Prestige
On the path to the place where the work is the win, you must be alert to the ability of “prestige” to derail you. “Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy,” Paul Graham writes. “It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.” If you want to get someone going down the wrong path, “the way to do it is to bait the hook with prestige.” (I looked into the etymology of the word and learned it comes from the Latin praestigiae: “deceptive, imposture, full of tricks.”) On the other hand, to do what you were meant to do, Graham writes, “it might be a good rule simply to avoid any prestigious task. If it didn’t suck, they wouldn’t have had to make it prestigious.” Prestige and some reasons to avoid it—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
A Genre Which Is Trifling By Definition
If not for the encouragement of his friend C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien said he wouldn’t have finished writing The Lord of the Rings. Primarily because, Colin Duriez explains in Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, “In the 1920s, there was no adult readership for fantasy, or literature in which the story element was predominant.” In the 1920s, Tolkien was a professor at the University of Oxford. And at the time, fantasy or literature in which the story element was predominant wasn’t considered “serious.” It wasn’t worthy of an Oxford professor. It wasn’t prestigious. In his 1956 New York Times review of The Return of the King, the poet W.H. Auden wrote, “I rarely remember a book about which I have had such violent arguments. Nobody seems to have a moderate opinion: either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect.” Auden explains that most of the objection was due to the fact that, at the time, most “people object to Heroic Quests and Imaginary Worlds on principle; such, they feel, cannot be anything but light “escapist” reading. That a man like Mr. Tolkien, the English philologist who teaches at Oxford, should lavish such incredible pains upon a genre which is, for them, trifling by definition, is, therefore, very shocking.” After his works of fantasy in which the story element is predominant went on to sell more than 600 million copies, Tolkien would eventually be widely called the “father of high fantasy.” He is just one example to remind us that what is called “prestigious” is not stable in time, that “if you do anything well enough,” to quote Graham again, “you’ll make it prestigious.”
Little Books Full of Pictures and Words
The morning after a conversation with Austin Kleon, I sent him that Tolkien story. As a kid, Austin told me, he did exactly what he does now: he made books full of pictures and words. “Then, in college,” Austin said, “this really stupid thing happened to me: I thought it was time to get serious. And I thought that ‘literature’ was the serious thing to do. So I completely devoted myself to writing and got thrown off the track of what my natural interest and talent is: pictures and words together.” Derailed by the warping thoughts of what is and isn’t prestigious, Austin went to the University of Cambridge where “I got terribly depressed and went home after like six months.” Back home, he discovered cartoonists and comic strip artists like Lynda Barry and Charles Schulz, who “really opened me up to realize, ‘Okay, you should really bring your visuals and drawings into your work.’” He started a blog, owned that he is “a writer who draws,” and went on to write multiple bestselling books full of pictures and words (my favorite, Show Your Work!, was partially why I started this newsletter)—like the ones he made as a kid. “I’ve got books here from when I was in kindergarten,” Austin told me as he turned and pointed at his shelf. “They’re these little handmade books that I did in school. They got pictures, and underneath the pictures, they got the words underneath. They’re the same thing. Little books full of pictures and words.”
It Not Working Until It Does. People Look Past You Until They Don’t
Like anyone starting out in any field, at the beginning of his acting career, Bradley Cooper had to take on jobs that weren’t considered prestigious. Jobs that were seemingly small and insignificant. Yet, as longtime Hollywood insider Krista Smith put in a conversation with him, Cooper approached those trifling jobs with “an insane amount of energy, focus, hard work, and gratitude.” “I think that just comes down to pure love of doing it, like no matter how small the role or whatever,” Cooper replied. “I’m very lucky that I love it so much. There’s no way you can go through a career, no matter who you are, if you don’t love it. I don’t know any career that’s just like that [makes a motion of a fast upward trajectory]. So you better love it because it’s all about it not working until it does and people looking past you until they don’t” and it not being considered prestigious until it is.
Mine Isn’t Going To Be That Way
In the early 1950s, when Walt Disney began kicking around the idea to build one, amusement parks were gross and depressing playgrounds, essentially, in slumlike areas. So Lillian Disney, Walt’s wife, asked him of his plans to build what he was initially calling Disneylandia, “Why would you want to get involved in an amusement park? They’re so dirty, and not fun at all for grown-ups. Why would you want to get involved in a business like that?” Walt replied, “That’s exactly the point. Mine isn’t going to be that way. Mine’s going to be a place that’s clean, where the whole family can do things together.” It’s all about it not being considered prestigious until it is, until you make it prestigious.
Anything Where There Are Options For Doing It Well or Poorly
Shortly after the publication of his now classic, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig said in a 1974 interview that he began hearing from “a lot of people who have doubted whether motorcycle maintenance is a worthy subject of art. I think that’s just snobbish. Because art is anything you can do well, anything you can do with quality, anything where there are options for doing it well or poorly. And there are very few things in this world that don’t have options for doing it well or poorly. So you can make an art out of just about anything.” You can make just anything prestigious.