The Happiness Of Pursuit Part 4

One Million Photos

Thomas Hawk has a busy day job, a wife, and four young children. As a lifelong photographer, he also has an audacious goal: to shoot and publish one million photos. As he describes it, pretty much every moment of his free time is spent taking photos, editing photos, sharing photos, or thinking about photos.

Thomas takes his camera everywhere, and he goes a lot of places. Weekends are spent flying out to the one hundred biggest cities in the United States, a project he expects to take at least a decade to complete. When he encounters people on the street asking for money, he offers them $2 in exchange for taking their photo, compiling a collection of authentic portraits of street life.

I snap plenty of photos with my phone as I wander the world, but that doesn't require much skill. For Thomas, the goal isn't just one million snapshots, it's one million processed and posted photos. He's an amateur photographer with an attention to detail that exceeds that of some professionals. To reach the million milestone, Thomas estimates it will require at least ten times as many shutter clicks. The final steps don't happen in a vacuum; every finished photo is shared online and receives thousands of views, along with much commentary from other photographers.

"What this goal means most of all for me is that I will dedicate a very large portion of my life to creating art," he told me in an email exchange from his home in San Francisco. "It means that my life will be intertwined with photography in a significant and meaningful way until I die. It's a discipline to ensure that I live my life in such a way that art will play a significant and prominent role in it."

Like Martin Luther, who nailed his famous theses to the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg, Thomas Hawk affixed his manifesto to a website for the world to see. Here's how it begins: We all have but a short time on this earth. As slow as time can be it is also fast, swift, furious and mighty and then it's over. Jack Kerouac is dead. Andy Warhol is dead. Garry Winogrand is dead. Lee Friedlander, Stephen Sh.o.r.e and William Eggleston are not dead yet, but probably will be at some point. Charles Bukowski once said that endurance was more important than truth. Charles Bukowski's now dead. When I'm not taking or processing the pictures I'm mostly thinking about the pictures.

As I discovered in visiting every country in the world, once you set a big goal it is often easier to work toward it than you first expect. In Thomas's case, he originally set out to shoot five hundred thousand images. As he worked toward the goal, he realized that one million would be a bigger challenge, yet still manageable. Thomas just doesn't quit: "When I'm tired, I keep shooting," he said, as if that explains everything.

The question that a lot of people have for Thomas is "How do you do it all? How do you make time for everything?" I wondered this, too, since I stay fairly busy myself, but not to the extent that Thomas does. Here's what he told me: The best answer is that I don't have enough time for everything. Things suffer. I get less sleep than I should. My wife would tell you that I don't give my family enough time. I'm shooting the one hundred largest cities in America right now. I've got twenty-four or so done .... I'd like to have the rest finished in three years. It's a constant tug-of-war between competing interests in my life. I deal with it the best I can and try to roll with the tension as best I can.

Everywhere he goes, the one-man doc.u.mentary machine known as Thomas Hawk keeps chipping away at the goal, photo by photo. The structure helps. The numbers help. And most of all, the awareness that he has to live moment by moment helps.

Hobby vs. Quest What's the difference between a hobby and a quest? You can stop thinking about a hobby, but a quest becomes a total fascination. Playing golf on the weekends is a hobby. Setting out to play St. Andrews or lower your score is a goal. Setting out to play every course in Scotland, in a set period of time, is a quest.

Phoebe Snetsinger pa.s.sed quickly through the ranks of hobbyists. The goal to see as many birds as possible and become the first woman to set a new world record was a serious commitment. Thomas Hawk, on track to create one million processed and published photos, is essentially a full-time professional-even though he has a busy day job as well.

There's an obsession factor with many quests. When you wake up at night consumed by your idea, that's when you've found a quest.

Remember the words of Kathleen Taylor, who worked with hospice patients in their final days. Once you're near the end, there's no time for bulls.h.i.t. But what if you decided there's no time for bulls.h.i.t-or regrets-far in advance of the end? What if you vow to live life the way you want right now, regardless of what stage of life you're in?

To truly live without regrets, pay attention. Ask yourself hard questions and see where they lead. Do I really want this job? Is this relationship right for me? If I could do anything, would it be what I'm doing today ... or something different?

People who live their lives in pursuit of quests or adventures understand that they have to be deliberate about doing things that matter. Every day, Adam seeks to honor the memory of his young wife Meghan by completing the list of goals she made before dying. Every day, Thomas Hawk works on his photos whenever he can grab a few minutes.

