#91: Three Things that got me thinking
🙃Liz Gilbert + 🎬Tom Hanks + ↔️ life decisions
Hello thoughtful reader,
Here are Three items that got me thinking about why we do the things we do:
Failure irrelevant
Hanging out on set
Figuring out what we want
Let’s go:
1. Trickster grin
I’ve been thinking again about this quote from Elizabeth Gilbert’s book Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear:
There is a famous question that shows up, it seems, in every single self-help book ever written: What would you do if you knew that you could not fail?
But I've always seen it differently. I think the fiercest question of all is this one: What would you do even if you knew that you might very well fail?
What do you love doing so much that the world's failure and success essentially become irrelevant?
What do you love even more than you love your own ego?
How fierce is your trust in that love?
You might challenge this idea of fierce trust. You might buck against it. You might want to punch and kick at it. You might demand of it, “Why should I go through all the trouble to make something if the outcome might be nothing?” The answer will usually come with a wicked trickster grin: “Because it's fun, isn't it?”
2. The Hang
It took me a while to acknowledge how important social relationships are for me to be happy at work. I can tolerate hard or boring tasks if the team is fun and welcoming, but interesting tasks are rarely enough to make up for a dull or unfriendly workplace.
It turns out that the same is true in Hollywood; actor Tom Hanks calls this the hang. In the 5 September episode of the Armchair Expert podcast, he describes the importance of that time spent hanging out with cast and crew between scenes: building memories, swapping stories and jokes and sharing food from the catering service. (I bet folks who feel respected and included on set often make better movies, too.)
Around 27.00:
Tom Hanks — You can talk about the work and the director and all that kind of stuff till the cows come home. And at the end of the day, that’s not what fills up your life. What fills up your life is What time did you get off work? How hot were the lights? And stuff like that.
Around 43:00:
Interviewer Monica Padman — I just want to underscore the ‘hang’ part, because not everybody listening is in [show] business, and that can be applied across the board.
Hanks — Any job has a hang.
Padman — Exactly, and that’s where the aliveness is, that’s what you take away when you go home and you talk to your friends at dinner.
3. No person is an island
Here is another set of prompts, this time from a recent Vox article titled How to figure out what you want out of life—a few questions that can help those of us who tend to pay more attention to external expectations than to our own intrinsic motivation :
[Psychologist Jeremy] Nicholson recommends paying attention to your feelings when confronted with significant milestones. Are you running away from something or running toward it?
It’s not about asking the question, ‘What do you want out of life?’ which sets you up for external measurements again, and some kind of ‘measured entity’ or ‘output,’” [therapist Natasha] Sharma says. “Instead, ask yourself: ‘What do I enjoy about life?’”
[Therapist Mercedes] Coffman says to consider what naturally excites you and to feed those desires. “If you lived on an island and there was nobody around to people-please or to impress, what is it that you would want in your life?”
"I can tolerate hard or boring tasks if the team is fun and welcoming, but interesting tasks are rarely enough to make up for a dull or unfriendly workplace." -- we don't often think about this, but it's so true!! And I look forward to reading the Vox article, thanks for the tip!