I’ve been reading Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. It is decidedly NOT a book about time management. It is about how to escape the tyranny of time in our lives, in the limited number of weeks (4,000) we spend on this planet.
Among other things, I was taken by this passage attributed to Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen, about the lines leading out of the Helsinki bus station.
There are two dozen platforms there, he explains, with several different bus lines departing from each one—and for the first part of its journey, each bus leaving from any given platform takes the same route through the city as all the others, making identical stops.
Think of each stop as representing one year of your career, Minkkinen advises photography students. You pick an artistic direction—perhaps you start working on platinum studies of nudes—and you begin to accumulate a portfolio of work. Three years (or bus stops) later, you proudly present it to the owner of a gallery. But you’re dismayed to be told that your pictures aren’t as original as you thought, because they look like knockoffs of the work of the photographer Irving Penn; Penn’s bus, it turns out, had been on the same route as yours.
Annoyed at yourself for having wasted three years following somebody else’s path, you jump off that bus, hail a taxi, and return to where you started at the bus station. This time, you board a different bus, choosing a different genre of photography in which to specialize. But a few stops later, the same thing happens: you’re informed that your new body of work seems derivative, too. Back you go to the bus station.
But the pattern keeps on repeating: nothing you produce ever gets recognized as being truly your own.
What’s the solution?
“It’s simple,” Minkkinen says. “Stay on the bus. Stay on the fucking bus.”
A little farther out on their journeys through the city, Helsinki’s bus routes diverge, plunging off to unique destinations as they head through the suburbs and into the countryside beyond. That’s where the distinctive work begins. But it begins at all only for those who can muster the patience to immerse themselves in the earlier stage—the trial-and-error phase of copying others, learning new skills, and accumulating experience.
“Stay on the fucking bus” indeed.
One of the things I see often is people, three years into a job, getting stuck. They find themselves at the point that Minkkinen talks about, when the gallery owner says their work is unoriginal—but instead of the gallery owner, the voice is their own. It’s a voice that’s saying:
“I’ve learned all that I can in this job.”
“It’s no longer new.”
“I don’t see a clear path forward.”
Those reflections may well be true in some cases. However, if a job has been good for a few years, this discomfort might indicate something else entirely: that you’re on the cusp of deepening.
Having succeeded in the first three years, you’ve mastered a set of skills. These are the core aspects of the first job or jobs, the stuff that’s easiest to describe.
This discomfort arises on the threshold of a new set of skills, the essential “soft” skills that really matter: managing and leading others; dealing with uncertainty; taking initiative; making tough calls; writing (some of) your own job description…
The list is endless.
It is a list full of skills that are harder to describe in a resume, that don’t boil down to a simple job title or a bulleted list of responsibilities.
But these are the skills that make all the difference.
These are the skills you might never get to if you’re constantly taking the taxi back to the Helsinki bus station.
