Buying Freedom to Resist Mediocrity

Most invitations to go down most paths in life, even the most successful ones, are extended before you as an invitation to give up your time and energy to be mediocre. I’ve always felt that way. I’ve always, sometimes very stubbornly, resisted. I’ve never wanted to work just to have cool stuff. I’ve always wanted to be a part of making cool stuff, and I see the difference as life defining.

So, when Kris Abdelmessih told me I really had to read the book, Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused, I met the recommendation with a healthy distrust. Not of Kris. I think Kris largely gets me and where I’m coming from (must be a PA/NJ 80s kid thing). But - an oral history of a party movie, which is a great movie, but is often overly celebrated by mediocre dude-guys? I could see an oral history of P.C.U. doing it for me, but Dazed and Confused?

Kris sold me on the suggestion that there was something about Linklater’s approach to gathering and telling deeply personal (re: unique to you, not necessarily revealing in some trauma-hunting way) that reminded him of me.

Sometimes, if it sounds like a compliment and you know it’s coming from somebody really smart, you just have to jump in. The book was ordered and sat on my living room shelf for a few weeks. Last weekend I cracked it. 50 pages flew by without me able to get up. Good call, Kris.

This first quote I have to share is about truth. About where it lives. About being obsessed with people who know how to hunt truth down and pull truths out. Linklater says, “Francois Truffaut is one of my heroes. There’s often him and two other screenwriters on his films, and he would send the other screenwriters out to do research, to get real stories that were relevant to the subject. He was obsessed with the notion of truthfulness—not necessarily that it had happened to him, but that it really happened to somebody. And I think I take a similar approach, to some degree. Anything’s fodder.”

In my experience, this is the same as my internal explanation of why everything is interesting. Somebody loves some weird stuff. I may not love it, or even understand it, but if I can meet a person who loves it? Who knows what love is in that domain? It’s not my truth, but it is truthful if I can find the right framing of the experience.

Maybe I should make movies. No, I shouldn’t. But, maybe I can send him some stories or… another quote I am going to be stuck with for a long time, because it’s about buying freedom to pursue the quest for truth:

“I had a pretty good run from ‘81 to ‘87 when I wasn’t employed. I had strong ethics about staying out of the nine-to-five grind. Maybe this sounds paranoid, but I think the goal of the greater world is for you to have a mediocre life, not realizing what you want in the world. That’s the story of my parents’ generation. Hardly any of them realized their dreams because they were young parents and fell into the trap of working. I saw the world as a big trap. I think that’s why I was able to save my money when I was in my 20s. I was buying freedom to live in the kind of world I wanted to live in.”

Money, yes - this is a financial person talking! - is a tool for resisting mediocrity. And, isn’t that true on so many levels? The trick is, as every artist knows, will you be good with just enough money to subsist on, or will you require more comforts and corresponding tradeoffs to have the life you actually want to live? This is hard. Money is the easiest means to enabling time to spend elsewhere. But, how much? That all depends on the comforts you require to be creative.

And, what if you’re not an artist in any traditional sense? What if you’re a baker, or a butcher, or a candlestick maker, or…? Don’t get hung up on that. I don’t make movies either. But the sentiment here is, if you are called to resist mediocrity too, you are called to create something of your own, and that is so very special to accept as a calling.

There’s no answer here. Just the reveal of the core truth, alongside the reality of money. Which lands us on one last quote, this one from Brian Raftery, about the early 80s film scene in Austin, about staying rooted while broadcasting the cultural truth you’re most in touch with because it’s made out of your own life experiences,

“Regional film scenes had started popping up. John Waters was working in Baltimore, and that was one of the first times that I remember a really interesting filmmaker being identified with a city he didn’t want to escape. Instead of fleeing your hometown and running to the West Coast or to New York, there was a new idea of staying put and broadcasting your hometown to the rest of the world.”

This is, presumably, why Kris knew I’d love this book.

What if you can embrace your weird little hometown? What if you can embrace the truth, for all its weirdness, as a unique expression of experience worth capturing? And, what if, you can view any means of getting towards being present with those truths, of helping others be present with those truths - no matter the medium - because you need others to know mediocrity is not the only option?

As finance-adjacent guys, Kris and I have this in common. There’s non-mediocre paths in front of and all around us we have the option (pun intended) to walk down. But, what if that’s not the path we want to be on? Where’s our truth in the mix? Who’s figured that part out?

Richard Linklater. Maybe not perfectly. But, he’s doing it well enough to lead us by one hell of an example. And the same goes for Melissa Maerz who pieced this book together.

The truth is out there. You already know what your curiosities are, so why not celebrate them too? You don’t have to be mediocre, not if you’re driven, you just have to figure out a way to make sure you have the time to celebrate your curiosities and build excitement with others.

All great art breaks the cycle of mediocrity, by revealing some truth, and inspiring others to give it a shot too. That’s a message I can live both by and for.

Need a place to start? Find one truth. Find one story that can only be told, let alone true, in the place you’re from, or from the people you know best in the world, or that you know the world has never heard anything like before. There’s an energy there. Start by admitting you feel it too.

I’m in on this book. Thanks Kris. Alright, alright, alright.