Like the mural at the Museum of Modern Art, the imaginative renditions of their week in data were intricate and complicated. Each was accompanied by a legend supplied by the artist for decoding the meaning of every squiggle, color swatch, doodle, and form. Lupi learned that Posavec’s husband inspired feelings of love in her more than three times as often as feelings of annoyance. And Posavec learned that Lupi sees far more dogs than rats in her wanderings, which is remarkable given how many New York City subway platforms she waits on. But more than these details about the nature of their days, they learned how they are each connected to a bigger social sphere, how they engage with their emotions, the patterns of their behaviors that create how each perceives and is perceived by the world. The minutiae of their data transformed into pictographs made them intimately human to each other. At the close of every week, and at the completion of their artistic renderings, they jotted down their pen pal’s address, plunked a stamp on it, and sent it off in the post to travel across the ocean.
Two strangers with no formalized commitment to each other set and succeeded at a goal that required daily maintenance for a full calendar year. Before I met Pete, I was single in New York. I admit to having met a few people in bars, strangers at the time, as Lupi was to Posavec. But the vast majority of my consorts were impossible to commit to for even fifty-two minutes, so the fact that these strangers sustained their arduous enterprise for fifty-two weeks amazes me. And it’s a feat that has been noted by far-harder-to-impress bodies than me. Lupi and Posavec cataloged their enterprise in Dear Data, a book that reproduced their postcards along with insider notes on their experience. It was published in 2016, the same year that the Museum of Modern Art acquired all 106 original postcards for its permanent collection.
I needed to know more. I started my query by video-chatting with Lupi. She sat at home in Brooklyn. I sat in my office in Manhattan. I asked all kinds of questions, and she gave the most interesting answers. She told me about the coincidental similarities between herself and Posavec—they’re both only children, of the same age, who crossed the Atlantic to pursue their artistic dream. She commented on the way that their drawing styles started to resemble each other over time. She told me about how she now teaches children about the Dear Data project, and how exciting it is to see middle schoolers illustrating the data from their own lives, and eagerly anticipating the math class they did this in—an elusive enthusiasm that practically achieves unicorn status. And she chuckled at the “data voids” that appeared because of a husband’s protests, three boozy Christmas parties, and other reasons.
I asked her my big question. “Giorgia, you and Stefanie did something that is really hard for lots of people. You set a goal and saw it through for an entire year, and by the end of that time, you actually finished it. How did you do it? What tricks did you use?” There was a pause. I used that moment to check out the room she was in, what was behind her and on the sides. And I knew then that the answer Lupi was about to give me would be totally unsatisfying.
What I saw was this. Behind Lupi was a glass wall. On which were more than a dozen Post-it notes. I meant for my attempt at sleuthing to be a surreptitious one, so I squinted with hopes of snooping as covertly as possible without being pegged as a weirdo. I saw sketches that seemed to evolve gradually from one square to the next, down the length of one column and across the rows. It was a storyboard documenting the evolution of Lupi’s work. I took the next moment to consider what her view was of what lay behind me. On a console in my office, behind my chair, was a mess of papers so scattered that she surely couldn’t see where any one pile ended and the next began, nor the counter underneath.
And my suspicion was right. From her response to my request for advice, it seemed that Lupi did not struggle to meet big goals. She didn’t seem to have doubted her ability to sustain the project or see it through. She didn’t have to change her life to realize her dream, even though she had to have been thinking about it almost every waking moment, because she was counting something in her daily experience all the time or drawing a picture of it.
I asked Lupi about that storyboard when I connected with her again later on. “I like remembering the first ideas I had for projects,” Lupi explained, “and having them around can be a nice reminder of how things evolve during a project.” I told her I thought this was genius, that posting her work on the walls she looked at every day rather than archiving them in file drawers may have been an intuitive system of materializing. She laughed. “The real truth is that I just like my sketches.” I don’t doubt that her choices may be aesthetic ones, but I’m convinced that what seems like personal style to her may actually be a key ingredient in her success. The storyboard collection was a tangible form of accountability, whereby ongoing projects are kept in sight and progress is visible. As second nature, Lupi surrounds herself with the visuals of inspiration and evidence of progress.
I decided to hit up Posavec for advice next, thinking I might relate to her approach a little more. The legends on her postcards had smudges where life got in the way of perfect penmanship. She crossed out mistakes. She included footnotes to her drawings, expressing her frustration in misspelled words. The vertical lines she drew strayed from plumb, which seemed metaphoric of how my life seems to generally unfold. She’ll get me, I thought.
I sent an email to Posavec asking to talk about Dear Data. I included in my plea an embarrassingly detailed account of my own organizational disasters, and described my envy of Lupi’s Post-it note grid. Posavec was half a dozen time zones away, juggling life with a new baby herself, but perhaps my self-deprecation worked. She wrote back, and we arranged a conversation. For starters, I asked her where she might place herself on the Giorgia–Emily spectrum when it came to formulating and enacting a plan for completing a goal, and (if she were more toward the Emily side of things) whether there was anything she used to help her visualize her plan of attack for Dear Data. She’s a really nice person, so I am nearly certain her answer was more to appease my ego than anything else, but she claimed, “I am definitely more on the Emily side of things, though over time working with Giorgia I have moved (just a little) more to the Giorgia side.” We all need a little Giorgia in our life.
Posavec offered another thought, however, which has stuck with me. She said that one thing that motivated her from week to week, and inspired her to keep going, was seeing Lupi’s postcard from the previous week—having been stamped and put on a plane in New York, flown across the ocean, carted to a flat in London by Royal Mail, and framed by her doormat for her to find. “There like clockwork after every weekend…”
That doormat deserves more credit than you might think. Knowing what I do about how a frame can highlight and direct our focus onto something that really matters, I realized that the doormat is in great part responsible for Stefanie’s motivational stamina. Her doorway contained her shoes, her umbrellas, her keys, and her bags. One little postcard dropped in the middle of all that could easily get lost. But that doormat highlighted that postcard’s arrival each week, bringing focus to it and to the goal it was serving. That doormat was framing up the thing that inspired this duo to persevere. In addition to the tool of materializing, we have the visual strategy of framing available for our use. And much like a horse and buggy or a pestle and mortar, you can have either on its own, but together you can get a lot more done.