It feels significant that, in the same week we have said goodbye to Dolly Parton and Yayoi Kusama, two women who could hardly have been more different. Dolly Parton died on Tuesday, aged 80. Yayoi Kusama, whose death at 97 was announced today, spent a lifetime covering the world in dots, pumpkins and mirrors.
Both women were outsiders in their own ways. Both were underestimated. Both developed fiercely distinctive identities and then built extraordinary careers around them. We sometimes talk about integrity as being honest or doing the right thing. But I think there is another dimension to it: the courage to remain recognisably yourself when the world is trying to turn you into something more acceptable.
Dolly never seemed particularly interested in becoming the kind of woman Nashville, Hollywood or the business world expected her to be. She was glamorous, funny, ambitious and commercially savvy, while remaining deeply connected to her Appalachian roots. She didn’t hide the parts of herself that other people might have dismissed as unsophisticated. She turned them into part of her power.
And she understood something important about success: you don’t have to choose between ambition and generosity. Her fortune enabled her to build businesses, create jobs and fund causes she cared about, most famously the Imagination Library, which has given millions of children access to books.
Yayoi Kusama took a different route. From childhood, she experienced visions and hallucinations that became central to her work. Instead of trying to make herself fit into conventional ideas of what an artist should be, she turned those experiences into a distinctive visual language. She kept painting, experimenting and creating for decades, becoming one of the world’s most recognisable artists. She was still working in the final days of her life.
Each women made themselves, experimented, evolved and changed. They took commercial opportunities. They built brands. They made mistakes. They each had a remarkably strong sense of what belonged to them. We all spend an enormous amount of energy trying to work out who other people want us to be. We learn to be more polished, more professional, less emotional, less ambitious, less loud. We edit ourselves and then wonder why we feel uncomfortable.
Dolly and Yayoi offer us so much inspiration, to be ourselves. What if the things you’ve been trying to tone down are actually the things you need to turn up? Your weirdness. Your ambition. Your creativity. Your humour. Your perspective. Your history. Your particular way of seeing the world. Integrity isn’t about becoming a better version of somebody else. It’s about becoming more fully yourself. And then having the courage to build something with it. That feels like a wonderful legacy to leave behind.
If you’d like a free clarity call to talk about your own vision for the future, book a call now, I’d love to hear from you.
