’s work to. In her book Hope in the Dark, Solnit writes:

Hope locates itself in the premise that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes. … It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand.

John Patrick Weiss, a former police chief turned writer, noted in a recent piece for The Good Men Project that “wounded children become broken adults.” Conversely, of course, hopeful children are much likelier to become hopeful adults. So it seems clear that the more we teach hope and how to build it—to our young people, to our staffs—the better it will be for everyone. After all, hope is the natural state in which we as humans thrive. As Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once remarked, “You can cut all the flowers, but you cannot keep spring from coming.”

Another figure who has done a great deal of work on hope is public-interest lawyer Bryan Stevenson, founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization based in Montgomery, Alabama. His episode of the On Being podcast is one I’ve listened to and learned from many times now. Stevenson says on the show,

I am persuaded that hopelessness is the enemy of justice; that if we allow ourselves to become hopeless, we become part of the problem. … And if I’ve inherited anything from the generation who came before me, I have inherited their wisdom about the necessity of hope.

One of Stevenson’s suggestions for sparking hope is to “get proximate.” And if we apply the six elements of the Hope Star in every direction, we do just that. He adds,

I think hope is our superpower. Hope is the thing that gets you to stand up when others say, “Sit down.” It’s the thing that gets you to speak when others say, “Be quiet.” I never met a lawyer until I got to Harvard Law School. I had the hope I could be something I’d actually never seen anybody like me be. We built [the Legacy Museum] and [the National Memorial for Peace and Justice]—I didn’t know anything about museums and memorials, but I had this kind of idea that we could create a space that might be a truth-telling space that might help people reckon with this past. And because we had this hope—even starting an organization like [the Equal Justice Initiative] in a place like [Montgomery], it didn’t make sense if there wasn’t a hope dynamic pushing you.

And I think we have to have that. I get worried when I meet hopeless teachers or hopeless lawyers or hopeless politicians or hopeless advocates. Those are people who are not going to help us advance justice in the world.

It’s abundantly evident to me that hope is a crucial component in improving our companies, our communities, and our countries—in fact, it’s a necessity. As writer bell hooks has it, “Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.” In other words, if we want to make the world better, we need to have hope! Rebecca Solnit observes that while America as a nation claims many positive attributes, nevertheless “we’re poor in hope.” Ironically, this shortage can be corrected at no financial cost, and with comparatively little effort. The six elements of the Hope Star offer just what we need to make it happen—no need for government grants, no need for new leadership in Washington, no need to wait for anyone else to get going. We can just do it! 

In that spirit, organizer and educator Mariame Kaba offers some inspiring words on transforming hope into a daily reality: 

… [W]hen I would feel overwhelmed by what was going on in the world, I would just say to myself: “Hope is a discipline.” It’s less about “how you feel,” and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other … It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not like a fuzzy feeling. Like, you have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible to change the world.

I’m reminded of the power of history—and the continuum of activism—when Swedish environmentalist Greta Thunberg, who turned 23 this year, shares much the same set of beliefs about hope that Lu Xun did more than a century ago: 

Once we start to act, hope is everywhere. So instead of looking for hope, look for action. Then, and only then, hope will come. 

In the coming days, weeks, and months, I will redouble my own efforts to make hope happen within our organization and our community. The more we work on this together, the better the road we will build. 

Have some hope

P.S. In last week’s e-news, I wrote about—and included a photo of—the strange building demolition (or, as I saw it, art installation) on a main Ann Arbor thoroughfare not far from the Bakehouse. I drove past again a few days ago. It’s gone. 

P.P.S. One of the best ways I know to build hope is to share all these learnings more widely. To that end, Jenny Tubbs at Zingerman’s Press put together this terrific “Hope Booster Box.” If you’re looking for a good gift for Father’s Day or any other occasion, check it out!

A coming together of Ashkenazi and Sephardic culinary traditions

With the holiday of Shavuot coming up in a few weeks, I’ve had the Jewish tradition of eating dairy foods and fish on my mind. I’m not sure exactly what led me to put this powerfully tasty combo together now, but I’m glad I did—it’s delicious!

Like most things I enjoy making, this one’s super simple. It reflects both the cuisine of the Sephardic Jewish Mediterranean and the foods of the Ashkenazi Jewish community of Northern and Eastern Europe. 

To make it, I started with one of the Bakehouse’s lovely Sesame Street Bagels, but take your pick; they’ll all be good. Toast until golden brown, then drizzle generously with one of our more delicate extra virgin olive oils—I’ve long loved the ROI oil from the Boeri family in the region of Liguria, the Italian Riviera. 

Spread some room-temperature world-class Zingerman’s Cream Cheese on the still-warm bagel. Lay on some really good anchovies—as many as you like. I used the outstanding ones we get from Ortiz, from the Cantabrian Sea off the north coast of the Spanish Basque Country. I also love the anchovies from Fishwife, which hail from Spain as well but via California. 

Grind on fresh black pepper and add any more vegetables you want: the pipparras pickled peppers from Spain, a couple of tomato slivers in season.

The warmth of the toasted bagel softens the cream cheese, and the creaminess of the cheese contrasts beautifully with the salty, meaty, umami tang of the anchovies. And when I think about it all culturally, I love that it’s a great coming together of the two main streams of Jewish culture in exile: the olive oil, anchovies, and herbs or capers from the Sephardic tradition, and the bagel and cream cheese from the Ashkenazi!

