The Joy and Catastrophe of Taylor Sheridan

via Cal Newport.

I read a book a couple of years ago, Deep Work, by Cal Newport, a brainiac science guy in his day job, but a productivity nerd as a hobby. I loved it. Highlighted heaps of pages which I return to regularly to hone my productivity chops.

He has a newsletter that drops once a week, and this week’s hit all my dopamine centres. Primarily, the reference to Taylor Sheridan in the title, and the screaming subtext that something had gone horribly wrong for the creator of Yellowstone and a whole bunch of my other guilty TV pleasures.

It wasn’t quite that, but it was still fascinating.

Newport retold the story of Sheridan’s ten-year overnight rise to fame and fortune, throwing in this detail.

In an early season of Yellowstone, Sheridan had filmed some episodes on the historic 6666 (Four Sixes) ranch, a mammoth collection of property sprawling over 350,000 acres in the Texas panhandle. The fourth generation owner of the family property, who Sheridan had befriended during the filming, died soon after. The executors of her estate called Sheridan and asked if he wanted to buy the ranch.

Here’s how he recalls the conversation in a recent Hollywood Reporter profile:

“I said, ‘How much?’

They said, ‘It’s $350 million.’

And I’m like, ‘I’m about 330 short. But please, you thought enough to call me, will you give me two weeks?’”

In search of the money, Sheridan abandoned his plan to pull back from show-running, and instead signed a $200 million overall deal with Paramount that would require him to create, write, and oversee at least nine more series for the network, many of them to be developed and aired simultaneously. (It’s estimated that, at the moment, Paramount is spending $500 million dollars annually on Sheridan-helmed projects).

Newport, with Sheridan’s help, then goes on to explain what a crushing fucking workload that dropped on the writer/actor/director.

To keep up with his writing demands, Sheridan eventually built an “isolation bunker” on one of his properties where he could retreat to write for eight to ten hours straight. “This volume of work is not sustainable for a long period of time,” he admitted in a 2022 Variety interview. “I don’t necessarily want to be doing this when I’m 70. I don’t know that I want to be doing it when I’m 60. So I’d rather work real hard to do it now.”

I do love a good writing bunker origin story, but that wasn’t what struck me in this particular newsletter. A few pars on Newport says that he thinks Sheridan knows exactly what he’s doing. He’ll work like a beast until his contract is met and he can retire to his ranch.

What’s interesting is how many of us fuck up that deal.

Cal Newport:

But so many other people enter less dramatic versions of this bargain with no clear exit strategy. They look up in their fifties, exhausted by a grinding but impressive job, captured by a cost of living that requires them to keep going, with no clear idea of what might be better.

The vague imperative to work really hard now for something better later is hard to shake because it’s simultaneously true and corrupting. I don’t, at the moment, have a clear answer to the question of how best to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of ambition and exhaustion. And for most people, of course, getting to a point where this question is even relevant would itself be a victory...

It’s perhaps never too early to begin thinking seriously about both the joy and catastrophe of getting what you want.

Yep.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently. I’ve got writing plans out the wazoo. Ten years plus worth of projects. Partly because I got bills to pay. Partly because I like knowing what’s coming.

I suspect the trick is in how you frame it to yourself. Not, ‘Oh god, I have to keep doing this for the rest of my life’, and more like, “Fuck yeah, I get to keep doing this for the rest of my life.”