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There’s a line I sometimes recite when I feel I’ve reached a professional roadblock.
It’s a punchline from an eighth-season episode of Seinfeld, where George Costanza is trying to spin his meager life triumphs amid countless failures into a grand success story.
“You know,” he says, “if you take everything I’ve accomplished in my entire life and condense it down into one day … it looks decent!”
When I watched two decades ago, I laughed with everyone else. We’re supposed to laugh at George. The line is meant to mock him.
But these days, it’s become somewhat of a mantra, a reminder of the power of the big picture. When I feel stagnant in my career, I reflect on what I’ve accomplished and discover a lengthier list than I realized. When I’m shooting a story and don’t feel like I’m capturing what I need, I aim to stay focused and remember I might feel differently by day’s end. In the moment, I often dwell on mistakes and failures. In the aggregate, I see a career that, condensed into a few paragraphs, looks decent.
And in 2020, when limitations and frustrations loomed over every day, I leaned on George’s line – or, at least, the optimism within it – to push through.