The Dancing Chicken Counts

What a grocery store commercial, Ansel Adams’ lost photos, and Phil Stutz’s String of Pearls taught me about the real work of being an artist.

A few years ago, I was in a grocery store in Charlotte, North Carolina, directing a regional commercial for a supermarket chain.

The star of the spot? Not an actor. Not an athlete. Not a celebrity.

A chicken.

A dancing chicken.

There I was, standing in aisle seven, trying to get coverage on a man in a foam chicken suit hitting his choreography. It was absurd. And yet, it was the job. The kind of gig that pays the bills but doesn’t exactly make the reel.

After that shoot, I remember heading back to the Holiday Inn Express and thinking: so this is it…this is the work!? Not the glamorous version people imagine when they hear “director,” but the real thing. The day-to-day.

And listen, I was grateful for the gig. I was grateful for the check. But this wasn’t exactly auteur material, if you know what I mean. Some days you feel like you’re shaping something close to your voice. Other days you’re in aisle seven trying to coax pathos out of a man in a foam chicken suit.

That’s when the questions creep in. What am I doing here? Does this count?

It turns out even the greats wrestled with that same tension.

In 1961, Ansel Adams was hired by Stanford University to take photos for a fundraising campaign. Two months of shooting arches, hallways, tiled corridors, and students moving across the quad. He was paid $3,000 for the assignment. Then the campaign ended, the negatives were boxed up, and for decades the images sat forgotten in a Bay Area garage.

And yet when they were finally rediscovered, you could still see Adams in every frame. The light. The discipline. The eye that had been honed by years of showing up, whether the work was destined for a gallery wall or a fundraising brochure.

That’s when Phil Stutz’s image of the String of Pearls came to mind (if you’ve been following along, the man changed my life). The idea is simple: every piece of work you do is a pearl. Some shine brighter than others. Some look rough. Some smell like poo poo caca. But the value isn’t in any single pearl. It’s in being the kind of person who keeps adding the next one to the string.

Your identity isn’t found in any one project. It’s found in being the person who keeps adding the next pearl.

That’s the invitation of a creative life. Not to obsess over whether today’s work will be remembered or discovered decades from now, but to commit to putting another pearl on the string. To practice constant work.

Stutz puts it this way:

“When I work with someone in the arts, the product or value of their art is totally irrelevant. All that matters is that they feel in themselves that they’re going to have to work for every second of the rest of their life. The only thing worth achieving is an inner state built on process. If they get this, it’s the highest gift.”

That’s what Ansel Adams was doing on Stanford’s campus in 1961. That’s what I was doing with a chicken in aisle seven. That’s what you’re doing when you sit down to write, design, rehearse, or create something that might never see the light of day.

Because the truth is, there’s no final step. No one pearl that makes the whole string. Just the discipline of showing up and adding another. And another. And another.

The dancing chicken counts.

The forgotten Stanford photos count.

The work you did today that nobody will see — it counts.

Because the point isn’t whether it’s remembered. The point is the string.