It’s A Minefield
On the 27th straight day of filming Forrest Gump, Tom Hanks was tired and worried. During a scene on the famous park bench, Hanks stopped and said to director Bob Zemeckis, “Hey, Bob…is anybody going to care about this movie? I don’t think anybody’s going to care.” Bob replied, “It’s a minefield, Tom. You never know what’s good…It’s a minefield! It’s a goddam minefield! We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.” Tom Hanks told this story after he was asked, “When I ask for a memory from your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?” He said that what Zemeckis said was true of every movie he’s worked on: “There’s never any guarantee…You do not know if it is going to work out.”
Negative Capability
Tom Hanks is the 5th-most highest-grossing actor of all time. And yet, the stickiest memory of his career is the feeling of uncertainty. Rarer than talent or work ethic, the poet John Keats wrote, is the ability to step into and push through doubts and uncertainties. In 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization. “At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.” Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
The Work is the Win
Those who possess Negative Capability, who can sit with uncertainty, who can spend months or years in the minefield that is working on something while knowing that there is a real possibility no one will care about it—they often possess another quality. They do what they do, not as a means to some end (money, fame, awards, etc.), but for the sake of doing it. When asked about one of his movies that commercially failed, Hanks said, “I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it.” As Ryan Holiday once told me, “The work has to be the win.” You control the effort, he says, not the results. “So ultimately, you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.”
The Harder You Work, The Better Your Tao
Those who know they don’t control the results often say something similar to what Hanks said—that you can’t know if what you’re working on is going to be successful or not. When Nike founder Phil Knight was asked if, when he first started the company, he ever imagined it would become a billion dollar company. “Sometimes when I get asked that question,” Knight said, “I say, ‘we’re exactly on plan.’” The interviewer laughed. No, Knight admitted, he couldn’t have imagined Nike becoming what it has become. “Luck plays a big role,” he writes in Shoe Dog. “Yes, I’d like to publicly acknowledge the power of luck. Athletes get lucky, poets get lucky, businesses get lucky. Hard work is critical, a good team is essential, brains and determination are invaluable, but luck may decide the outcome. Some people might not call it luck. They might call it Tao, or Logos, or Jñāna, or Dharma. Or Spirit. Or God. Put it this way. The harder you work, the better your Tao.”
The Dunce of the Class
Throughout high school and college, Hugh Jackman worked at a restaurant, a bar, a pizzeria, and then a gym. In his last semester of college, he decided to pursue acting. He thought about what he had learned from those earlier jobs, and then, he made this contract with himself: “Give it seven days a week for five years.” That, Jackman realized, was what all those small business he worked at had in common: They were open 7 days a week and their success required years of hard work. “No one,” Jackman said, “goes into starting a small business thinking, ‘Oh, this is going to be easy and immediately successful.’” Jackman wasn’t immediately successful. “When I started at drama school,” he said, “I was the dunce of the class. It just wasn’t coming right to me…Everyone seemed more likely to succeed, everyone seemed more natural at it.” But the harder you work, the better your Tao. He never broke his contract. He worked hard—seven days a week for five years. “And before that contract with myself expired, I was cast in X-Men as Wolverine.”
The Potential That Lays Here
On the set of Saving Private Ryan, a young Matt Damon, who had a small role in the movie, was sitting with Tom Hanks and some of his fellow young actors. “And Tom said: ‘You are all one movie away from being the biggest movie star in the world. That’s the good news. The bad news is your mailman is one movie away from being the biggest movie star in the world.” It’s a minefield—you never know if it’s going to work out. “But if you crush this,” Hanks said, “somebody out there is going to say, ‘get me that actor.’ That’s always the potential that lays here. You never know who might see your work.” You never know when you might get lucky. The harder you work, the better you Tao.