4:MINUTE.MEDIA
I chased four minutes. Then everybody caught it.
I named the company after a number I spent years working toward: the four-minute mile. It was rare back then. It isn't now. Common is a fine thing to be — it just isn't what I'm about.
THE NAME
WHY IT WAS RIGHT, AND WHY IT CHANGED
I got close.
Just not close enough.
The standard didn't get lowered. Everybody else got faster. That is the part worth paying attention to.
I ran on a track scholarship at the University of Kansas. Four minutes was what we all wanted — the line between good and rare. I chased it for years and got very close but never broke it, and for a long time that was fine, because almost nobody did.
Recently the times started falling like rocks. Carbon plates and foam changed what a shoe does. Threshold training changed what a week looks like. Bicarb changed what the last lap costs. High school boys run under four now, several a year. It has lost its luster.
None of that is cheating and none of it is sad. It is what progress looks like. But the number I named a company after stopped meaning what it meant, and I noticed.
The same thing happened to the work. An iconic image used to be rare. Now everyone has the tools and the feed is full of them. Moving a room is no longer the hard part. Knowing what to do with the room after it's moved — that's still rare.
I don't want to run a common time or a common company. I want to be uncommon. That means moving with what changed instead of defending a number that already moved. I have changed seats.
WHAT IT BUILT
I DID EVERYTHING I SET OUT TO DO IN THAT SEAT
Uncommon isn't a claim. It's a body of work.
Refugee camps, disaster zones, mountain villages, donor rooms, boardrooms, arenas. Every frame here was made by walking toward something most people were walking away from.
99 countries
Most of them on somebody else's worst day
$200-400 million
Estimated commitments at major-donor events whose films I worked on
300 million
Viewers of a single film during the 2010 World Cup
TIME
Among the "Person of the Year" Ebola Fighters, Liberia, 2014
A DIFFERENT SEAT
SAME BUS
The question was never whether you're on the bus.
While I was making EDDIE, an idea about seats on a bus stuck with me. Not whether you have one. Whether you're in the right one. I spent twenty-four years in a seat I chose in my twenties, and I did everything in it I hoped to do and more.
That's not a complaint and it's not an ending. It's a chapter I've turned the page on. I even wrote a book about it. The seat I sit most in now is next to the person deciding what happens next: a CEO, a board, a founder aching for growth. I still carry a camera. I'm just no longer hired only to point it.
Changing seats cost me nothing. The craft came with me. So did the crew.
THE CRAFT
The easy misread is that I'm walking away from story. The opposite happened — it went from being the product to being the thing the whole practice stands on. An ask nobody can picture doesn't get a yes. Trust gets built out of true things told well, long before anybody is asked for anything. And what happens after a room is moved is a story too — the one an organization tells itself about what it's now capable of. Somebody has to keep telling it.
THE CREW
4:Minute.Media has always run lean on purpose — one name on the payroll, and a team assembled for the work. Directors of photography, editors, colorists, sound, and fixers in places where the right fixer is the difference between a story and an incident. Most have worked with me a decade or more. I can put a team on the ground almost anywhere in the world inside a week. None of that is going away. It's available, it's current, and it's one phone call.
THE LATEST
THE FILM I'VE BEEN QUOTING
FEATURED FILM
EDDIE
An ordinary man built a sports network and ended up changing how a lot of people think about leadership. He agreed to the film on one condition: that we show the decisions he got wrong. Keeping the spotlight off him and on the lesson was the job.
