“If a man knows not which port he sails, no wind is favorable.
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While studying in Copenhagen during her junior term at Yale, Maya Lin lived near an area where a large cemetery, Assistens Kirkegård, was also used as a public park. Walking to and from class, she observed how death and remembrance were integrated into the daily life of the Danes, not hidden off to the side like the cemeteries she knew from her hometown in Ohio.
When she returned to Yale, she approached her architecture professor with an idea for a senior seminar to study how mortality is expressed in the structures we build for the dead. As the undergraduates immersed themselves in the study of memorial architecture, someone came across a flyer for a competition to enter the design contest for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Lin and her peers decided that was the perfect opportunity for their final project.
The Memorial
In the fall of 1980, Lin started working on her idea. She and her classmates visited Washington, D.C., during Thanksgiving break to look at the site. Standing on the lawn at Constitution Gardens, she started to visualize how the memorial would look within the landscape. She imagined cutting into the earth and polishing the names of the fallen and missing soldiers on its dark surface. And she contemplated the feelings she was trying to evoke in her work: to focus on the fallen and create a beautiful space within the landscape for the living and the dead to meet in as personal and evocative a way as possible. It was all about subtlety, not spectacle.
As she worked through the details, she would use two polished black granite walls that stretched out and descended gradually toward an apex, 10 feet below grade, where they converged at a V, acting as bookends to the war. From above, the walls would look like the earth had opened up. Visitors would descend into the memorial, passing the names of over 57,000 dead or missing veterans before returning to ground level. The names would be listed chronologically in order to capture the timeline of the war, allowing veterans and their families to revisit the time they served and find everyone they knew within a few panels, forging a deeper connection to their experience of the war.
Lin sent through her final submission in the spring of 1981, a soft pastel sketch with an essay explaining her concept in detail and how the experience would feel. There were over 1,400 submissions, including one from her professor and many other from professional architects. On the last day of class, Lin received a call from the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, requesting to visit New Haven to ask her a few questions. Three officers arrived to meet Lin in her dorm room and delivered the news—she had won.
Standing her ground
After graduation, Lin moved to D.C. to oversee construction. By this point, word was out, and outrage was spreading over her and her design. How could a 21-year-old Asian-American woman who had just graduated from college without any experience of the war herself possibly design a proper memorial for the Vietnam veterans?
During meetings and press conferences, she faced a backlash for her Asian heritage and designing a memorial for a war fought in Southeast Asia. She received hate mail, personal insults, and racial slurs. People called her design “a black scare of shame,” an “open urinal,” and “something for New York intellectuals.” Critics wanted to make the memorial a white stone, move it above ground, and plant a flagpole or towering statue at its apex, rendering the walls as nothing more than a backdrop.
Lin faced these confrontations with admirable courage. She stood her ground and fought for the design she believed in. She had thought through the design decisions of the memorial in detail and how each contributed to the overall experience she was working to create.
In the end, Lin’s vision for the memorial was preserved, except for a bronze sculpture featuring three soldiers and an American flag added near the entrance. This addition was made without her input, and she didn’t learn about the compromise until she saw it on the news. Frederick Hart, the sculptor of the bronze monument, was paid more than $300,000 for his work, compared to Lin’s $20,000 prize money. At the dedication ceremony, Maya Lin’s name wasn’t mentioned once.
But time would be on her side. She had fought for a design she believed in, visualized what she was working to bring to life, and realized that vision. Within a year, people were clamoring for interviews with her. They finally understood her vision for the memorial because they could experience it themselves.
The Vietnam Veterans Memorial became a sacred place. Today it’s one of the most famous monuments in the world, with over five million visitors each year.
So, what are you working toward?
Visualization is the practice of considering how you want to show up in the world. Creating meaningful work isn’t going to happen by accident. It requires thoughtfulness and channeling what you believe to be true about the world into your work. But in order to do that, you must understand what you’re working toward. You have to visualize the future state and hold onto the integrity of your ideas along the way.
