You Should Have Seen It When He Was In Charge
Jerry Seinfeld said the following is one of his favorite jokes, the one that “would encapsulate my worldview.” A gardener was out tending to his beautiful, magnificent, thriving garden when another man walked by and stopped to admire it. “Boy,” the man said, marveling at the blooming flowers and the perfect rows of crops, “some of God’s best work, huh?” The gardener set down his tools, wiped his hands, looked up, smiled, and replied, “You should have seen it when he was in charge of it.” ”That’s how I look at life,” Seinfeld said. “It’s all beautiful, but not really. Not until we do something with it.” It reminded me of what the 20th-century historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt identifies in The Human Condition as the core trait “inherent in all human activities.” Everything that happens in this world, she writes, “rests on initiative,” on those “willing to take the burden, the toil and trouble of life, upon themselves.”
Taking charge, taking initiative, taking the burden upon yourself—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
You Have To Make Your Own Turn
Since she was a kid, Greta Gerwig wanted to be a director. At one point, she met with executives at Sony Pictures and tried to persuade the studio to let her direct an adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s novel Little Women. “Who are you?” one of the execs said. “I don’t know who you are.” Accepting that if she were to get what she wanted, she’d have to “will it into existence,” Gerwig wrote an original screenplay, Lady Bird. With it, she made her directorial debut and earned three Oscar nominations, including Best Director, becoming just the fifth woman ever nominated in that category. After Lady Bird’s success, Gerwig said, Sony Pictures “came back around and said, ‘do you want to direct Little Woman?’” Reflecting on her path, Gerwig said, “When you’re coming up, you kind of have this sense that somebody at some point will be like, ‘Now it’s your turn. And it doesn’t ever happen like that…There’s no man behind the curtain who goes, ‘Ok, your turn now.’ You have to make your own turn. You have to will it into existence.”
I Think Roy Kent Is In Me
Five episodes into writing the first season of Ted Lasso, one of the writers, Brett Goldstein, began to think that he could play the part of Roy Kent, the intimidating tough guy on the show’s premier league soccer team, AFC Richmond. “But I also thought,” Goldstein said, “no one in this writers room is thinking I could be Roy.” Unlike Roy, Goldstein is not an intimidating tough guy. He is soft-spoken, he doesn’t like confrontation, he loves the Muppets, et cetera. “So I knew not a single person was thinking of me for Roy, for obvious reasons,” Goldstein said. “And I didn’t want to make anyone uncomfortable by suddenly saying in the writers room, ‘what about me for Roy Kent?’” So Goldstein waited until the writers finished the first season before privately renting time at a production office where actors can record audition tapes. There, he filmed five Roy Kent scenes. Playing opposite him was an intern who, Goldstein said, “was not even an actor. He was just this sort of deadpan Norwegian man who I asked to stand in as Keeley,” a PR consultant for AFC Richmond and Roy’s eventual love interest on the show. After filming, Goldstein emailed the tape to Bill Lawrence, the show’s co-creator who had originally hired him as a writer. “Look,” Goldstein wrote in the email, “if this is awkward or if this [audition tape] is shit, pretend you never got this email. And I promise I will never ask you about it. But if you like it, I think Roy Kent is in me.” Then Goldstein boarded a plane to fly back to his home in London. When he landed after the long flight, Goldstein had an email from Lawrence, replying that he thought the tape was brilliant. “And,” Goldstein said, “that’s how I got the part.” He willed it, initiated it, into existence.
Make What’s Missing
Before Lin-Manuel Miranda created award-winning musicals, he was a substitute teacher in New York City. From an early age, he dreamed of starring in Broadway musicals. In college, he studied the musical theater canon, searching for potential acting roles. “For Latinos, in the musical theater canon, it’s slim pickings,” he explained. “We have West Side Story, Zoot Suit, and we have a couple of parts in A Chorus Line—that’s it.” Instead of responding to the lack of Latino roles with bitterness or resignation, Miranda took initiative. “I decided to make what I saw was missing,” he said. “I didn’t realize it at the time, but that’s the best advice you could give anyone: make what’s missing.” So, he continues, “I wrote a musical full of scenes where people are rapping outside of bodegas [and] doing the stuff that me and my Latino friends used to do.” He set his musical in a majority-Latino neighborhood (Washington Heights) near where he grew up, he filled it a majority-Latino cast, and he titled it, In The Heights. He wrote it over the course of 5 years—mostly on nights and weekends—while “I was a ‘whichever teacher is sick’ substitute teacher.” And on March 9, 2008, In The Heights premiered on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre. That same year, it won a Grammy (Best Musical Show Album) and four Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
With Enough Effort and Preparation…
In the documentary Free Solo, a team of neuroscientists perform an fMRI scan on Alex Honnold’s brain. They conclude that he was born with an abnormal brain, one that “doesn’t experience fear like the rest of us.” “I find that slightly irritating,” Honnold later said. Because saying his brain is abnormal—a detail repeated in nearly every interview and article—is sort of like the admirer chalking the beautiful, magnificent, thriving garden up to God. It implies that Honnold’s physical and mental abilities are merely a genetic fluke, something he was born with. It overlooks the burden, the toil, and the trouble he has taken upon himself to become who he is. “I’ve spent 25 years,” he said, “conditioning myself, through systematic practice, to work in extreme conditions.” In 2009, for instance, Honnold began thinking about free soloing (rock climbing without ropes or safety gear) El Capitan—a 3,000-ft rock wall in Yosemite. “For the next seven years,” he said, “I’d drive into Yosemite, look at the wall, and think, ‘No way. Too scary.’” “To gradually expand my comfort zone,” as Honnold put it, he took on incrementally harder climbs. He climbed El Cap hundreds of times with a rope. Hundreds more, he hiked to the summit, rappelled down with over a thousand feet of rope, and rehearsed every hand and foot movement on every section of the wall. Through this systematic practice and preparation, over time, the wall looked less and less scary each time Honnold drove into Yosemite. And on June 3, 2017, he became the first person to climb it without a rope. “I think the real takeaway from that fMRI experience,” Honnold concluded, “is that with enough effort and preparation, you can change the way scary things register in your brain.” You just have to take the burden, the toil and trouble of preparation, upon yourself.
Little Gets Done For Us
In a 1928 letter to his friend Edmund Wilson, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “It’s little we get done for us in this world.” It’s little we are given, gifted, granted, or born with. It mostly rests on initiative, on being willing to take the burden—the toil and trouble of making your own turn, your own audition tape, your own roles, your own abnormal brain—upon yourself.