Pain is temporary. Quitting lasts forever.
Lance Armstrong
Is it good to wake up tired? (Disclaimer: You have to wait until next month to get the answer to that question.)
Ever heard of the idea that you need to spend 10,000 hours doing something before you get good at it?
A rough calculation gets me to about 97,000 hours working at Queensboro.
There was a time when I was in high school and college, before I started Queensboro, that I thought an ideal life would include sleeping as late as I wanted every day and having the money to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted.
Doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
Even as the demands of being in business started to reshape how I thought about work, in those early years, in the back of my mind I still thought, “If I do this right, maybe I can work hard for 10 years or so and then still have plenty of time to goof off for the rest of my life.”
Having started my business while I was in my early 20s, retiring at 35 and doing nothing that I didn’t feel like doing for the rest of my life sounded like a solid aspiration.
Fortunately for me, my parents, and their parents, as well as all their brothers, sisters, cousins, aunts, and uncles, as well as the rest of our neighbors, my teachers, and pretty much everyone else in the medium-sized New York suburb where I grew up, were all very hard workers. We were all comfortable, but no one was noticeably wealthy.
At the time, all this hard work all these people were doing did seem a little “old fashioned” to me. After all, this was the 60s and 70s! Business was bad. Love should be free. Any available shortcuts should be taken full advantage of.
I went to college in New York in 1977, and my sheltered suburban existence was quickly turned on its head. It was a dangerous but exciting time in New York. Much of the area around campus was considered no-man’s land, and the city’s transformation from a place where things were made to a place where things were done had left large swaths of formerly industrial properties, such as downtown Manhattan, abandoned to the whims of more creative-minded people. Punk rock, incomprehensibly dissonant art, lots of cheap but good restaurants, all-night clubs, and lots of drugs were starting to redefine what New York was all about.
This was the environment into which Queensboro was born. After a couple of years, Queensboro settled into an old paint factory in an “up and coming” neighborhood in Brooklyn where we had many artists as neighbors. Some of them were successful, and some were very, very successful.
I got pretty close to one artist in particular. He was a couple of years older than me but hadn’t gone to college. While I was in college, he had managed to survive in New York, working in restaurants and doing odd jobs while starting to build these kinetic, computer-driven sculptures that were both incredibly complex and very beautiful.
By the time we met, he was working full-time on his sculpture and was a rising star in the New York art world.
I was a few years into my business by then and still a little resentful about how much time it was taking. But, for the most part, I enjoyed it. We were growing, I had some great people working with me, and despite living perpetually on the edge of complete financial ruin, I was being pushed in ways I had never been before and was responding better than I ever thought I could.
However, I found that just to get everything done, I had to get into the office earlier and earlier.
I soon surprised myself by falling in love with the quiet peace of the morning, getting to my desk early, watching the sun come up over the New York skyline, and feeling the energy rise as New York woke and got to work. By 9 or 10 o’clock in the morning, I’d already have a good amount of work done and would be free to check in with employees, customers, suppliers, and friends.
Those early starts were a real eye-opener for me. I was initially surprised by all the lights on in the neighboring art studios, particularly the lights of my friend, the sculptor.
My first thoughts were, “Wow, these guys have been partying all night! But when I saw them with their morning coffee and (amazing New York) morning rolls, just as sober as I was, it became clear that many of them were on the same schedule that I was on, with some even starting earlier.
So, great art didn’t just come out of thin air? Artists worked and toiled methodically and systematically, just like I was doing.? I was particularly impressed by how responsive and respectful my friend was to the gallery owners, newspaper reporters, party planners (he was a hot commodity for parties), and everyone else involved in building his career. He didn’t have an ounce of attitude. He was genuine, sensitive and sincere. He was a far cry from the nihilist punk rockers that flooded the city a few years earlier. My friend was not just an artist; he was a businessman, which, by association, maybe made me not just a businessman but an artist! (Ha!)
I saw my friend’s behavior repeated with other successful artists in the neighborhood. Some were jerks and maybe still had a little success, but for all kinds of reasons, these would generally be the ones that quickly crashed and burned.
I had a good education, but this was a lesson no one was teaching: inspiration without perspiration is DOA, dead on arrival! And the thing that was so crazy about this lesson was not just that no one was teaching that, but that it seemed all society was trying to encourage the opposite! It was a mind-bender, but I was busy with other things, so I left the untangling of that question for another time. Meanwhile, I had work to do. With this revelation, I found my relationship with the actual work I was doing starting to change. The seeds of an idea were planted – hard work doesn’t produce great art; great work is the art.
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