Creator Notes#4: Being Alive to Opportunity
And how not to miss it
There’s a parable of the lucky man, I don’t remember where I heard it, or what, accurately, it is; it’s a kind of swirl of leaves, it spins up from time-to-time and litters my consciousness, perhaps Derren Brown ran an experiment on its main theme, I don’t remember, I’ve probably embellished it, it goes like this: there’s a sunny, optimistic guy, he strides out confidently into the morning, his world is one of blue skies and yellow beams, he likes to say “yes”.
This guy, let’s call him “Sonny”, is curious about the environment around him, he likes to think about it and turn it around in his head. While out striding, confidently, he pays attention to the air and streets and people as life unrolls before him. He notices a dropped tenner, it’s tatty and has the dark shadow of a partial boot-print scuffed over the surface. He has a look to see if there’s someone nearby who might have dropped it, but the streets are empty, he puts it in his pocket and continues on his way.
He reaches a busier part of town, humming with people assembling their day, he nods to those that he knows, he stops for a chat in the market, he asks questions and learns something new. While he is chatting, the pub landlord comes barrelling out of his pub in a state of high disorganisation, he heads for Sonny, whom he knows to be an approachable, good-natured chap. He makes a flustered request for a favour: there’s an emergency, at the brewery over in the next town, unless solved his pub may run out of ale and spin into an economic crisis – can Sonny help? Sonny agrees without hesitation, and departs at once for the brewery over in the neighbouring valley. While he is there, desperately helping the one-armed brewer to turn the jammed wheel valve on the gushing ale tanks, he meets the brewer’s blushing daughter and falls hopelessly in love. The pair are soon married, happiness reigns.
There’s a second guy, let’s call him “Mardy”. Mardy’s skies are bruised and torn, he heads out into the world with his hood pulled over his head, his lips mutter about what a struggle his life is, the recognition that he deserves and doesn’t get, the money that he doesn’t have. Mardy stalks rapidly through the town trying to avoid eye-contact, he stamps over a discarded tenner without noticing it. The pub landlord comes barrelling out of his pub in a fluster, he sees Mardy, whom he knows to be a negative dick, and swerves around him.
Later, while recessed in the corner of the pub, Mardy watches Sonny buying drinks at the bar. Sonny is celebrating his thrilling engagement to the brewer’s blushing daughter, the laughing landlord is clapping him on the back, Sonny regales the crowd with a story of how he found the money for drinks discarded in the park that morning. “Lucky bastard”, thinks Mardy, bitterly.
You’ve probably heard some variation on this story: “luck” attends to people who have an optimistic outlook, engage with the world and are alive to opportunity. In other words, luck is not a matter of chance; the same opportunity that blesses the “lucky” can present itself to an “unlucky” person, but because of their closed-mindedness and sceptical attitude, the unlucky person misses it.
I don’t believe that this is true in all circumstances, I do think there is such a thing as genuine luck, a matter of blind chance. But the core message of the Parable of The Lucky Man does, I think, hold: you have to be alive to opportunity in order to grasp it; which is a combination of positivity, enthusiasm, thoughtfulness and being attentive. This combination can be difficult for creatives, who are often introspective and consumed by their own projects, rather than alert to the currents flowing around them, in the chaos of the material world.
Most of the great artists who have ascended to the top of their profession (say, I don’t know, Steven Spielberg), seem to have mastered the technique of spotting and seizing opportunity. I see examples repeat in their bios. I have also met a chunky quotient of highly talented, “unlucky” artists who have remained in obscurity because they are bad at recognising an opportunity.
Again, luck does sometimes play a role in success (a topic for another Note), but often enough success is a question of disposition. I remember some years ago when one of my colleagues was out in Germany, shooting a film that we had in production on the roots of electronic music. He had gone to lengths to secure an interview with a particular German artist, who was more obscure than his talent should have permitted, and who was proving difficult to pin down. The day before the scheduled interview the artist pulled out, saying that it was “not a good day”. My colleague repeated this episode to a famous electronic musician who did show up to be interviewed; on hearing about it, this musician said, “that guy? I know that guy very well: yesterday’s not the day, today’s not the day…it’s never going to be his fucking day”.
I know all this, I’m writing it in this article, and yet I still find being alive to opportunity to be a difficult skill to acquire, when it’s not something that comes naturally. My big ambition has been to free myself from the endless bondage of selling labour or submitting to commercial demands, and instead have enough income to pursue my own creative projects without reference to either, however, when the big opportunity to achieve that dream presented itself, I missed it.
If you read Creator Notes#1 (you probably didn’t, no-one did), you’ll be aware that in 2005 my film studio expanded into a four-storey building on Cowper Street, Shoreditch. I signed a lease for an initial five years. The landlord, Sam, was an eccentric, squat, spherical guy with a dodgy toupée clinging unsteadily to his head.
