Turning Pro

Some recent ones:

1. In a sweltering military surplus store in the middle of Fucking, Nowhere, where an old man was showing me the proper way to cinch an army duffle.
2. Trying not to get submitted in a matter of seconds by a Pan Am grappling bronze medalist. And failing.
3. Murph Pup chewing up my condoms. At least they weren’t used.
4. Prepping food for grilling with our director. Eating steaks and drinking the Kansas City beer I brought, bullshitting with the crew. Right before Jeff shoots me in the back with a BB gun.
5. 

Yeah, there may be a logical reason for each of these:

1. I needed the duffle for sandbag training.
2. I’m learning MMA.
3. Murph will eat anything that’s not [this space intentionally left blank].
4. Jeff tends to be around living things that are wounded, or dead things that were made so recently. Neither by coincidence.
5. Louisiana may be known as the “Sportsman’s Paradise,” but even a capital-S Sportsman takes a backseat to the Lord in Shreveport.

But even when there’s a sensical chain of events leading to a surreal moment, it’s always nice when you realize one for what it is.

Friday morning, Tucker, Greg (another assistant of his), and I were having hamsteak and eggs for breakfast, as Tucker talked about what it means to be a pro. Here were a couple of his main points, and I’m paraphrasing here:

“Games are won in practice. It’s about doing it when it doesn’t matter–when no one’s watching. Because that’s what makes you great when it does matter. That’s what makes you a pro. There’s a reason Michael Jordan is world-famous and nobody’s ever heard of Earl ‘The Goat’ Manigault, even though he was a better basketball player. Jordan was a pro, and The Goat wasn’t.”

“What’s the difference between the mediocre and great? It’s usually not talent. I’m not the greatest writer or businessman or filmmaker or whatever, but it doesn’t matter because I work the hardest. Let’s say you’re faced with 10 important tasks. A loser will do few or none of them well, an amateur might do 5 or 6 pretty well but do ‘just whatever’ on the rest and let them slide. A pro will step up and hit all 10 out of the park, and then do the same thing with the next 10.”

This reminded me of a scientist I read about in A Short History of Nearly Everything:

For all his success, Rutherford was not an especially brilliant man and was actually pretty terrible at mathematics…he wasn’t even particularly clever at experimentation. He was simply tenacious and open-minded. For brilliance he substituted shrewdness and a kind of daring. His mind, in the words of one biographer, was “always operating out towards the frontiers, as far as he could see, and that was a great deal further than most other men.” Confronted with an intractable problem, he was prepared to work at it harder and longer than most people and to be more receptive to unorthodox explanations. His greatest breakthrough came because he was prepared to spend immensely tedious hours sitting at a screen counting alpha particle scintillations, as they were known–the sort of work that would normally have been farmed out.

This rings true in any job, any sport, any pursuit–but as I’ve learned over the past week, especially when making a movie. For instance, I never imagined casting strippers all day would be in any way exhausting. And let’s be clear: I was just a fly on the wall, trying to absorb the interactions and process. I didn’t have to make the precise evaluations of a producer or director or casting director.

Speaking of which, when you think PRODUCER, what do you picture? I bet it’s not prolonged discussion over bathroom fixtures and sofa pillows. Think about how much trouble people have just decorating their house. Now you have to keep the house within the taste of a character, then coordinate it with the character development of others, while making it consistent with the themes and evolution of the entire film. Now multiply this over several locations, many vastly different from one another, and then weave in all the practical considerations of money, time, negotiations, and the logistics of filming.  Everything is nuanced, everything counts, and every aspect of the film can be infinitesimalized as far as the artists want to take their art. But you can only manipulate each of these tiny segments so far, or you’ll warp the aesthetic curve of the film. That’s the producer’s job: to see the atoms and the universe.

Well, good ones anyway. The pros. The rest mail it in. This is mind-boggling to me, because even shitty movies require considerable time and resources to produce. As aggravating as that is, I have to remember that the same rules apply–3 out of 10, 6 out of 10, whatever–it’s just on a mammoth scale.

