I have very little time today—the whole day is going to be taken up with a trip to Rochester because Butters has an interview. The kennel where he's already stayed numerous times wants him to re-interview, so, I have to drive to Rochester (1:20), wait three hours, and drive back, and there goes my day.
But I wanted to point something out that's kind of curious. The "Secret Art" piece took the longest of any piece I've ever written in my life, and we worked over it the hardest of anything, ever. (I've never written a book or any other long-form piece of writing—no thesis or dissertation either.) And then yesterday I had the pool gang coming over for our regular Monday session (we do it every week, 10–12 Mondays followed by lunch), and I didn't get all the morning stuff done until nine, and that's when I sat down to write...so yesterday's post was written—conceived, drafted, polished—inside a one-hour window.
I just thought the contrast was pretty striking. Writing for newyorker.com is the best possible challenge for me at this time of life. I get to learn a new way of writing, with a working method—collaborative, directed, considered, detail-oriented, fact-checked, disciplined—that is the polar opposite of the way I've been writing for years. Couldn't have found a better way to improve and grow, is what I'm guessing.
Being organized and working hard
The older I get, the more I'm convinced that there are two things that contribute to success more than anything else: being organized and working hard. That sounds simple, but I had no clue about it when I was young. I valued many things above those two—intelligence and talent certainly, but insight and vision and other assets as well. Heck, I even valued my own opinion more than I valued being organized! (Opinions are overvalued by everyone always.) I'm not sure I really even considered organizational ability to be an aptitude at all. The Dunning-Kruger Effect might have been in operation there. I'm very disorganized, and have come around to seeing it as one of my major liabilities. You can learn to work hard, but I'm not sure you can learn to be organized. I literally can't organize my house. It's beyond my skills. Martha Stewart could organize a single house while the tea brews, and I can't do it at all.
Ego/self-belief is also important. Norman Mailer said "writer's block...is simply a failure of ego." Self-confidence is the outward sign of believing in yourself, but it's also possible for it to be compensatory, meaning it indicates low self-esteem and lack of self-belief. So mere confidence isn't the key. Inner self-belief is an asset to be prized.
And if you don't have the ability to be organized and you aren't able to work hard, devising workarounds for those two deficits will be among the most important challenges you have to face in a career. You can make up for either deficit, but to do so you have to be very aware of them and you have to understand their importance. I don't think I did until later in life.
The devil's-advocate position
Of course, outward success isn't everything. A lot of people lead happy and fulfilling lives without being "successful" in the conventional career sense. In fact, at my age, I know a number of people who feel they sacrificed too much for career and wealth; they missed too much else, worked too hard at outward success and didn't enjoy life enough as it was passing by. (Seeing both sides of an issue is one of my strengths.) But where career and accomplishment are concerned, I suspect that being organized and learning to work hard are probably the two keys to success. What do you think?
These two keys are important to success in photography as much as anything else.
Mike
Book o' the Week
Grit and Grace: Women at Work in the Emerging World. Unfortunately, this will be the posthumous swan song of the indefatigable documentarian Alison Wright, whose untimely death at 60 in the Azores this year meant she never got to see it published. Wright's photography was inextricably entwined with her life's dedication to social justice, a sense of acceptance of humanity, and a roving search for beauty and color.
The book link is your portal to Amazon from TOP, should you wish to support this site.
Original contents copyright 2020 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.
(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:
darlene: "I would add a third key: if you work hard at it, it is usually because you love it and cannot see yourself doing anything else."
Albert Smith (partial comment): "...For me time management is most important. Time is the one thing that can't be regenerated or increased. If you waste it, it's gone. [...] I'm retired now, have no urgent deadlines to be met (unlike my pre-retirement life), but I don't go to bed without having my 'to do' list filled out. All my activities that require me to leave the house are mapped out ergonomically so that I don't duplicate effort or retrace steps, thus getting more done in less time. Old habits die hard."