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Learning to lean in and muster more resilient leadership

Last week, I wrote about how a random connection to a cover version of a 30-year-old Nirvana song led me to explore and learn from the life and work of the extraordinary musician and artist Abe Partridge. Had I clicked on a different song that day, the whole thing would have turned out entirely differently. 

With this week’s topic, it’s the total opposite. I didn’t stumble upon the recent Supreme Court decision on the Voting Rights Act and Louisiana by accident; to the contrary, I was watching the case closely. Even if it might have been nice to be able to tune it out, what was at stake is enormous, and my desire for denial is nowhere near that strong. It’s an issue that’s close to my heart and, I believe, of huge ethical import to the health of the country. All of which means that when the Supreme Court ruled as it did, I, like many people I know, found the word “setback” at the forefront of my mind. It did not go away the next day. In fact, the more I thought about the situation, the louder the voice in my head kept blaring, “SETBACK!”

Again, I’m far from the only one who sees it this way. On May 3, the L.A. Times headline got straight to the point:

After Voting Rights Act setback, Black Americans brace for a renewed fight

The Packard Foundation’s headline was equally dire: 

U.S. Supreme Court Ruling Is a Devastating Setback for Voting Rights

And the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center observed: 

A 6-3 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Callais has eviscerated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and opened the door for states to enact discriminatory voting maps and laws.

This decision—which contradicts the text of the Voting Rights Act, the will of Congress and the Constitution—is one of the most consequential setbacks for our multiracial democracy in a generation.  

For six decades, the VRA has served as the backbone of federal protections against racial discrimination in our elections—an essential guardrail ensuring that every American, regardless of race, has a meaningful opportunity to participate in the political process.

These statements are, I know, reflective of my own personal beliefs. But given that we at Zingerman’s have openly, freely, and passionately committed to the project of working toward an ever more diverse organization and community (it’s written into our 2032 Vision, among other documents—email me if you’d like a copy), it would be pretty much impossible for me not to see this ruling as a massive step backward, as those headlines indicate. 

So what do we do when faced with a significant setback? After all, we don’t need the Supreme Court in order to encounter one; barely a day passes without setbacks of some sort showing up at our doorstep. Having reflected on all this in recent days and weeks, I think it’s quite clear that the people who do the best in any organization are those who are most adept at handling the setbacks—both large and small—that come their way. Positive psychologist Seph Fontane Pennock writes,

Whether [your] goals stem from desires for fitness, entrepreneurship, or some other domain, they all have one thing in common: a road paved with uncertainty, sacrifice, and setbacks. As such, it is key that you learn to foster a sense of resilience within yourself to ensure you overcome these setbacks to aid your rise to greatness.

Indeed, as monumental and overwhelming as the current national malaise feels, I keep bringing myself back to the wisdom of psychologist and author Angela Duckworth, who says in her groundbreaking book Grit, “Do not let temporary setbacks become permanent excuses.” Whether it’s destructive, despair-evoking Supreme Court decisions or—on a much less consequential scale—food orders that don’t show up, setbacks are inevitable when you’re trying to build a regenerative organization or get a great meal on the table for a party of 10. Yes, there’s a lot we can do to try to avoid them: teaching everyone to think like a leader, open-book management, helping people learn visioning, developing new forms of democratic governance. Nevertheless, setbacks will continue to arise. And to Duckworth’s well-taken point, the feelings of frustration that they provoke are fully reasonable and understandable. What we do next, though, is up to us. As she writes,

Everyone gets discouraged. Everyone cries, sometimes. But some of us cross the Rubicon. When we do, we can say without reservation: Setbacks don’t discourage me for long.

Which explains, in part, why Duckworth is who she is: a remarkable and important—if openly imperfect—writer and teacher who has contributed greatly to the quality of life of thousands of students and readers around the world. She’s a major 21st-century philosopher whom I am grateful to call a friend (I’ll be speaking at her Wharton class next winter), someone who can give a globally recognized TED Talk while still speaking openly about her own anxieties and uncertainties, and a person who is now skilled at overcoming setbacks—and who, through her brilliant work, is helping others (like me) surmount ours as well.   

It’s critical to keep in mind that how we view our setbacks—how we frame them—can make all the difference. Writer Rebecca Solnit has said that trying to decide where a story begins is like dipping a cup in the ocean. Similarly, my friend Gareth Higgins, the Irish author, taught me that “you never know where a story will end, especially when you’re in it.” In other words, the way we center a setback in our own history will vastly alter its impact. We have the power to turn setbacks into normal and expected—if also still sometimes frustrating and frightening—aspects of our personal and organizational constructs. 

The late British sculptor Phyllida Barlow made setbacks an essential part of her art, saying, 

I am interested in the cycle of damage and repair. There is something about that edge where those two things coexist: damage and repair. And nature gives evidence to that in extraordinary ways where you see the rotting tree, but you also see the new green shoots springing out of it. … In the collapse of a monument, there is a tragedy, a triumph, a beauty, and also an immense grief. The monument has this extraordinary range of emotive qualities.

