Staying on the Bus

This essay originally appeared in the Monday morning newsletter on 5/16/22.

Graduation season is upon us! What an exciting – and equally overwhelming – time. 

One of the best parts about the season, in my opinion? All the new commencement speeches :). 

I love a commencement address. I love seeing who delivers them, the inspiration and hopefulness, and the lessons you can walk away with (even if you aren’t the one graduating!). 

One of my favorite commencement speeches to-date is actually quite random. I can’t remember where I read about it, but it was a commencement speech given back in 2004 by Finnish American photographer Arno Minkkinen. He was addressing graduates at the New England School of Photography and shared a parable about the secret to a creatively fulfilling career. Even as someone who doesn’t necessarily consider themselves ‘creative’ (at least in the traditional sense), his story still resonated with me in terms of thinking big picture about my career.

Minkkinen’s speech centered around the operations of the busy bus station of his hometown, Helsinki, the capital of Finland. 

In Helsinki, there are about two dozen platforms that several different bus lines depart from. All the routes take the same path out of the city for at least the first mile (or guess I should say kilometer!) or so. This means that even though the buses are headed to different destinations, they all start out at the same stops. 

Minkkinen provided this context and then asked the audience of photographer grads to imagine that each bus stop represents a year in their life. He asked them to picture picking out a style of photography they wanted to focus on and embarking on their career.  

They embark on, let’s say, Bus #21 and three stops (“years”) later, the post-grad photographer has developed quite a portfolio of their selected style. They take their three years of work to a gallery, only to realize that the work is not as original as they thought it would be. Photographers who had focused on the same style had produced nearly identical work even though they were on Bus #58 or Bus #71, etc. All their routes had visited the first same three stops.

Minkkinen goes on to say, “Shocked, you realize that what you have been doing for three years others have already done. So, you hop off the bus, grab a cab (because life is short) and head straight back to the bus station looking for another platform.”

The photographer decides on another style and jumps on a different bus. But three years later, the same thing happens: the work produced is not original. 

“So once again, you get off the bus, grab the cab, race back, and find a new platform. This goes on all your creative life, always showing new work, always being compared to others,” Minkkinen says before proposing a different approach. 

“It’s simple,” he says, “Stay on the bus. Stay on the bus. Because if you do, in time, you will begin to see a difference.”

You see, as depicted in this graphic, all the bus routes start off the same on their way out of the city, but eventually, the routes diverge and begin to take individual journeys to their different destinations. That is when unique visions take off, where you eventually get into more and more rarefied bus stops where fewer people are getting off. 

Especially at a time like graduating from college, we can put some harsh pressure on ourselves to have it all figured out, at least career-wise. And not only expect ourselves to have it figured out, but also desire to do something unique or original or unchartered.  

What’s really needed at that time, instead of the pressure, is patience. Patience to get us through those beginnings that feel strange and confusing and require us trying different things out to see what works/what doesn’t and what we like/dislike.

I love this metaphor for normalizing that where we start is not where we end up (why do we so often expect that? It feels so obvious when typed out…). We start out with a final destination in mind, but patience is required as we make our ways through the twist and turns that happen first. 

Throughout a career you collect experiences, and these experiences and learnings fuel your next steps, your definition of success, your unique craft. Instead of thinking only about how far those first three bus stops are from our destination, what if we instead thought about them more as opportunities to collect experiences that – as long as we stay on the bus – enhance the rest of the stops we make?   

I find the metaphor of “staying on the bus” also reassuring in the sense of acknowledging nothing is truly wasted. As Julia Child said, “Well, all I know is this – nothing you ever learn is really wasted, and will sometime be used.”

Minkkinen was speaking to photographers looking to hone their creative craft, but when I read his speech, I could relate this metaphor to my own career. I’m loving what I’m doing right now for work. It feels specialized and challenging and unique to my interest and skills. But it’s funny because it’s different than what I set out to do. In fact, I wouldn’t have even been able to verbalize what it is I’m doing now because I didn’t have the interest or awareness of it yet. With hindsight as my guide, I’m able to look back and see how a slew of one-off experiences and opportunities set into motion a domino effect that – unbeknownst to me at the time – got me to where I am now.  And I can’t wait to stay on the bus and continue to see how things change and evolve because of the experience and learnings I’m collecting at the “stops” along the way.

We just have to remember to be patient, stay open to opportunities, and be on the lookout for ways to apply things learned from previous stops. 

We have to stay on the bus. 

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