#78: Stay on the bus...

I learned about The Helsinki Bus Station Theory from Oliver Burkeman’s article in The Guardian.

The theory had been circulating among the photographers for years before Burkeman brought it to exposure to a wider audience.

First outlined by Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen in 2004, the theory claims, that the secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki's main bus station.

To understand the theory, imagine this - you are at a bus station. A big bus station that is cleaner, environmentally friendly, and inviting.

There are two dozen platforms, from each of which, several different bus lines depart.

Thereafter, for a kilometer or more, all the lines leaving from any one platform take the same route out of the city, making identical stops.

"Each bus stop represents one year in the life of a photographer," Minkkinen declares.

You pick a career direction – maybe you focus on making platinum prints of nudes – and set off.

Three stops later, you've got a nascent body of work. "You take those three years of work on the nude to [a gallery], and the curator asks if you are familiar with the nudes of Irving Penn." Penn's bus, it turns out, was on the same route.”

Annoyed to have been following someone else's path, "You hop off the bus, grab a cab… and head straight back to the bus station, looking for another platform."

Three years later, something similar happens. "This goes on all your creative life: always showing new work, always being compared to others."

What's the answer?

It's simple.

Stay on the bus.

Stay on the f*#king bus.

The point Minkkinen is making is when you find your work resembles someone else’s, or you’re on someone else’s bus, traveling someone else’s path, don’t try to go back to the bus station at the very beginning completely reinvent yourself and start from scratch. Instead, stay on the bus.

At a certain point, your path will split off into something new.

It’s the separation that makes all the difference. Once you start to see the difference in your work from the work you so admire, it’s time to look for your breakthrough.

Suddenly your work will start to get noticed. Now you are working more on your own, making more of the difference between your work and what influenced it.

Your vision takes off.

There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling, one, it vividly illustrates a critical insight about persistence. And second, it points out the perils of a world that obessess with originality.

“More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality,” wrote Austin Kleon.

We hear the stories of kids dropping out of high school and launching a crazy-sounding start-up and becoming an overnight success, yet Helsinki theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you'll never reach it.

Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.

"Stay on the f*#king bus."

Now that’s a fridge-magnet slogan to live by. Just make sure you take it off the fridge when your prudish relatives visit, says Oliver Burkeman.

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Welcome to new subscribers of the newsletter.

I am pleased to report that staying on the bus is paying off and the subscriber count of this newsletter is steadily increasing.

I am going to be away on a mini-holiday in Tasmania from next week. Although I should be able to keep my commitment to both Wednesday and Friday editions if for some reason I am not able to send the despatch, I hope you will excuse me. I need this holiday for my sanity.

That’s all from me this week.

Neera Mahajan

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