Life is not an Edward Hopper Painting.

The real world is complicated and messy. And that’s what’s great about it.

I love Edward Hopper’s works. They carry a sense of simplicity and longing that have always resonated with me.
Hopper’s paintings are often described as melancholy, a quality that stems from their sparseness of composition and the isolation of the characters depicted. But, to me, this also illustrates the opposite idea: that much of the joy and exuberance of life comes from human relationships and the fact that the world is complicated and messy.

Take a look at the image at the top of this newsletter. Nighthawks is probably Hopper’s most famous work. It’s a beautiful composition of stillness, stark lighting and characters lost in their own thoughts. And, I don’t know about you, but that’s probably the neatest, calmest diner I’ve ever seen. Think about what a real diner would be like: signs all over the walls (try our corned beef hash!), plates of food and cups of coffee in constant motion, people engaged in animated conversation and waitresses calling everybody “hon.” And that’s why I love diners.

So, here’s an important thing to remember this time of year—if you try to be too perfect, if you try to make everything just so, you’re likely to squeeze all the life out of what’s going on. The holidays are often a fraught time of year, and it doesn’t help to beat yourself up over everything not being as neat and organized as it ‘should’ be. Allow yourself to enjoy the hullabaloo that generally accompanies the holidays.

I wrote a year-end piece a few years ago about what I call ‘The Dirty Harry Principle.’ It’s about a closely related idea: knowing your limitations, being comfortable with them, and not needing to be perfect all the time, particularly this time of year. It’s a message worth a few minutes of your time.

There’s an important implication here for my field of qualitative research: don’t try to make conversations and research stimuli overly neat and orderly. Let them be kind of messy to create energy and simulate reality. For example, overly simple and clean renderings of a retail shelf set may produce misleading results because actual retail environments are so cluttered and untidy. Also, real-world conversations generally don’t involve everybody taking their turn to speak—they can be pretty chaotic. While quantitative research needs to be controlled and structured in order to generate representative and projectable data, qual doesn’t need to do that. So let the turmoil work for you.

My previous newsletter was about how decision making in the real world tends to be messy, impulsive and irrational. Decision making isn’t the only human phenomenon that’s kind of wild. We’re just a crazy species. So embrace that old adage:  God bless this mess.