From Radiohead's sound engineer, Pete Clements, Giulia Wilkins Ary, the interpreter who works at the United Nations, from the ghostwriter like David Yoo, who allows actors, sportsmen and politicians to tell their stories, to the creator of perfumes for major brands, David Apel , to Dannis Poon, the engineer who oversees the structural calculations of the tallest skyscrapers in the world (the Petronas Tower in Kuala Lumpur which was the tallest until 2004, then the record passed to Taipei with 101 floors, in Taiwan) . Who are they and what do they have in common? David branch, American writer and musician, met them, interviewed and told in “Invisible. Behind the scenes of success” (Egea 2014; 264 pages; 25 euro; 14,99 e-pub). They are people who, given the choice and having done so, have, by their nature, opted for jobs in which both they and the results of their efforts remain invisible, at least until the moment they make a mistake.
“I started studying the invisible,” he says Zweig, “because I was fascinated by people who choose to do a job that requires extensive training and preparation, but who willingly accept to receive little attention and little merit from the outside world in exchange for their efforts. What fascinates me is that they know how to draw an enviable sense of fulfillment from their work, despite an almost antithetical approach to the one prevalent in our culture". The real attraction lies in their stories and the profiles on which the book is based are people who are among the most qualified elite in their respective fields.
"I had the opportunity to access their world, a rare, sometimes even unique concession", says the author, "in a period of my life when I too worked as a fact-checker for a magazine, doing a meticulous job that it lasted for hours, but no one seemed to notice me, until I made a mistake. But the better I was, the more I disappeared from sight".
Despite their anonymity, the book reads, they are nonetheless people who are very successful and are highly appreciated, deeply respected by their colleagues for their skills and the results they achieve. Unlike the at-risk-of-poverty workers in Western countries or the anonymous workers toiling in factories in developing countries, the invisible have chosen a career that offers them no outside recognition.
But, again, what do these invisibles have in common? Three precise characteristics: indifference to recognition, meticulousness and a taste for responsibility. “But the most important one” says Zweig, “is curiosity, or rather the still palpable desire to continue learning, even though we are already tops in their field. They work harder, they delve as much as possible."
But Zweig also launches a very current cry of alarm: "Attention", he says, "our society by dint of thinking that only those who emerge count is losing awareness of the fact that our intelligence of the world is based on a complex set of knowledge , knowledge, skills where each part feeds on the other”. In fact, the book is not a nostalgic contribution to the beauty of the work of great craftsmen, but a precise call to give back the right value to things that matter.
