How being “happy enough” prevents us from becoming great.
During his time working at a video store young Quentin Tarantino fell “asleep for a few years because working at that store” he got “caught up in the little life there.” Tarantino had fallen into a routine, with no real sense of urgency to achieve his goals.
In the 33 strategies of war Robert Greene warns us that ” Our daily patterns and routines help us to avoid feeling directionless, but there is always the niggling thought that we could accomplish so much more. We waste so much time.”
Tarantino was content enough with his job at the video store, as he explains ” It’s one of those things where you think ‘well, this isn’t my dream, this isn’t what I wanted to do – working at a video store’, I wanted to make movies, it’s not my dream what I’m doing. But it’s dream adjacent, it’s close to my dream. I get to watch movies all fucking day, I get to talk about movies all fucking day.”
This led him to put his ambitions to sleep because he was “happy enough”
After understanding what his life would look like at 30 if he stayed at the video store any longer, 25 year-old Tarantino had what he would call a ‘Quentin detest fest’.
” I would spend all night laying out everything that I was doing that’s wrong, then, I would spend the last few hours figuring out how I could change it. And as opposed to just doing it and going to get some sleep and then you forget about it and fall back into your routine, I decided to change my life,” he said.
He put himself what Robert Greene calls ” ‘Death Ground‘ where your back is against the wall and you have to fight like hell to get out alive.” He located the root of his problem and gave himself no back up plan. As Greene explains “You sometimes have to force yourself onto death ground— leaving stale relationships and comfortable situations behind, cutting your ties to the past. If you give yourself no way out, you will have to make your new endeavour work.”
The future Oscar winning director moved near Hollywood, where he quickly started meeting people who were doing what he had dreamed doing.
Instead of doubting himself he would look at those guys and think “If these guys can do it, I can do it, because they weren’t too special”. As Marcus Aurelius had said centuries earlier “do not think what is hard for you to master is humanly impossible; and if it’s humanly possible, consider it to be whiten your reach.”
As some might see the part of his life working at the video store was not unimportant, he was actually putting himself through “a self-directed apprenticeship”. This concept by Robert Green acknowledges that during that time Quentin might not have “stories of great achievement or discovery” but “under the surface” his mind was “transforming in ways we cannot see” but contained ” all the seeds of his future success.”
Anya Idelsen 