None of Us Have Ever Done Anything on Our Own
Or, nobody mentions the makeup artist, ever!
I waste a good deal of time watching Instagram reels. It’s something I’m not really proud of, but once in a while I do come across something on my feed that gives me an insight (which I believe I wouldn’t have been able to stumble upon otherwise) and this is how I justify wasting time on Instagram.
I recently came across this random video showing Bryan Cranston transforming into Walter White. As it begins, Cranston has a head full of hair. And no goatee. As the makeup artist slowly works on him, he gradually turns bald, and by the end of the video, he’s a different person all together — with goatee and all. There were even some tiny hairs implanted on his scalp. Fascinating stuff!
This got me thinking. Breaking Bad is a great show. Undoubtedly! But most of the time (in fact, all the time), the leads (Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul) and the show’s creator Vince Gilligan get all the credit for its success. Nobody mentions the makeup artist. Ever!
Unless makeup is VISIBLY at the forefront of a project, such as in The Lord of the Rings, nobody even touches upon makeup or prosthetics. But makeup is important, and even more so when it’s invisible and NOT at the forefront — like in Breaking Bad. All this time I thought Cranston was actually bald and he actually sported a real goatee, but nope! They felt real in the show only because of someone’s talent and dedication and hard work.
The same story is repeated in all successful shows. Not that they don’t deserve it, but the makers do get the lion’s share of credit. And just like makeup, people rarely credit sound mixing, background acting, boom operating, wardrobe selection, assistant direction to a show’s success.
We have a deep love for simple cause and effect logic. That’s why we give too much credit to a single entity for any sort of event. WW II happened because of Hitler. Vietnam War happened because of Cold War. I’m stuck in a traffic jam because some idiot took a lot of time to make a turn down the road.1
Root Cause Analysis (or, as we like to call them: RCAs) make a lot of sense in board meetings (where you have to pretend that you know your shit even though you have no clue about anything). But in reality, complex events often involve multifaceted factors and a nuanced interplay of circumstances that are usually hard to comprehend. There’s rarely ONE root cause.
It might be true that without Christopher Nolan or Martin Scorsese or any of the greats at the helm, a movie project may not turn out to be as great as it could have been, but as Quentin Tarantino once put it, a director’s job is to have a vision, and it’s the hard work and and passion and talent of everyone involved in the project that makes the vision a reality. In other words, you can’t do jackshit with just a vision.
I’m not saying that we shouldn’t be praising the actors and the creators of Breaking Bad (or any other show) for its success, and praise someone else instead. No! What I’m saying is that no one entity makes a great show. Just like no one person invented the light bulb.
WELL, ACTUALLY, SOMEONE ELSE INVENTED THE LIGHTBULB. BUT NO!
Important inventions are almost always created NOT by individuals, but by broad collaborations involving lots of people building upon existing knowledge and systems. You always need giants to stand on their shoulders.
In the early 19th century, inventors like Humphry Davy and Warren de la Rue demonstrated that electric current could produce light. They used arcs of electricity to create light, but these methods were not practical for widespread use.
Many other inventors experimented with incandescent lighting. Notable figures include Sir Joseph Swan in the UK and Warren de la Rue, who worked on improving incandescent lamps.
But it was only in 1879 that Thomas Edison and his team successfully demonstrated a practical incandescent light bulb with a carbonised bamboo filament, which lasted for about 13.5 hours. Edison is often credited with the invention of incandescent light bulb, except for the fact that he did not invent it. However, he did find a way to improve the incandescent light bulb for practical use.
When I say Edison did not invent the light bulb, some people may hear, “Well, actually, someone else invented the lightbulb.” But no! The solution to wrongly worshipping individuals is NOT to change the individuals we worship.
The truth is, no one invented the lightbulb. It was invented over many decades of collaboration and competition among many people. And that is almost always what drives human change.2 That’s why the work individuals do matters so much, as do the choices they make under the circumstances they are put into.
To illustrate my point, let me introduce you to a German lady by the name Margarete Steiff. Steiff is often credited as the inventor of the stuffed animal. Sort of.
