Hans Peter Brondmo

On the 27th straight day of filming “Forrest Gump,” Tom Hanks was tired & worried. During a scene on the famous park bench, Hanks stopped & said to director Bob Zemeckis, “Hey, Bob…is anybody going to care about this movie? I don’t think anybody’s going to care.” Bob replied, “It’s a minefield, Tom. You never know what’s good…It’s a minefield! It’s a goddam minefield! We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.” Tom Hanks told this story after he was asked, “When I ask for a memory from your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?” He said that what Zemeckis said was true of every movie he’s worked on: “There’s never any guarantee...You do not know if it is going to work out.” Takeaway 1: Hanks is the 5th-most highest-grossing actor of all time. And yet, the stickiest memory of his career is the feeling of uncertainty. Rarer than talent or work ethic, the poet John Keats wrote, is the ability to step into and push through doubts and uncertainties. In 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization. “At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.” Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Takeaway 2: Those who possess Negative Capability, who can sit with uncertainty, who can spend months or years in the minefield that is working on something while knowing that there is a real possibility no one will care about it—they often possess another quality. They do what they do, not as a means to some end (money, fame, awards, etc.), but for the sake of doing it. When asked about one of his movies that commercially failed, Hanks said, "I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it." As Ryan Holiday once told me, "The work has to be the win." You control the effort, he says, not the results. "So ultimately, you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.” - - - “Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get.” — Forrest Gump Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!

In 1997, at the age of 27, Matt Damon won his first Academy Award for Best Screenplay ("Good Will Hunting"). After Damon won the Oscar, he went home, sat down on his sofa, & looked at the award. As he looked at it, he was suddenly overwhelmed by a heartbreaking thought. "Imagine chasing that, and not getting it, and getting it finally in your 80s or your 90s with all of life behind you and realizing what an unbelievable waste of your life...It can't fill you up. If that's a hole that you have, that won't fill it." "My heart broke," Damon said. "I imagined another one of me [not getting that award until I was] an old man, and going like, 'oh my god. where did my life go? What have I done?' And then it's over." Takeaway 1: Many successful, rich, famous, etc. people talk about chasing success, money, fame, etc., getting it, and realizing that it didn't feel like they thought it would. That it didn't, as Damon said, fill the hole they had. One of my favorite analogies for this pattern comes from Sam Hinkie. Hinkie was asked about what he's learned from reading Robert Caro's books—about some very successful, rich, famous, etc. people. "I think of it like the Pacific Salmon," Hinkie said. "They spend their whole life making this journey upstream to spawn in this one spot. And as soon as they do, they die. That's largely what Caro shows you." Takeaway 2: Before he was a big-time comedian, Hasan Minhaj was asked if he thought he was going to become a big-time comedian. “I don’t like that question,” he said. “I fundamentally don’t like that question.” Because that question implies that he is only doing comedy as a means to some end (success, money, fame, etc.). “No, no, no,” he said, “The set I get to do tonight at 7:20 PM is the win. I get to do comedy—I won. It being predicated on doing X or being bigger than Y—no, no, no. To me, it’s always just been about the work." "The work is the win," as Ryan Holiday once told me. - - - "It's such a gift to be able to [do] something and to love it for the sake of it...I see people with talent, with all those things. But the one thing they don't have is just that love for doing it for the sake of it...So if there's anything, just find joy in what you do for the sake of it." — Rodney Mullen Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!