My Most Valuable College Lesson

When I was in college the best lesson I learned wasn’t taught in a classroom.

This is around 1998 or so. I was in a Media Arts program (kind of like a film course). Early in our 1st year we were given an assignment to take a portrait pic of someone. What the majority of the class did was turn to the person beside them and ask if they could take their picture. They went into the hall, snapped a quick picture with horrible flash photography and that was that, pretty much zero effort went into it.

My friend Eric turned to me and asked if I could meet him at the school on Saturday for helping with the portrait. I said that if he wanted to take my picture we could just go out in the hall and do it now, but he was like, no, I don’t want to take your pic, I need help.

So we met on a Saturday at the school in the broadcast studio. This was strange since we were in 1st year, and to sign out the studio we needed to have a 2nd year student accompany us. We had just started the program, but he had went up to a 2nd year that we didn’t know and he asked him for help as well.

We spent a few hours setting up lights, putting colored gels and diffusion over the lights. At the time this was all new to me, and I had never thought so much work and set-up could go into taking a picture. Then his girlfriend came in, dressed like she was going out to a club. She brought her friend, who was also beautiful, they were both hardly wearing clothes. Then Eric turned on some music from a boom box he brought, he pulled out some drinks “to loosen things up” and he started taking pictures.

This was before digital cameras. Back then we were shooting on film, so I would always conserve the amount of shots I would take, but he went through three rolls of film taking pic after pic. He fired up a smoke machine to add atmospherics and we stayed until he ran out of film, probably a couple of hours.

A few days later he was looking at the slides over a light table, excluding all the bad shots until eventually he picked out the best one and he submitted that for the assignment.

I remember the teacher going through the classes slides, each one worse than the last, struggling to say anything about the portraits that were submitted. Then he got to Eric’s.

He probably spend a good 15 minutes talking about it. He went on about the lighting, how the blue and red lights contrasted each other. How the smoke wrapped around them. How one of their arm’s led your eye to the other and how the composition was so strong.

It was a real work of art, while everyone else’s was amateur.

After the class, this guy from the class came up to us, Eric still buzzing from how well he did on the assignment. The guy said to Eric:

“You know, you got lucky.”

We looked at him, not really knowing how to react to that.

“You didn’t place her arm that way, you didn’t make that smoke curl around her arm, you didn’t know that the light was going to hit her that way. You got lucky!”

Then he went on his way.

I’ve thought about this for YEARS.

Because in a way, the guy was right. Eric didn’t position her arm that way, he didn’t make the smoke curl around her, he didn’t know the light was going to catch her eyes like that.

What he did do was put everything in place so that it COULD happen.

What I’ve come to realize is that in life, almost everything that happens to us is out of our control. You could be a perfect driver, but you can’t control it if someone runs a red light and smashes into you. You could be the perfect employee, but if a company decided to cut 10% of it’s workforce, there’s not much you can do.

The only thing we can do is control ourselves, our reactions to what happens to us. Eric set up the scene so that something great could happen.

I think a lot about this when I start working on my own work. I can’t guarantee that a project will turn out great, but can I put the conditions in place that something good COULD happen?

That also showed me that I wasn’t working as hard as I could have been. If you would have asked me at the time “Are you trying as hard as you can”, I would have said yea. But it wasn’t until I saw someone actually working hard that it showed me that I really wasn’t giving it my ALL. It really reframed what I thought was possible. I was limiting myself by not dreaming big enough. Instead of doing what I needed to do to get the grade, I should have been asking myself ‘what’s the best that I can do right now’.

(Not that you have to work that hard all the time. It’s very hard to truly give 100% all the time, but there are times when you really need to, and it’s good to know that you can do that if you have to)

It also showed me that if you stand out, there’s always some asshole out there trying to drag you down.