Meet Thane Zrongo

August 8, 2024

Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Thane Zrongo. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Thane, so happy to have you on the platform with us today and excited to chat about your lessons and insights. Our ability to make good decisions can massively impact our lives, careers and relationships and so it would be very helpful to hear about how you built your decision-making skills. How did you develop your decision-making skills?

Decision making skills are the cornerstone of life. It’s a field that I feel isn’t stressed enough when we are being educated as children. We are expected to make good decisions but never instructed on what that process looks like. We are only scolded for the outcome. We are bombarded with sayings like “you make bad choices” or “they never make good decisions”. It’s a deep irony that making good decisions is in itself a decision. Without a knowing hand, it can be like unwillingly starting a Rube Goldberg machine.

I use a form that has various decision-making questions on it. This is a form that I’ve developed over the years that hits points like, “Am I right about my position?” as well as, “How do I know I’m right?” and, “What three people have I spoken with who have succeeded in doing the same thing? How do they feel about the decision?”

The form is constantly changing depending on the efficacy of my decisions. It challenges my decisions until they are either extremely sound or at least identified as being on an emotional basis – not a practical one. It’s important to express that not all decisions in a creative industry are based entirely on numbers and facts. Art is all about emotion but selling it is all about equations.

It’s a concept that’s foreign to a lot of people. That they might systematize their decision-making. It’s very difficult to keep every element pertaining to a decision in your head and even harder to keep all the criteria for each element straight. It’s a lot like any other part of life. The moment you start quantifying parts of it, each part becomes clearer and clearer as new patterns emerge.

If you fail more than you succeed it’s not you, it’s the criteria for your decision-making. If you can record and quantify your decisions, suddenly there isn’t any mystery. You have data that you review and hone your process with. When the information is down on paper it becomes very clear that your decision-making arithmetic doesn’t add up and you’ve been adding 2+2 and getting 4.5, never realizing it because the answer was so close to the mark.

Thanks for sharing that. So, before we get any further into our conversation, can you tell our readers a bit about yourself and what you’re working on?

I work as the Creative Director at The House of Grand Design. This means that I’m in charge of most of the creative aspects of the business. Much of my time is spent immersing myself in what makes a garment. This often means the physical construction in terms of the materials and design, but also what the culture is around it. Each piece is a walking representation of much more than just fabric. Sometimes it’s derived from a military garment, sometimes there’s inspiration from the equestrian world. Each piece means something and therefore should strive to be held to the highest echelon of that inspiration.

We work to produce clothing that’s ethically manufactured in the United States. We try to contract with companies that hold similar standards, or with smaller artisans to produce our products. Each of our items are produced as a long term investment. We hope to create a piece that will last years and in some cases a lifetime. One such way of meeting these standards has been the decision to start carrying fabrics from Dormeuil, one of the top mills in the world. Each fabric is not only breathtakingly beautiful, it’s also crafted with a focus on being ethically sourced and environmentally friendly. My favorite suit that I own is made from a Dormeuil fabric.

We are a small fashion house so I am the master tailor as well as designer for the pret-a-porter line. I work with the clients who are commissioning bespoke garments. Bespoke is the art of crafting a garment to the body of the client. We work very closely with them to create exactly the garment that they have in mind. This is the work that gives me the most pleasure. It’s an amazing experience to sit down with a customer over coffee and hear about the clothing that thrills them. You get to engage with people on a very deep level. It’s not uncommon for me to accompany clients back into their memories and draw inspiration from pieces they saw years ago or have dreamed about for much of their lives.

I recently had a client who had been dreaming for decades about a coat modeled after Steve McQueen’s jacket in the 1971 film Le Mans. He only wears this jacket for about a minute on screen, but the style of this character left such a deep impression on the client that he carried around a dozen deer hides for decades before he trusted someone enough to create this jacket. It was such a special moment when this stern and studious looking man turned to me from the mirror, grabbed my hand and said, “This is so f@#&ing cool” while grinning from ear to ear. This client had told me that he owned the same Porsche that McQueen drove in the scene and had been dreaming about the coat for decades. He told me that there comes a time when you can’t put things like that off any longer. He expressed that it’s better not to take your wishlist to the grave.

This is the sort of story that really gives the work its meaning. These stories are formed by the clients who invite me to their wedding or drop in to share their favorite brand of coffee. We look to form a relationship as strong as people seek to form with their clothes. You get to work very intimately with them over several weeks to bring their vision to life.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

The three most influential skills were undoubtedly humility, objectivity and a deep drive to understand. I say that these are skills because they truly are. Each one takes practice and can be honed to a level like any other area of expertise. We are all born with a very similar set of mental mechanisms that all develop in different ways as we grow and experience life. It’s important to understand that we have control over this process. The gauges are set in our childhoods, but as we age we are responsible for identifying the mechanisms that need attention and correcting them ourselves or seeking help to do so.

