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."