Why hacks don’t cut it

“You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally. That’s the way all the experts do it.”
— Robert Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“

The concept of “hacking” or finding an unconventional, often more efficient, way of achieving something has become very popular. Indeed, some people even build their careers around it. For example, Tim Ferriss has become famous for his books “The 4-Hour Workweek“, “The 4 Hour Body” and “The 4-Hour Chef“. As the titles imply, the underlying idea in all of them is to maximize the outcome of minimal efforts. I am a fan of Tim’s approach partly because I like the ideas of innovation and optimization that are inherent in hacking, but also because his view of hacking is deeper than simple cutting of corners on the way to a goal.

The concept of 10,000 hours that are needed to master a craft, which was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers“, has recently been debunked, or at least put into a wider context by several authors. Also, the Pareto’s 80/20 rule of diminishing returns when practicing a skill suggests that a lifetime dedicated to any single task would be an example of inefficiency. However, in my personal experience, whenever I see an example of something remarkable being created, it is inevitably a result of a lot of work. When everything is said and done, even if we follow all the quick recipes for success (“10 steps to taking a perfect photo” or “10 steps to writing a perfect blog post”, etc.), the very act of cutting corners removes something valuable both from the process and from the resulting product. We really do need to live the craft that we practice, make it our way, like the “do” in kendo, kado, shodo, etc.

In photography, for example, there is no way to fake the genuine knowledge of the subject, the intuition that comes from true mastery of the technique, the emotional connection with the models, etc. In the event and reportage photography in particular, one needs to become a participant, rather than the observer, in order to convey the emotional content to the viewers. Recently, I was photographing local dance students participating in a Santa Claus parade, an event that is difficult to capture because of the poor lighting conditions (it takes place at night) and general setting (the spectators are separated from the participants, who quickly pass by them on the street). I wanted to take pictures that would capture the excitement of the the early holiday season and the enthusiasm of the young dancers. My strategy was to join them as they were preparing for the parade – meeting at the lobby of the local museum, lining up in their spot long before the start of the parade, doing the sound checks, going over their dance routines again and again to keep warm on a cold November evening. The performance itself probably counted for 80% of the impact on the spectators and took 20% of the effort from the dancers, considering all the hours they spent preparing for the show. But I think that it is capturing the other 80% of the event from the participants’ perspective is what makes the memories recorded in the photos valuable and gives them emotional content.