The Forms of Capital
In economic contexts, “capital” refers to accumulated wealth—money, property, or other financial assets—that can be invested or used to potentially generate more wealth. In his essay The Forms of Capital, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu expanded the meaning of the term: “Capital is accumulated labor…It is what makes the games of society—not least, the economic game—something other than simple games of chance.” Beyond economic capital, Bourdieu identified three other forms of capital “inscribed in the very reality of the social world, which govern its functioning in a durable way, determining the chances of success”: social capital (e.g., relationships and connections), cultural capital (e.g., knowledge, skills, and taste), and symbolic capital (e.g., prestigious awards and honors). Like economic capital, these other forms, Bourdieu writes, “take time to accumulate” and contain “a potential capacity” to generate wealth, opportunities, power, advantages, success, and so on.
Forms of capital that make the games of society something other than simple games of chance—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
I Was Obsessive About That Fucking Tea
Music industry legend Jimmy Iovine got his start as an assistant to the producer and engineer Roy Cicala. He swept the floors, set up equipment, restocked supplies, ran errands—he did whatever Cicala or the musicians recording in Cicala’s studio asked him to do. Then, in 1971, when Cicala was producing John Lennon’s album Imagine, Iovine said, “I learned how to make John Lennon’s tea.” It was a small task—something that many might overlook or dismiss as inconsequential. Not Iovine. “I was like the way I am about everything with that fucking tea,” he said. “I perfected it. I timed it exactly. Lennon wouldn’t let anybody else make it.” Over time, that tea—and Iovine’s precise dedication to it—built a kind of dependability and reliability that are highly valuable forms of social capital in a world that is highly collaborative, dependent on relationships, and driven by trust. “As time went on,” Iovine said, “Roy—like all of us do—began handing bigger things off to me.” On Easter Sunday 1973, Cicala called Iovine—then 20 years old—and said, “I need you to come in today to answer the phones.” When Iovine told his Mom he had to go to work, she said, “Are you crazy? It’s Easter Sunday!” When he got to the studio, Cicala and Lennon were there laughing. “What are you guys laughing at?” Iovine asked. “We wanted to see if you would come in on Easter Sunday,” Roy said. “The assistant engineer can’t make it. John wants you to do it.” Iovine got his first credit as an assistant engineer on Lennon’s 1973 album, Mind Games. He would go on to work on six of Lennon’s albums, including Walls & Bridges and Rock ‘n’ Roll,gradually accumulating the cultural and symbolic capital that would lead to him engineering and producing albums for Bruce Springsteen, Patty Smith, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, and on and on. It all started, Iovine said, because “I was obsessive about that fucking tea.”
You Ain’t Got It, Kid
A year into what was supposed to be a seven-year acting contract with Columbia Pictures, in 1966, a 24-year-old Harrison Ford was called in to meet with Columbia executive Jerry Tokofsky. “You ain’t got it, kid,” Tokofsky told Ford. “You have no future in this business.” Dropped from Columbia, Ford—married, with two young sons, needing “to have another source of income”—borrowed books from the public library and became a carpenter. Carpentry allowed Ford to accumulate forms of cultural and social capital that, as it turned out, contained a capacity to generate acting opportunities. The skills, habits, and discipline he developed through carpentry shaped his approach to acting: “Carpentry,” Ford explained, “is preparing your materials, lining out your process, putting a brick on a brick, and building something. And that’s exactly what you do in acting and filmmaking.” One director, who would cast him in five movies, said he liked having Ford around because he could figure out how to do just about anything: “I’ve seen him pick up a hammer and fix a set when the construction man’s not there.” Another praised “Harrison’s rigor and practicality…his carpenter’s approach to acting.” And during the long stretches when he wasn’t acting—“there was a period of eight to ten years when I had three acting jobs”—Ford was accumulating social capital. He built bookcases for Joan Didion, a deck for Sally Kellerman, a recording studio for Sergio Mendes, and around Hollywood—an everybody-knows-everybody kind of town—he became known as the “carpenter to the stars.” Most famously, in the mid 1970s, Ford was building “an elaborate portico entrance” at director Francis Ford Coppola’s offices, where Coppola’s friend George Lucas was leading casting meetings for Star Wars. Though Ford had a small part in Lucas’s American Graffiti, Lucas had sent a memo to the actors’ agents telling them not to bother with auditions—he wouldn’t be casting anyone from Graffiti in his next project. “So there I was kneeling on the floor in my carpenter’s belt, working late one night,” Ford said, “when I was asked by George if I would read with the other actors—just as a favor. There was no indication that I might be considered for a part in the film.” That night and the next, “I read with more than three hundred actors. And weeks later, they asked me if I wanted to play Han Solo.” After the success of Star Wars, Ford landed the iconic role of Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Then it was starring roles in Blade Runner, Witness, Working Girl, Presumed Innocent, and on and on. And fifteen years after he was fired from Columbia, Ford—now one of the biggest names in Hollywood, having starred in five of the ten highest-grossing movies of all time—was out to eat one night. “A waiter came over to me in the middle of my meal,” he said. “He had a little tray, and on it, there was a little white card.” Ford picked up the card. In handwriting, it read, “I missed my guess.” He turned it over—a business card, with “20th Century Fox, Producer” printed beneath the name…Jerry Tokofsky. “He was guessing,” Ford said. He was thinking the business is a simple game of chance, never imagining the forms of capital Ford would work to accumulate, “and,” Ford said, “he made a bad bet.”
