What profession do you admire most and why?
I was going to say doctors. Everyone says doctors. Doctors are wonderful, and if I ever need one at 3am I will not be reading them a blog post about it.
But the people I actually admire most, the ones I quietly stalk on the internet while thinking “how did you even think of that,” are creators. Not a single profession, really. More of a personality type that has escaped into several professions at once. Artists, scientists, entrepreneurs, activists, the friend who turned a hobby into a business, the kid who made a song out of the sound of a boiling kettle. That whole crowd.
Here is what I love about them. Most of us look at how things are done and think, “Right, so that is how things are done.” Creators look at the same thing and think, “Says who?” And then, instead of leaving it as a rhetorical question at the dinner table like the rest of us, they go and do something about it. A filmmaker ignores a rule of cinema and it works. A scientist pokes at something everyone agreed was settled and it turns out it was not. This is deeply annoying for the rest of us and also how progress happens.
The other thing that gets me is that they finish things. Anyone can have an idea in the shower. I have had roughly four thousand. Creators are the people who get out of the shower, dry off, and actually build the thing. They take an idea that lived in one head only and drag it out into the world where other people can see it, use it, cry over it, or complain about it in the comments. That last part is a whole skill on its own.
And nobody talks enough about how unglamorous the middle bit is. We see the finished painting, the launch, the breakthrough. We do not see the eleven versions that were rubbish, the year when nobody cared, or the Tuesday afternoon spent staring at a wall wondering if a regular job with a regular salary and a regular parking spot would have been the sensible choice. Creators go through all of that and then, inexplicably, keep going. I find this both inspiring and slightly suspicious.
The best part, though, is what they do to everyone watching. Every time someone breaks a rule and survives, a few more people think, “Oh. You are allowed to do that?” And then they try their own thing. It spreads. One brave weirdo at a time, the world gets a bit more interesting and a bit less beige.
So that is my answer. Creators. The people who look at “this is how it’s done” and hear it as a suggestion. May they keep annoying us with their ideas, may they keep finishing what they start, and may at least one of them please invent something for the laundry.