Mike replies: When I was young, I had the persistent feeling that if I didn't have enough time to do something, it wasn't even worth getting started. This got worse and worse, until, if I didn't have a block of hours free to do something, I wouldn't attempt to even get started. Then I read a book about time management. And now I'm the opposite. However small the chunk of time I have free, I'll think, 'what will fit in [x] minutes?' So if the tea has two and a half more minutes to brew, I'll unload the dishwasher. I can take a shower in twelve minutes. Sometimes, even if I have 30 seconds, I'll find something I can do in that time. A bonus has been that I use time to motivate myself. When I'm feeling slothful and don't want to take out the trash, I'll think, c'mon, it only takes three and a half minutes. That makes it a lot easier to do.
I'm not saying I never waste time...I waste a lot of time. But I no longer think I need a lot of time to get anything done.
Kenneth Tanaka (partial comment): " In my opinion and experience the strongest ability toward universal 'success' that anyone in any walk of life can develop is reliability. That means being reliable to yourself as well as to others on matters big and small. If you say you’re going to have that article ready by Friday, do it. If you say you’ll finish construction of a building by December 15th, do it. If you promise yourself you’re going to accomplish something by Saturday, do it. Make your word golden and always be as good as your word in whatever fields of endeavor you call home. [...] Flakes are plentiful and worthless. Reliable people are relatively rare and very valuable."
Mike replies: My father had an employee who was later a U.S. Congressman. He said the most remarkable thing about the guy was that "you only ever had to ask him to do anything once, and you knew it would get done."
Kirk: "In my experiences over the last six plus decades I find that discipline is the most important asset for success—in everything. Showing up every day ready to work or swim or parent or save or whatever. That's the difference between 'meh' and 'yay!' Talent is overrated."
Geoff Wittig (partial comment): "The smartest human being I have ever met was the late Frank Oski, the brilliant head of Pediatrics at SUNY Upstate and later at Johns Hopkins. He once suggested that medical schools should alter their selection process to favor diligence and integrity over book smarts. His argument was simple; 'Most errors in medicine are due not to stupidity but to sloth; hence students of merely high average intelligence who work harder are preferable to intellectually gifted dilettantes.'"
Andrew (partial comment): "Another quality that I would put on equal footing with organization and work ethic is resilience. It might be related to the inner self-belief you describe, but resilience is different. The ability to overcome challenges and recover from mistakes is necessary."
Malcolm Myers: "I am middle-aged now (53) and I've reached a kind of happy medium in life. I wasn't as successful in my career as I wanted to be, but I have a wife and two children, (seven and 10). We have just built a lovely new house that we owe nothing on, and I work for myself, mostly at home, and earn a reasonable amount. Much like my photography, I never amounted to much, but I have an enjoyable record of my travels when I was single and of my family growing up. I have a stress-free life and I am extremely content with that. Sometimes, less is more."
Scott Abbey (partial comment): "I would add 'showing up' to the list of critical life skills. This is related to working hard, but a surprising number of people seem to not even try to be successful (not judging; whatever rocks their boat). When the boss asks for volunteers for a tough project, the ones who raise their hands are showing up. When I think about my many failings in developing myself, I realize I often never even showed up to try."
Mike replies: My cousin Liz applied to the Radcliffe Publishing Course, a famously intensive six-week summer course in publishing (now called the Columbia Publishing Course). She was waitlisted. So she showed up on campus (from Kentucky) three days early and simply told the school that she was there. There ended up not being a place open for her, but they let her in anyway...just for showing up. She ended up getting a job at ArtNews and working there for seven years.
Stephen Scharf (partial comment): "Rather than 'working hard' and devising 'workarounds,' think about it this way: you want to work effectively and efficiently. Effective is doing the right thing and efficient is doing things right."
