Dad to Triplets, 2 with Autism, Author of the forthcoming book SuperParent; Having a Special Needs Child in your life is not a detour | Mets fan w/jar of tears
On the 27th straight day of filming “Forrest Gump,” Tom Hanks was tired & worried.
During a scene on the famous park bench, Hanks stopped & said to director Bob Zemeckis,
“Hey, Bob…is anybody going to care about this movie? I don’t think anybody’s going to care.”
Bob replied,
“It’s a minefield, Tom. You never know what’s good…It’s a minefield! It’s a goddam minefield! We may be sowing the seeds of our own destruction.”
Tom Hanks told this story after he was asked, “When I ask for a memory from your career, what’s the first thing that comes to mind?”
He said that what Zemeckis said was true of every movie he’s worked on:
“There’s never any guarantee...You do not know if it is going to work out.”
Takeaway 1:
Hanks is the 5th-most highest-grossing actor of all time.
And yet, the stickiest memory of his career is the feeling of uncertainty.
Rarer than talent or work ethic, the poet John Keats wrote, is the ability to step into and push through doubts and uncertainties.
In 1817, Keats wrote a letter to his brothers to share this exciting realization.
“At once it struck me,” Keats wrote, “what quality went to form a Man of Achievement … Negative Capability.”
Keats explains that “Negative Capability” is “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
Takeaway 2:
Those who possess Negative Capability, who can sit with uncertainty, who can spend months or years in the minefield that is working on something while knowing that there is a real possibility no one will care about it—they often possess another quality.
They do what they do, not as a means to some end (money, fame, awards, etc.), but for the sake of doing it.
When asked about one of his movies that commercially failed, Hanks said,
"I loved making that movie. I loved writing it, I loved being with it. I love all the people in it."
As Ryan Holiday once told me, "The work has to be the win."
You control the effort, he says, not the results.
"So ultimately, you have to love doing it. You have to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.”
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“Life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're going to get.” — Forrest Gump
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Of all the selfish, narcissistic things Trump has done, attending MSG to see the Knicks play in person Monday night is the absolute worst. 20,000 attendees will be MASSIVELY inconvenienced for all the extra security, the Knicks Watch Party at Garden Is canceled, thousands of extra law enforcement officers will be required (paid for by taxpayers), traffic will be a disaster -- all so he can sit in the Garden rather than watch the game on TV.
Presidents ought to be willing to sacrifice once in awhile.
The most darkly funny aspect of this video is that Ivanka Trump speaks as if she went on some profound, prolonged spiritual and philosophical journey to ascertain the meaning of life, and concluded that the most elevated human state is to live on a gigantic private island in the Mediterranean, in a sprawling mansion paid for with the billions of dollars given to her husband by the Saudis and Emiratis to ensure favorable treatment by him and by her dad in their exercise of the powers of the American Presidency. Real uplifting stuff. 🙏
If we date, don’t stop being you. Keep having fun, keep seeing your friends, keep chasing your goals, and keep enjoying your life. A relationship should add to your life, not take away from it. Just make sure you save time for us too.