Margarete was born in 1847 in a small town in southern Germany. Before she was 2 years old, she contracted polio, which paralysed her legs and caused profound weakness in her right arm. Margarete and her two sisters went to school until they were teenagers, which was quite uncommon for their time. Then they enrolled in a sewing school, which was somewhat less uncommon.
Due to her limited use of her right hand, Margarete struggled with sewing. She would later write that her sisters “were so capable and talented, where I seemed to make every mistake that was possible to make. They gave up hoping that I would produce anything worthwhile with my needle.”
Around the same time, a stringed musical instrument called the “zither” was becoming very popular in Europe. This was around the time when Johann Strauss II was writing solos explicitly for the zither.
While Margarete’s muscle weakness made it difficult to play the violin or the piano, she could play the zither by bracing her right hand against the instrument. It didn’t hurt that she had a wonderful ear for music.
Margarete soon became an accomplished zither player, and then starts teaching zither lessons. She uses the money from those lessons to purchase the very first sewing machine that her little town in Germany had ever seen. She refashions the machine so that she could work primarily with her left hand, and suddenly, she was able to sew despite her disability.
Margarete was in her mid-20s when she teamed up with her sisters to start a successful tailoring business. But it’s a little bit of a bummer just to be tailoring pants all day long. Margarete loved fashion, so she starts sewing and selling ready-made clothing, especially underskirts made with felt — a soft textile that had made its way into Europe through central Asia. Her clothing becomes so successful that she eventually opens up a factory and branches out into women’s dresses and children’s coats.
In her early 30s, somewhere in 1879, she comes across a clothing pattern called, “elephant of cloth” in a magazine she subscribed to. She decides to make one using felt. Margarete would later write, “felt was the ideal material for this toy, and the filling would be of the finest lamb’s wool.”
These initial felt elephants were quite small. Margarete mostly made them for friends and family. They were often used as pin cushions. She only sold 8 of them in 1880. But pretty soon, she was making more stuffed animals, often working from patterns she would find in magazines. She made donkeys and dogs and lions and bears, even parrots.
Again though, most of these designs were not “invented” by Margarete. They came from places that published patterns. What Margarete saw was that lots of people lacked the time or the resources or the expertise to make their own stuffed animals, so she did the work for them (and slightly better than they could have done it).
And soon, stuffed animals from Margarete became a popular children’s gift because they were relatively cheap and also because they were sturdy — especially compared to the porcelain dolls that were the most popular plaything at the time.
By 1890, 11 years after she made that first elephant, Margarete Steiff’s company was selling over 5,000 stuffed animals per year. She then expanded internationally, and things really took off just after the turn of the 20th century with the introduction of the world’s first teddy bear. Sort of.
Here’s the story of the teddy bear as it is usually told: In November of 1902, US President Teddy Roosevelt went bear hunting in Mississippi. The hunting party’s dogs chased a bear for hours before Roosevelt gave up and returned to camp for some lunch.
Roosevelt’s hunting guide that day, a man named Holt Collier, continued to track the bear with his dogs as the president ate lunch. Collier had been born enslaved in Mississippi, and after getting his freedom became one of the world’s most accomplished horse riders. (He also killed over three thousand bears in his lifetime.) While Roosevelt was away, Collier’s dogs cornered the bear. Collier blew a bugle to alert the president, but before Roosevelt returned, Collier had to club the bear with a rifle butt because it was mauling one of his dogs.
By the time the president arrived on the scene, the bear was tied to a tree and semiconscious. Roosevelt refused to shoot it, feeling it would be unsportsmanlike. Word of the president’s compassion spread throughout the country, especially after a cartoon in the Washington Post by Clifford Berryman illustrated the event. In the cartoon, the bear is reimagined as an innocent cub with a round face and large eyes looking toward Roosevelt with meek desperation.
Morris and Rose Michtom, Russian immigrants living in Brooklyn, saw that cartoon and were inspired to create a stuffed version of the cartoon cub they called “Teddy’s Bear.” The bear was placed in the window of their candy shop and became an immediate hit.
Curiously enough, Richard Steiff (the nephew of Margarete Steiff who had joined the company recently) manufactured his own version of the teddy bear based off of Berryman’s illustration around the same time. This changed everything for ever. Five years later, the company was selling nearly a million of stuffed animals per year, and employed over 2,000 people.3 However, Margarete didn’t live to see it. She caught pneumonia and died a couple of years later. She was in her 60s.
