CIRCLES AND SQUARES — WHY I LOVE MY JOB
This was originally a post I wrote for the blog of a creative agency, Matchlight.
I love my job. I’m so grateful to be able to say it that I’ll say it again: I love my job. Truly. People often ask about work, you probably get asked about it too. And usually, when people ask, I start by saying that sentence, “I love my job,” almost always followed by the question, “why?”
Well for starters, it’s just fun. It probably wouldn’t be fun for everyone, but it is some serious fun for me. My team gets to rumble around some cool areas of the world with extraordinary people making videos that people will want to watch over, and over, and over again. We get to work hard in the editing room selecting, cutting, and designing our videos to be as engaging to watch as possible. We feel like chefs preparing a meal that people just don’t want to end, and that is so fun.
This job also allows us to communicate important messages. We feel like everything we make is worth making, that the world is better because of what we’re doing. We get to listen to and share some highly impactful stories. Whether it’s coffee farmers in Honduras fighting for farmer dignity, or an engineering firm in Charleston hoping to recruit the best and brightest to join their team, our work can bring goodness to light and leave our audience, ourselves, and our subjects in a better, more human place than before.
And while all of that is good, and true, for a long time I felt like I didn’t have words to describe why I loved this particular job. There are hundreds of other jobs that would let me have fun at work, and hundreds still that would allow me to do work that makes an impact beyond my own life. So why this? Why be a part of a video production firm? Why the shooting, the editing, the directing? After a while, the answer came to me in the form of an image: circles and squares.
There is work that is objective. People can point to it and say “this is wrong” or “this is right.” For example, there is no debate about how much weight a bridge can hold. It either holds the truck, or it doesn’t. Getting better at this kind of work is about learning how to be more technically correct, accurate, precise. This means learning how to work out the little imperfections in your work to be more objectively correct. In video production, this means things like settings on cameras, frame rate correctness, shutter speed correctness, etc. No one argues anymore about what proper frame rate should be (unless you fall down the right hole on Reddit or you’re Peter Jackson), it’s just agreed that things play best for the human eye at 23.976 frames per second. There are technicality’s about my job that just are. There is no debate.
And yet, there are also things about my job that are not right or wrong, they are more like right and left. Both are just directions you can go and debate about all day long. How a video should start and how it should finish are not questions of technicality, they are questions of abstraction. Whether the hues in a particular shot should be more blue to fit the mood is not an objective question, it is subjective. We’ve spent weeks in our office debating these kinds of questions simply because they don’t have “right” answers. And to get better at this work is to grow into a person who can think about these questions from more angles and has had the experience to know which approach works for which desired outcome.
And it has become helpful for me to think of those both as squares and circles. There are things that are angular (squares), and abstract (circles). Things that are objective, and subjective things. Correct things, and good things. And both of these kinds of work live all over my job. To get better at my job means to become better as a technician, and better as an artist. To know how to be more technically proficient, and also how to be more creatively intuitive. It’s to learn what is teachable and to learn what is purely experiential.
Do you know much about animation? I don’t know a ton, but what I know is that just about everything you see in a Pixar movie is made up of tiny little triangles put together in just the right way. The ocean in Finding Nemo: millions of little triangles put together to make waves. That’s how I think about this work. You’ve got these gorgeous things that come to be, but they fundamentally depend on the structure of angles.
These both support each other. My job can’t just be squares because then my work just gets boring for me and the audience. But my job can’t be just circles because then my work could be a technical nightmare that’s difficult to watch. But getting good at the technicals allows me to get great at the abstracts. Really good squares support incredible circles. I need the education to work in squares, and the bravery to talk in circles.
I hope you see some squares and circles hiding in your job too. I hope you don’t neglect the technicals, because those are what will allow you to be more trustworthy. And I hope you don’t neglect the abstracts, because that’s what will actually change people’s lives. I love my job because it allows me to work in circles, and to work in squares.