Leadership Quote by Jim Hodges

"It’s as if I were collaborating with myself" sounds like a studio confession, but it lands like a quietly radical theory of authorship: the self isn’t a single speaker issuing commands, it’s a committee. Hodges frames making as negotiation between inner parts, a way of admitting that intention is never pure. Even the phrase "as if" signals skepticism about mastery; he’s describing control and immediately undercutting it.

The mechanics matter. "My hand would make the drawing" grants agency to the body, to trained muscle memory, to habits you can’t fully narrate. Then "my mouth would transmit it" flips the hierarchy: speech isn’t the origin of the work, it’s the courier. In politics, that inversion is pointed. Public life treats the mouth as the engine - messaging, declarations, the performance of certainty. Hodges imagines the opposite: the action comes first, and language follows as a kind of translation, maybe even damage control.

That’s the subtext: communication is downstream from process, and what gets "transmitted" is already filtered. It also hints at the uncomfortable intimacy between making and explaining. The hand produces something messy, partial, tactile; the mouth packages it for an audience that demands coherence. The "relationship to the material" becomes a stand-in for a relationship to reality itself: you don’t just speak about what you did, you reveal how you touched it, what resisted, what changed you back.

In a media culture that rewards seamless narratives, "collaborating with myself" is permission to be internally divided - and still accountable.