Like the rest of us, Margarete Steiff was a product of her circumstance. Had her parents lacked the resources to educate their daughters, or had the sewing machine not been invented, or had the zither not become popular, or had she not developed an expertise with felt, or had the magazines not published those animal patterns, or had political cartoonist Clifford Berryman not published the bear cartoon, Margarete would not be remembered as the inventor of the stuffed animal, and we wouldn’t have had the good fortune of having teddy bears. Sort of.4
SOMETIMES YOU NEED AN ENTIRE COUNTRY TO EXIST
The 2023 Hindi movie 12th Fail tells the true story of Manoj Kumar Sharma who overcomes extreme poverty to become an Indian Police Service officer. You might call him a self-made man.
Even though he didn’t get any handouts, he did get immense support from his family, especially his grandmother who gave him all of her savings from her late husband’s pension money; he got inspiration from his upright father; he found motivation to become a police officer from an honest DSP who had stopped cheating during exams in his school that caused Manoj to fail in the exam; he got help from his friend Pandey, from whom he got to learn about the Civil Services Exam, and who sponsored his train ticket to Delhi after all of Manoj’s belongings were stolen; he got moral and emotional support from his girlfriend and future wife Shraddha; he even got help from a former aspirant who showed him it’s impossible to crack the exam if he cannot timebox his answers; and the bulk of his support came from Gauri bhaiya who gave him his own room to study and took over the task of sending money to Manoj’s family every month so that Manoj can focus on his studies and give up doing odd jobs.
We love the idea of a self-made man. I understand the sentiment. It gives us hope. It inspires us that if someone, despite coming from nothing, are able to get something out of their lives, maybe we can too. It gives meaning to our daily struggles. But, nobody really is a self-made man or a self-made woman.
None of us have ever done anything on our own when you really think about it. We are products of our circumstances and we all get help from others in some shape and form. Others have paved or pointed the way for us in some form or other, whether we’re aware of it or not.
I think Arnold Schwarzenegger put it the best in his book Be Useful. “I believed that I was an example of the American Dream coming true. I believed (and still believe) that anyone can do what I did. But I felt, if anything, that this made me the opposite of a self-made man. Let’s just analyse this for a second. If I am an example of what is possible in America, how could it be possible for me to be self-made, since I needed America for any of the successes I experienced to be possible. I was indebted to the existence of an entire country before I picked up my first barbell!”
We are all here thanks to the contributions of others. Even in the worst case scenario where we hardly had any positive influence in our life; even if most of the people we’ve ever run into have been only an obstacle or an enemy or they did nothing but hurt us — they have all still taught us something. We are here today, right now, in whatever shape and form, because of the people and circumstances in our life — for better and for worse.
Stuffed animals would probably have still been invented around the same time even if Margarete Steiff didn’t exist, just as lightbulbs would still exist even if Edison and Tesla never had. The same goes for the internet, the telephone, Facebook, Google, OpenAI, etc.
At the end of the day, we’re just vessels through which history flows. Next time you appreciate a movie or a series, don’t forget to think of the makeup artist, the sound designer, the person who moves the camera over the dolly, even the busboy. If we can be sure of one thing, it’s that the work individuals matters more than we give them credit for.
If you want to learn what really causes traffic jams, and how it’s somewhat similar to what causes office politics, this is a good read.
Alexander Graham Bell is often credited with inventing the telephone, but there were multiple inventors working on similar ideas simultaneously. Elisha Gray, for example, filed a patent for a similar device on the very same day as Bell. Charles Darwin is widely recognised for the theory of evolution, but Alfred Russel Wallace independently developed a similar theory.
That same year, in 1907, back in Brooklyn, the Michtoms used their teddy bear sales to found the company Ideal Toys, which went on to manufacture a huge array of popular twentieth-century playthings, from the game Mouse Trap to the Rubik’s Cube. There was no rivalry and both companies ended up becoming successful.
The part of the teddy bear origin story that often doesn’t get told is that right after Roosevelt sportingly refused to kill the bear, he ordered a member of his hunting party to slit its throat, so as to put the bear out of its misery. No bears were saved that day.