The past few years have seen plenty of career pivots, thanks to the pandemic. Often, the prompt is to meld your passion and purpose into your work life.
Pivoting can be risky but rewarding. Success can be an inspiration. Often, it leaves the rest of us thinking, ‘What if?’.
I’m warming to bees, but unlikely to switch career tracks just yet. My family and I have three bee colonies underway in our yard in Orange County, California. To get to this point has taken great planning.
What’s fueling this new-found interest is my passion for pollinators, a thirst for apiarian knowledge, and humility about how much they do for our organic garden and the world beyond our gate.
We’ve even committed to the Xerces protection pledge. It’s a global campaign to grow pollinator friendly flowers, provide nest sites, shirk the use of pesticides, and spread the word. Xerces is an international nonprofit organization for invertebrate conservation.
Someone who’s in a whole different league tapping into his passion for pollinators on a global scale is Matt Willey. An artist, he’s nine years into his global art project/movement called The Good of the Hive. His vision is to inspire people to see and experience the connectedness of life through pollinators.
“My goal is to bring enough art and enthusiasm so that at least a few people everywhere remember that all of life is connected; soil to bees to air to water to people (even the ones we don’t like so much). Any illusion of separation we feel is just that, a socially constructed illusion,” says Willey.
So far, he’s painted more than 10,000 pollinators – mostly bees – on exquisite murals across the U.S. and internationally (even this one at Burt’s Bees headquarters). He’s completed 39 murals and 13 installations including two permanent installations at the Smithsonian. Willey’s also done a TEDx talk, spoken at the United Nations, and is also working on a documentary film, slated for release in 2025, and a book. He’s helped work on policy in New York (his home state), playing a role in getting the Birds and Bees Protection Act passed. It brought about a moratorium on the use of certain neonicotinoid pesticides. Even sub-lethal doses of these chemicals slow down bees, hindering their foraging and hive productivity.
He says: “When I started embarking on this 21-year piece of art that will include 50,000 hand-painted bees – the average number in a healthy hive – it became clear (relatively quickly) that the first thing that needed to change, was me.”
Willey told me about his career pivot from designing interior murals for private clients as a New York-based fine artist to painting large-scale (very) public outdoor murals of pollinators.
“For 20 years, my goal was to please a client, whether that was a homeowner, designer, or business. My goal with The Good of the Hive is to get people curious about the planet we live on through the lens of art, bees, and storytelling. The latter is way more challenging,” he says
What used to be an audience of just a few people has become a roadshow of human interaction with an audacious mission of connecting every type of community in the world with one simple idea – the beehive.
His “gateway bug” to his career pivot was a bee on its last legs that bumbled onto his apartment floor in 2008. It had altruistically removed itself for the good of the hive, something innate to those pollinators.
Meanwhile, Willey’s version of the good of the (human) hive has catapulted him from introvert to extrovert.
“I literally became an artist so I wouldn’t have to speak in front of people, and I have spoken at locations around the world (including the United Nations) at this point.”
He’s getting used to the ‘buzz’ of change in his work life.
“I have painted at schools where kids get rowdy and I’m standing there painting with kickballs hitting me (and the art) as I paint. A month later, I am sitting with a CEO and PR folks at a global company,” he says.
“Weeks later I could be in a community in middle America or the UK. All the while, experiencing vulnerability from extreme heat or heavy rains to painting while people watch and make comments about the work in progress.”
Going into very different types of communities with one mission is counterintuitive to finding your audience or ‘market’ as an artist, says Willey.
“My work assumes there are at least one or two things on the planet that connect us all. Bees are one of them. And it isn’t simply the bees. My art is about what the hive represents.
“Food and food systems are two of those things. Pollinators are a huge part of that system. The importance of pollinators is linked to every human alive, he says.
“We are living in a time of massive change (and challenge) from every direction, yet unlike the bees and most other species on the planet, we are wired for choice, not change. To change collectively, we need to remember that there are things that we are all on the same page about whether we choose to see it or not.”
Standing in front of his mural, paintbrush in hand, gives him a ringside seat to incremental change. While painting an outside wall at a DC elementary school, Willey found it chaotic and loud, particularly as learners were transitioning from before, during and after school activities.
“I stood debating with myself how to rope off the area or get noise-canceling headphones (or immediately find another career choice), when a little girl came up to me and wouldn’t stop talking about the queen bee with a gold crown I was painting on it. The mural had ignited a little fire in the girl. The combination of art and bees was inspiring her to share what she was seeing,” says Willey.
Experiencing that “surreal moment” taught him to let go and lean into the energy and enthusiasm of the movement, highlighting change as the art form, rather than the mural itself.
“Everything about The Good of the Hive goes back to a simple paradigm shift that happened to me when I looked closely at a bee for the first time on my studio floor. The murals are an echo of a moment where a tiny bee became big in my mind,” he says.
“I suddenly saw the world (and my place in it) differently. That is what The Good of the Hive is about. The art is meant to be a vehicle, not a destination. But it is essential to anchoring the change I am working toward.”
As a full-time mural artist and activist, Willey relies on communities, businesses or organizations inviting him to paint and the design evolves over about a month while he’s there. On completion, he usually hosts an event like a dance party, public talk, or a “giant dinner table, inviting the town to bring food we can enjoy with the mural as a backdrop”.
“Pollinators are about food systems and that’s what connects us all. I want to ignite curiosity for the environment and planet through the lens of bees and storytelling, not proselytizing,” he says.
Willey’s pivot demonstrates you may not have to leave your craft, trade, or profession, but reframe your thinking about the career capital you’ve built up, to paraphrase Cal Newport. Linking into your passion, purpose, and connection to humankind is a pretty powerful framework to get you moving.