Steven Soderbergh: A Case Study on How To Avoid Burnout*

Lately, I have noticed that there's a good number of my friends quitting what seems to be perfectly good and stable jobs because they are tired of what they do. There's my friend's husband D, who is a tech guy who does projects with international clients and earns in the ballpark of 6 figures a month. But he grew tired of what he was doing and went from corporate guy to outsourced projects guy and then quit the tech scene altogether to do some kind of multi-level marketing**. 

Then there's my friend V, who quit an office job overseas even when the company offered her a 100% raise. But she said that she knows that even with the raise--and $4,000/month is nothing to sneeze at--she knows she will still dread coming into the office in the working, and will show up at 11am and do facebook all day. So she quit. She's sending two kids to school but she's not afraid that she will find other work. It seems that money is not enough of a motivation to stay in a job you don't like. 

Then comes the news that director Steven Soderbergh is quitting directing movies once he turns fifty. In this interview with Vulture, he has some very interesting points about how to approach "creative" work. In between his 1989 debut sex, lies and videotape and this year's Side Effects, he has directed 26 films, each one of them different in terms of style and genre--the "perfect chameleon" is how the Vulture's Mary Kay Schilling describes him. 

This is a director who wants to go to work--after he got fired off Moneyball, he turned his energies to making the super low budget The Girlfriend Experience. So it came as a bit of a surprise when he recently announced that after his 50th birthday, he's going to stop directing movies to focus on painting. He still plans to direct--mainly, theater and maybe television if there are interesting projects. He explains his decision partly as getting tired of the way we tell stories now, and so "wanting to slough off one skin and grow another." In short, the necessity to reinvent when one is getting tired of the way we do things: 

"It’s a combination of wanting a change personally and of feeling like I’ve hit a wall in my development that I don’t know how to break through. The tyranny of narrative is beginning to frustrate me, or at least narrative as we’re currently defining it. I’m convinced there’s a new grammar out there somewhere. But that could just be my form of theism." 

What for me, what stood out in the interview is Soderbergh's attitude on "creative work." It's not enough to learn how to do things--your attitude and how you relate with other people is equally, if not more, important: 

"On the few occasions where I’ve talked to film students, one of the things I stress, in addition to learning your craft, is how you behave as a person. For the most part, our lives are about telling stories. So I ask them, “What are the stories you want people to tell about you?” Because at a certain point, your ability to get a job could turn on the stories people tell about you. The reason [then–Universal Pictures chief] Casey Silver put me up for [1998’s] Out of Sight after I’d had five flops in a row was because he liked me personally. He also knew I was a responsible filmmaker, and if I got that job, the next time he’d see me was when we screened the movie. If I’m an asshole, then I don’t get that job. Character counts. That’s a long way of saying, “If you can be known as someone who can attract talent, that’s a big plus.” 

And it does make sense, especially for those who work in the creative industries. There's a huge threat of burnout, but guys like Soderbergh, who went on a 26 film run in 24 years, you have to admire them for the stamina to just slug through and deliver project after project. A couple of years ago, Soderbergh made public his daily diet of creative consumption: a list of all the books and things he read and movies he watched interspersed with his work schedule (shooting for Haywire, Contagion).*** So it seems like that to be as productive as Soderbergh, one must feed the creative soul and not just tire oneself out with just work. 

There's the myth of industry vs inspiration: that work can only "flow smoothly" if the muse is there to inspire you. But in the real world, there are deadlines and deliverables. One can't pack up a shoot of a commercial or a television show and risk a blank screen. Too much is at stake. Also, there's the idea of eccentric behavior from artists and geniuses. Bad behavior is inexcusable, and surely, ill temper is not the only sign of geniuses. 

Which reminds me with a talk I had with my boss. It's important to meet deadlines. If you have two workers where one is merely adequate and the other has more polished work but takes a very long time and will most likely deliver late, guess which person will get the next project? 

At the end of the day, it's going to be the one who delivers. And it won't matter that it's "just okay" or "sufficiently adequate." Which means that I need to work on working faster. It's slow going, but this is a quest at improving oneself and one's attitude towards work, so we will try. Or as Yoda says, "There is no try. Only do." 

*Or alternatively: Knowing When To Quit

**I'm not convinced that multilevel marketing or networking is the way to go. In my head, these are all variations on the pyramid scheme: common products sold at a high mark up and the illusion that you have your own business. But the only ones who get rich out of this are the ones who got in really early to cash in. Everyone else who comes in later is screwed. 

*** One thing that makes sense with this list now is that in the interview Soderbergh mentions that he was working on an adaptation/reboot of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. So that's why he was watching all those episodes. So even if it seems like the list was just him "reading" or "watching," he was actually working.