The reason you must understand what you’re aiming toward is because directions in life are mutually exclusive. Certain decisions and paths preclude others. Tim Urban, author and writer behind the popular blog Wait But Why, visualizes this concept in a graphic that shows all the life paths closed to you versus those that remain open. You have made decisions in your life and work that have led you to this point. You can’t go back in time and change those.
But there are still dozens of decision points—tributaries—ahead of you that you can use to guide yourself toward realizing the best version of yourself and your work. But you must bring your vision to the forefront and understand what you’re working toward to optimize your decision-making in this moment.
The challenge is that many of us have become decision averse. We don’t want to cross any options off the table. But eliminating options isn’t restrictive: it’s empowering. This frees us to focus and bring our best ideas to life. Decisions are how we come to define our lives and our work. And deliberate, thoughtful decisions are the most powerful currency available to help you realize your vision.
Early in my career, I wanted to be everything and, as a result, was unable to commit to anything. I wanted to be an author, entrepreneur, director, photographer, musician, and that’s just a fraction of the list. I convinced myself that I could balance dozens of unrelated goals. But progress proved impossible because I was unwilling to prioritize and had no idea what I was aiming toward.
In his book, Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman explains, “Since every real-world choice about how to live entails the loss of countless alternative ways of living, there’s no reason to procrastinate, or to resist making commitments, in the anxious hope that you might somehow be able to avoid those losses. Loss is a given. That ship has sailed—and what a relief.”
Visualization forces us to realize that we can’t be everything. We have to understand, at our core, what we can’t live without. Then we must sacrifice and optimize decisions for what matters most.
Realizing your vision
Maya Lin faced many of these decisions in her architecture. What type of experience was she trying to create? What was she trying to say about death? How would the memorial pay its heartfelt respect to the fallen soldiers, veterans, and their families? How would she make it feel like a private, personal experience? What tradeoffs would she make with how visitors moved through the memorial? All of these decision points required a holistic understanding of the vision she was working toward to ensure all elements of the memorial worked together.
Visualization works in both the immediate and long-term. It’s helpful to visualize both your next move and your ultimate goal. What does it look like if you project ten years into the future on your current path? Is that the life you envision for yourself? What feels right? What needs to be different? The same exercise can be applied to your current work on a shorter timeframe. Do you understand and know what you’re working toward? Have you built conviction around that direction? Once you know this, you can track the optimal path and fine-tune your near-term tactics to give you the best chance at making progress against your longer-term vision.
Remember: you are the architect of your own life and work. But you must understand the shape of what you’re building to create anything worthwhile. When you know what you’re working toward, you empower yourself to make tough decisions and navigate challenging tradeoffs in favor of your ultimate goal. But it will always require some sort of sacrifice. It’s your job to determine where you’re willing to make those sacrifices and which elements of your work take precedence, demanding an unyielding approach.
Sources:
[1] Branch, Mark Alden. "Maya Lin: after the wall." Progressive Architecture, vol. 75, no. 8, Aug. 1994, pp. 60+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A15739154/GPS?u=denver&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=2d91b918.
[2] Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
[3] Clinton, Chelsea, and Grace Lin. She Persisted: Maya Lin. Philomel Books, 2022.
[4] Lin, Maya. Boundaries. Simon & Schuster; Reprint edition, 2006.
[5] Menand, Louis. "The Reluctant Memorialist.” The New Yorker, vol. 78, no. 18, 8 July 2002. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A88605695/GPS?u=denver&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=969bd096.
[6] Mock, Freida Lee, director. Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision. Ocean Releasing, 1994.
[7] "Thinking With Her Hands." Whole Earth, winter 2000, p. 72. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A68617397/GPS?u=denver&sid=bookmark-GPS&xid=0aa391a1.
[8] Urban, Tim, @waitbutwhy. “We think a lot about those black lines, forgetting that it’s all still in our hands.” 5 March 2021, 10:14 AM, https://twitter.com/waitbutwhy/status/1367871165319049221?lang=en.