I love Barlow’s notion of existing at the confluence of collapse and rebirth. By chance, I just happened to catch sight of a real-life example of this phenomenon right here in Ann Arbor. The other day, I was driving from my house to the Bakehouse; it’s a route I take at least 10 to 20 times a week, so it’s easy for me to make the 12-minute drive on autopilot. I was about 80% of the way to the Bakehouse when I came over a slight ridge in the road and—whoa—on the left was something that made me think one of Phyllida Barlow’s followers had come to town to do some serious large-scale sculpture. At first, I thought I was seeing an art installation of a half-torn-down house. But when I looked closer, it was actually a building, Wolverine Tower, partway through the process of being demolished (as shown in the photo up top). Creative art or collapsed ruin—as Barlow suggests, the two don’t actually appear all that different. It’s our own beliefs, vision, and values that shift the equation.

Along these same lines, the Belgian artist Erik Pevernagie writes about failure—another version of collapse and setback—as a source of positive potential in the notes for his painting The freedom of new thinking:

Through the freedom of new thinking, we can transcend boundaries and break down cultural, social, or intellectual barriers. It even lets our failure be seen as a stepping stone to success rather than a setback.

The most powerful art does often seem to emerge from the artist’s willingness and ability to remake their personal hardship into work that resonates with and inspires others. This, I think, is a lot of what hit me so hard about the music of Abe Partridge, who left the Baptist ministry and “lost his mind” before embarking on his creative journey.  

So what, then, can we do to increase the odds of transforming our own setbacks—of which there will undoubtedly be plenty—into successes? The late longtime San Francisco 49ers head coach Bill Walsh writes in his leadership book The Score Takes Care of Itself: 

When you stand and overcome a significant setback, you’ll find an increasing inner confidence and self-assurance that has been created by conquering defeat. Absorbing and overcoming this kind of punishment engenders a sober, steely toughness that results in a hardened sense of independence and a personal belief that you can take on anything, survive and win.

This is the quality that Angela Duckworth calls “grit.” As I mentioned, Duckworth’s ideas have had a big influence on me, on the culture of the ZCoB, and on the world of work at large. She writes: 

Grit is passion and perseverance for long-term goals.

One way to think about grit is to consider what grit isn’t.

Grit isn’t talent. Grit isn’t luck. Grit isn’t how intensely, for the moment, you want something.

Instead, grit is about having what some researchers call an “ultimate concern”—a goal you care about so much that it organizes and gives meaning to almost everything you do. And grit is holding steadfast to that goal. Even when you fall down. Even when you screw up. Even when progress toward that goal is halting or slow.

It seems fairly evident to me that anyone who possesses grit, as Duckworth describes it, is likely to do well when dealing with setbacks. Those who lack it, on the other hand, may struggle mightily. Which isn’t to say that there’s anything wrong with feeling down when we find ourselves facing a setback. As Duckworth explains, this is universal: 

Don’t think that gritty people never feel discouraged.

Do use times of doubt as an opportunity to consider what you truly want and believe. 

In a sense, we at Zingerman’s know these things already, as an ecosystem whose members have, both individually and collectively, become quite adept at handling setbacks. Here are some of the ways I believe we work to achieve this:

Teach and practice visioning. When we know where we’re going—and when that destination is a goal we consciously chose and committed to, and genuinely believe in—it’s much more likely that we can stay the course when we falter. 

Build connections, both across the organization and outside it. People who feel isolated have a much harder time dealing with setbacks. Connections support us in staying calmer and more focused, and make us better able to get ourselves back on track. 

Teach beliefs. The Belief Cycle framework helps folks to process things in much more positive ways. It’s a stumble, not a surrender.

Teach hope. This allows us to see multiple possible paths toward our desired outcome.

Have open meetings. Let staff see the struggles we have as leaders, to normalize them as part of leadership!

Be vulnerable. Show others that we have doubts and pain, and own those feelings. This is so much of what recently drew me to Abe Partridge’s work. When he started painting and playing music professionally, he opened himself up in amazing—and meaningfully effective—ways. From the stage, Partridge began to reach out as he never had previously: “I played, in front of 7,000 people, songs that I wrote in the darkest part of my life.” 

On a related note, Angela Duckworth shares, 

I make a point to tell undergraduates that I go to therapy, was lonely, cried a river. … We are not invincible people … we are human beings, and it is okay to tell people when you are not okay.

Build emotional resilience. The more that new staff can see leaders in the organization model the sort of resilience we’re after, the more likely they are to practice it, too. Greater resilience always leads to better handling of setbacks when they occur. We start this teaching early on—see “Secret #49: Why (Paul or) I Still Teach Orientation for New Staff Members.”

Build patience into the culture. Patience is one of the most important assets for overcoming roadblocks. For example, as the heirloom bean folks at Rancho Gordo in California explain: 

A lot of us who cook also garden, and as spring arrives, there’s this funny pressure to hurry up and get things into the ground. It’s anecdotal, but one year we didn’t get our seeds in until almost July. We thought we’d roll the dice and see what happened, but we were prepared for losses because we were so late. Guess what? When the soil is ready, magic happens.

Lean into the inner life of our ecosystem. This is about training ourselves not to force things or “make something happen” when the greater ecosystem in which we’re working is not yet ready. We even see a version of this dynamic play out in the natural world, when industry attempts to impose its will on the land. As photographer and regenerative expert Camrin Dengel observes,

Many land stewards across rural America are rising up. They are collectively pushing back against extreme industrialization and fighting for the survival of rural economies. Working with the land, rather than presiding over it, has become its own form of resistance.

