Yachts, villains, titans, tenets 🛥️
Or: Which man on the internet should we listen to about work?
If you’ve spent some time catching up on the scroll this holiday season, you may have noticed that Instagram has a lot of clips of Jeff Bezos, the founder and ex-CEO of Amazon.
Sometimes the clips are the current “swole”, suntanned, retiree Jeff giving business advice.
Sometimes, they are old interviews of the young, geeky Bezos talking about his vision for “Day 1 of the internet.” To give credit where it is due, while it’s clear that what he was saying was out there for the time, he successfully built an entire company around this tenet that it’s always Day 1.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, the idea roughly translates to:
What have you done for the customers and the company today? Not yesterday, not tomorrow. Today.
Beautiful in theory, understandably grueling in practice. It is also less easy to compliment, now knowing it turned him into a bridge-disassembling yacht villain.
But for those of us want to run successful businesses (yet not turn into yacht villains), or work in places where we can perform at a high standard without burning out, we can use it for our own ends. Namely, that:
Performance (or success, or achievement), is the result of consistency and reliability.
For example. Showing up consistently and reliably to protest, which in turn gets the disassembly of a historic bridge canceled, so a billionaire’s new gargantuan yacht can’t pass through. That’s an achievement. As a side note: I love the Dutch.
Thankfully, there’s another man on the internet defying the “live long enough to become the villain” trope. And bonus, he talks about this topic, so we can listen to him instead. It’s actor, producer and director Denzel Washington.
As a career actor/director and a family man - Denzel Washington is at the top of his game, and he has the awards, recognitions, and honorary doctorates to prove it. He’s a high performer (if you can pardon the pun).
In other words: He knows what he’s doing. And humans who know what they’re doing - in life, love, career, and community - give great advice. Advice well worth listening to (especially if we need to choose between a certain e-commerce founder and…anyone else).
A great example of this advice in practice is his speech when accepting an award from the NAACP in 2017.
Here’s how the speech goes.
Denzel Washington gets on stage and begins his remarks by naming several of America’s greatest playwrights, ending with August Wilson. He goes on to say that Wilson is one of the best playwrights in the world - which makes sense, since Wilson won a Pulitzer for his play Fences.
Denzel Washington is talking about August Wilson because Denzel produced Fences into a movie, starring in it alongside many other great actors, and that is why he’s on stage. He is receiving an award for his work related to the film.
That Denzel Washington starts by giving homage and credit to August Wilson is a sign of an accomplished human being. He is comfortable in sharing the credit, and the spotlight.
He goes further to shine the spotlight on others, including director Barry Jenkins, whose movie Moonlight came out the same year as Fences (2016). If you remember, this movie was a triumph - Oscars galore - but he brings it up for a reason. He reminds the audience that Barry Jenkins had to make upwards of twenty short films before he had the opportunity to make Moonlight.
And then, he says:
So never give up. Without commitment you’ll never start. Or, more importantly, without consistency you’ll never finish. It’s not easy.
He goes on to say if it were easy, there would be no standout stars like Kerry Washington, Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, even himself.
He ends with:
So keep working. Keep striving. Never give up. Fall down seven times, get up eight. Ease is a greater threat to progress than hardship. So keep moving, keep growing, keep learning. See you at work.
Understandably, it’s hard not to give up. It’s hard to keep working and striving and picking yourself back up and while doing all of that, also remembering that discomfort is the catalyst of growth. It’s not like we all have Coach Boone following us around to remind of it (I wish).
That’s when it’s easy to think: Hmm, are we sure this is the way? Because it sure seems like it would be nicer and easier to be good if work was just easy.
Which comes first, the chicken or the egg? Does nicer work come as the result of a nicer workplace?
Or - is it possible that nicer work is what lands you a nicer workplace? Is this what Denzel Washington means when he talks about Barry Jenkins making twenty short films to make one Oscar winner?
Yes.
The power to deliver consistently and reliably, against all kinds of deadlines and challenges and hardships and in all matter of environments, is a superpower.
Half of life is just showing up, is how the advice goes. Never underestimate how many people just don’t show up.
I didn’t realise until later that this doesn’t need to be literal. If someone came to work, but was uninterested in moving forward, in growing and learning or improving? That’s not showing up.
It’s frustrating, but it isn’t for forever. In the face of a person, several people, or an entire workplace like this - all we can control is ourselves. So: Stay consistent, stay reliable, stay committed to your craft. Or, as Denzel tells us:
Keep moving, keep growing, keep learning. See you at work.
And with that: Welcome to 2024!