I loved every bit of this GQ profile on Robert Downey Jr. and his career turn-around following the success of Iron Man. His confidence and insistence on playing the role of Tony Stark is inspiring:

But Downey was obsessed with the notion that the part should be his. “I don’t know why,” he says. “I do like a bit of Jung, and it was just this kind of numinous thing.” Even after the film’s director, Jon Favreau, passed on the word from Marvel that it wasn’t going to happen, Downey refused to listen. (Favreau later explained that Marvel had actually been even more definite: “Under no circumstances are we prepared to hire him for any price.”) Downey persisted nonetheless, and eventually he was told he’d at least get a screen test.

He had three weeks to ready himself. The way Downey describes what happened in that period seems itself like an origin montage from a superhero story: a time of focused preparation and of “spiritual/ ritualistic processes” that he still considers private and prefers not to detail. He worked on the scenes over and over: “The missus says she could’ve woken me up in the middle of the night and I’d have recited the audition dialogue in double time.”

Robin Sloan points out that this kind of focused vision is a rare but valuable asset:

There’s something very powerful about (a) the confident identification of a thing you want to do — a thing you must do — paired with (b) the professional skill to pull it off. That second part is crucial; we aren’t Green Lanterns and willpower alone does not suffice. But put them together and the combo never fails to impress, to a degree that is often surprising to everyone involved.

Honestly I just think relatively few people, even very skilled and/or successful people, have that kind of specific plausible vision for themselves. If you can muster it — or if perhaps it grabs you by the throat — it becomes a significant competitive advantage.

Something I hear over and over about successful businessmen and artists—Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Stanley Kubrick—is that that have an impossibly clear vision for the work they want to do and the things they want to make. And then on top of that, the ability to execute on that vision. It’s a kind of focus I hope to have.

Adding to my collection of commencement speeches, I recently came across Bill Watterson’s speech at Kenyon University from 1990. This part especially stuck out for me:

Creating a life that reflects your values and satisfies your soul is a rare achievement. In a culture that relentlessly promotes avarice and excess as the good life, a person happy doing his own work is usually considered an eccentric, if not a subversive. Ambition is only understood if it’s to rise to the top of some imaginary ladder of success. Someone who takes an undemanding job because it affords him the time to pursue other interests and activities is considered a flake. A person who abandons a career in order to stay home and raise children is considered not to be living up to his potential-as if a job title and salary are the sole measure of human worth.

You’ll be told in a hundred ways, some subtle and some not, to keep climbing, and never be satisfied with where you are, who you are, and what you’re doing. There are a million ways to sell yourself out, and I guarantee you’ll hear about them.

To invent your own life’s meaning is not easy, but it’s still allowed, and I think you’ll be happier for the trouble.

Milton Glaser, when asked if he designs out of necessity or habit:

Well I’m 83 and I realized that when I wake up in the morning the thought of not having someplace to go to work is the thing I dread most, that if I didn’t get up, get dressed, and come here, I would go nuts. And what is most significant to me is that I might do something that I haven’t done before and I might learn something I didn’t know before. Because my work is very different than it was a year ago, or two years ago, or five years and I feel at the brink of a different kind of knowledge that I never had. So I don’t know what to call that; is it necessity? i think it’s necessity, I really think I’d go nuts if I didn’t have it to do…part of it is the realization that there is a purpose to my life.

I hope when I’m 83, I’ll retain that same sense of wonder, that feeling like there is still something new to do, discover, create, and learn.

Vulture has a super interesting interview with director Steven Soderbergh on his retirement from Hollywood. I especially liked this bit on his ability to get films made:

On the few occasions where I’ve talked to film students, one of the things I stress, in addition to learning your craft, is how you behave as a person. For the most part, our lives are about telling stories. So I ask them, “What are the stories you want people to tell about you?” Because at a certain point, your ability to get a job could turn on the stories people tell about you. The reason [then–Universal Pictures chief] Casey Silver put me up for [1998’s] Out of Sight after I’d had five flops in a row was because he liked me personally. He also knew I was a responsible filmmaker, and if I got that job, the next time he’d see me was when we screened the movie. If I’m an asshole, then I don’t get that job. Character counts. That’s a long way of saying, “If you can be known as someone who can attract talent, that’s a big plus.”

The New York Times had a great profile on Jerry Seinfeld last week (but you probably already knew that). The piece focused on his post-sitcom life, most notably his obsession with doing stand-up. The whole piece is fascinating but really excited me was the look into his creative process and his approach to crafting a joke:

Seinfeld will nurse a single joke for years, amending, abridging and reworking it incrementally, to get the thing just so. “It’s similar to calligraphy or samurai,” he says. “I want to make cricket cages. You know those Japanese cricket cages? Tiny, with the doors? That’s it for me: solitude and precision, refining a tiny thing for the sake of it.”

When he can’t tinker, he grows anxious. “If I don’t do a set in two weeks, I feel it,” he said. “I read an article a few years ago that said when you practice a sport a lot, you literally become a broadband: the nerve pathway in your brain contains a lot more information. As soon as you stop practicing, the pathway begins shrinking back down. Reading that changed my life. I used to wonder, Why am I doing these sets, getting on a stage? Don’t I know how to do this already? The answer is no. You must keep doing it. The broadband starts to narrow the moment you stop.”