Artist Lily Hevesh Wants to Change the Way People Think About Time and Prioritize Tasks
Dominoes are small, flat blocks of rigid material such as wood, bone or plastic used to play games by placing one on top of another. They are also known as bones, pieces, men or cards. Most dominoes have a rectangular front and are plain on the back. The face of each domino is divided into two squares, with one side bearing a pattern of spots or pips similar to that on dice and the other blank or marked in varying ways. There are many variations on this basic form. Some domino sets are “extended” to include more than the standard 28 tiles, and a game can be played with any number of players.
Lily Hevesh started playing with dominoes when she was 9. She loved the classic 28-pack and creating a line of them in straight or curved lines before flicking the first one and watching the chain reaction that followed. Now, she’s a professional domino artist who creates spectacular setups for movies, TV shows and events like an album launch for Katy Perry.
While she has the technical skills to be a domino artist, her creativity is what drives her. Her goal is to create art that’s beautiful and inspires people. She creates a range of designs, including curved lines, grids that form pictures when they fall and 3D structures such as towers and pyramids.
The art she creates requires meticulous planning and detailed craftsmanship. But it’s also about a bigger idea. She wants to make people think differently about how they use their time and prioritize tasks. She’s drawn on her experience as a CEO to develop a strategy she calls the domino effect, where she ranks tasks according to their impact and importance. She then works on the most important task first, giving it her full attention until it’s completed. After that, she completes the second most important task, and so on.
If she can get people to follow this strategy, she believes they will be more productive and happier. And if they’re happier, that will have a positive impact on their work and relationships.
It’s not the only way she hopes to change the world, but it’s an important one. She says she’s inspired by the work of a man named Peter F. Drucker, who wrote the book The Effective Executive in the 1960s. He believed that a leader’s job is to “create a climate in which everyone can succeed.” And it’s a philosophy she’s carrying on today in her leadership of Domino’s Pizza.
She’s worked to improve the company’s culture and create a workplace where people can be themselves. She’s also focusing on innovation, particularly in transportation and delivery. The Domino’s website lists a number of initiatives that seem to be designed to help people connect with the brand. Some, such as the delivery van, have a lot of substance behind them. Others, such as a pizza-sized drone, have more of a marketing purpose. But both are driven by a desire to give customers more options and to modernize the Domino’s image.