My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important.
A theory of change is the opposite of a theory of action — it works backwards from the goal, in concrete steps, to figure out what you can do to achieve it. To develop a theory of change, you need to start at the end and repeatedly ask yourself, “Concretely, how does one achieve that?”
Along with being a meeting place, the stoop is a space of spectatorship. A street lined with stoops is a kind of lateral stadium, ideal for viewing the passing parade, whether formal ones like the giant Gay Pride and Halloween Parades (until their route was changed a few years ago) or the more informal quotidian version. Hanging out on the stoop allows the sitter to observe the dance (Jane Jacobs’s ballet) of daily activity, to notice what is out of the ordinary, to provide the kind of public presence that prompts neighborly behavior.