None Of It Is Wasteful
Early in his songwriting career, if he sat down at the writing table and walked away hours later without a song, John Mayer felt like he had wasted his time. And when a song occasionally flowed out of him, he felt like it came out of nowhere. So he looked for ways to eliminate the wasted efforts and increase those spontaneous bursts of creativity. What he found was that he was wrong on all counts: the wasteful efforts were not wasteful, and the spontaneous bursts were not spontaneous. “When you’re writing and you think you’re not getting anything good,” Mayer said, “what you’re actually doing is you’re assembling firewood for the moments where that second thing happens. You’re assembling firewood for the moment when the truth is ready to come out. And so none of it is wasteful. Nothing ever happens on the spot.” When something seems wasteful, unproductive, and/or terrible but turns out to be essential—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Every Single Thing Has Paid Off
James Cameron has written and directed 3 of the top 4 highest-grossing movies of all time (Avatar, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Titanic). Long before he made movies, after he dropped out of community college, Cameron spent about ten years working low-wage manual labor jobs. He was a truck driver, a school bus mechanic, a high school janitor, a precision tool and die machinist, and so on. “It was a long period of frustration for me in this kind of blue-collar life,” he said. “I was frustrated because I just kind of didn’t know what I was here for.” At some point, he started spending his weekends in the University of Southern California library, where he discovered a deep fascination with filmmaking. He printed every film-related thesis and dissertation he could find, filed them in big binders, and “gave myself a full graduate course on film technology,” he said. In 1979, he got an entry level assistant job at a small independent film company. He quickly developed a reputation for being able to figure out how to do pretty much anything, and in 1982, he was hired to direct his first major film. “I found that everything I had been doing before all flowed perfectly to that moment of film directing,” he said. “Now I look back on it, and every single thing that I learned at those blue-collar jobs has paid off for me. How to drive a truck. How to be a machinist. Even being a high school janitor and scrapping the gum off the bottom of the desks—even that is something that I value now as something that I needed to go through.”
The Gods Must Have Been Smiling On Me
After he graduated from college, Robert Greene worked some sixty different jobs. He was a journalist in New York. He did construction in Greece, taught English in Barcelona, worked as a hotel receptionist in Paris and a tour guide in Dublin. He tried writing novels and plays. He worked in Hollywood as an assistant to various directors. And at the age of 36 in 1995, he began to get depressed by the thought that he had wasted his twenties and thirties. “I was essentially a failure and a loser,” he said. “And I was working in Hollywood, which was just awful. People were so deceptive—they would present themselves to be so saint-like, so virtuous, but behind the scenes, they’d do all kinds of masterful, manipulative maneuvers to get ahead. It really pissed me off. So I was very depressed.” He left Hollywood and moved to Italy where he got a job at an art school. There, he met a book packager named Joost Elffers. While on a walk one day, Joost asked Robert if he had any book ideas. The truth was that Robert did not have any book ideas, “but I improvised one,” he said. “The gods must have been smiling on me. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, all of my pain, all the books I had read, all my experiences in all my different jobs, all the hardcore Machiavellian tactics I saw in Hollywood—it all just welled up and gushed out of me in this book idea.” Essentially, his idea was to use stories from throughout history to illustrate the timeless games people play to covertly manipulate and maneuver others in order to acquire and maintain power. “I want to expose those games,” Robert told Joost, who loved the idea so much that he said he would pay for Robert’s basic living expenses while he wrote the book. “I poured into the book all the lessons I had learned,” Robert writes, “all my training as a writer, all the discipline I’d gained from journalism, all the power-hungry manipulators I saw, all the horrible bosses that I had dealt with.” His entire catalog of experiences turned out to be the firewood for what became his first book, The 48 Laws of Power. “All the good and bad experiences I had accumulated in my sixty different jobs—I didn’t know it of course, but I was building up all those experiences to write that book.”
I Felt Like, ‘It’s Time’
While directing a play in 7th grade, Greta Gerwig got made fun of so much that she gave up her dream of being a director. For the next 17 years, Gerwig pursued what Steven Pressfield calls a “Shadow Career.” Often, Pressfield writes, “when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. That shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same.” In essence, a Shadow Career mimics some aspects of your authentic calling but is ultimately a (conscious or unconscious) diversion from it. In Gerwig’s case, she pursued writing and acting. Then at a party in 2012, about 17 years after seventh-grade-Greta gave up on directing, she met the director Sally Potter could sense just in her body language that Gerwig was resisting her desire to be a director. “It’s written all over you,” Potter said. “The word is ‘dor,’ which means, ‘a yearning that’s bigger than your body.’ You have that and you need to do it. You need to be a director.” Gerwig did it, and four years later, she and Potter met a second time—this time at an event for the award-winning movie, “Lady Bird,” written and directed by Gerwig in her directorial debut. There can be a tendency to think that time spent in a “Shadow Career” is time wasted. But they often turn out to be critical periods of incubation and preparation. In Greta’s case, during those 17 years, she assembled her writing abilities—the ability to write an award-winning script like “Lady Bird.” As a writer and then an actor, she assembled relationships with experienced directors—before filming “Lady Bird,” she made a list of the directors she’d worked with, and then she called and picked their brains for an hour and a half each. So when Potter nudged Greta to step out of her Shadow Career, Greta said, “I felt like I’d been preparing to do it for a very long time. I felt like, ‘It’s time.’ I felt prepared.”
That Terrible Experience Led Me To Say, ‘No Way.’
René Redzepi—chef and co-owner of Noma, a restaurant in Copenhagen, named one of the best restaurants in the world year after year—is known for his incredible ability to develop talent. Chefs Rosio sanchez, Christian Puglisi, Matt Orlando, Søren Ledet, Daniel Burns, Sam Miller, Dan Giusti, Damian Wawrzyniak, Thomas Frebel, Jose Luis Hinostroza, and David Zilber, just to name a few—they all worked for Redzepi before going off to start successful restaurants of their own. Redzepi was asked about this. Why do you help your most talented employees go off and do their own thing? Isn’t it a hassle to find and train new people? “I had a period after I left a restaurant I was working at,” Redzepi said, “where everyone treated me as if I was a stranger to them. Leave. Stay away. Now we’re competitors.That kind of thing. And it was a terrible experience. It was just a terrible experience. And I promised myself never to be that. Never to create that experience for anyone else. Honestly, that’s how it happened—that terrible experience led me to say, ‘No way. When people are ready to leave my restaurant, if they do it in a sound way…I will do everything I can to help them.’”
It’s All Material
The writer Jorge Luis Borges said, “A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose…All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.” The wasteful efforts, the periods of frustration, the diversions, the shadow careers, the terrible experiences—none of it is wasteful. It’s all material.