Louise Marlborough
You need a host of skills in any museum career. But in a sector awash with passionate and talented people, it is persistence and perseverance that enable us to survive and thrive.
Even though I have 12 years of experience under my belt, working in such a competitive and notoriously poorly paid field means I still need to cultivate grit – the art of simply sticking with it.
In the book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, the author Angela Duckworth makes the point that talent or natural ability are given higher status, but points out they will only get you so far. Society places much more emphasis on talent, with effort just a poor cousin.
Duckworth goes on to show how effort is actually more important and the main agent of change in our lives. And then there is planning. She describes high-end goals and objectives: they are top-level targets that inform the next level of your aims and then the next, and so on, until nearly every action and step is guiding you slowly and purposefully towards that one high-end objective.
So if you fancy holding the sought-after position of director of Tate in 10 years’ time, then everything you do between now and then, however small, should be leading you towards that goal and informing your decisions, every day.
Louise Marlborough is the art-handling coordinator at the National Gallery, London
