Margaret Mead, America`s foremost anthropologist, wrote 34 books and scores of articles, made 10 films, lectured constantly, frequently lobbied the government for more funding for scientific research, authored a monthly column for Redbook for 15 years, kept up with an extensive network of friends and taught for many years at Columbia University. (She died in 1978.)
Biographer Jane Howard wrote in her book, ”Margaret Mead: A Life”:
”With her daring journeys, provocative ideas and unbounded energy, she built on that celebrity (image) until she achieved the status of myth throughout the English-speaking world.” Howard likens Mead`s extensive lecture travels to ”those of Air Force One.”
So remarkable were Mead`s stamina and enthusiasm that one young colleague mused on the need for a project ”to study the source of her energy, her creativity and her appetite for and ability to encompass the complexity of very many lives within her own life and intellect.”
Surely one source of her energy was her fervor to communicate her findings and continuously to gain new insights on a culture`s effect on its people. Her work routine began at 5 a.m., when she wrote 1,000 words before breakfast.
”She had a great talent,” Howard quotes another colleague as saying,
”for producing ideas, and never mind how many secretaries it kept up all night, . . . she never wasted a minute or a meal. All her meals were business meals, and why not? She`d take trains back and forth to New York, and her time was so calibrated that she probably wrote a book each way.”
In addition, rather than ride alone in a cab to the airport, Mead often was driven by her students while she viewed videotapes of their work.
Mead`s passionate spirit was another wellspring of her energy. She could be as temperamental as she was generous and supportive, and her ”jabbing, aggressive manner,” quotes Howard from a close friend of Mead`s, helped generate ”incredible amounts of work. She invoked and evoked the best in other people. She`d get them off their butts and tell them, `Of course you can write this dissertation.` ”
Yet Mead enjoyed many hobbies and interests as well as her work, among them cooking, sewing, knitting, socializing and raising her daughter, Cathy. Mead could have afforded a cook, but she once commented, ”If I had a cook, I would be tempted to go to dinner conferences, but this way I have to come home to make dinner for Cathy.”
She also believed in incorporating her child into her daily routine, as her parents had done with her.
”I expect to die, but I don`t plan to retire,” Mead said in her late 60s. Indeed, until she began to suffer from various illnesses in her last years, she seemed to attack her work with increasing vigor, calling it ”post- menopausal zest.”
The writer Leo Rosten commented that her insatiable curiosity kept her learning ”all the time, through her pores.
”She had a brilliant flair for seizing ideas from children, colleagues, historians and every other source that came her way. She was the greatest picker of brains I`ve ever known, the greatest girl reporter in the world.”
Of course, Mead needed to stop to ”refuel,” just like the rest of us. One way she restored her energy was to take catnaps whenever the opportunity presented itself. Once she passed up a formal prespeech luncheon to revive herself before giving her address. Other times she would instruct her staff to wake her up just minutes before she was to begin her speech.
Georgia O`Keeffe
Georgia O`Keeffe was a highly creative and productive contemporary of Mead`s. O`Keeffe composed nearly 900 completed canvases depicting her unique vision of Southwest landscapes, clouds, flowers and stones, and evocative abstractions.
She was always setting goals and challenges for herself, using new hues of colors, trying difficult techniques or painting a picture so it could be hung with any of the sides serving as the top. In her later years (she died in 1986), she experimented with large sculptures and ceramics. In her 70s, in fact, she created her largest canvas-a spectacular 24-by-8-foot cloudscape.
O`Keeffe`s usual work style was to paint intensely, from several hours up to an entire day if she was pleased with her results. But her work was often broken up by short, reviving breaks and ”mini-vacations” away from her work. In ”Portrait of an Artist: A Biography of Georgia O`Keeffe” author Laurie Lisle reports that O`Keeffe as a young student ”sometimes worked intensely, and other times refused to work for days and instead pestered the other girls in the studio . . . indulging in antics.” During her many years of living in New York, she would start on a painting by midday, absorbed in her work until the fading light of dusk forced her to stop. Then she would take to the sidewalk for a long walk.
Throughout her life, O`Keeffe balanced the stillness of her painting sessions with daily exercise. During her many years of living in Texas, New Mexico and elsewhere in the Southwest, O`Keeffe would typically be out before sunrise for a two-hour hike across the desert. She was also fond of swimming, camping and climbing, and enjoyed exploring the countryside of every place she visited. O`Keeffe was also an avid gardener.
Although she maintained many strong liaisons throughout her life, O`Keeffe also needed times of daily solitude. She took most of her walks alone; she used the time to focus on the landscape and muse on the latest technique she was experimenting with. O`Keeffe continued producing art until her death at age 98.
Liz Claiborne
Liz Claiborne, now 61, launched a fashion business with a $255,000 initial investment in 1976 that became one of the youngest companies ever to land on the Fortune 500 list. (She retired from active management of the company in 1989, and from its board of directors in 1990.) She built the company as much through her ability to innovate, dream big and take risks as through her sharp business sense. She captured a market that other designers had overlooked-the professional career woman, 30 and older, who prefers classic but casual clothing over short-lived trends.
Claiborne has been described as a ”pathfinder” and a ”reluctant revolutionary.” Working for years as a designer for other clothes
manufacturers, she tried unsuccessfully to persuade her bosses to create moderately priced clothes for mature professional women.
Then in 1976, she and her husband/partner, Arthur Ortenberg, risked all their savings to market their own line of womenswear. Claiborne went on to dream big, take risks and break into new merchandising areas such as menswear, fragrance and accessories.
Claiborne typically put in a 10-hour work day, but she knew the tricks for replenishing her energy supply. A physically active person, she often walked many blocks to work from her apartment. She still runs for aerobic exercise.
Now she and her husband spend time promoting environmental causes, plus walking, reading and watching birds at their beach house on Fire Island, New York, or at their ranch in Montana.
People describe her as being intense but candid, witty and fun-loving with her staff and peers. Wednesday mornings, for example, she would jump into a company van with her design staff for a trip to a fitting session in New Jersey. She didn`t put herself above her staff, but enjoyed getting into the thick of things right along with them.
