No Effort is Wasted

I took the title of this post from a recent Hank Green video, but actually I had been turning a similar idea around in my head lately. He had been doing the same, and had a moment of clarity when New York Times puzzle author Wyna Liu articulated this idea really well:

“No effort is wasted” - Wyna Liu, genius

Hank spends an entertaining few minutes really teasing out the profundity of this statement, which I recommend, but a valid précis is this quote of his:

Your life is not about getting some task done. It is about building a you. - Hank Green, another genius

I have had a series of different careers and jobs, and this is the lens through which I had been considering this idea. While I have worked a few retail jobs, most of my professional life has been spent in some kind of creative production. It used to be various aspects of narrative and documentary filmmaking, then it was videography (similar but different) and now it’s in games.

While there are substantial, important differences between, say, producing this:

And this:

It is also obvious to me that working on one has enriched my experience of working on another. This may not be in hard skills, or mean that I get to skip some part of the learning curve – I started learning about game development in my late 20s, which was humbling – but I have developed both coherent insights from working in a conceptually similar industry, and have fresh insights that set me apart from my peers. In fact, this latter part has often felt the most important, as someone with a fundamentally technical role in creative projects, my background in the creative side has helped me countless times, whether that’s getting to better solutions faster because I understand the problems, or often just being able to communicate with people whose day-to-day jobs are very different to mine, and my peers’.

And this is the cool part, even my jobs in retail¹ have helped me here. Messaging discipline, the power of authenticity in communication, these have helped me manage working in what can sometimes be a socially difficult process, negotiating with passionate people who are simply not aligned on the how, even when they’re aligned on the what, or the why.

This has left me reappraising my careers, and helped me to articulate, if only to myself, why it feels contigious even when I had to bump myself down from Film Producer to Game Programming Intern.

Hank’s video takes this point and expands it more generally to life itself and makes a pretty good case for personal growth being the purpose of being. I recommend (and am inclined to agree) .

1. Twist! ↩︎