Every Profile is an Epic Story, Next-Shot Mentality, The Desire to Walk, and More

Friday, March 8, 2024

Happy Friday y’all.

Here are 10 things I found interesting from the last week or so.

1/ Every Profile Is An Epic Story

Writing a profile is one of my favorite things to write. I particularly enjoy writing profiles on artists, but being an artist can look very different for many people. So, I lean more towards saying I like interviewing people who make things. I've interviewed painters, bloggers, comedians, movie directors, podcasters, poets, entrepreneurs, authors, and DJs. The chance to sit and talk to a single individual for hours and hours and hours excites me. If I wasn't pursuing writing, I probably would have been a counselor in another life. 

The reason is that I believe what you work on works on you. Typically, whenever I profile someone, the article centers around a specific thing the person just made, like writing a book. 

Why?

For starters, it's a win-win. 

The person I'm working with gets publicity for their work, and I get to work. 

Secondly, everything leading up to that person's creation has shaped them in a very specific way. Their unique path molded them into the only person who could create the thing in front of us—a piece of art, a stand-up set, a business, a poetry collection, etc. 

In the process of creating that thing, they took different materials from their life and transformed them into art, and as a result, the art transformed them into a new person. That is fascinating. The individual is now experiencing somewhat of a metamorphosis. They have been reborn. They now see the world in a different way. The chance to share the room with someone like that and have a few cups of coffee together over the course of two, three, sometimes four-plus hours of conversation is – and there's no other way to say this – freaking cool. 

Last week, I mentioned two things about reading: one, rereading is where the magic is, and two, reading something short like a blog or an essay can be just as powerful as reading an entire book. In journalism school, there was an essay that was required reading in nearly all of my writing classes: "Every Profile is an Epic Story" by writer, journalist, and teacher Alex Tizon. The essay originally appeared in Telling True Stories, A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University.

Whenever Tizon begins working on a profile, he reminds himself of four things: 

• Your Subject is as complicated as you are.

To stay on guard against sentimentality and simplicity, Tizon reminds us that each person has a dark side. We are complex creatures and we're capable of contradicting ourselves a lot. Remember the person you are talking to is just as weird as you are. That's a good thing. Be aware of someone's dark side. It can explain a lot of why and how and what people create. 

• Your Subject carries a burden as heavy as yours.

Everyone has experienced pain in their life. How they carry that pain reveals a lot about them. However, as Tizon writes, "It may not end up in the profile, but the writer must look for that person's pain to understand him or her."

• Your Subject wants something.

I'm going to quote this whole section because it's just great. Tizon writes: 

"Every story has a protagonist who wants something and must work through a series of obstacles to obtain it. Every good story, and every great profile, is a quest. The quest can be simple: to escape boredom, to get the girl, to win the money, to redeem oneself, to avenge something.

What is your Subject's quest? Somewhere in the tangle of the Subject's burden and the Subject's desire is your story."

To write a good profile is to aim to untangle such complexities between burden and desire and then tie things up again in a nice bow to create something new to offer the reader. 

• Your Subject is living an epic story.

Again, I'm going to quote Tizon's first paragraph here: 

"The epic story is the larger narrative within which your Subject's life fits. I firmly believe that within two hours of talking to anyone I could develop an idea of that person's epic story. All those Greek legends we learned in school do translate into our contemporary lives."

He then goes to mention Sisyphus, Prometheus, and Midas and how they relate to our everyday lives. Furthermore, due to people's complex nature, they are living multiple stories simultaneously. The job of a writer working on a profile, as Tizon says, is to choose the right story. The obstacle is how to lift, expand, and stretch the story so it is proportionate with an epic tale like a Greek legend, but paradoxically, in doing so, paying attention so that you can discover something universal in the Subject's story that can relate to a single individual, the reader. 

In writing a profile, you realize, as Tizon explains, that your Subject is living an epic story, and the challenge of writing someone's epic story is an epic task to take on. This is what makes a writing profile all the more fun to try. 

2/ Truth Works Far

Speaking of making art, I found a quote by Arthur Schopenhauer that relates to the connection between Junot Díaz x Hippocrates x Voltaire from a while back. The philosopher wrote: 

"Life is short, and truth works far and lives long: let us speak the truth." 

Make stuff. Create the art only you can create. That is speaking the truth through your art. 

3/ Play The Fool 

Speaking of creativity and following up on writing about following your path last week, I rewatched Ethan Hawke's Ted Talk "Give yourself permission to be creative." The whole video is great, but I liked one line at the very end, 

"There is no path. There's no path til you walk it, and you have to be willing to play the fool. So don't read the book that you should read, read the book you want to read. Don't listen to the music that you used to like. Take some time to listen to some new music. Take some time to talk to somebody that you don't normally talk to. I guarantee, if you do that, you will feel foolish. That's the point. Play the fool." 

4/ LSSF

To not follow the default path and to play the fool, as Hawke says, it's easy to feel stupid and lost. I enjoyed how Paul Millerd, author of The Pathless Path, described it: have long, slow, stupid, fun. Check out his newsletter on this very subject. 

5/ Next-Shot Mentality

Along your path, it's easy to get nudged off course because of small mistakes. We see this with athletes very clearly. An athlete makes a mistake – turns the ball over, misses a shot, messes up the play – and then that mistake is still playing in their mind during the next play or when they take their shot, and soon a bad play turns into a bad quarter, a bad game, so on and so forth. 

Billy Donovan, the head coach of the Chicago Bulls, has a great way to prioritize a "next-shot mentality." Check out the clip here. 

6/Toyota's Unskippable Ad

Well done, Toyota. Nailed it. 

7/ Favorite Song of the Week 

Can't Fight the Feeling by Matroda. Great running song. 

8/ Yutori x Drex

I've mentioned the concept of "yutori" before and I've mentioned the designer Drex before. And now they have come together beautifully. 

9/ LeBron Reaches 40K

Congratulations to LeBron James for becoming the first player to score 40,000 points. Crazy. What's even crazier is the consistency that it took to get there. Check out this graph by NBA writer Ben Golliver.  

10/ The Desire to Walk 

To end this week's newsletter, I'd like to share some wisdom on walking from the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: 

"Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Everyday, I walk myself into a state of well-being & walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. But by sitting still, & the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right."

Thank you for reading. Enjoy a nice walk this weekend and I'll see you next Friday. 

–Garrett