This morning I was reading some takes on last night’s episode of The Good Place and of course everyone was excited about the weird and unexpected and hilarious way they brought Timothy Olyphant in for a cameo. This led me (as happens when you are reading culture news over coffee in the morning) to a May 2019 Rolling Stone interview with Olyphant about doing Deadwood: The Movie and working with David Milch and the business in general. And just as an aside whenever you get a chance to read an interview with Olyphant you should do so because he is gregarious and candid; something of a raconteur with a side of mischief that makes him pretty entertaining.
Anyway, I came across a section where he is talking about regretting many of his acting choices during the original Deadwood run. “I recall being an actor who’s just trying not to get fired,” he explained, which the rest of the world thinks is ridiculous since he was so popular in the role. The context is that you learn from all the work you do, and you get better and more confident, and you know what works and what doesn’t and what you feel comfortable with and all the things that you learn in the course of your career. Then I came to these comments from him:
“But this experience led to others. By the time I got to Justified, I recall being an actor that showed up and said, ‘I’m just going to assume everyone else here has bad ideas until proven otherwise, and I’m just going to do it the way I would do it and fall on my own sword, thank you very much. And then we’ll go from there.’ And it was just a wonderful experience. I wasn’t concerned about being fired. I was concerned about whether or not I wanted to quit. You’re just at a different place along the journey. And that really is the biggest difference. Showing up here, worrying about losing my job; showing up to that one down the road, a similar type of role, worrying about whether I wanted to fire the show or not. By the way, I’m not suggesting that was a possibility or even in my mind. But it’s just, you’re at a different place along the journey, and your mind is on other things.”
And I thought, this is a pretty good description of what the last decade has been for me professionally. At my age, with my experience, I am almost always a more accomplished and knowledgeable business communicator than anyone in the room. But you have to keep that to yourself, and politely listen as younger and less experienced people offer opinions on things they know little about because of hubris, and bosses offer opinions on things they know little about because they think they’re expected to.
So you come to a place where you assume everyone else will have bad ideas until proven otherwise, and mostly they aren’t bad so much as naive and incomplete and you try to provide the best counsel you can because ethically and professionally that is your obligation. Sometimes they listen and sometimes they don’t. And when they don’t listen it can be for a variety of reasons: they don’t want to admit their idea wasn’t brilliant; they don’t know what they don’t know and assume it isn’t worth knowing; and the very popular reason, that listening would mean more work for them, so they are happy to do mediocre or ineffectual work to check off a box and move on.
Sometimes, though, someone has a really good idea and that is thrilling. You’ve discovered a collaborator and a colleague and things start moving and you enjoy starting work on that project every morning. This happens less often than it should.
You get to be old enough and experienced enough in your field, you start to sit in a lot of rooms where you watch people, full of themselves, eagerly head down a path where they will simply peter out and fail to accomplish what they need to accomplish, or, worse, have little understanding of what they need to accomplish, or, worst of all, crash disastrously into a brick wall, and you gently, cautiously try to warn them, but you can’t control them, they don’t report to you.
So, like Timothy Olyphant, your big concern is whether or not you want to quit, whether or not you want to fire your job or not. Not that it is really on your mind much, or even generally at all. But it’s just, as Olyphant says, you’re at a different place along the journey, and your mind is on other things.