The Helsinki Bus Theory
“You’re only as good as you’re willing to be bad…The fact that you’re not going to be good at something or that you’re going to fail at something—that’s OK." - Randall Stutman
1.
People fear to fail. I may want to understand the reason, especially if you are in a country that stifles your dreams. But, to be frank, this is not fair on us. Everything in our culture stigmatises failure; from primary school. Phrases like “Do you have two heads?” “look at your mates,” There is this incessant, mind-numbing comparison culture that has eaten deep into us and has become a cankerworm; the very basis of all our anxieties, even when there is an obvious reason for the failure, you can NOT fail.
It is a total mess.
You know, our parents have never failed before, haha. They always carry the first position, lol. They have always done it well with no mistakes. You can’t make a mistake in your workplace in this country and not risk losing your job – it is a mindset that has been ingrained into us. Culture has turned us into bots that must not fail as that is reserved for “unserious people.” But the point is, you are as good as you are willing to be bad; this is today’s newsletter’s theme.
2.
“People have to be bad before they can be good.” – Lorne Michaels
Celebrated photographer and filmmaker Arno Rafael Minkkinen postulated a theory on creative originality: The Helsinki Bus Theory. To start with, Helsinki is the name of a city, the capital of Finland. The theory goes like this: there is a bus station in the centre of Helsinki, and every bus makes the same stopovers before they go in different directions. Let’s home this. Everyone you think made it in their fields, went through the same process, no matter how bad. So, when you get to that point and it looks like you are not doing anything right, it just may be that it is part of the process.
Now, if you decide to jump off that bus before it goes in its different directions just because you think everyone is going in the same direction and that’s not what you have in your head as to where you are going to… you will miss the point. Stay on the bus. Stay in your process. Stay in the process. If you stay, there is a tendency that you learn, fail and get up again.
The movie brats as they are fondly called - Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorcese, George Lucas, and Francis Coppola became friends in the 1960s and the four of them have gone on to make some of the most critically successful movies of all time. But that’s not the fun part. They are incredibly patient people. They have failed several times.
But what kept them going was, that they sincerely loved what they did and didn’t mind all the ruffles along the way. It is a mindset to have. To love what you want to do and to weather the storms and still love what you want to do is incredibly hard but it is the secret recipe to success.
You have to be bad to be good. It is not a curse. It takes nothing away from you except your naivety. It is not a bad thing to fail.
You don’t want to have unrealised dreams…ewww… the toxicity that can brew in you? You have no idea. However, to become good, you have to be bad, it is just how this damn’d world works.
Loves.