People You Should Know About: Piet Hein

Volume II: Piet Hein / Danish / 1905-1996

Discerning the difference between a simple but valuable nugget of wisdom and a horribly tired cliché can be tricky. The context and the medium can sometimes be good clues. Business meetings are of course an opportunity to practice wariness – you never know when you might be handed a “Reach for the Stars Positive Pal Starfish,” offered by the good people at Successories.com, with this explanation:

Let these Positive Pals plush toys work for you - no training necessary! Gifts, incentives, giveaways…these are just a few ideas for using our affordable Positive Pals stuffed animals. Use Positive Pals plush toys wherever a smile is needed!

And affordable they are – just $4.99 in quantities of 250 and up. It’s pretty tempting, really: I believe the “no training necessary” promise, and it’d be nice to forego smiles for a while and just chuck plush at all the overachievers I meet.

I’m happy to report that Piet Hein has nothing to do with Positive Pals. But I did become aware of him in a context that had potential to devolve into cheesy motivational tools. Several years ago, I did some coffee presentations and participated in workshops in Palm Springs as part of Starbucks’s launch of new training programs. The meetings were held at a very cool and authentic mid-century resort; its best days were long in the past, but it was nearly empty and I’m sure the price was right.

At the opening of one of the workshops each participant was given a small, rectangular card, perforated so it could be opened like a greeting card. Breaking the seal revealed a pithy saying; once we read them we were directed to discuss them with our tablemates. Here’s what I saw when I opened mine:

Problems worthy of attack

prove their worth

by hitting back

--Piet Hein

Now this wasn’t life-changing, but in a world where “There’s no ‘I’ in team” passes for wisdom, my little card struck me as pretty meaningful. This was probably in the mid- to late-nineties, which was, as was pretty much always the case, a period of rapid growth and change at Starbucks. I suppose what I like about this little verse (I would soon learn that they were called “Grooks” and that there are hundreds of them.) was that it brought another dimension to the old idea that “if was easy anyone could do it.” For me, it helped crystallize the notion that change, newness, risk – all the things we say are necessary for success – are hard in part because there is always something – a person, an idea, a structure –that would rather see things stay the same. And they hit back. If the problem isn’t big or serious enough to do so, it may not be a problem worthy of our efforts.

So it stayed with me. I kept that little card on my desk for years. And when I got back to the office, I did a little research on Piet Hein – the name seemed a little unusual, so I was pretty sure he wasn’t a motivational speaker from Newport Beach. Turns out he was Danish, and he invented a shape, was a designer, writer, philosopher and more. And internationally, he is considered the third best known Dane of the 20^th century. Can you name either of the other two? (Answers are at the end of this post.)

He invented a shape. That alone seems pretty cool to me. Here’s the story, straight from www.piethein.com :

Harmonic forming in mathematics: The superellipse
Parallel to his poetic work, Piet Hein decided to find an absolutely harmonic physical design. With mathematical intuition he first found the form and then explained it afterwards. His superellipse was to solve the double contrast between the circle and the square and that of the ellipse and the rectangle. By means of mathematics he found a harmonic geometrical figure which was first used on a large scale in connection with the solution to a town planning problem in Stockholm. In a rectangular square, 200 metres long, in Stockholm's centre two motorways were to meet in a gigantic roundabout. The solution was the application of the superellipse to both square and roundabout at the new Sergels Torg. Later on the superellipse has been used in Canada, France, Japan, the US and Mexico in connection with the solution of as different constructions as residential areas and sports centres for example the Olympic Stadium in Mexico City:

Within furniture design the superellipse also became the solution to various problems -especially in relation to Piet Hein's design of tabletops the superellipse became popular. In a three-dimensional version the superellipse became the superegg which has been used for metal versions of various board games, superegg drink coolers and the anti-stress ball. Especially the latter reached an enormous distribution in the 1970s. In addition to his work with the development of the superellipse Piet Hein has executed a great many other design commissions, from board games in wood to the elegant Sinus lamp

If you spend just a few minutes on the website, you’ll likely find something familiar – a design sensibility you may have taken for granted, or even a toy from childhood. Give it a look.

Because I am much more verbal than spatial, it’s the little bits of verse that I find most intriguing about Hein. In 1940, the Danish newspaper Polotiken began publishing Hein’s little poems, which were known as “Gruks” – “Grooks” in English. It’s not clear where the name came from – apparently Hein said it “just came to him.” Others believe it is combination of the Danish words “grin” and “suk” (laugh and sigh). I’d like to think that this is the origin, because so many of them prompt in me those two reactions. So I’m just going to end this with a few of my favorites.

Here’s one about patience:

T. T. T.

Put up in a place

where it's easy to see

the cryptic admonishment

T. T. T.

When you feel how depressingly

slowly you climb,

it's well to remember that

Things Take Time

This one’s just fun:

SOCIAL MECHANISM

When people always

try to take

the very smallest

piece of cake

how can it also

always be

that that's the one

that's left for me?

On being one’s own worst enemy:

ON PROBLEMS

Our choicest plans

have fallen through,

our airiest castles

tumbled over,

because of lines

we neatly drew

and later neatly

stumbled over

And finally, something familiar:

A MAXIM FOR VIKINGS 

Here is a fact

   that should help you fight

      a bit longer:

Things that don't actually 

      kill you outright

      make you stronger.

To read a whole lot more of these, visit http://tiny.cc/ULoGp

Oh yes: the two 20^th century Danes with more international fame than Piet Hein: physicist Neils Bohr and author Karen Blixen