The Central Question
When he was 5, Jeremy Strong started acting in community theater. In high school, he got crew jobs on movie sets, writing letters to filmmakers whenever he heard they were filming near his home in Massachusetts. In college, he performed in student productions, and after graduating, he moved to New York City. He worked odd jobs—delivering room-service in a hotel, shredding documents for a construction company, and typing manuscripts for a playwright—while relentlessly auditioning for roles in movies, plays, and TV shows. For nearly a decade, he landed only bit parts, often playing unnamed characters and appearing on stage or screen for a few seconds. The actor Anne Hathaway asked Strong about those years—what did you tell yourself during that time? How were you able to persist when it seemed like you weren’t making progress? “It’s such a great question,” Strong replied. “It’s sort of the central question: ‘What keeps us going despite any evidence that we’ll have the chances to do the work that we want to do?’” In another interview, asked about that same period, Strong quoted a Wallace Stevens poem, “after the final no, there comes a yes. And on that yes, the future world depends.” “And that was certainly true for me,” Strong added. “You know, I had to accept that my dreams ultimately might not happen the way I wanted them to…And I had to ask myself, will you still commit to doing it then? Will you still commit to doing it when you realize it’s not going to look the way you imagined it would? And I remember feeling, ‘Well, yes, I’m going to commit to it because I enjoy the work, whatever work I can get.’” And on that yes, Strong’s future depended. In his mid-30s, he landed minor roles in films like Lincoln, Zero Dark Thirty, and The Big Short, gaining a reputation for his commitment to his craft, even in the smallest parts. Then, at 37, it finally happened: he was cast in his breakout role as Kendall Roy in Succession—a role that, as Hathaway put it, “revealed [Strong] as one of our great, great actors.”
What keeps one going despite any evidence that they’ll have the chances to do the work that they want to do—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Valley Of The Shadow Of Death
Early in his career, the great cinematographer Brad Rushing was struggling to get any chances to do the work he wanted to do. “I was so frustrated and so down and didn’t believe in myself,” he said. “And I had this revelation—I was like, ‘you know what? I’ve set a goal. I don’t have to believe in myself. I just have to do the steps that I committed to doing to get me through the valley of the shadow of death.’ And that worked for me. That was a device that worked for me.” (File next to what Ryan Holiday likes to say: “Belief in yourself is overrated. Generate evidence.”)
What Does My Success Look Like?
To date, Brandon Sanderson (author of The Stormlight Archive series, the Mistborn saga, and the Skyward series, among others) has sold more than 40 million books in 35 languages. But his first 12 books were all rejected by every publisher he sent them to. After the twelfth was repeatedly rejected, Sanderson said that after the final no, “I had a metaphorical come to Jesus moment where I was like, ‘What am I doing?’ … I was not making any headway at all.” On top of his own self-doubt, Sanderson’s family and friends were urging him to face reality, pointing to the mountain of rejections as evidence that he should commit to something else. “I had to ask myself,” Sanderson said, “’What does my success look like? What am I willing to accept? If I died—let’s be optimistic, in my 100s—with 150 unpublished manuscripts, was I okay with that? Was I going to keep doing this, even if I knew I would never get published?’ And I realized, ‘Yeah. I would. I would keep going. I would keep writing and telling my stories.’ And I made the call that I was going to keep writing even if I eventually never sold anything.” Telling this story to a creative writing class during the first class of the semester, Sanderson encouraged them, here at the outset of their writerly journey, to decide whether they’d be content to spend their life writing books and never selling one. “You can divorce the ‘I have to be professional and make a full-time living’ from the ‘I just like writing and telling stories,’” he said. “You can shoot for that at the lowest level of success rate—focusing on, ‘I like telling stories, I like getting better as a writer, and maybe one day I’ll sell one.’” (File next to: Expect Nothing. Accept Anything).
“Why Are You Wasting Your Time?”
Similar to Sanderson, for many years, the late great poet Nikki Giovanni was surrounded by people telling her that she was wasting her time pursuing poetry. That writing poems was no way to make a living. In the valley of the shadow of death, as Brad Rushing referred to it, it can be hard to keep going when people are encouraging you to give up. “That is the one thing that I really hate,” Giovanni said, “is people saying, ‘Oh, why are you wasting your time with that?’ As if they know how much time you have and what you should do with it. I’m always amazed—people will tell you, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t waste any time doing this,’ or, ‘I wouldn’t waste any time doing that.’ Well, ‘Who the hell are you? And how do you know this is a waste of time?’ It may not be wasted.” Asked what she’d think or say when people told her she’d never make money as a poet, Giovanni said, “Well, not having money was not significant to me. What I wanted to do was what I was doing.” (It makes me think of the Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Danny Kahneman’s definition of happiness: “happiness is when you’re doing what you want to be doing.”)
It’s All About It Not Working Until It Does
Like anyone starting out in any field, at the beginning of his acting career, Bradley Cooper had to take on jobs that seemed like a waste of time. Jobs that were seemingly small and insignificant. Yet, as longtime Hollywood insider Krista Smith put it in a conversation with him, Cooper approached those minor 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 hand motion of a rapid upward trajectory]…It’s all about it not working until it does and people looking past you until they don’t.”
But What Of That?
When she was a teenager, Marie Curie (then known as Manya)—who would go on to become the first woman to win a Nobel Prize—began thinking about pursuing a career as a scientist. But from a poor family in Russia-controlled Poland, the necessary education was beyond her parents’ financial means. So she struck a deal with her sister Bronya: Marie would get a job as a governess, using her wages to help Bronya pay for medical school in Paris, on the condition that once Bronya became a doctor, she would in turn help pay for Marie’s education. “The first of January 1886,” Eve Curie writes in Madame Curie: A Biography, “the day of her departure was to remain one of the cruelest dates of Manya’s existence,” as it marked the beginning of five long, lonely years working for a wealthy family in the rural countryside, sixty miles north of her home in Warsaw. She tutored the family’s children during the day, and in the evenings, she read and studied subjects like physics and mathematics, driven by the faint hope she’d one day get the chance to do the work that she wanted to do. In a letter to her brother during that time, she wrote, “It is difficult for me to tell you about my life in detail; it is so monotonous and, in fact, so uninteresting…It seems that life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained. Perhaps everything will turn out very well, at the moment when we least expect it.”