Suppose someone’s about to punch you in the face – for practitioners of jujitsu,  the options are these: duck, re-direct the punch away from you, or let that knuckle sandwich crash into your mouthful of teeth.  Trying to stop the punch by, say, grabbing their fist in mid-throw almost never works – unless you’re Chuck Norris.

This is great wisdom with application far beyond martial arts. So many times we’re faced with a problem, something bigger than ourselves.  To resist the problem consumes strength and energy, and often ends in failure.  Most times it’s more to our advantage to go with the flow or find a workaround.

As I am not Chuck Norris, I tend to favor the latter approach – or at least I thought I did.  Over time, though, I’ve come to realize that when it comes to my career, I haven’t been as Navy-SEAL-adaptable as I  thought.  On the contrary – lately I’ve been resisting, big time.  I thought the way I believed things should be was right, and everyone else was wrong.   The result was I was worn down, mostly broke, and profoundly miserable.

Let me elaborate: I’ve worked in TV for almost twenty years now, and up until lately I loved it.  I confess I had no particular career goals except to have fun and know as much as I can about how TV gets made.  When I was in journalism school,  I would volunteer on the weekends as a cameraman, and when I finished university I sought out a job as a edtior/cameraman rather than as a reporter, like all my classmates were. Through a combination of luck and occasional hard work, I successfully segued from one job to another, and oftentimes the jobs would have little connection with each other, other than they were in TV.   In this way, I worked as a reporter, a director, a producer, a writer, a videographer, and a presenter.

I did this partly out of curiosity, but mostly I figured the more I knew, the less likely I was to be unemployed.  I thought bosses wanted people who can do a lot of different things – that it showed the mental dexterity needed to solve problems creatively.    It’s a nice thought, and there was a moment there when my experience aligned with it. For almost a decade I was with one network, and my adaptability made me a go-to guy -well, that, and nothing makes a cost-conscious company happier than one person who can do three jobs.

Today, though, my assumptions seem like old world, broke-ass thinking.  They belong to a bygone era, along with formica tables and fins on cars. The fact is we now live in a world of specialists. The smart players now are not the ones who cover everything; they’re working the corners, creating niches.  My brain’s had some trouble expanding to embrace this new reality, even as I acknowledge it: as I wrote in another post “it’s not enough to be a doctor, you have to specialize in hooded penis syndrome in males between the ages of 6 and 9.   You’re not just a lawyer, you’re a wills & trusts lawyer specializing in properties belonging to people who died between 1 and 4 on a Thursday afternoon.”

There’s some logic for this, especially in TV: as one very close friend (and highly successful TV producer) told me, a producer is usually working with someone else’s money, namely a network. It’s not unreasonable for that network to want to feel their cash is well-spent.  So, if my friend is looking to hire a director, he’ll be wanting one with experience, single-mindedness of purpose,  realistic salary expectations – and a CV that features an unbroken streak of directing jobs.  A network won’t approve his hires on faith – they want to see proof that the people working on the show aren’t turnips.

My friend says that anyone wishing to hire me might look at the wide variety I’ve jobs I’ve done and easily assume I’m good at none of them.   To them, my resume is NOT a testament to a curious, adaptable mind – it’s evidence of attention deficit disorder. There’s a Japanese proverb that says “To a hammer, everything must be a nail.”  Nails perform a highly specific task; their very shape speaks to their drive, focus and singularity of purpose. The hammers in my industry only want to hit nails, and to them I am little more than a ball of silly putty – lots of fun, possibly suited to the job, but more likely to be crushed under the pressure.

So it’s a specialist’s world now, and they aren’t always interested in any input you may have on their area of expertise, because – well, they’re the specialists. This can make pointing out problems difficult. To a specialist, you are like a waiter on the Titanic – maybe you’re just trying to be helpful by pointing out that iceberg, but they already have a guy who does that.

Now, is this right? It doesn’t make a difference if it’s right or not – it’s how things are.  Perhaps they may change, but not tomorrow.  Or the day after that.  Or the day after that.  And I need to provide for my new family – today.   Another career approach is imperative, both with the individual battles and the overall war, and this is it:  I will become a specialist myself.   No longer will I conform to the shape of the vessel I occupy, except in so far as it allows me to get along well with others.

I will stop worrying about the outcome I want, and happily accept the outcome I can live with (and if they last few years have taught me anything, I can live with a lot).  It may seem like I’m narrowing my options, but really I think this is the only way to open them up.  By confining myself to that which is asked of me,  I may showing supreme adaptability.  Up is down. Black is white.  Taking shit is the path to success.

So am I abandoning my principles, or compromising my integrity? Maybe, although as Anthony Bourdain pointed out in his great new book Medium Raw, a lot of guys get integrity and vanity mixed up. I prefer to think about what Steven Spielberg said about compromise – that it was a filmmaker’s best ally, and that one should never let their “vision” get in the way of making a film (or any project) better.  Sage advice – I think that Spielberg guy will be big someday.  So I’m not opposing – I’m accepting and deflecting.  Call it taking shit if you want.  I call it a jujitsu state of mind.  Jason Bateman would be proud.

 

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