Entry 28: Twice the Fun, Twice the Trouble

There are activities so good, you do them twice.

After the exciting Paint & Sip session on Father’s Day, Faith thought it’d be a great idea for the Cowrywise family to bond over brushes, colours and yoghurt.

Last Friday was an amazing experience with the entire office team. All things digital were abandoned for the manual. Developers had to leave their MacBooks upstairs, designers weren’t allowed to use Figma and neither were product managers able to draw any roadmap on how the process would go.

We were all given a blank physical 200 by 200 pixel canvas secured on a wooden easel, only 2 brushes (no you can’t download any extra Photoshop brushes from the internet) and a paper plate. HEX codes were not provided, we were simply asked “blue or purple?”.

I’m a really orderly person, so I foremost loved the approach to the painting.

Our instructor, Johnson, said “Paint the farthest object first”. It made me glad that we had some order in here, even though I ended up painting twice. Long story.

So yes, start with the end in mind.

Also, I realised it can be very hard to appreciate your own work when you are up close to it. As we all made progress on our easels, you could see a lot of dissatisfied looks.

Dissatisfied, not because we were doing a bad job, but because as humans we often hold ourselves to a much higher standard of performance.

Sometimes it takes having a neighbour peeping at your work to tell you “Hey, you are doing a great job”.

The instructor had mentioned it was leisure painting; no competition at all. That, however, has never stopped any Nigerian from trying to be the best. We all feel the pressure to blow by 23, buy the first Benz by 24 and build the first crib by 25.

Not surprisingly, that undue pressure pushes too many to engage in high-risk-high-return-high-BP investments 😬

Anyway, by the time we were all done, you could see wide smiles all around.

We all started with blank canvas, yet each of us had managed to make a masterpiece in our own way.

Some moons were so gigantic they looked more like suns. 💀Some mountains were too steep to climb. Some stars looked more like birds lmao. (Y’all shouldn’t come for me, my Cowrywise people, I’m only saying what I saw 😂)

T’s painting was perfect though.

That’s right. T was there.

It’s a long story, but T works at Cowrywise too.

That’s the problem.

That’s the trouble.

T has been with a colleague in the past, and it didn’t go well, and according to T…

“There are some things so hurtful, you only do them once.”

I’ll tell you about it tomorrow.

Love,
Ope 💙