Your "bag of tricks"
I’ve had several career conversations lately, and a distant memory came to mind as food for thought. I remember reading an interview with Academy Award winner Jodie Foster many years ago, somewhere around the time she was promoting the film, The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. An interviewer asked her how her life experiences had been a conscious source of inspiration in her work.
Foster put forward a fascinating metaphor. She said many people develop a “bag of tricks” between the ages of about 17 and 22. Then they keep reaching into that bag to re-discover the contents. She claimed this era of life is when you stumble upon the essence of who you are. It may take decades to appreciate the full implications, but that initial encounter with the core truths of your identity has a lifelong resonance. Your deepest cares and curiosities tend to stem from this time.
In Turning Pro, author Steven Pressfield tells of a pivotal moment from this era of his own life. He was languishing in a halfway house, surrounded by people whose common emotion was fear. They feared the consequences of disintegration, now that the pillars in their life had apparently crumbled. He was making $1.75/hour at a body shop, training to become a trucker.
Then one night he had a dream. He dreamt he walked into his room and everything was immaculately clean and tidy, not filthy and in disarray as usual. He sprang up in bed, eyes wide open and heart racing, registering the message his subconscious had forcefully delivered: “I have ambition.” The next day he left the halfway house and moved into a log cabin, eventually going on to become one of the top writers in Hollywood. To this day he keeps a picture of the cabin as a reminder of what the dream demanded of him.
Tim Ferriss, after cresting the heights of entrepreneurship, publishing, investing, and podcasting, recently committed to a fiction project he unabashedly describes as “bizarre.” He’s building an intricate and fantastical world with prose and illustrations. By his own admission, the project is directly traceable to his fascination with Dungeons & Dragons as a teenager.
A bag of tricks can be long neglected. It can take a while to see what’s hidden at the bottom. But I agree with Foster that it’s worth rummaging through the contents on a regular basis. For your day job, or perhaps your side project, there could be things worth dusting off.