On Track Themes

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“Courage is the power to let go of the familiar.” — Raymond Lindquist The business of producing themed attractions and visitor centers is, in part, the business of adopting the passions of our clients. We learn to protect their treasured brands and to care deeply for their underlying messages. Today, we are passionate about fair trade coffee; tomorrow, it’s a cartoon character in our charge. This seeming schizophrenia isn’t without its costs. C.S. Lewis said “All mortals tend to turn into the things they are pretending to be.” By acting like we care about our client’s intellectual property, we end up actually taking on the client’s core values. We think of the resulting entertainment that is developed as “ours” and the visitors as “our guests.” A colleague recently remarked to me how satisfying it is to be part of the concept team and then to see it all come to life. I agree – there is nothing like it. But the day after we hand the attraction to our client and pack our bag of tricks, a sad truth always emerges: it is no longer our attraction. We come to the realization that it has never been truly “ours.” Because of this, we feel the sting of the inevitable letdown that arrives once we end the work. I have observed several coping strategies for dealing with this transition. Some simply refuse to attach in the first place. This of course makes them less effective at performing their work, and clients can read this disconnection as lacking passion. Some won’t detach, annoying the client who is trying to make it their own by trying to operate the attraction. Between these extremes are an array of behaviors that can be detrimental to our well-being, our clients, and our work. We at On Track have found that we cannot effectively serve our clients unless we are passionately engaged. When the project ends, we can neither deny our involvement nor possessively hold onto the project. We have learned to let go and hand the project over to the client. In fact, for us it’s important to have a formal handover – a rite of passage if you will – typically in the form of a written document and/or a meeting where we officially let go and turn the project over to the operator’s hands. It seems simplistic to say “just let go,” but each of us knows that we face this “letting go” in our lives all the time. For those of us who are parents, we have to let go of our children and let them find their own way. When learning to ride a bike, we have to let go of training wheels at some point and risk falling, or we never learn. At all of the critical milestones in life is a process of putting down one thing and picking up another – a time of transition. It is important that we take that into the process of our creative and production efforts and internalize the notion that letting go is part of the larger pattern of our lives. We must start each endeavor knowing that we will care deeply and that we must inevitably hand it forward to the next person. Preserving this attitude throughout the process is fundamental for providing quality service to our clients.

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