Embrace the ritual of the routines we depend on. Without the foundation of our working routines, it’s almost impossible to create the kind of stability, continuity, and long-term commitment we need to turn setbacks into ultimately positive contributors to organizational health. Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, says,

Treat the boring task as a ritual, alive with aesthetic nuance and a welcome respite from the clamor of thinking. Find your own contemplative practice.

While the above approaches are part of what we do at Zingerman’s, author and speaker Amy Shoenthal has developed her own effective four-part cycle for managing setbacks:

Establish. What was the setback that happened?
Embrace. Make peace with the challenge.
Explore. Why did the setback occur? What could we have done differently? What are others doing?
Emerge. Where will we go from here?

Shoenthal’s formula provides a simple but valuable framework—one that today’s young people might especially benefit from adopting.

Like all things, how we respond in such moments is, of course, shaped enormously by what we learn as kids. In a recent essay in The Atlantic provocatively titled “Let Your Kids Fail,” Russell Shaw, head of school at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C., writes, “Too many parents, probably unwittingly, are conditioning their kids to be afraid of losing. But experiencing failure and learning to recover from it are prerequisites for long-term success and, crucially, for mental health.” Shaw is suggesting here that we would be wise to work to develop a sort of “setback immunity” in our children:

I’ve come to believe that failure works in a comparable way—that it is in a child’s best interest to be exposed early to manageable setbacks, so they can develop what we might call “failure immunity,” the psychological antibodies that allow them to face future disappointments without falling apart. This requires practice—specifically, practice at encountering obstacles and pushing through them. You can’t develop perseverance if you’ve never had to persevere.

And Shaw reminds us that this effort starts with us as parents or leaders: if we don’t model this perseverance, and stay open about what we’re grappling with, we’re going to have a hard time getting the young people around us to cultivate it.

To pivot slightly: David Lorimer once wrote a beautiful piece about the late Irish poet and philosopher John Moriarty. In it, he describes how Moriarty became increasingly convinced that, as the world evolves, “[t]he next big revolution in science … will be epistemological. That is, it will entail the very notion of knowledge itself, of how we know.” I believe this epistemological revolution could also include how, fundamentally, we think about setbacks. Rather than blaming ourselves or others when things go awry—rather than falling apart or giving up—we’d undergo a revolution in our heads and hearts that would allow us to see setbacks as golden opportunities for learning and growth.

Or, well—if you want to take a pass on all that—one can always write a poem. That’s right: when setbacks have us feeling out of sorts, poetry is another terrific tool to help us step back, look through a different lens, and see the scenario in a fresh light. In his lovely introduction to collagist Keith Waldrop’s book Light While There Is Light, poet and novelist Ben Lerner leans into the import of poetry in difficult situations—like when we suddenly find ourselves facing a setback and are totally unsure of how to move forward. He quotes Wallace Stevens, who pointed out that “[p]oetry is a means of redemption.”

All of which challenged and inspired me to sit down to try to write a poem about setbacks! I make no claims to poetic excellence—only to what I’ve been learning from my poetic collaboration with Michael Dickman: that the point isn’t to get into the poetry hall of fame; it’s to increase understanding, to open new doors, to push pause and start to see things in new ways. It’s way more important, I’ve learned, to write poetry than it is to be right. And it seems Keith Waldrop took much the same approach: Lerner shares that, as a professor, Waldrop “pretty much gave everybody an A.” You know what? It works. Here’s the poem I wrote to help me handle the national setback that’s been so prominent in the news over the last few weeks:

“Positive Poetic Setback: Spring 2026”

It’s not, I suppose, a surprise.
When I say it aloud,
Might as well be proud.

Setbacks suck

Still, I can’t, I won’t,
     I definitely don’t.
          Let them stop me in my tracks.
          Setbacks are significant.
          But they are not legitimate cause to claim, “I can’t do it.” 

Setbacks … It’s like the Stooges sang circa 1969
“No Fun, My Babe, No Fun!” 

We lose our footing, breathing isn’t easy;
     The world seems awhirl.
     But still, setbacks are not defeat.

So sit back
     Sit up
          Sit straight.
               Breathe deep

Get centered.
     Lean in.

Get back on track
     Set the setback aside, for a collage that’s yet to come.

Breathe deep. Reread your vision. Or, better still, sit down and write one.
     Reflect, redirect?

Timothy Snyder, historian, Yale, recently removed to Toronto, says
“The politics of inevitability is a self-induced intellectual coma.”

     That we go that way,
     Though,
     is anything but inevitable.

When it comes down to it, still, we get to choose
Setbacks can slow us down, but
Inevitability is not inevitable.
And we can, I’m confident, do better.

So, setback? Sure?
Stop?
No way. I know. We have more to do.

Breathe deep. Double down.
Ready. Set. Back up off the ground. Get going.