John Camp: "Perhaps your thought is a little too broad. I work hard in an organized way for a few hours most days, but that's it; the studio where I work looks like a tornado went through it. I can't even find my cameras half the time, and two broken, obsolete computers have been sitting on a desk for six months since I pulled the hard drives out of them, but I can't get organized enough to drop them off at Best Buy for recycling. You seem to be the same way—you're organized enough to write a blog most days, but maybe not so much in other stuff, and that's fine, because with the main thing you do, you are organized and work at it. Frankly, I don't trust people who are organized in everything. Reeks of fascism."
"I have very little time today—the whole day is...."
Under your two criteria for success, I really prize being organized. Simply being organized can reduce the need to work hard to just basic work. And of all the organization categories, for me time management is most important. Time is the one thing that can't be regenerated or increased. If you waste it, it's gone. Then you will have to work hard to get things done in less time than if you could have just spread that work load over a greater window of time.
I'm retired now, have no urgent deadlines to be met (unlike my pre-retirement life), but I don't go to bed without having my "to do" list filled out. All my activities that require me to leave the house are mapped out ergonomically so that I don't duplicate effort or retrace steps, thus getting more done in less time.
Old habits die hard. I thought retirement would end my regimented life style, but it's more stressful for me to go all "whatever" mode.
Posted by: Albert Smith | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 11:42 AM
success: noun: the accomplishment of an aim or purpose.
“Be organized and work hard” were mantras drilled into my head as the passports to "success" throughout the first chapters of my life, probably like many people. Later, after decades of life experiences, I stood back and questioned this religion. Success at what? “Success” without a specific objective is meaningless. And without an objective, “keys” like organization and hard work are also mush. Organize what? Working hard at what? I’ve known people who spent 110% or their energies obsessing over making largely useless lists to feel they’re organized. Also people who beat themselves crazy working hard on jobs that achieved nothing towards their professional or personal progress. But they sure were “hard workers”. So, no, I don’t summarily agree with those keys, Mike. They’re certainly useful personal traits but, like lasers, only if directed toward a target.
In my opinion and experience the strongest ability toward universal “success" that anyone in any walk of life can develop is realiability. That means being reliable to yourself as well as to others on matters big and small. If you say you’re going to have that article ready by Friday, do it. If you say you’ll finish construction of a building by December 15th, do it. If you promise yourself you’re going to accomplish something by Saturday, do it. Make your word golden and always be as good as your word in whatever fields of endeavor you call home. If you have to be organized and work hard to achieve that status, so be it. (Some people are just clever at recruiting such people.)
Flakes are plentiful and worthless. Reliable people are relatively rare and very valuable.
Posted by: Kenneth Tanaka | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 12:13 PM
Being organized certainly helps and it can be learned. It is a necessary (well, helpful) but not sufficient contributor to success, however you define success. Over a long career in business I’ve had to adapt my natural, “creative” personality to the exigencies of getting things done on time and on budget. There are all kinds of tools and techniques a disorganized person can learn to accomplish this - the trick is you have to want to enough.
Posted by: Adam Isler | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 12:28 PM
I would partially agree; being organized and working hard are two of the traits that contribute to success in most fields. Raw intelligence, creative thinking and people skills are also helpful. Being especially gifted in one of these domains can compensate for deficiency in another.
In my field of medicine, the grueling competitive selection process favors raw intelligence and organization over compassion, people skills or creativity, with unfortunate consequences.
The smartest human being I have ever met was the late Frank Oski, the brilliant head of Pediatrics at SUNY Upstate and later at Johns Hopkins. He once suggested that medical schools should alter their selection process to favor diligence and integrity over book smarts. His argument was simple; "Most errors in medicine are due not to stupidity but to sloth; hence students of merely high average intelligence who work harder are preferable to intellectually gifted dilettantes". As David Bayles notes in his classic Art and Fear, "Even talent is rarely distinguishable, over the long run, from perseverance and lots of hard work".
Posted by: Geoff Wittig | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 12:53 PM
I work in an office of 70 professionals, plus support staff. The work is demanding, and I like to think we provide excellent advice and work product to our clients.