Followup to: Suffer Fools Gladly

My favorite blog comment ever:

Erg. I’ve skimmed through a few of these. Obtuse 26 year old fumbling through self-discovery with the depth and breadth of insight of one of Jack Johnson’s more polished lyrics. Seriously, you have written so much and said so little. You clearly have not suffered for your knowledge- it is a shiny trinket. You have completely fallen in love with yourself for finally engaging in the act of looking. You have, a few times, dipped slightly beneath the surface of linear mundanity which lubricates most interpersonal exchange, and you have such a hard-on about it. See how the man of limited creative facility clings to the writings of Steve Pressfield, hoping that his lack of technical mastery can be offset by a swollen compensatory ambition reeking of plebianism! In a truly insidious way, this might be the most offensive blog on the web. Assuming that a future individual post is sufficiently lacking in blather to merit a specific response instead of an overarching condemnation of you together with your ostentatious enterprise, expect the lofty cadences of my voice to comment thither and yon. Overarching condemnations, however, may well be forthcoming, depending on my inclinations.

To be incontestibly certain, while he could’ve eschewed the effrontery, his markedly unterse writing catalyzed a bandwidth spike the likes of which thesaurus.com had never seen, thus establishing a heretofore chromodynamic paradigm.

“He had his blanket wrapped around him and his head down. When he road past, I’d seen he was carrying fire, in a horn the way people used to do. I could see the horn from the light inside of it, about the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew–”

It was at that exact moment in the theater, during the final lines of No Country for Old Men that I saw a guy in front of me sigh and circle his arm forward in a “move it along” motion.

Yeah, for a second, I wanted to break it in half. But if I set out to break the arm of every idiot that didn’t get [it], I couldn’t even keep up with the world’s reproduction. (Though the thought of me frantically running from person to person, armbarring them each in turn is pretty awesome.)

There’s a difference between being happy that you get it and being happy that others don’t. There’s a word for that.

We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And a question requires doubt.

–Richard Feynman, The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

I once had a job doing CAD, and to say I was overqualified would be an understatement. I won the state industrial technology contest in high school. My teacher had me teach his classes the hard stuff. The expertise needed for the job was menial by comparison, so I finished tasks quickly, and got bored just as fast.

And speaking of menial, one of the tasks I was given involved making the most efficient use of raw material available–basically cutting a number of different pieces out of larger ones with the least amount of waste. I’ll simplify it a bit:

Let’s say you have access to 10 x 10 sheets of metal. If someone asked you for two 5 x 10 sheets, you would simply cut one stock piece in half, with no waste.

Now imagine you need six 5 x 5, and five 2 x 5 sheets. This requires a bit more thought, but can be pretty easily figured out like a puzzle. You can do it with two stock pieces, and no waste.

You’re probably seeing how fast the difficulty scales, so I’ll get to the punchline. What if your task were to cut 500 pieces, of all shapes and sizes? Or 10,000? Not only that, but what if you had many different sizes of stock to choose from?

I quickly realized what a pain in the ass this would be to do manually, by simply putting them together in the best way I could come up with. And even then, how did I know it was the most efficient pattern? All I was doing was trial and error, and the uncertainty got worse as the number of possible arrangements went up. It was mathematically ugly. I wanted beauty, I wanted the formula: X pieces cut from Y pieces with Z efficiency. So I tried to come up with one.

My bosses weren’t happy about how I was spending my time, so I placated them by explaining the potential of enormously reduced material cost and man-hours. And I still did my other work, but I could finish a typical workday in 1-2 hours, so I had plenty of spare time. I just wasn’t using it to surf the internet.

After a week or so of wracking my brain, I was dumbfounded and frustrated at my lack of progress. My roommate happened to be a computer science PhD student, so I asked him for help. Why is this so hard? And if you have any sort of math/comp sci background, you can probably guess his response:

“Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha”

Apparently, while playing around with some rectangles, I had stumbled upon one of the great problems of mathematics. It’s funny how quickly menial becomes profound, if you give it legs.

Being an artist or philosopher or scientist used to be a lot easier to dismiss as unrealistic. Not too long ago, your dreams were “shelter” or “food” or “water that doesn’t kill you.” Nowadays, there are still plenty of people that think this way, but as the economy reveals it to be more and more an excuse, there is a new one taking its place: “I don’t know.”

“I don’t know” might be the most important and productive expression since man first put word to meaning–when it’s punctuated with an ellipses, not a period.

“…but I’m going to find out” is the other half, of course.

Did I want to buckle down and revolutionize complexity theory? Hell no. But at least now I know that. There are many forms of laziness, but only one truly matters: Being too lazy to find out.

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Further reading: Opportunities