Category: Everything else

I came across this passage from a commencement speech by Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen.

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There is a bus station in Helsinki I want to introduce you to, a bus station just next to Eliel Saarinen’s famous train station. Surrounded by Jugenstil architectural gems like the National Theater and the National Art Museum, the bus station makes a cool backdrop for Magnum wannabees armed with D-SLRs and vintage Leica’s.

You might find yourself there sometime, too.

But getting back to the bus station and what makes it famous, at least among the students I teach at UMass Lowell, the University of Art & Design Helsinki, École d’Art Appliqués in Lausanne, or the many workshops I give in Tuscany, Maine and Santa Fe, is the metaphor it offers students and professionals alike for creative continuity in a life-long journey in photography, the metaphor it provides to young artists seeking to discover their own unique vision one day.

The Helsinki Bus Station: let me describe what happens there.

Some two-dozen platforms are laid out in a square at the heart of the city. At the head of each platform is a sign posting the numbers of the buses that leave from that particular platform. The bus numbers might read as follows: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19.

Each bus takes the same route out of the city for a least a kilometer stopping at bus stop intervals along the way where the same numbers are again repeated: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19.

Now let’s say, again metaphorically speaking, that each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer, meaning the third bus stop would represent three years of photographic activity.

Ok, so you have been working for three years making platinum studies of nudes. Call it bus #21.

You take those three years of work on the nude to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn. His bus, 71, was on the same line. Or you take them to a gallery in Paris and are reminded to check out Bill Brandt, bus 58, and so on.

Shocked, you realize that what you have been doing for three years others have already done.

So you hop off the bus, grab a cab (because life is short) and head straight back to the bus station looking for another platform.

This time you are going to make 8×10 view camera color snapshots of people lying on the beach from a cherry picker crane.

You spend three years at it and three grand and produce a series of works that elicit the same comment: haven’t you seen the work of Richard Misrach? Or, if they are steamy black and white 8×10 camera view of palm trees swaying off a beachfront, haven’t you seen the work of Sally Mann?

So once again, you get off the bus, grab the cab, race back and find a new platform. This goes on all your creative life, always showing new work, always being compared to others.

What to do?

It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the f*cking bus.

Why, because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.

The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination. Bus 33 suddenly goes north, bus 19 southwest.

For a time maybe 21 and 71 dovetail one another but soon they split off as well, Irving Penn is headed elsewhere.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly your work starts to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

And as the years mount up and your work takes begins to pile up, it won’t be long before the critics become very intrigued, not just by what separates your work from a Sally Mann or a Ralph Gibson, but by what you did when you first got started!

You regain the whole bus route in fact. The vintage prints made in twenty years ago are suddenly re-evaluated, and for what it is worth, start selling at a premium.

At the end of the line—where the bus comes to rest and the driver can get out for a smoke or better yet a cup of coffee—that’s when the work is done. It could be the end of your career as an artist or the end of your life for that matter, but your total output is now all there before you, the early (so-called) imitations, the breakthroughs, the peaks and valleys, the closing masterpieces, all with the stamp of your unique vision.

Why, because you stayed on the bus.

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It resonated.

We were out skiing the other day and saw a sight that blew our minds.

We saw a lady who looked like she might be in her 60s making her way down the slope with a big sign on her bib – “Visually Impaired Skier.” She had a guide ahead of her who was telling her to turn/step, etc. That process was far from perfect of course. She had to make a couple of ungainly stops where she nearly lost her balance.

And yet, she stuck with it.

We assumed she had limited vision… until we heard a conversation with her guide. She was asking the guide where the gondola was, the ski lift was, etc. That blew our minds again.

Spirit is such a powerful thing. When there is a will, there is a way.

One way of categorizing problems is along the lines of problems that get solved with money and problems that money can’t solve.

A broken pipe at home, a dent on the car, and other such incidental expenses are all problems that go away when we spend money.

The alternatives are problems that no amount of money can fix – a health issue, a problem in a close relationship, or a challenging relationship with a manager.

It always sucks to deal with problems. But they’re also a fact of life. And between the two, problems that money can solve are the best kinds of problems. Assuming we live within our means, these problems may cause temporary hurt – but they’re far better than the alternative.

From time to time, I get the opportunity to speak with folks who are considering changes in their career. And in some of these cases (I’d estimate ~20%), the relationship continues long enough for me to track how the change worked out.

Over the years, I’ve observed a consistent pattern that is especially pronounced amongst those making moves within the same company – most folks prioritize factors like scope and advancement opportunities over the manager they’ll report to

Sometimes, this means making an explicit trade-off – “I know x isn’t a great manager. But the scope looks promising.”

It is a trade-off that always makes the “I wish I’d done this differently” regret list later.

It doesn’t matter how amazing the job looks from the outside. Managers make or break the experience.