Finally—to come full circle—I’ve had music on my mind ever since writing last week’s piece on Abe Partridge. And this week, I got caught up in a cryptic, ancient-sounding set of instructions for how to build one’s own musical instrument, from the liner notes for South African dark folk band Inekt’s new album, Hálgrem. It struck me as a great metaphor for creating the kind of organization we believe in—an organization that’s true to its essence, that brings beauty to staff and customers alike, that helps today but is built to last well into the future. An organization where setbacks happen, but where determination, resilience, and resolve overcome obstacles every day: 

Do not carve the frame in haste, for the body will remember the hand that shaped it. Take wood that has listened long to wind and shadow, and bend it gently, as one persuades rather than commands. When the hollow is made, stretch the skin across its face while it yet holds a breath of life, for dead hide lies silent, but living skin will answer when called. Draw it tight, though not to pain, and bind it fast, whispering to it as it dries, lest it forget its former song. Set the neck as one joins bone to body, firm and without doubt, and thread the strings as veins laid careful, each one knowing where it must sing. Then leave it awhile in stillness, for such an instrument must come to itself, and will not suffer to be hurried. And when at last you pluck it, do so as you would greet an old companion returned from a long and troubled road—for it is not merely made, but awakened, and it will remember whether you were kind.

Naturally, I tried to dig deeper to uncover the origins of this mysterious text, but, frustratingly, I got nowhere. It was, one could say, something of a setback. No surprise, though—I’m definitely not done digging. I’m sure I will learn more.  

So if you were looking for a quick answer on how to deal with setbacks—such as the recent Supreme Court decision—I admit this essay is not that. It is, though, an invitation to reach out—to me, to others, to folks who can offer insight and support on the questions that matter most: how we build our organizational ecosystems. How we train ourselves to handle setbacks with grace. How we go forward, owning the struggles but not getting stuck in them. Our communities will remember if we’ve been kind, and people will absolutely notice the difference.

When we struggle and slip into deep self-doubt, we shift all the energy in the room—down and out, and not for the better. But when we’re able to rebound effectively, positive outcomes can emerge. Every time a setback plucks at our heartstrings, think of it as if we’re about to “greet an old companion returned from a long and troubled road.” And while setbacks surely do still suck, they don’t need to stop us in our tracks. As Southern California writer Eleanor Brownn puts it,

A comeback is a setback that did its homework, learned the lesson, and then moved forward.

Just last week, Brownn posted this clip of Lyndon Johnson’s last recorded interview—done 10 days before his death in 1973—in which he reflects on his work to get the Civil Rights Act passed in the 1960s. Johnson experienced many setbacks during that arduous battle, but he also knew that they were not the end. There is also, per Keith Waldrop, light while there is light. 

Last night, the wisteria in our backyard—a plant that represents longevity, romance, good luck, and resilience—bloomed in an abundance we have never seen in 25 years of living in the house. 

There is hope. In Brownn’s words, “Walk gently and be brave.”  

A meal that’s easy to make at home in a matter of minutes

I probably shouldn’t be surprised anymore that the best ideas so often start out as silly jokes. The Pimentuna casserole began about a decade ago with a bit of light culinary humor and ended up as a classically delicious, go-to, make-at-home Zingerman’s dish.

The whole thing started when my significant other, Tammie Gilfoyle, had the good idea to mix our Zingerman’s Pimento Cheese with tuna. I tried it, and she was right: it was terrific. This grew into the highly popular Pimentuna melt sandwich that ran as a special at the Roadhouse for a while, grilled on one of my Bakehouse favorites, Roadhouse Bread. 

Making Pimentuna really couldn’t be much easier. Start with a container of Zingerman’s Pimento Cheese, and mix it with roughly the same volume of really good tuna. You can adjust the ratio, of course, to fit your taste. Add salt and pepper as you like, and you’re ready to go. Enjoy it in a sandwich or as a salad!

A year or so after all that, we were still joking around—this time with the notion that we ought to turn our new mix into a Pimentuna casserole. I would be a throwback to, and a takeoff on, the tried-and-true mid-20th-century classic. This sounded a little crazy at first, too, but then it started sounding better and better … and I decided to make it, tossing the Pimentuna with the Mancini family’s marvelous bronze die-extruded, slowly dried maccheroni.

The Roadhouse crew had the great idea to seal the deal by topping the dish with a handful of Zingerman’s Black Pepper Potato Chips to add some crunch. What can I say? Killer! Comforting, compelling, and definitely worth taking a few minutes to make for lunch!

Life lessons from an Alabama folk artist and musician

I suppose it might sound sort of silly to admit, but the truth is that this entire essay—and all the learnings contained within—emerged from the wholly unsought, completely unexpected discovery of a cover version of the classic 1993 Nirvana song “Dumb.” When I listened to it for the first time several weeks ago, I liked it—a lot. I knew nothing about the man who made it, and I had no idea whatsoever where it might lead me. But hey, for a buck, I bought it on Bandcamp. In the days that followed, I listened to the tune multiple times. I’m still listening—and learning—many weeks later. 

The creator of the cover is Alabama singer-songwriter and visual artist Abe Partridge—whom I’d never heard of until I stumbled upon the song. Now I know that the amazing artwork that accompanies his version of “Dumb” belongs to Partridge as well. I’ve begun a journey of studying his life and work, and as I dig deeper, more insights and inspiration continue to appear. I love Partridge’s music and his paintings. And as you’ll soon see, his story is a pretty darned remarkable one. 

What’s so exciting about all this? Well, for me at least, it’s incredibly heartening to remember that at any given moment, I might well happen upon some seriously good learning—and that a mentor in the making might be waiting just around the next intellectual corner. Despite the off-putting title of Nirvana’s song, keeping our mental door open to this kind of learning—learning that could light the way for us as we sort out how to live our lives every day—is actually anything but dumb. 