I agree that being organized and working hard contribute enormously to success in my field (law). You can compensate for lack of one or the other, but only to a certain degree. I used to revere intelligence, but I’ve realized that beyond a threshold level, smarts don’t determine success vs. failure. I’ve seen plenty of folks far smarter than me unable to get out of their own way and produce good work.
Another quality that I would put on equal footing with organization and work ethic is resilience. It might be related to the inner self-belief you describe, but resilience is different. The ability to overcome challenges and recover from mistakes is necessary. Without it, people don’t last long in my line of work.
Posted by: Andrew | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 01:12 PM
Sigh. Yes. The older I get, the more I appreciate organization and hard work (two things I'm also deficient in) and deprecate talent and cleverness (two things I seem less deficient in). And yes the latter can often compensate for the former, with practice. However, organization and hard work seem far more robust than the latter approach, which often requires a spark (naturally--only one of these approaches is also a method.) Also agree that people like me should develop our gifts, though that, too, greatly benefits from organization and hard work.
Posted by: robert e | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 01:33 PM
I’m going to assume that success doesn’t include something like “they were successful at spending their inheritance before the age of 40”.
One can work hard and not be successful (I know way to many people like this). But I don’t believe one can be successful and not work hard. At least not if your success is defined as doing better in your chosen sphere of activity than the average.
Lack of organizational skills, on the other hand, is often overcome by … working harder. In fact, many other presumed shortcomings - intelligence, specific knowledge related to a task, fluency in a foreign language, etc. - can be overcome by working harder.
I would add “showing up” to the list of critical life skills. This is related to working hard, but a surprising number of people seem to not even try to be successful (not judging; whatever rocks their boat). When the boss asks for volunteers for a tough project, the ones who raise their hands are showing up. When I think about my many failings in developing myself, I realize I often never even showed up to try.
Posted by: Scott Abbey | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 03:02 PM
Rather than "working hard" and devising "workarounds, think about it this way: you want to work EFFECTIVELY and EFFICIENTLY.
EFFECTIVE is doing the RIGHT THING and EFFICIENT is doing THINGS RIGHT.
Once ya think about it this way, it will provide you with INSIGHTS about ACTIONS you need to take to achieve your AIMS.
With respect to organized, of course you can learn to be organized. To that end, my recommendation: buy (and actually read) Atomic Habits by James Clear. It's excellent and based on truly effective principles. Best book I've read in years.
As a side note: I didn't start figuring this stuff out until I started working as a Design for Six Sigma (DFSS) Master Black Belt after 30 years working as a scientist. DFSS helped me to codify my thinking process in new ways, both as a scientist (Design of Experiments, aka DOE, was a veritable revelation, why isn't this taught to scientists at University?).
Funny how that stuff can translate to other things in your life. Wish I knew this stuff when I was in my 20's. ;-)
Posted by: Stephen Scharf | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 03:36 PM
You need to have something to say! Show me something I've never seen before. Well organized garbage is still garbage.
Posted by: c.d.embrey | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 03:47 PM
"But where career and accomplishment are concerned*, I suspect that being organized and learning to work hard are probably the two keys to success. What do you think?"
I think that you have pulled out a couple of the many factors that figure into "success" as "the two keys" when that is simply not true.
The one-armed paper hanger and the blind photographer come to mind as extreme examples of the importance of mental, emotional and physical attributes appropriate to the job.
I imagine you’ve never sung next to someone tone deaf? Never played catch with someone who couldn’t visually follow the ball and make their hands intersect its course?
I was a science nerd as a kid, then a physics major at Berkeley. It was something of a come down when I found I did not have the sort of brain that could do the math involved in going further. Sure, I could have gotten a tutor, buckled down, worked harder, organized my learning.
But one of my skills is analysis, seeing what’s going on. It became clear that no matter how hard I tried, I would never have the comfortable skill that’s a base requirement, before other things, for that career.
