The Study Of The Relative Value Of Things
In 1915, Robert Henri joined the faculty of the Art Students League, an art school in New York that would go on to develop some of the great artists of the 20th century, including Jackson Pollock, Norman Rockwell, and Georgia O’Keeffe. That year, Henri wrote a letter to the students introducing his philosophy on teaching and the creative process—ideas that would shape both his students and the school itself. In the letter, Henri encouraged his students to resist the tendency to fixate on technical precision, brushwork technique, and rigid, established composition rules. He believed those sort of things come naturally, as a byproduct of prioritizing more important things. As for what those more important things are—well, that’s the work. “The study of art is the study of the relative value of things,” Henri wrote. “To study art is to study order, relative values, to get at fundamental constructive principles. It is the great study of the inside…All outward success, when it has value, is but the inevitable result of an inward success of full living, full play and enjoyment of one’s faculties…Those who live in full mastery of their faculties understand the relative value of things.” The relative value of things—what matters and what doesn’t, what to worry about and what to let go of—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
I’m Going To Be So Busy Thinking Of All The Things That I Got To Do That…
Francis Ford Coppola is known to take huge financial risks, often betting his own money on projects he believed in. The production of Apocalypse Now, for example, went wildly over budget and schedule due to a series of complications: a typhoon destroyed sets in the Philippines, lead actor Martin Sheen suffered a heart attack, and Marlon Brando showed up overweight and unprepared, forcing Coppola to rewrite key scenes. To keep the project alive, Coppola, in his late 30s at the time, mortgaged his home and took on immense personal debt to finish it. More recently, Coppola auctioned off a portion of the winery he built from a modest purchase in the 1970s into one of the largest premium wine producers in the U.S. He used the proceeds to self-finance his latest movie, Megalopolis, an idea he’s been working on for forty-plus years. In his first podcast appearance ever, Coppola was asked how he’s had the guts to take such big swings throughout his career. “For me,” Coppola replied, “it’s about what I value. I don’t value money. I never valued money.” He talked about the way overvaluing money often holds people back from doing what they really want to do. “There’s so many people where when they die they say, ‘I wish I had done this. I wish I had done that,’” he said. “But when I die I’m going to say, ‘I got to do this. And I got to do that. And I got to see my daughter win an Oscar. And I got to make wine. And I got to make every movie I wanted to make.’ And I’m going to be so busy thinking of all the things that I got to do that when I die, I won’t notice it.”
Son Of A Bitch, He Stole My Line
As he was struggling to break into Hollywood, Matt Damon read about how Quentin Tarantino did it. Essentially, he got a big-name actor (Harvey Keitel) to want to star in Tarantino’s first movie (Reservoir Dogs) then leveraged that to get the movie funded. “And so,” Damon said, “We wrote Good Will Hunting and that part that Robin [Williams] eventually took—we called it ‘the Harvey Keitel part.’” “Ben [Affleck] and I wrote the movie specifically because we wanted the parts as actors…But we knew we needed a big-name actor who could get us some money because Ben and I were worth nothing.” Understanding the relative value of being unknown actors, Damon and Affleck knew they’d need help drawing interest from studios and investors. “And so we wrote ‘the Harvey Keitel part’ really open-ended. So we could adjust it: if Morgan Freeman or Denzel Washington wanted to come in and play it—we could make that character from Roxbury [a neighborhood in Boston], and we could explore the historic racial tension in Boston. If Meryl Streep took the part—instead of a father-son relationship, we could make it a mother-son relationship. So we really left it open-ended because we wanted to cast as wide a net as possible because we were just trying to get the movie made…And then once we got Robin to sign up to do it, that’s really what got us a green light to make it…He changed our lives.” Among other reasons, Damon recalled, Williams famously improvised one of the film’s most iconic lines: “Son of a bitch, he stole my line.” Which all reminded me of what Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull writes in his book, Creativity. Inc., about the relative value of good, talented people: “Getting the right people is more important than getting the right idea…If you give a good idea to a mediocre team, they will screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a brilliant team, they will either fix it or throw it away and come up with something better.”
Nobody Ever Takes My Advice
“Despite a lack of natural ability,” Steve Martin writes in Born Standing Up, he would go on to put together one of the most decorated careers in the history of entertainment—five Grammy Awards, an Emmy, multiple Lifetime Achievement Awards, an Honorary Oscar, and on and on. Once, during a talk, someone in the audience asked him how to become successful. “You have to become undeniably good at something,” he said. “Nobody ever takes my advice, because it’s not the answer they wanted to hear. What they want to hear is: here’s how you get an agent, here’s how you write a script, here’s how you do this, here’s how you do that.” What they want to hear is that the relatively easy things are the relatively valuable things. That there’s a straightforward formula to follow or checklist to tick off. That there’s a way to bypass the pains of relentless repetition. “But I always say, ‘Be so good they can’t ignore you.’ If you are just always thinking, ‘How can I be really good?’—people will come to you.”
Just Feeling Like I Was Feeling When I First Started
After the success of her second album, 21, Adele struggled to make music for nearly two years. She even considered walking away from it all, saying, “I was like, ‘I’m never going to be able to follow up 21.’” But then, “I realized that I actually didn’t want to live up to 21. I didn’t want to live in the state of mind that I was when I wrote 21. Because it was a miserable one…It was horrible. I was miserable, I was lonely, I was sad, I was angry, and I was bitter. I didn’t want to feel that again.” It was a subtle shift in her thinking—a realization of what truly mattered. With it, Adele said, “I was able to let go of the pressure to follow up the success of 21. And instead, I was like, ‘I’m just going to write music for fun.’” When she stopped trying to follow up 21, she said, “the process felt a lot like when I was making my first album—I was just doing it because I wanted to.” Doing it just because she wanted to, Adele recorded her third album, 25, which went on to win 6 Grammys and become the fourth-best-selling album of the 21st century. “The success of 25 was like madder than 21,” she said. “And I was not expecting it. I was just making music for fun and feeling like I was feeling when I first started making music.” The outward success of 25 was but the inevitable result of Adele’s inward success, of just valuing what she valued when she first started making music.
The Fisherman And The Businessman
After nine years of creating Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld returned to being a standup comedian. He made an estimated $38 million from just the last season of the show—when he had a boatful of money and unlimited options, he went back to the thing he loved when he had little money and few options. It made me think of the parable of the fisherman and the businessman: In a small coastal village, there is a fisherman who owns a small row boat. One afternoon, after fishing all morning, the fisherman returns with his boat full. A vacationing businessman, impressed, asks, “How long does it take to catch so many fish?” “Just a couple of hours,” the fisherman replies. Seeing an opportunity, the businessman offers to invest in a bigger boat and set up a company supplying fish to local restaurants. The fisherman asks, “And then what?” The businessman explains, “We’ll expand, sell the business for a fortune, and then you can retire by the sea and fish as much as you want.” The fisherman replies, “Isn’t that what I already do?” It’s just a reminder: the ability to do what you want for as long as you want is priceless and, often, relatively inexpensive.