When it comes to my own experience. I believe that the thing that was most essential was my drive to figure things out. Without that need to understand what a problem was in its entirety and develop a solution to whatever problem I was facing, I would have quit at the first failure. I sought to view a failure as an issue in the system that I’d built, not as a personal insult. It’s a problem that has a root cause and the current problem is just a symptom. This naturally goes hand in hand with the humility that’s necessary to review the results and change course. It’s important to understand that in any field you are wrong more than you are right until you reach a point that you are right more than wrong.

The best advice that I can give is to fail as much as you can. Each time it hurts less and every time something doesn’t work, you learn. It’s important to try to look at each failure as objectively as possible, sometimes even asking others who have lived through similar failures to gather some knowledge about why you’ve arrived at a particular outcome. A person who is interested in succeeding has to have the ability to objectively look at their actions, assess where their own logic was incorrect and learn to not make the same mistake again. It reminds me of a child running into a glass door. It’s an obvious impediment to an adult but only because we’ve all run into one. This is a simple analogy, but It takes applying these three principles to avoid what could otherwise be an invisible problem.

Before we go, any advice you can share with people who are feeling overwhelmed?

One of the most interesting things that I find about being overwhelmed is that there often comes a point where the task is over and you still feel that sense of overwhelm. I’ve dedicated some thought to this phenomenon and my conclusions are a little more personal philosophy based than science. It seems there reaches a point where you begin to see the feeling of being overwhelmed as an entirely separate feeling from what is going on. It’s this feeling that’s unpleasant and not necessarily about the task. The feeling of being overwhelmed is a symptom and not the problem. The trick is to begin to understand that you can separate yourself from this feeling and by doing so, you can become a more effective worker. I’ve heard that if you are in control, the chaos happens around you. That’s no more true than when that feeling of overwhelm is beginning to creep in.

Combatting overwhelm is one of those things that takes a lot of practice. What comes to mind is often the difference between the highest functioning people who have thousands of tasks but seem to have total calm and those who need to achieve one thing during the day but are panicked and flustered. I’ve found as you practice being calm, you begin to adjust your threshold of feeling overwhelmed and find that the feeling does not need to be part of the equation.

There is an interesting thing that happens with a mindset shift. If we tell ourselves that we are in control, that we are capable and able to handle whatever the day has in store. Science has shown that we can create new neural pathways that make us more capable and less prone to being overwhelmed. It takes some time – like any habit – but after it’s in place, the calm during the storm becomes second nature. It takes practice and diligence, but it does seem to work. I would suggest giving it a try. It sounds like new age hocus pocus but it’s a solution with very little downside. After all, there’s no fee to try it.

I like to implement very practical solutions to the feeling of being overwhelmed. I understand that I am in a position where I can dictate my own schedule much of the time. However, that does mean that I am often dealing with many ongoing scenarios at the same time and have no time or energy to waste on being overwhelmed, as it is an extremely draining and time consuming feeling. I think that scheduling is key. It’s important to let clients, bosses, subordinates and coworkers know what is possible in a set amount of time. Much of the overwhelm comes from a schedule that is too tight. I’ll often schedule tasks with an “insurance day”. This is a time buffer that lets things overrun or unexpected things happen and they don’t damage the timeline. I’ve heard people say this means that less will be done but it seems to not be the case. By allowing enough time to make quality work you allow for better decisions, better communication and sometimes projects coming in ahead of schedule. It’s remarkable how when you tell someone it’ll be six weeks, they often set their expectations to that six weeks.

I understand that there are times where it’s impossible to avoid. We now understand that most adults can only actively hold around 7 things in their mind before they begin to forget them. It becomes very clear that any mental list with more than 7 items or more than 7 steps becomes very overwhelming. In this case I will often create a physical master list of tasks. This gets all the noise out of my head and onto a page. It’s amazing how one task can sound like several when it’s in the echo chamber of your skull. After I have that, I can parse though and prioritize all the tasks. You really see that some tasks are much smaller when they are on paper and as you cross them off, the list becomes less and less daunting. This also creates an opportunity to divide tasks up into ‘like to do’ lists and ‘must do’ lists. Oftentimes you find that a percentage of the tasks that are making you feel overwhelmed are actually just things you’d rather do and not pressing items at all.

There’s another benefit to creating a physical list which is that it gives you a clearer look at each task so you can create a plan to execute each task as efficiently as possible. This seems like more work but with a clear task and instructions on how to execute each task, the entire workload will take half as long. It’s amazing how much time you have when you’re not actively trying to figure out what to do.

View the article on Bold Journey: https://boldjourney.com/meet-thane-zrongo/