In my lengthy career, much as what might be called lower middle management, I hired, fired and supervised a fair number of people.
There are people who are highly organized, really hard working, never wasting a moment, and who simply can’t produce the results required, and being done with ease by others. There are also people who are , at least apparently, disorganized, and not particularly hard working, but produce the results, and everything between.
I hated firing. I hated having a guy crying in my office, a guy with a stay at home wife and two kids, but his depression was affecting everyone. Then, he got into right work for him fairly quickly and was a success, becoming head of department in a big County.
In that same career, I was never organized. My offices were known for their piles. I was often asked how I ever found anything. I was a terrifically hard worker, the minority of the time when I was deeply engaged in the work. I was occasionally a running scared hard worker when facing an important deadline.
I also wasted an astonishing amount of time. Force an intuitive creative into office hours, and lots of time is spent being unproductive. But I had skills not held by others, that were generally useful and occasionally crucial to a huge enterprise.
And yet, I retired at 55, have had over 20 years of, to my mind, fabulously successful retirement, with more than adequate retirement income and savings.
Thesis unproved.
------------------
* Are you sure you don’t mean Fame and Fortune? I think that’s what most people mean when they say Success, or use these stand-ins.
Posted by: Moose | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 04:45 PM
In life, being able to balance and to enjoy a mix of the physical, mental & intellectual, emotional, financial and the spiritual is great gain.
Posted by: Dan Khong | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 05:36 PM
I guess a degree of survival bias is at play there. Whoever comes to the conclusion that being organised and hard work are important should have a minimal level of intelligence and talent.
Posted by: John Y | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 05:53 PM
I rather suspect that for many photographers, being organised and working hard both present problems. You can be as organised as you like, but that doesn’t make the ‘phone ring, and if it ain’t ringing, you ain't gonna be working very hard either.
From my own experiences, it only felt like hard work when the gig wasn’t going very well, and that was almost invariably down to clients having pushed the wrong model into the job, or it was one of those shoots that I should have walked away from instead of accepting. The latter sounds easy, but unless you have faced the choice, you won’t know how difficult it is knowingly to slam doors on the fingers of people who might turn out later to become good clients; you also need a good bank account behind you if you want to play that game.
Truthfully, work never felt like hard work when it was going well. In fact, the surprising thing was just how fast the clock turned out to have moved at such times. Perhaps everybody is different, but my own feeling is that when things are moving sweetly during a shoot, time ceases to exist, and you find yourself in a parallel space, a little private world of just you and your - with luck - muse. Funny thing: if sweat is supposedly a sign of nerves, of possible fear, then we have seriously to reappraise our conception of nervous energy, and remove it (sweat) from any absolute connection with fear; as confident as I may have felt during a great session, the sweat just rolled off my head and my shirt would be soaked. I would be physically wiped out after a few hours of such work in a studio. For some reason (and I have never thought of it before), this sweating thing, in memory at least, played no part of outdoor gigs. I wonder why? Could it be that, outdoors, the experience is less intense, muted by the many distractions any location affords, whereas a roll of white Colorama is pitiless, and subconsciously, we feel this?
Posted by: Rob Campbell | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 05:59 PM
Your readers want to know-what is a "reinterview" for Butters when he has already attended? Am I confused or am I seriously confused?
Posted by: John Berger | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 06:18 PM
I suppose it all comes down to how you define success. My advice to young people is to show up on time, ready to do whatever it is you get paid do, then do it. That gets you ahead of a lot of the crowd. Working hard at it, like you say, gets you to where the crowd starts thinning out. Being organized helps make sure the hard work is being applied to the right places.
If that still doesn't get you 'success', then the going gets tougher. You need to tap into talent, and being really good at it, plus being really good at helping other people understand how good you are at it without being a jerk about it, which is something else entirely.
Posted by: Keith Cartmell | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 07:35 PM
I'm going to say, "Yes, but...".