In improv theater, you always keep the story going. No stalling or backing out allowed! How about you-what's the next chapter of your story?

Remember.

Meghan always went all-in, even when she was sick. She didn't want to save anything for later.

The awareness of our own mortality can keep us focused. Eyes on the prize!

When Phoebe had a brush with death, she considered "All the things I haven't done." What's on your list?

1 Olivia Gentile notes in her extensive biography of Snetsinger that this kind of projected life span for such a diagnosis would not normally be given by most doctors now. Instead, they would provide a range of typical responses to the illness, along with the observation that results can vary.

II.

Journey.

Chapter 5.

Self-Reliance.

The most courageous act is to think for yourself. Aloud.

-COCO CHANEL.

Lesson: NOT EVERYONE NEEDS TO BELIEVE IN YOUR DREAM, BUT YOU DO.

What does it mean to do something for yourself? To choose self-reliance or independence, to face down a fear and overcome a challenge? Ask Laura Dekker, a sixteen-year-old who sued her own government for permission to undertake a solo journey at sea after social services tried to prevent it.

Life on the water was comfortable to Laura. She was born on a yacht off the coast of New Zealand and had sailed all her life, beginning with a solo trip around the harbor at age six. Ever since she was ten years old, she was clear on her intentions, planning to become the youngest person in the world to circ.u.mnavigate the globe. There was just one challenge, and it wasn't the obvious danger of pirates, storms, or losing her way. The challenge was the Dutch government, who imposed an injunction that prevented Laura from leaving her country on her own.

After a solo trip to England and back at age thirteen, when she announced plans to begin the worldwide journey the following year, the government placed her under state guardianship. Laura ran away to St. Martin, but was found and sent back to Holland. Finally, Laura pursued a legal case against her government and won. The journey would go on.

After all the drama at home, setting out to sea seemed anticlimactic. The court case and media attention had taken a lot out of Laura, but once she was on the water she had unlimited time. There wasn't much in the way of a schedule. She had plenty of tasks to tackle, and a big book of homeschool a.s.signments to complete, but it's hard to be more isolated than in the middle of the ocean on a small sailboat. No doubt there would be challenges ahead, but she was now in control of her circ.u.mstances. The days stretched out before her. Her time was her own, as was her journey.

Laura never wanted to be famous. After the quest was complete, it took some work to track her down for this book. When I finally found her living back in New Zealand, we exchanged emails about why she did it. "I didn't want to be the center of attention," she wrote. "I wasn't trying to become a celebrity. I just loved the sea and I wanted to do this for myself."

Life on the Run

Bryon Powell had been ultrarunning for nearly a decade when he made an abrupt change to place the sport at the center of his life. Before quitting his job, selling his house, and relocating (all at once!), he'd run the Marathon des Sables, a seven-day, six-stage, 150-mile race in the Sahara desert in which partic.i.p.ants carry all their food and supplies except for a group tent and water. Yet as big as that challenge was, he faced a bigger hurdle in building a community, a business, and a writing career around what had formerly just been a pa.s.sion.

Bryon's motivations for change were similar to those of many other dissatisfied employees. An attorney who'd graduated from law school with honors while training for fifty-mile races, Bryon described his work as "giving technical advice on meaningless projects, and then never knowing whether the advice was even followed." He was a highly paid paper pusher with an urge to be outside and a drive to contribute to something more significant.

Out on the trail, Bryon had struck up friendships with many other athletes. These relationships were naturally oriented around races-who was going where, what the training plan was for a particular course, and so on. Outside the actual races, though, there was no single place for everyone to gather and share stories. Ultrarunners were solitary by nature, but like most people, they also craved community. Even those who had supportive families yearned for more connection with fellow enthusiasts who understood the unique challenges and benefits of training hours upon hours each weekend. Bryon had a vision to bring these people together in a virtual community that would operate in every time zone and always be available, no matter where its members happened to live. To do it right, he realized, would require an all-in commitment that drew on all his resources for a long period of time.

Flying home from Morocco, he made the decision: It was time to move forward with the plan, now or never. On his first day back, he listed his home with a real estate agent. The goal was to downsize his life at the same time he changed careers. It was scary, he said, but he focused on the worst-case scenario: "I might fail, but I'd never forgive myself if I didn't try."

