Stay On The F#cking Bus
How to know when to quit and when to keep going with any personal or business endeavour.
For a country of just over 5 million people, Finland bats well above its weight when it comes to cultural influence. Last year I wrote about the time I spent with a Finnish philosopher talking all about the meaning of life, and today there’s another Finn I want you to meet.
His name is Arno Rafael Minkkinen and he’s a world-famous photographer. Like many creatives, it took Arno years of searching to find his own niche in photography, which ended up being arresting and occasionally humorous photos featuring his own body intervening in the image itself.
But in 2006, Arno took to the stage in front of the New England School of Photography in Boston to give a graduation speech that was so compelling it’s evolved into its own theory.
In the centre of Helsinki, connected to a shopping centre, sits the Helsinki Bus Station, one of the most modern and busiest bus stops in the world. It has 35 bays laid out in a square, and every day around 700 long distance buses arrive and depart from there.
And this is what Arno said:
At the head of each platform is a sign posting the numbers of the buses that leave from that particular platform. The bus numbers might read as follows: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19.
Each bus takes the same route out of the city for a least a kilometer, stopping at bus stop intervals along the way where the same numbers are again repeated: 21, 71, 58, 33, and 19.
In Arno’s minds, these are not just buses, they represent different paths you can take in life. Viewed through the lens of being a photographer, each bus symbolises spending time going down certain creative paths.
So in Arno’s words:
Now let’s say, again metaphorically speaking, that each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer, meaning the third bus stop would represent three years of photographic activity. Ok, so you have been working for three years making platinum studies of nudes. Call it bus #21.
You take those three years of work on the nude to the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn. His bus, 71, was on the same line. Or you take them to a gallery in Paris and are reminded to check out Bill Brandt, bus 58, and so on. Shocked, you realize that what you have been doing for three years others have already done.
So you hop off the bus, grab a cab (because life is short) and head straight back to the bus station looking for another platform.
This time you are going to make 8×10 view camera color snapshots of people lying on the beach from a cherry picker crane. You spend three years at it and three grand and produce a series of works that elicit the same comment: haven’t you seen the work of Richard Misrach? Or, if they are steamy black and white 8×10 camera view of palm trees swaying off a beachfront, haven’t you seen the work of Sally Mann?
So once again, you get off the bus, grab the cab, race back and find a new platform. This goes on all your creative life, always showing new work, always being compared to others.
At this point in the speech, Arno turns to the audience and asks them a simple question:
What to do?
It’s simple. Stay on the bus. Stay on the f#cking bus.
Why, because if you do, in time you will begin to see a difference.
His analogy of the bus continues.
The buses that move out of Helsinki stay on the same line but only for a while, maybe a kilometer or two. Then they begin to separate, each number heading off to its own unique destination…
It’s the separation that makes all the difference, and once you start to see that difference in your work from the work you so admire (that’s why you chose that platform after all), it’s time to look for your breakthrough….
At the end of the line—where the bus comes to rest and the driver can get out for a smoke or better yet a cup of coffee—that’s when the work is done. It could be the end of your career as an artist or the end of your life for that matter, but your total output is now all there before you, the early (so-called) imitations, the breakthroughs, the peaks and valleys, the closing masterpieces, all with the stamp of your unique vision.
Why, because you stayed on the bus.
For this month’s OUTLET, I’m sharing with you a very useful tool I think about all the time when I’m sitting on a metaphorical bus wondering when I’ll ever get off.
One Useful Thing for November 2024: The Dip
Seth Godin is one of my heroes. The marketing guru has helped pioneer so many of the skills and techniques that we now take for granted to market any product or service, and he also wrote one of my favourite books, The Dip.
It is a very tiny book that you can read in just over an hour. It’s so simple that you can summarise most of the insights in a single image:
This graph represents the amount of effort you put into a personal or business endeavour along the x-axis, and the amount of return you get from it on the y-axis. The line in red is the ‘naive curve’ that illustrates what some people think success is going to look like.
The black curve that initially goes up, before falling dramatically, is The Dip. It’s a feeling familiar to everyone who’s ever tried to achieve something difficult and reached a moment when it all seems too hard.
Let me give you a live example: I’m in the middle of a very big Dip right now as I try to learn a new language.
Most mornings, sandwiched between the gym, video calls, work and writing, I pick up my small backpack that sits at the front door and walk through the streets of Palma to a small Spanish language school. It’s the first time outside high school that I’m learning a new language. And - spoiler alert - it’s damn hard.
My husband and I attend Spanish classes in Mallorca five days a week at the moment. We occasionally share a look across the classroom when the irregular conjugation of verbs in strange tenses makes it feel like you can hear the cogs turning in each others’ heads.
I’m in awe of anyone who speaks more than one language because I understand how much goes into mastering one, especially given I didn’t speak a single word of Spanish 18 months ago.
Every time I think I’m getting ahead, like having a simple conversation with a bank teller, or my waitress, it is followed by a conversation where I catch one in every 15 words. And none of the important ones.
But there’s one thing that’s helping me get through this herculean task: the concept of The Dip. In every big endeavour, you will always feel the temptation to give up and, as Seth explains, there’s a good time to quit and a bad time to quit as seen in the image above.
I’m way past the point of giving up now, so the only way is through. And when you can recognise that you’re The Dip, it’s so much easier to keep putting in effort to reach the other side of it.
The Dip is Seth Godin’s way of talking about sticking with hard things, and for Arno Rafael Minkkinen, it’s the Helsinki Bus Station Theory.
So to whoever needs to hear this today: if you’re in the middle something difficult right now in your work or personal life, do not get off the bus. Stick with it and one day you will finally, patiently and eventually reach your destination, I promise you.
Just stay on the f#cking bus.
This is the second last OUTLET of the year (woah). I’m very excited to head to London next week for a bunch of meetings and press to launch my book into the UK. It looks like it’s going to be very fresh while I’m there, so wish me luck.
I’m also having a lot of fun over on LinkedIn at the moment turning my weekly column in the SMH and The Age into video content. If you’re on LinkedIn too, I’d love for you to connect with me there.
Until next month,
Tim!