A Cinderella Story
In 2016, Pharrell Williams visited an N.Y.U. music production class to critique student songs. After he listened to a song called “Alaska” by a student named Maggie Rogers, Pharrell said, “Wow. I have zero, zero, zero notes for that.” “And I’ll tell you why,” he said. “Because you’re doing your own thing. It’s singular. It’s like when the Wu-Tang Clan came out—no one could really judge it. You either liked it or you didn’t, but you couldn’t compare it to anything else. And that is such a special quality, and all of us possess that ability.” The video with Pharrell went viral and Maggie Rogers, seemingly overnight, was a pop star. But…Rogers started playing music when she was 7. She started songwriting a few years later. In high school, she attended courses at the Berklee College of Music. During her senior year, she recorded her first album—the album that got her accepted to the N.Y.U. music school and the opportunity to play one of her songs in front of Pharrell. As Rogers later said of the viral video, “My many, many years of focus and hard work got kind of packaged into a Cinderella story.” Her many, many years of accumulating capital got packaged into a kind of simple game of chance.
A Long Period of Frustration In This Kind of Blue-Collar Life
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, Cameron got a job as a model builder for the independent film company, New World Pictures. He didn’t know it at the time, but during those years of frustration in that kind of blue-collar life, Cameron had been accumulating forms of cultural capital—practical skills, technical know-how, and a hands-on problem-solving mindset—that would generate real advantages, immediately setting him apart on movie sets. The second set he worked on was for a horror movie called Galaxy of Terror. At one point, there’s a scene of a chopped-off arm on the floor with maggots crawling on it. The maggots were actually mealworms from a pet food store, and when Cameron initially sprinkled the mealworms on the prop arm, they didn’t move. Borrowing a technique he’d previously read about, Cameron explained, “I took a piece of electrical cord, put it underneath the arm, and buried it so you couldn’t see it. Then I had a guy behind the set, who plugged in the electrical cord when I said, ‘Action.’ Now, these two guys walk up behind me. I don’t see them, but they’re sizing me up, watching me work. I go, ‘Roll camera, and, Action!’ All these worms come to life and start wiggling around, and then I yell, ‘Cut!’ The guy behind the set unplugs the cord, and the worms stop moving. I look up, and there’s these two guys looking at each other with amazement.” It turned out the two guys were producers from another studio and in need of a director. “They were like, ‘Hey, you want to go to lunch?’ And that’s how I got my first directing gig…I always say, ‘fortune favors the prepared mind.’ I had been training myself for when the opportunity arose.” He had been accumulating capital, Cameron said, “so when the opportunity did arise, I actually had some knowledge and skills.”
A Currency Like Gold
In a car ride with Robert Greene on December 11, 2021, he asked me about working for Ryan Holiday. I love it, I said, but I also battle the nagging thought that friends on more traditional career paths are making more money. “Don’t worry about money,” Robert told me. “At this point in your life, above all else, focus on acquiring knowledge and skills. Knowledge and skills are like gold—a currency you will transform into something more valuable than you can imagine.” Focus on accumulating forms of capital—cultural, social, and-or symbolic. They are like gold—a currency you will transform into something more valuable than you can imagine.