Bryon didn't want to fail. In the new project he worked ten to fourteen hours a day, seven days a week, for more than a year. He tells people that when you find something you believe in, you should put everything you've got into it. "Once you make the leap, be patient ... very patient and persistent. Do work your b.u.t.t off for a couple years if that's how long it'll take for you to get there. Easy projects aren't quests, they're holidays from real life. Any real trial will challenge you to the core. Acknowledge that and fight like h.e.l.l to keep working through it!"

"Fighting like h.e.l.l" was a good att.i.tude that well represented the spirit of a man who'd run more than one hundred miles in a single day, but it was also hard to sustain in his new role. On the road to cover a race one day, Bryon realized he'd forgotten a tripod at home. It shouldn't have been a huge deal-he was only half an hour away when he made the discovery-but he nearly had a nervous breakdown. "I wanted to quit right then," he says, recalling the weight of the past year hitting him at the gas station where he was refueling the car. Thinking over his strong reaction, he realized he just needed to pace himself better. He could still work hard, but he had to learn to work smarter.

Bryon recovered, took a break to resettle, then returned his focus to the worldwide community he'd chosen to serve for at least five years.

Embracing Rejection

If you're trying to do something new, you may feel uncomfortable with the idea of starting, or you may worry that your idea won't be accepted by everyone. One way to "get over it" is to learn to become comfortable with failure. Jason Comely created a real-life game called Rejection Therapy that encourages players to engage in social experiments. The goal of the game is to ask for something and have the request denied, stretching your comfort zone.1 If you ask for something and get it, that's a bonus-but the day's round of Rejection Therapy isn't over, because you ultimately have to be rejected before moving on. Since beginning the game, Jason has seen fans and adherents practice it to become more bold in making requests.

Perhaps the most ambitious rejection project has been thirty-year-old Jia Jiang's in Austin, Texas. Prior to beginning the project, Jia (p.r.o.nounced "Zhaw") had been turned down in an investment pitch for a business he was trying to start. The rejection stung, and he wanted to desensitize himself against similar pain in the future. Having heard of Jason's Rejection Therapy concept, Jia decided to embrace it with a twist. He'd launch a "100 days of public rejection" project where he'd make a series of bold requests from strangers and record the results.

Jia recorded his requests on a camera phone and uploaded them to YouTube, creating a built-in accountability effect. Once he started, he couldn't stop-he knew he'd be letting people down. He began with tasks that were relatively simple: for example, asking to deliver pizza for Domino's, or asking for a "burger refill" at a fast-food chain.

One of his first requests became a popular online hit. Jia visited a Krispy Kreme donut shop and requested a box of donuts in the shape of Olympic rings. To his surprise, the cashier took his request seriously. "How are they linked?" she asked. "I didn't pay much attention to the Olympics this year."

Jackie, the cashier, pulled out a sheet of receipt paper and began sketching an idea. "How about red, yellow, blue, green, and white? Do you think that looks right?"

At this point Jia was wondering if he should have picked a different experiment, but he dutifully sat down and waited for Jackie to return with the box. When she did, with the donuts linked in the shape of the Olympic rings, she had another surprise. "How do I pay?" Jia asked.

"Don't worry about it," Jackie said. "This one's on us."2 Jia's requests got crazier and more elaborate as he went along. He visited the Austin Humane Society and asked to borrow a dog for an outing. "I want to make him the happiest dog in the world for a day!" he told the representative, who was polite but firm in declining to loan out a dog for an afternoon romp through the park. He went to a fire station and asked if he could slide down a fire pole, and he asked a police officer if he could sit in his cop car. By day fifteen, Jia was cruising along with his rejection project, picking up suggestions from people who watched his videos and from strangers he encountered through practicing rejection.

Whether his request succeeded or failed, Jia extracted a lesson from each experience. He asked a stranger to "partner up" on buying a lottery ticket, and upon a.n.a.lyzing the interaction noted that there are many hidden costs of such an exchange. Another day he visited a BBQ place in Austin and asked to grill his own meat. The guy on the front line thought it was hilarious, but the manager said no-producing the lesson that it's important to funnel your requests through the right gatekeeper. (File under: "I fight authority, authority always wins.") Jia learned that rejection, like experience, produces confidence. The act of moving forward, continuing to make requests despite a number of failures, was empowering.

What Does Self-Reliance Mean to You?

I asked this open-ended question to readers from several different countries. Here are a few of their answers.

Knowing that I can rely on myself to take care of things.

