“The secret to a creatively fulfilling career lies in understanding the operations of Helsinki’s main bus station,” said Finnish-American photographer Arno Minkkinen, back in 2004.
Helsinki Bus Station Theory had been circulating among photographers for years before Oliver Burkeman brought it to a wider audience through an article in The Guardian.
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, and from each platform, several different bus lines depart.
But 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 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.
Your work looks very much like Penn’s.
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.
A few 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 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 see the difference in your work from the work you so admire, it’s time to look for your breakthrough.
Suddenly, your work will 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:
- It vividly illustrates a critical insight into persistence.
- It points out the perils of a world that obsesses with originality.
“More often than not, originality lies on the far side of unoriginality.” — Austin Kleon.
Helsinki’s 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.”