How to embrace the right kind of struggle and why we need to become problem hunters
3 minute read
Friday Thoughts & Learnings
This week Mark Manson showed me how to embrace the right kind of struggles to live a better life and not give a f*ck about anything else and I learned that becoming a Problem Hunter can help you avoid getting a ‘Dark Mark’ on your reputation.
How to embrace the right kind of struggle
Mark Manson has great turn of phrase and tells it as it is. I read this book to get a no-nonsense take on how to prioritise what’s important and better celebrate the struggles of life.
And he delivers.
Good struggles he says are anything that challenges us to become better and move us towards what we all really want – a better life.
What I got out of this book was:
Struggles are good for you, and you need them more than you think.
Choose the struggles (challenges) you want or accept the ones that are good for you
Select the right values to live by so when you choose or accept a struggle it’s for the right reasons. (ie. don’t do stuff just to be better than other people or just for material gain – boo!).
Accountability is the antidote to victimhood – accept this and you will get to a better life faster.
Mistakes and insecurities are cool. Accept yours and you’ll enjoy the struggle much more.
And don’t give a f*ck about what anyone else says or thinks. Just do you.
Nice one 👊
Why we need to become Problem Hunters
My friend Simon is an Art Director. He helped produce movies and music videos in Hollywood for over 20 years. He moved there from his hometown of Sydney as a young 20 something in search of adventure and much bigger parties to go to. He got both!
Simon is one of those people who has more captivating stories than most of us have had glasses of water. A great many of them from his days working on film sets making movies.
The stakes can be eye wateringly high on big budget films. Simon told me: “on films I worked on, it would cost between $100,000 and $250,000 for each hour we were filming”. So, problems on set that caused delay could cost big dollars very quickly.
He became what I’d call a Problem Hunter. Find the problems and prevent them before they happen.
Simon told me of an incident that burnt this thinking deep into his mind.
On one film he was working on, a young guy named Mark was responsible for setting up the camera to shoot the scene. This was in the days before digital, where movies were shot with analogue film. You couldn't just rewind the film and review it easily. So annoying.
The type of camera Mark was using had separate lenses, one to look through and another to expose the film.
Illustrative photo. Not an actual image of 'Dark Mark'.
It was a bright sunny day. As they were filming outside, Mark selected the biggest sunshade he could find to cover the lens to make sure the film was properly exposed. It had four sides, each could be moved to perfectly block unwanted sunlight from the camera lens.
After a long day of shooting scenes, he sent the film to the Director to review. Standard procedure.
To the Director’s horror, the top half of each frame was black and only the bottom half had images. Oops!
A rookie error of folding the top side of the lens sunshade too low had caused the problem.
Mark didn’t have a checking procedure to make sure the sunshades were placed correctly before filming. And because the lens he looked through was separate to the lens exposing the film, he didn’t notice the problem when filming.
The problem couldn’t be solved, and the entire cast and crew had to be recalled and the affected scenes shot again the following day, causing millions in additional costs.
The camera operator then became known as ‘Dark Mark’. Simon said it took him many years to shake off this unfortunate nickname.
What I’ve learned from this is that becoming a Problem Hunter is a good way to avoid getting a ‘dark mark’ on your reputation. It helps you search for and work out how to prevent really bad things from happening.
Thanks for the lesson, Mark 👏.
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