[email protected] The belief that I am responsible for my achievements and failures, that I first look for solutions to problems within myself.

[email protected] The ability to love yourself and to know, no matter what, you'll be OK. The ability to wear silence like an old shoe.

[email protected] It's my path, not yours.

[email protected] Knowing yourself and having purpose.

[email protected] That I can get myself out of most any situation and live life on my own terms.

[email protected]_Chapman The combination of self-reliance and independence gives me autonomy. "Need to do" is defined by me, not by someone telling me.

[email protected] Self-reliance: Learn when you're stuck. Independence: Learn at your own convenience.

[email protected] Trusting yourself to do what you say you're going to do. If you can't rely on yourself, no one else can.

"If I Didn't Do It, I Would Always Wonder"

What's it like to be blind? According to Julie Johnson, the average sighted person has no idea. Perhaps you've played a game where you closed your eyes and tried to find your way to the bathroom down the hall. Maybe you b.u.mped into a wall or became frightened and gave up, thinking to yourself that you could never manage not having the ability to see. As Julie put it, "blind people get a lot of practice at being blind." It's hard in the beginning-there's a lot of stuff to learn, from reading Braille to learning to tell when your food is cooked properly, and countless other details. It takes time to acquire these skills, much longer than the brief experiment of trying to walk down the hall to the bathroom. But then, because you get a lot of practice at being blind, you learn. You improve, and most of the time, blind people can become largely self-reliant.

Julie was born with glaucoma, a degenerative eye disease that often leads to blindness. When she needed a guide dog, she first looked to the many different programs that train service animals-but then she decided to make her own plan. Some of the guide dog schools retain ownership of the dog and train them using corrective-based methods. In all her work with animals, Julie had come to favor a less corrective-based approach, so she decided to do it herself. For her, at least part of the motivation came from so many people dismissing the idea offhand.

"There were a lot of people telling me that it couldn't be done," she said. "They told me it was dangerous, that I was crazy, that there was no need when there were charities that would provide me with a trained guide dog. The more people tried to push me away, the more I became intrigued with the idea. I kept thinking, Why not? I knew it would be tough and I knew there would be setbacks, but I truly felt like I could do it."

Julie didn't become legally blind until age twenty, and she'd worked with dogs as a young adult. Even if it was hard, she had to do it. "I needed to do this Big Thing," she said. "I didn't know then that it was a Big Thing. I just felt drawn to this path. I knew it was something that I needed to do for myself. If I didn't do it, I would always wonder about what could have been."

This last statement, "If I didn't do it, I would always wonder about what could have been," was repeated over and over and in many different ways by the people I talked with. I understood it well, because it's exactly how I felt when I first began to ponder the goal of traveling to every country. I had to do it! It was such a ridiculous idea that I knew I'd always wonder about it if I didn't try.

For someone who has visited every country in the world, I have a terrible sense of direction. I'm not legally blind like Julie, but almost everywhere I go I get lost at least once-and this includes my own city, which is conveniently laid out on a grid. Yet even with my constant ability to forget which way I turned, I love heading out for a long run in a new country without a map or phone. There's a thrill that comes from doing something that feels new and disorienting, and the times when I've run on the treadmill in a hotel gym, or simply back and forth on a street in sight of my guesthouse, just don't feel the same. It's all about the feeling of being out there on your own, relying on yourself to run ten miles or more in an unfamiliar city and still make it back for happy hour.3

You Must Believe

As I talked with the young sailor Laura and many others, I was struck by an important principle: You must believe that your quest can be successful, even if no one else does. You can deal with setbacks, misadventures, and even disasters as long as you still believe you can overcome the hardships and see your way to the end.

If no one else believes, it may be hard-but you can still do it.

Out on the high seas, Laura struggled with many things, battling loneliness and the Dutch social services-but she never doubted her ability to complete the journey. Whatever your quest, you, too, must believe.

In Laura's case, the dream of self-reliance meant spending 518 days at sea. For Bryon, it meant leaving a stable career to build a community around his pa.s.sion of ultrarunning. For Julie, it meant training her own guide dog.

A desire for ownership and accomplishment, the fierce desire for control over one's life-these are powerful forces. Being told you can't do something is supremely motivating. There is joy in the retelling of the stories. At one point in my research I talked with someone who ran fifty marathons in a year. "According to conventional wisdom," he said, "You're just not supposed to run a marathon every week. But that's why it's so satisfying!"