When racing champion Mario Andretti was asked for a tip for success in race car driving, he quipped – “Don’t look at the wall. Your car goes where your eyes go.”

It is fantastic advice when attempting to control a race car.

It turns out to be great advice for life too.

What a person chooses to let bother them is a good proxy for the amount of wisdom and perspective they possess.

It is worth paying attention to what we let bother us. :-)

I was booking some tickets recently and decided to check out ticket prices. As it happens sometimes, when I decided to get to booking it the next day, I saw a 6% price increase. What followed was fascinating.

I kept coming back to check ticket prices over the next couple of days without taking any follow up action.

A few such visits later, I asked myself a few questions:

(1) What are you expecting to happen?

(2) How long are you willing to wait to get the “right”/old price? Do you know if will?

(3) Are you in this to play the price arbitrage game and risk not booking on the flight you want?

(4) Is this worth it?

And my responses were

(1) Not sure.

(2) Not sure and I don’t.

(3) No.

(4) Probably not.

It wasn’t that I didn’t know that these were my answers – I think I did subconsciously. I knew I needed to get the bookings done. But asking those questions and verbalizing my responses gave me a lot of clarity.

When you find yourself spinning/taking consistent action without making progress, it nearly always is a result of a lack of clarity.

Take the time to pause and clarify it to yourself.

It is always worth the time.

The biggest change as I switch from version 32 to version 33 is the realization that most of my time is spent solving for upside.

That means I spend no time worrying about basic necessities, little time contemplating worst-case scenarios, and all of the rest attempting to make myself, the people and things around me a bit better. It means I get to choose the projects I get to spend time on, choose where I work from, and choose the kind of work I do.

It also means I get to see places I might never have dreamed of and spend money and time on things that I didn’t think I’d have the opportunity to experience growing up.

Admittedly, it does all feel a bit ridiculous at times. The scrawny kid from 20 years ago would look at the present me and scarcely believe his luck. And for good reason.

There have been three side-effects to this realization.

The first is gratitude. Lots of gratitude. To the combination of people and circumstances that have made all this possible and continue to do so today.

The second is perspective. This privilege means my regular problems are minor blips in the grand scheme of things. I’m not attempting to save our family from an invasion. We’re not stuck facing a pandemic without financial resources. We’re incredibly lucky. Remembering that privilege every day brings lots of perspective.

And the third is a sense of responsibility to make something of all this luck and privilege. It means making doubly sure I’m doing my best to work on problems that matter and giving them my best shot. The results I seek aren’t guaranteed – but the journey is one I can dedicate myself to.

These realizations have also helped me be more at peace with myself – with all my strengths and weaknesses. When I find that sense of responsibility getting overwhelming or when I feel myself falling short (and let’s face it – it happens often), I know I can count on the perspective to remind myself that things are fine, really. Mistakes and stumbles are expected, even essential. Failing isn’t falling down, its staying down.

Perhaps, most of all, listening to all this self-talk and attempting to improve it has helped me better appreciate the therapeutic power of writing every day. Every day, as I open up my WordPress editor, I realize it is a great opportunity to take stock.

Time to remind myself to summon that perspective and find the learning in those experiences.

Time to grow, hit refresh, simply begin again.

Thank you for joining me on the ride and for all the encouragement along the way.

It means more than I can express.

(Past birthday notes: 32, 31, 30, 29, 28, 27, 26, 25, 24, 23)

A tip I share with new hires is to pick collaborators with just as much rigor as they apply to picking a project.

A dynamic I’ve seen play out time and time again is that projects with collaborators who don’t work together under-perform expectations. Conversely, projects with collaborators who work well together have a way of exceeding expectations.

A great collaborator shouldn’t be the sole reason to pick a project. But once we’re at the stage where we find ourselves weighing projects with similar impact, making the final decision based on who we collaborate with is among the most important things we do.

A more expensive car costs more to insure than a cheaper car.

A 10-room mansion costs a lot more to maintain than a smaller home.

And the maintenance in both cases costs a lot more than just money. There’s a lot of mental investment that goes into their upkeep.

This might sound obvious. But I think it isn’t. That’s because we often focus on the “mo’ money” part without paying as much attention to more problems. That’s why it is human nature to think that the grass is greener on the other side – without necessarily paying attention to all the work and money that goes into maintaining the green grass.

The biggest lesson I’ve learnt here about making mo’ money choices is that a combination of self-awareness and intentionality tends to serve us well.

There isn’t any good or bad judgment inherent in the choices we make. Some folks care deeply about owning a high-speed motorboat. If that gives them (or us) happiness, so be it. The key is understanding what we care about, spending our money on the things and experiences that give us the most happiness, and making peace with the costs.

So, it is true that mo’ money comes with mo’ problems. It is just on us to be self-aware of our willingness to deal with the problems and to be intentional about the kinds of problems we choose to solve.