Like Ruth Adler Schnee, about whom I wrote a whole lot last week, Partridge has shown me how much wisdom I can glean from someone I wasn’t even aware of until recently. Whereas Adler Schnee, who passed away in January 2023, was a mentor from the past, Partridge, who is younger than I am and very much alive, illustrates that this sort of mentorship is not tied to age. Insight can come from anywhere. When I feel down, anxious, uncertain, or overwhelmed by what’s going on in the world (all of which can come up within about 18 minutes of each other), I’m lifted up by folks like Partridge and Adler Schnee—inspirational leaders who remind me of what is possible in the most positive of ways. And although figures like Partridge may not (yet) be widely known, they’re out there, telling us, in his words, “You’ve gotta put your antennae up. There’s stuff going on all around you.”

“Antennae” makes me think of outer space, and sure enough, Partridge has a song that’s a pretty perfect fit for that subject. In the chorus of his rousing “Alabama Astronauts,” he sings with courage and enthusiasm, “I’ve been waiting for those aliens to come.” He’s loaded up and ready to hold his ground! The rest of us, I believe, can stop waiting, though. Partridge is a more than suitable stand-in—a little bit of an alien, something of an “inner space” astronaut, an artist with the ability to transform his life into wonderfully weird songs and paintings. His work has had me laughing, crying, and learning all at the same time. Like that of Adler Schnee, it’s wholly unique and a reminder that any of us who put our minds to it and put in the required effort can make great things happen.

Both Partridge and Adler Schnee demonstrate how creativity can be brought to life in meaningful ways, and how one can effectively access the unique essence that is deeply ensconced in each of us. Adler Schnee did so in a cultural milieu I can pretty easily relate to—namely, formally educated, middle-class Jewish immigrant families making their way through the American Midwest in the middle of the 20th century. If someone told me my mother had met Adler Schnee, I wouldn’t have been surprised in the least.

Conversely, I’m very confident that my mother did not ever come into contact with anyone from Abe Partridge’s family, nor sit in attendance at their church. In the Northern, urban Jewish immigrant world in which I grew up, the idea of a close-knit Baptist community in Mobile, Alabama, would have been as alien as the otherworldly folks Partridge writes about. And yet I love breaking down these silos and opening up to new connections—as different as they are, learning from Adler Schnee and from Partridge is an equally deep experience! 

At the end of his song “What Good Is Art?”, Partridge sings, “What good is art if you don’t know how to use it?” He, it turns out, is quite adept at using art to produce learnings that have changed the course of his own life—and the lives of others—into an avenue for good in the world. 

It wasn’t always that way for Partridge. Here’s one version of his life story he often includes when performing his great song “No Teacher Blues”:

I grew up in Mobile, Alabama, where we moved to a new school every year.
I left Mobile when I was 18 years old to become a Baptist preacher.
I went to four different Bible colleges in four years, and I married my wife on the day I graduated.
When I was 25, I started pastoring at a little Independent Baptist church in the mountains of Kentucky.
Then, when I was 27, I lost my mind.

During this period of “losing his mind” and questioning his path in the church, Partridge encountered music he’d never known about before. As he told The Bitter Southerner:

When I was 27 was the first time I had high-speed internet. And I started hearing all sorts of music for the first time. When I heard Townes Van Zandt singing “Waiting Around to Die” when I was waiting around to die, I could totally relate. …

I started writing songs while up there losing my mind, still in the ministry, and that’s when I started painting. That’s when I started all my art. It was an avenue, a way I could get all of it out because I didn’t have anybody I could talk to. I had no friends. …

For years I just played them at home, to my wife. But then, in 2015, I decided to play them in public at a songwriting contest in Mobile. And that changed my life.

Partridge’s story does not, of course, end there. But I want to segue for a moment because it’s actually a near-ideal example of a phenomenon that ethicist and essayist David Brooks described in a 2019 New York Times Op-Ed entitled “The Moral Peril of Meritocracy”:

Many of the people I admire lead lives that have a two-mountain shape. They got out of school, began their career, started a family and identified the mountain they thought they were meant to climb—I’m going to be an entrepreneur, a doctor, a cop. They did the things society encourages us to do, like make a mark, become successful, buy a home, raise a family, pursue happiness.

For Partridge, the “first mountain” was, of course, his ultimately unsuccessful attempt to become a Baptist preacher. As Brooks explains, the first mountain is almost always some sort of significant but finally unfulfilling pursuit:

People on the first mountain spend a lot of time on reputation management. They ask: What do people think of me? Where do I rank? They’re trying to win the victories the ego enjoys.

These hustling years are also powerfully shaped by our individualistic and meritocratic culture. People operate under this assumption: I can make myself happy. If I achieve excellence, lose more weight, follow this self-improvement technique, fulfillment will follow.

While Partridge doesn’t use these exact words, the model clearly fits his trajectory. Pastoring did not work out well for him. Brooks, though, opens our minds to the second part of the story—the part that Partridge’s life illustrates so beautifully: after the despair, after the feelings of worthlessness, helplessness, and hollowness, there is still an awesome and inspiring “second mountain” for us to climb. 

