Your Career is a Theme Park, Your Career is a Movie
A Framework for designing your career
A few years ago I watched a documentary about the life of Walt Disney. There was one throw away idea in the movie that I revisit fairly often:
Walt Disney understood that the process for creating films and theme parks differed in one key way, once the film is released your work is done but you can iterate on a theme park forever.
For this reason, according to the documentary, Disney preferred to work on theme parks — in Gladwellian parlance he was a tinkerer.
We now know, all these years later, that the films and the characters in those films are the foundation of a perpetually succesful Disney theme park (…streaming service, licensing deals etc). So even though the process of working on a film comes to an end there is still a seemingly limitless amount of value that can be extracted from the film’s story and its characters.
Our careers work the same way.
Our careers are filled with moments where we work on projects that have beginnings and ends. They are finite. I will submit this project…and then the project will be over. I will sell this product… and then my client will have the product. I will be an account manager…and then I will be an account executive.
While we are working on these projects we give it our all.
We work to perfect the thing that we are going to put out into the world — like an animator who carefully crafts the wink or smirk of a beloved princess.
Then the project ends.
You get assigned something new to work on, your client needs a new product, or you keep the account executive title but you switch companies. We tend to look back at these projects with hindsight and contemplate the time spent on each one.
These projects are our films. We won’t and shouldn’t tinker with our films.
Additionally, people don’t know what went into each project and they likely will never find out. They will simply see the complete work. I remember learning this lesson when I saw an exhibit at The Whitney Museum that focused on Edward Hopper’s process for creating some of his most famous paintings, including Nighthawks (Hopper Drawing, May-October 2013).
As a non-artist we see a painting like Nighthawks and we picture Hopper approaching the canvas with his brush and palate. But in reality he worked on the painting for a while, practicing the correct angle of a bent elbow and the best way to portray the curve of a glass window.
We are presented with the final product, the same way each and everyone of our projects are presented in its finality.
Our careers, however, are alive. Our careers need to be revised, edited, emboldened, updated and refreshed like an amusement park.
Only we know which characters from our films will be the star attractions in our amusement park. We know which projects we should learn from and which we should put into our archive. We know which teammates and managers will go to any length to turn your blockbuster into a dynasty. We know how to tell our story and franchise it.
Our careers are more like a retrospective exhibit of Edward Hopper’s works at the Art Institute of Chicago and less like an individual painting. Together the paintings tell the story of a great artist.Our careers are made up of movies but ultimately they are a theme park that can be worked on forever. You can always add another film, you can always add another painting.
One last thought…
I remember visiting Universal Studios theme park in the ’90s and watching the “Waterworld: A Live Sea War Spectacular”. As a kid I had no idea that it was a reference to one of the worst performing films of all time and I was wowed by the theatrics. The tinkerers recognize that Waterworld performed better as a memorialized attraction than it did as a film.
The creators and tinkerers behind that ride took the finite project that flopped and recycled it. All good careers have their Waterworlds, the key is in knowing when we should repurpose those projects into something that will shine.
