There is little point in stating that Milton Glaser is a titan in the modern world of art and design; he certainly is and that requires no further elaboration. Today I want to share with you one of his more recent interviews about many things including when to craft things for an audience, and when not to. Why? Because I think this applies to pretty much everything from aesthetics, to food, to writing grant proposals.

We so often try to make things fit what we imagine to be right for a given audience: “Is this what this potential funder might want to fund? Let me ask for this xyz, or spin it this way or that… Let me create something new that might please them…”

Only that we never REALLY know what might please “them”, whomever “them” are. We try to guess and extrapolate and we drive ourselves nuts with the guessing. Nobody really knows what would please whom, and as such, life is nothing but a constant process of predicting based on past observation and constant analysis of what can be reduced, ultimately, to patterns of response.

And that’s why our kids send back their untouched lunchboxes and by the same token, why many appeal emails result in no donations, and so on… Most people try too hard to hit a target they have no hope of knowing much about, because the nature of the target will forever be inherently mysterious.

I have no idea on any given day what my kid would fancy eating; what do you do about that? Marketing and communications are billion dollar industries because all brain science and behavioral economics aside, we as humans are too complex to ultimately predict. You can predict the behavior of crowds with some degree of accuracy, while never truly being able to know how a given individual will react to given stimuli at a given time.

So what’s left to do? Do what you truly want to do. Pack in the lunchbox what’s already in the fridge, do it now with love and expediency, and stop fretting about it – if it’s healthy and delicious it is healthy and delicious, and it’s going to either be eaten or not going to be eaten, and that’s that. Repeat next day and every day without attaching yourself to the outcome.

The lunchbox is, of course, a metaphor. Do your work, do your art with boldness and courage, play with joy and present your projects to the world in the way that you feel is right because you can’t really control the outcome more than you can be in two places at once to shove food down your kid’s throat at lunchtime. (Even assuming you could, from personal experience I vouch for the fact that you can’t make them chew it…)

Write that grant proposal about the work that you already do, about the programming and impact that you TRULY want to create in the future, and about what you REALLY need funding for. Don’t justify; just EXPLAIN with as much clarity, passion and exquisite simplicity as you can master. Some people will always appreciate your art, and some will never do. The same person might not like it one day and adore it the next.

Stop guessing and just go on co-creating the world with the unfettered joy of children not caring too much about the world’s purchasing power.