This is one of the most powerful messages I take away from studying Abe Partridge’s fascinating life and art. As my friend Gareth Higgins, the Irish author and activist, taught me, “You never know when a story is over, especially when you’re in it.” So when things look grim, don’t give up—there’s a positive story still waiting to play out! For Partridge, that second mountain is the magic of painting and playing music, of being a storyteller. As Brooks writes,

In the lives of the people I’m talking about—the ones I really admire—something happened that interrupted the linear existence they had imagined for themselves. Something happened that exposed the problem with living according to individualistic, meritocratic values.

This “interruption” in Partridge’s existence came in large part from enlisting in the Air Force after leaving the ministry—and being sent to fight in Iraq. The experience changed him, and pushed him to put himself out there artistically:

I saw a lot of stuff over there that I had suspected before. But when you’re looking at it right square in the eye, and you see the B-2s [the stealth bombers], and you see six of them in this 12-hour shift come and go and come and go, I realized that basically, the only thing I had ever done with my adult life was brought negativity into the world through the type of preaching I did, and bring violence into the world through the military. …

In the meantime, I was making this art: I was writing these songs, and I was painting these pictures, and I told God that if He’d just let me get home, that I would do my best to try to bring beauty into the world.

The war, it seems, was one of the last low points in the valley before Partridge began to climb the second mountain. He put the pain of this ordeal into a bracing song called “Undisclosed Location in Southwest Asia Killing Floor Blues.” 

Each of us, of course, has our own personal version of life in the wilderness before the second mountain. I describe my own period of struggle, and the accompanying emotional challenges I faced, in Zingerman’s Guide to Good Leading, Part 3: A Lapsed Anarchist’s Approach to Managing Ourselves. In many ways, those were the hardest years of my life. But it’s also clear to me now that without that struggle—and the deep reflection and learning that emerged from it—I would not be who I am today, doing what I do the way I do it. I see a strong parallel in Partridge’s story, as expressed in his artist statement:

When I was 27 years old, I became acquainted with a horrible depression. I left the ministry and turned to Art. I had written songs and made paintings like these for years. Only after joining the military and going to war did I decide to begin sharing my art with the world. I never took a songwriting class, nor have I ever had an art class. I always just thought I was weird …

Partridge effectively figured out how to turn his strangeness into specialness—to use art to, as he says, convert “what was really chaotic into something that was really beautiful.” And that, I suppose, is one of my key takeaways from all this as well. Why? Because any of us can learn to do it. No matter the form it takes, making art—or, indeed, doing anything creative—can have the same transformative effect for any of us who are willing to work at it, and to do the kind of self-reflection and reassessment that Partridge undertook. And when we create from the heart, with passion and skill put together wisely and well, the results can be truly astonishing. 

These principles from Partridge’s artist statement frame his work—and they could, for that matter, frame mine, too:

Rethink preconceived notions.
Question authority.
Create new methods of survival.
See beauty.

As much as Partridge may have struggled in life, that was only the dark before a new dawn. He found focus, purpose, connection, and passion; he discovered his vocation, and it worked out. His painting, his music, his podcast—all he does, to my eye—are disarmingly down to earth and equally excellent. And he makes his points in the process. As he exclaims partway through “No Teacher Blues,” “Somebody’s gotta stand against the mainstream.” He’s in. So am I.

Partridge is not alone in this antiestablishment position. Eve L. Ewing, a sociologist at the University of Chicago and the author of Electric Archesandthe epically stirring poem “I saw Emmett Till this week at the grocery store,” writes,

We need the arts because they make us full human beings. But we also need the arts as a protective factor against authoritarianism. In saving the arts, we save ourselves from a society where creative production is permissible only insofar as it serves the instruments of power. When the canary in the coal mine goes silent, we should be very afraid—not only because its song was so beautiful, but also because it was the only sign that we still had a chance to see daylight again.

Along similar lines, Partridge says, “To endure as an artist is my act of resistance.” So if, as I write in “The Art of Business,” everything we do is art—life and business included—then simply being true to ourselves and making the “art” that is uniquely ours is some seriously solid resistance.

As I move toward wrapping up, I want to return to the fact that my engagement with Abe Partridge—as with Ruth Adler Schnee—began completely by chance, through an accidental encounter with a cover of a Nirvana song. Life is almost always like that. Straight lines sound great, but they don’t really exist in nature. Another example of this unpredictability: I was recently reminded of the true story of a Deli line cook back in our first years in business who made a well-intentioned but not very sound decision and almost burned down our building—and who today is the beloved Episcopal bishop of a major American city! 

Strange things connect in unexpected places, paths unfold, shit happens—and the next thing you know, a random mention or a seemingly insignificant tangent turns into artistic mentorship worthy of deep reflection. Such inspiration and insight can come from anywhere: Southeast Michigan or Mobile, Alabama; the Bauhaus or a local dive bar. 

Developing this piece, I started to put together a whole new list of life lessons drawn from Abe Partridge’s life’s work. But I realized halfway through that they were pretty much the same as the dozen I detailed last week from studying Ruth Adler Schnee. Still, I’ve found over the years that there’s often great value in repeating important messages—especially ones we can go out and apply ourselves. Here, then, is a variation on last week’s learnings:

A Dozen Life Lessons Inspired by Ruth Adler Schnee, Effectively Echoed by Abe Partridge

1. Find joy. Just listen to Partridge sing or speak—he exudes joy everywhere!

2. Live your values. Don’t do work you don’t believe in.Partridge has said, “I can’t listen to the radio, dude. It just doesn’t feel like reality. It’s written by people using artificial intelligence to tell them the right words to put in a song. I’d rather listen to someone who isn’t that talented sing something they feel passionately from the heart.”

