When I was eighteen years old, I applied to business school the same day I auditioned for a theater Academy. In Milan, as well as in my head, they were on the same street. When the time came to choose one, my dad asked me a question to help me navigate this conundrum in between two apparently unrelated paths in life.
He asked: “Do you want to be an artist? Or do you want to work with artists?”
Now, this question was not just a question. It was also a mirror for how education and society were demanding of me at the time, to find only one thing to practice, only one thing to be, and only one place to occupy in one industry when it comes to work. As if it was at all possible, or even realistic to jump in the ocean, and only swim one way, like forever.
I ended up choosing business school and having a career that led me to collaborate with a lot of great artists. But it also got me to always carrying a burning desire to be one myself.
Before launching this podcast into the world, I have been sort of an escape artist.
You know, exiting reality whenever I could to be a concealed writer, photographer, collage artist, performer, secretly trying to find my way out of this claustrophobic idea that all of this creative wealth that made me different, could only be designed as a one-way street, something that require an either/or choice to be able to be integrated and displayed in public.
To try to make sense of this, of being like an executive by day and an artist by night, I came out with a term “corporate artist”.
Giving it a brand in my head felt a little like stopping water from a running fountain. But at least it helped me accept that this fragmented, mixed, gorgeously infinite identity was something accessible to me, something I could see on the horizon and something that could make me strong, unique even, in what I could offer the world.
That even if I was not a truly, fully, and only specialised being, I was worth of value.
The life I was in, made me believe that this creative insecurity was just my status quo. It was just organic to it. But it also led me to love myself less and therefore be less capable of love and led me to experience a burnout amidst confusion about my purpose.
Until I quit that life and I was finally on that open road again, when it was time to stretch this thing beyond the either/or, and see how far we could get, giving all the different cells that live inside of me a go. Try them out, and no longer just in my small room.
When I met our podcast episode’s guest in New York, one day, I met someone that made me realize anything is possible, if you know yourself enough. She was out there living in between two completely different worlds, and she was able to thrive in both equally.
With time and by seeing more and more people like us around, I got more confident about the fact that some of us succeed not despite the range of experiences we have, but because of it.
And Katie Longmyer is an example of that. And ambassador of variety, and dissolving this duality we all know too well: that at work you can only be one thing.
As an inbetweener, Katie calls herself “the quiet person in the loud room” and as such, she built her own bridge to master the edge between the cultural underground sphere and the corporate executive world.
She proves that a voice with range can shine in a world that only demands single chords.
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The guest
She continued her career as a creative advertising executive, and then pivoted to Chief of Staff to the founder of We Work, then pivoted again to become partner and managing director at Mother in New York. She is currently a partner of a venture company focused on deploying capital for minorities and businesses called PROTO. All of this without ever putting Good Peoples aside. In our conversation, we talk about her own definition of success, the challenge and the wonder of how she held on to nightlife-Katie and daytime-Katie, at the same time, and what can we learn about returning to ourselves over and over again.