I think being organized and working hard may be necessary for "success", but the evidence I've collected says they're not sufficient.
In my trade (academia), there are many people who are organized and work very, very hard. However, they've only achieved modest "success" -- and will never achieve much more success -- because they're lacking the ability to networks effectively, and to build their own brand and market it effectively. The same is true, from what I can see, in many other domains.
Worse, we all know people who have achieved "success" in their careers despite not working hard or being particularly effective. These tend to be masters of self-promotion.
Of course, we should also define our terms. What does "success" mean? In my trade, it's possible to be extremely successful by the typical metrics that matter to universities (publications, grants, accolades), yet be rather unsuccessful in more important ones (e.g., making real advances in knowledge, having significant impacts on a field).
Posted by: Rob de Loe | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 07:48 PM
I agree, but I'll add a third. The belief in your own ability even, especially, if you don't have any. I have seen many times over a person who believes they are a master in their field where in reality they are no more than an apprentice. It works for them because most people know far less about your field than you do so if you are convinced of your skill, misguided as it may be, others will be also.
Posted by: Steven Palmer | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 07:50 PM
What is "success"?
For me it's... being where you want to be and doing what you want to do.
Posted by: Elias | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 08:50 PM
Curious what your work-arounds are to compensate for not being organized and not being able to work hard (as hard as you once did). I write things down to remember them, but not in an organized way. I can work hard, but not consistently.
I like your writing. It is very readable. I am hooked and a daily reader for years. Interesting to read of the pre-edited versions and process of the New Yorker piece.
Posted by: Mike | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 09:05 PM
I have seen many people who have been well organized and worked very hard only to have an empty life when they retired. The missing ingredient seems to be passion--certainly to be truly successful a great photographer or writer or teacher etc.--one must be passionate about what they do and their related interests. That combined with working hard and being organized lead to personal success and satisfaction.
Posted by: Andy HOlman | Tuesday, 19 July 2022 at 10:10 PM
"Seeing both side of an issue" can be a liability as regards success. I know that in my later working life, when I moved into the private sector (I was a UK civil servant for about 20 years), my boss often felt that I was going native sometimes; I would accept the customer's point of view (and suggested solution) more than was necessary or profitable for my employer and hence my continuing employment! I frequently had to accept that he was right to take the stronger line with the customer than I would have preferred.
@Kenneth Tanaka: Yes, reliability was a key point for both my wife and I. One of the major satisfactions we both took from work (her especially, as she worked in project teams) was that the knowledge that once we'd been tasked with something, the boss/project manager could forget about it: either it would get done, on time and to budget, or there would be an issue with the task which we would raise promptly and correctly.
Posted by: Tom Burke | Wednesday, 20 July 2022 at 03:56 AM
Towards the end of his life I overheard my father tell someone that he had been "a failure, but a happy failure".
That'll do for me.
Posted by: Dave_lumb | Wednesday, 20 July 2022 at 07:33 AM
There is only one key to (personal) success: Ignore the noise.
Posted by: Niels | Wednesday, 20 July 2022 at 11:58 AM
I have many post-nominal degrees, etc., but I am asked to participate, academically, because I am reliable, e.g. deadlines, et.. Plus I have some knowledge and understanding in certain fields, but reliablity is the key.
Posted by: Trevor Johnson | Wednesday, 20 July 2022 at 01:46 PM
Success can be overrated. I know a narcissist woman who has bankrupted two husbands while buying every damn piece of crap her heart ever desired. She is successful at what she does, i.e., being selfish, but I think the world would be better off without that kind of success. :)
Posted by: Robert Roaldi | Wednesday, 20 July 2022 at 05:53 PM
Probably just me but I find "efficient and effective" to be inversely proportionate to "creative". My professional life a constant attempt to find the happy middle ground. Fortunately I have photography as a hobby which allows me to ignore the former and just focus on the latter!
Posted by: Bear. | Thursday, 21 July 2022 at 10:11 PM