3. Go where you want, but start with what you have. This is the very definition of folk art. Partridge paints on a piece of board he’s smeared with tar pitch—can’t get much more basic than that. Simple origins, outstanding results. And when it comes to ideas, he says, “I cherish every idea because I feel like they’re gifts. They’re like a spark. … I don’t know if they’re coming from within or without.”

4. Pursue your dreams regardless of what others tell you. I can only imagine the dissonance Partridge encountered as he began to shift his life’s focus from religion to art.   

5. Don’t get caught up in limiting beliefs that society has set for “people like you.” Partridge had long been on the path to becoming one kind of person—namely, a Baptist minister—but he had the courage to depart from it to find his deeper calling as an artist. 

6. Pay attention and seek beauty. As Partridge puts it, “Beauty lies outside the rules.” And giving credit where credit is due, he adds, “I learned that from Sonic Youth.”

7. Align with essence. “I don’t put on any masks,” Partridge says. “I don’t do anything fake. I just am who I am.” In other words, he’s true to himself and his soul’s essence. 

8. Learn from the edges. When he left the pastorship, “for the first time in seven years, I was outside of that echo chamber,” Partridge explains. “I had the mental space to realize that I didn’t know everything. I didn’t have all the answers. When you’re in a belief structure like that, where everything is based on certainty, and doubt is a sin, as soon as you admit that you’re uncertain, it all comes crumbling down.” But outside that rigid structure, the edges—the periphery, the “alternative” spaces—have so much to teach us. (It’s a whole ’nother essay unto itself, but Partridge has dedicated a great deal of time and energy in recent years to documenting the rituals, beliefs, and music of the snake-handling churches of Appalachia. You can learn a lot more from his podcast, Alabama Astronauts.)

9. Push for greatness—but within your own framework, not as society defines it. Partridge may be a so-called “outsider artist,” but the art he’s making is reaching people in profound ways. If that’s not greatness, I don’t know what is. 

10. Find ways to turn your vocation into a living. This Partridge has clearly done—just check out his website to see everything he has going on. 

11. Design for both medium and means. Partridge doesn’t talk about anarchism a lot, but to me, it’s spiritually embedded in his freewheeling, freethinking work. And as he sings in the stunning “Abe Partridge’s 403d Freakout,” “I found hope in anarchy.”

12. If you love what you do, and you don’t want to stop, don’t! Partridge is just in his 40s now, but there are certainly no signs of him letting up anytime soon. When you love what you do, doing it is fun—I can absolutely relate! 

I need only listen to a few minutes of Abe Partridge’s singular music or sit with a couple of his compelling works of art to increase my personal level of hope. For me, people like Partridge are proof positive that we’re going to get to the other side of our current tenuous national situation.

The Black Mountain College artist I quoted last week, Kenneth Noland, says about making art, “You can say after the fact what you’re doing, but, believe me, you can’t project it ahead. … It’s a search … it comes out of the practice of painting, the practice of your art.” And that restless search, to my eye and ear, is exactly what Abe Partridge has spent the second part of his life committed to. Or, as he sings in “No Teacher Blues” (which, to be clear, is about how he learned to play without a teacher, not about a dislike for teachers):

 I’ll just play it like I feel it
 Let it come from soul
 Cause you don’t need no teacher
 To rock ’n’ roll

Perhaps my favorite Partridge song right now remains “What Good Is Art?” from his album Suwanee. It sort of sums up this entire essay. “They don’t teach our kids to create; they’re taught to follow the rules,” he sings. But we don’t need to take that instruction passively. Again, “Somebody’s gotta stand against the mainstream.” And the tune’s closing line brings us back to the dual personal and political value of artistic practice: “What good is art if you don’t know how to use it?”

(Oh—and if you’re curious what Partridge’s music sounds like, I can offer a whole list of folks you might consider if you were constructing a sonic collage: Vic Chesnutt, for sure, and definitely some early Bob Dylan. A little Loudon Wainwright, and some Tom Waits, too. Maybe a bit of Lou Reed here and there, and some rocking Southern band, like the Red Clay Strays or Drive-By Truckers. In Partridge’s songs, humor and pathos exist side by side. As Cracked put it, “This Dude Is Either the Funniest Folk Singer or the Most Serious Humorist I’ve Ever Seen.”)

In closing, don’t forget to keep those antennae up! Inspiration may come from a cover of a now 30-plus-year-old song, from a painting or collage or comment, from Ruth Adler Schnee or Abe Partridge—who knows where! But the last words here must, by rights, belong to Partridge, who encapsulates all I’ve written this week (and last week), and, for that matter, all I’ve endeavored to do for my whole working life. I’m fully and passionately aligned with him when he says, 

I’ll paint whatever my heart needs to paint, and I ain’t scared to say anything that my heart needs to say. If anybody says I can’t say what I feel, well, it’s not their heart in my chest, it’s mine. I just have to be true to myself.

Turn life and business into art

P.S. If you pay attention, I’ll wager that you, too, will find an unexpected mentor or two to help inspire you in the days and weeks to come. Let me know what you discover!