I came to understand that almost the whole of Shoreditch was owned by Sam and four other landlords, who had arrived with cash sometime in the Sixties, when the East End was a collapsing, derelict wasteland, and had bought up all the real estate prematurely deemed to be worthless. He had repeated this trick in other former slums around London (his rubbish-tip empire had its capital near Harlesden) and became unimaginably wealthy during the London property booms.
Sam’s greatest source of stress were the dissolute tenants of his slum properties and their destructive volatility; his entire client base was bad for business. We had taken over the premises on Cowper Street from some record label associated with Pete Doherty, and the whole place was a crime scene of drugs and regret: chasing foils in the basement, stripped mattresses on the top floor, a weird gym area where the kitchen should be, a toilet that carried the sewers in. These people would inflict property damage, freak out the neighbours, fail to pay their rent, skip out with no warning, leaving an enraged mob of utility providers to come looking for someone they could pin the bills on.
For Sam, all this was incredibly vexatious, and so he dearly loved and appreciated us. We were a stable, solvent business that favoured a low-drama existence. We refurbished his property, we always paid the rent on time, we were valued and responsible members of the Shoreditch entrepreneurial class. Sam was a fan of this body of work. I got the impression that he didn’t really understand the area, which he didn’t visit. He was not conscious of the vertiginously rising property prices, nor the tech businesses marching in, with their grating young employees riding BMXs into stripped-brick offices with neon signs that said things like “fucking brilliant” hanging above the entrance.
No, in Sam’s mind this remained a slum attractive only to the mad and the desperate, and so I was able to negotiate an unbelievably good deal. The rent was cheap.
As anyone reading this will recall, the economic prospects of the entire planet went South in 2008, when the dissolute tenants of the banking system eloped, leaving a crime scene of drugs and regret, and an enraged mob of the UK population to come looking for someone they could pin the bills on. London’s financial district was, of course, just down the road from Shoreditch and I remember heading through it as the place went up in flames, bankers spilling out of the pubs in the dark mid-morning, balancing their cardboard boxes of personal effects on the tops of bollards while shot-gunning pints.
We managed to see the crisis through and survive, many of our clients and suppliers didn’t. Businesses that had been around since I was at school collapsed in rows. We shed staff, became leaner, reduced costs, we no longer needed a four-storey office. Our lease was up in 2010, I called Sam to discuss our exit.
Sam took the call badly, he sounded dismayed. I gained the impression that Sam didn’t think temporally, it had not occurred to him that our lease might come to an end, there had been money funnelling into his bank account every month with joyous stability, now there wouldn’t be. My call had snapped Sam into distressing visions of a wrecked future, in which Pete Doherty’s friends smoked smack in their pants and tattooed bailiffs acting for BT went through his picture window with a sledgehammer. I could feel the toupée sliding down his tearful face.
Sam skipped straight from denial to bargaining, “what about renewing?” he asked, hopefully, “take ten years – fifteen. Same money”. I was fixated on surviving the recession. We had discussed a plan, in which our annual production slate was reduced, and we would move to smaller, cheaper premises. This part of the plan was simply to inform Sam that we were leaving. It did not occur to me to modify the plan.
“Sorry Sam”, I said, “we just don’t need the space”.
“OK”, Sam replied, “then you sublet”.
“No, our lease doesn’t permit subletting”
“That’s ok, I’ll change it. New ten-year lease, or fifteen, same rent, and you can sublet”.
“No, Sam, I really don’t want to be a landlord. We’re already looking elsewhere, we’ll be gone at the end of the year. Thanks for the offer, though”.
I reported the substance of call to my business partner. “Who wants to be a landlord??”, he asked, “and how would we divide the space? There’s only one entrance, we’d be crashing into tenants. How would the insurance work?”. “Crazy”, I said, “it’s ok, I told him we’re not interested”.
We could have rented that building out for four, five times what we were paying to Sam. As the tech boom steadily enveloped Shoreditch over the next decade, we could have conceivably charged ten times the rent. We wouldn’t have had to share the space with tenants, in fact, the best business move would have been to get ourselves out of there and into cheap premises double-time, in order to make as much space as possible available to paying tenants. Management of the tenancies could have been outsourced to a local agent, we would never have had to work again unless we wanted to. And I didn’t see it, I was too focused on what was already in my head, on my settled plans, assumptions and prejudices.
When Sam presented me with the best offer that I have ever had, all I saw were the problems, I just wasn’t alive to the opportunity. I’d like to think that I’d spot it the next time, but I’m not certain that I would. It takes a particular mindset, and if you’re not born with it, you have to work to cultivate it.
I now try, so far as I can maintain it, to live in a mental state of optimism and possibility. If I had that call again, I would try simply to say “the lease is up” and then listen. To whatever came back at me down the line, I would attempt to ask the question, “How could this be good?”.