Tim Leberecht : "Luxury is almost never an object and almost always an experience" - Inter

This interview is part of a project called Luxury Inception, see below to learn more about the project.

If you go on Tim Leberecht's page you would be astonished to see how diverse his curriculum is. Here's an extract:

• Founder and CEO of Leberecht & Partners, a consulting firm that helps leaders and organizations build beautiful, humanist stories, cultures, and brands

• Author of the international bestseller The Business Romantic (HarperCollins); translated into eight languages to date; an “Inc. Top 10 Motivational Book of 2015” and “Forbes Top 10 Creative Leadership Book of 2015”

• Long-time CMO of Frog Design and other leading design and innovation firms

• Founder of The Business Romantic Society, a global collective of strategists, advertisers, curators, artists, developers, designers, researchers, and data scientists with the shared mission to bring beauty and enchantment to business

• Co-founder and co-curator of the 15 Toasts dinner series

• Serves on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Values, the NationSwell Council, and on the Board of Advisors of Jump Associates, a strategy and innovation consultancy

Tim has an innovative perspective on work and life in general, here's what he has to say:

How do you perceive luxury, as a concrete object or an abstract concept? How do you associate yourself with luxury?

To me, luxury is almost never an object and almost always an experience, if not merely an abstract concept, an image or perception. At any rate, it is so much more than just an object of extreme scarcity. It is a bit like a first kiss: a forbidden fruit; a thrill that does not come so much from doing it but the thought of doing it; an experience that feels like the first time, a moment of expansion of your self and its possibilities, when the vastness of your soul finally gets the space it deserves.

Luxurious are experiences when you are in the moment and observe the moment at the same time. Specific examples that come to my mind are my watching a football game in a big stadium on the main stands, with the full pitch at my feet. Sure, you might consider it luxury because I probably paid a fortune for the ticket, but what really makes it a luxury for me is the deep satisfaction from watching myself as the main protagonist in a scene that I only imagined in my dreams, the thought, “I’m really here in this very moment, living the dream.” Or take five-star luxury hotels in Asia. I remember staying at the Trident Hotel in Gurgaon once, a tech cluster near Delhi. When I walked into the hotel lobby for the first time, I felt moved by the generosity of space and attention. I was so touched that I almost cried.

Luxury is romantic in a sense that it doesn’t emanate from a material necessity, in fact, it does not meet a material need at all: like romance, it is unnecessary, impractical, transcendent. It always take us beyond the here and now, the standard and routine, the trivial and profane, and points to something sacred. Luxury is a novelty, a one-off suggesting that nothing will ever be the same again. In an age of serial digital reproduction, luxury maintains aura, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, in fact, it is all aura.

Like art, luxury doesn’t serve or deliver; it just teases and pleases. It gives us a hint of a perfect world, a better self, of how things might be if only we could afford them, not just economically, but also morally and spiritually. Luxurious products, services, and experiences are the most shallow and decadent, and yet the deepest and most spiritual goods of commerce. The most unneeded and yet the most desired.

I would say that the ultimate luxury is an amour fou: exuberant, unbounded, unconditional, foolish love. But, who knows, with artificial intelligence threatening our very human agency, the ultimate luxury might soon be to be human.

What item would you be wiling to spend the majority of your fortune and time?

A lasting piece of art (a book, a movie, a poem, a music recording, painting, etc.)

What are you passionate about besides your profession (alter ego)?

Anything that lets me see the world with fresh eyes: football, books, art, travel, friends, my wife, my daughter (not particularly in that order….)

What would you say is the predominate source of your anxiety in our current society?

Behind every anxiety is the dear of death, and right now its most concrete manifestation for me is Jihadist terror. It is so frightening because it is so irrational, so impossible to grasp, and so asymmetrical. As someone wrote: “They have nothing to lose, but we have everything to lose.

Here's Ted Talk of Tim Leberecht on romanticism.

About The Luxury Inception project :

What does luxury mean ? What would a new vision of luxury be? These 2 intriguing questions cannot be answered in solely a few words neither do they have a unique answer.

We created The Luxury Inception Interviews to open the discussion and debate and to see if among all the subjective answers we get we can imagine a new definition of luxury.

We invited interviewees from various geographical regions, upbringings, educational backgrounds, ethnic groups, cultural cultivation and industries to experiment a new vision of luxury. Some of them are well-known to the public, some of them are well-respected in their fields and some of them are in the ascendence in reaching the next great accomplishment. Despite of the diversity of our selective guest interviewees, they share one thing in common - not only are they brilliant minds in the current globalized world but they are constantly in search for a profound comprehension of the world.

We are just excited as you are to find out what is going to come out from these precious testaments once we’ll attempt to decipher luxury in a rather different angle.

Please stay tuned, the future of luxury is unlocking right here.

#luxury #Interview #newluxury