# 108: “Whatever It Takes”
Story behind the Passage
They played this song on the radio in the car just now. I do not like the song, actually. It is not my kind of music — too loud, too modern, too violent in my ears. Still, the lyrics got me today. I am dealing with people everyday who do “whatever it takes” to fulfill their dream. In the tech environment, there is a lot of this. I know, it was the same in any “world” and in any historical era, i.e., work environment in which people achieved things. Still, so many people do not have dreams anymore. Or they do not talk about them. I do not know.
When I say “dreams,” I do not mean it in the unrealistic and completely illusory way. I am talking about goals that are achievable but hard to attain. In the tech scene, this difficulty does not merely arise from the difficulty of inventing and building innovative products. It comes from the difficulty of selling innovative products to people who are not that innovative. I do not mean this in any derogatory way. I am just saying that innovative products are very hard to understand for potential clients/users because they are new. This issue has been the topic of hundreds of management books on innovation management. There is no need to go into this at this point.
Still, these books have not eliminated the problem, they just offer tools to tackle the problem.
For me, writing is such a tool. It is my technology. But it is still so hard to sell in a world in which writing is a commodity. Again, this is not bad in and of itself. Having commodity status means that your products are being sold to customers. If you are writing things that do not find that many customers for whatever reason — mostly because it is not even your goal to reach many but the right ones — you have to do “whatever it takes” to deal with this.
My Learnings
“Whatever it takes / Yeah, take me to the top I’m ready for / Whatever it takes.” Doing “whatever it takes” usually goes along with working very hard. This is the case for so many young people who are building companies. They work their ass off to survive because they have to work two or three jobs until their own business finally flies — or not. But the reason why these lyrics touched me so much today is not because of the “working hard” part. It is because of the dignity part — which is my issue and not an explicit part of the song. I claim there is a difference between working hard and selling your soul. If you sell your soul, you are losing your dignity. And sometimes it is hard to tell where to draw the line — for yourself, I mean, not even talking about the opinion of others. They very often see lines where you have long transcended them — and succeeded.
So, what I mean by selling your soul is that you really think you are giving up all your principles and values. One should never do this. But the point is, hey, look at the music industry. So many singers started by playing in the streets, earning some coins from pedestrians, being treated like homeless people by some — and quite often they were homeless. Did they sell their soul just because of the ‘circumstances,’ because of playing in the streets instead of having a fancy producer and recording in an even fancier studio somewhere in New York City or Berlin? Remember, they were still doing what they loved — singing and playing their instrument. They were still free in what they did and how they did it, even though nobody paid big money for it.
If you transfer this to the sphere of writing, it might be that successful writers also need to eat shit (~ play in the streets) until they get wherever they want to get. Maybe they do not even know where they want to get at the beginning. But they do “whatever it takes” to move on. For a writer, this could mean that he/she needs to accept any writing job out there. But this is where the problem with the analogy to the musician is flawed. If you accept any kind of writing job, you are not writing freely — you are not doing what you love. Because in writing, this is similar to singing, I guess, you cannot simply turn off your brain. If somebody tells you to write some real bullshit content-wise, you cannot simply not notice how much bullshit there is in it. Even though you know that many readers might not even notice. After all, definitions of bullshit depend on the person defining it, that is self-evident.
Still, if you do this, if you just write it because you are telling yourself you are doing “whatever it takes” to make a living as a writer, then you are violating your inner values and you are feeling like you are selling your soul. And the thing that I am really worried about is that people push you to do this. As it says in the song “take me to the top I’m ready for…” Who is that imagined counterpart who takes you to the top? As far as I am seeing it these days, Covid has produced a wave of ‘creative’ managers and consultants who are looking for talents outside their usual habitat because the arts scene is completely down. It went down to zero within days — no concerts, no theater performances, nothing. So, they are trying to identify alternative artists and promise them to “take them to the top.”
My suspicion is that some writers fall into this target group as well and they will end up following this path because they have decided to do “whatever it takes” to become famous and rich and possibly both. Yes, I know, you will say now that real artists give a shit about this, they do not pursue this profane vision that marks business people or narcissistic celebrities. Maybe. Still, nowadays, ‘creatives’ want to get visible and visibility goes along with being famous and becoming famous also goes along with big money. After all, the music industry like the book industry just like any industy is an industry — it is business. And that business has its value and professional experts who know how to produce this value, I am not doubting or critiquing this in any way.
The problem is simply that I found out that writing just for the sake of entertainment is not my kind of writing. I sell my soul if I do this. I do not even know what entertainment actually is. Yes, storytelling as a means of touching people might be considered entertainment but for me, the one is a tool for the other, not vice versa. And the ultimate goal of writing for me is learning, not just “escapism” as the media studies folks might say now. Of course, learning means something different to everyone, that is totally fine. The point is, I as a writer need to write about stuff that I personally think I can write about in order to make people think about this.
It already takes a lot to be able to write so that people enjoy and learn from your writing. But this is only the beginning, it seems. This is not the “whatever it takes” level, I suppose. I wonder where this level starts. Do you have to type advertising labels or write 30-character website content to show that you are willing to do “whatever it takes”? I do not think so. I think that we all need to do what we enjoy and what we are really good at. I do not think that people like Goethe, Haruki Murakami, Tom Wolfe or any other writers and intellectuals would have been/be good as copywriters. But who am I to know “whatever it takes”?
“Hypocritical, egotistical
Don’t wanna be the parenthetical, hypothetical
Working onto something that I’m proud of, out of the box
An epoxy to the world and the vision we’ve lost
I’m an apostrophe
I’m just a symbol to remind you that there’s more to see
I’m just a product of the system, a catastrophe
And yet a masterpiece, and yet I’m half-diseased
And when I am deceased
At least I go down to the grave and die happily
Leave the body and my soul to be a part of thee
I do what it takes” — Imagine Dragons
Reflection Questions
1) Do you have any goal in life that you are pursuing with a “whatever it takes” mentality?
2) Does writing have any value for you?
3) Was there ever a situation in your life in which you thought that your dignity was in danger?