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Like Hitchcock: Curating a Life of Work
At some point later in my career, I stumbled onto a simple but helpful (for me) perspective regarding work as a reflection of identity. As a professional designer (and for many other vocations I’m sure), I think it’s human nature to feel our value is commensurate with whatever we are working on at a given time; we always want to be creatively engaged, to demonstrate our value, and to encapsulate our skills and tastes in whatever we do, particularly for major endeavors we’re expected to commit months or even years to. On the other hand, if we’re stuck on something that seems tedious, less intrinsically rewarding or less visible, it can feel like a neverending slog, and can even take a toll on our self-esteem. But a couple decades into my design journey, I embraced this analogy that helped me take stock of my own big picture with a healthier mindset.
The Director’s Lens My first critical exposure to Alfred Hitchcock was an undergrad Comparative Lit class I took called “How to Read a Film;” our assignment was to discuss the famed director’s implementation of narrative point of view in his 1941 classic Suspicion, starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine. I became deeply immersed in both the assignment and the film, and it led me down a rabbit hole of digging deeper into Hitchcock’s filmography. Mind you, this was before streaming, so if I couldn’t rent a film at my local video shops or catch it on TV, I was basically out of luck. To date, I’ve seen most of his work but not all, which is kind of cool actually, since it means there are still unseen treasures for me to discover. But I digress…
On a separate tangent, one day I was daydreaming about “definitive works” of prominent figures in the arts; in other words, if I could pick only one piece to epitomize the life’s work of a given artist in any field, what might it be? For example, van Gogh’s Starry Night is both well-known and generally representative of his accomplishments. For the band Queen, it might be Bohemian Rhapsody. And so on.
When I tried to apply this exercise to Hitchcock, I struggled. Rear Window is my all-time favorite film, but I don’t think it adequately sums up who he is as a director on its own; it’s a masterpiece built on themes of voyeurism and economy of space, but it represents a few of his many dimensions. In contrast, consider something like Psycho, a gritty modernist slasher film that fundamentally changed the horror genre. And then there’s Rope, a brilliant technical experiment produced to play out as a single uninterrupted scene. Or To Catch a Thief, a romantic comedy caper; or North by Northwest, often cited as the first true modern action film. These are just a few examples of the stylistic and narrative versatility evidenced throughout his legendary career. In reality, Hitchcock is the sum of his experiments, his technical obsessions, and his evolution. To represent him as an artist, you inevitably have to take a much larger sample of his accomplishments into account.
When I shifted perspective to imagine my own career through a similar lens (pun intended), the effect was both eye-opening and liberating. It made it easier for me to mentally reframe individual projects as elements that organically accrue to a greater whole over time. This in turn inspired me to seek out a broader range of diverse challenges in my subsequent work, and with them the potential to continually add new dimensions to my experiences and skillset. I also realized that even if a project seemed tedious in the moment, I became more open to consider new ways to approach it, with the aim of learning and growing regardless of the task at hand.
For me, this analogy helped encourage me to embrace curiosity and perpetual learning even more than before, and a willingness to take more risks along the way. It was a living reminder that the whole of a career is truly greater than the sum of its parts. In the end, you aren’t defined by the one project or the job function, but rather by the thread that connects everything you’ve done; the collective resonance of every experiment, failure, and breakthrough.