What Not Selling a Painting Taught Me About Leadership

Paul was a business executive with a quiet passion for oil painting. He studied it in college, and despite the demands of raising three boys, he would occasionally return to the canvas — creating bold, Picasso-esque pieces and hanging them in the back of his studio, rarely shown.

Life threw him some painful chapters: divorce, a serious car accident, and time away from his children. In the stillness of that isolation, he kept painting. Room by room, wall by wall, his work filled the house. Yet in all those years, despite hundreds of paintings, my father — Paul — never sold a single one.

I always wondered why.

Not selling a painting isn’t just about missed opportunity — it reveals something deeper: fear, vulnerability, and the human need to protect what is personal. And so it is with leadership. Both require us to show up, let go, and allow our work to speak — knowing we are still whole, even if it’s not universally embraced.

A famous quote by Picasso says, "Art is the lie that enables us to realize the truth."

Maybe the lie, in this case, is that your leadership doesn’t matter — and the truth is, if you could fully understand its impact, it would change you.