EDITOR’S LETTER

Editor-in-Chief Farrah Storr on why finding true purpose is the real key to success

Every month, just a few days shy of sending the pages of this magazine to print, I stand in front of a white board, onto which is pinned every page of the issue. It is usually to check on small logistical things – do the headlines repeat, is the layout of the page too similar to the one that came before it, do we have the right picture to stop readers in their tracks – but in doing so, I also start to see almost imperceptible themes running through the pages. This month, that theme is drive.

Drive has always fascinated me. One part grit, two parts graft and three parts passion, drive is the invisible motor that pushes us all forward. The importance of being ‘driven’ was one of the first lessons I was ever taught. From an early age, my father pressed the importance of drive into me. So too did teachers, and characters in books and films who all seemed to find their way in life through sheer determination alone. Go out into the world with a tanker full of pluck and you’ll be OK, was the general gist of it. At least that’s what I thought. And so, for many years, that was what I did: kept my head down, kept my motor burning and aimed forward.

But what ignites that motor is different for everyone. In this month’s issue, Kate Spicer writes about how another woman’s achievements fuelled her desire to succeed (page 39), while a new school of artists making their names via Instagram gather their drive from fighting the old guard ‘system’ of the art world (page 122). As for Audrey Gelman and Lauren Kassan, the mavericks behind women’s club The Wing, they are driven by the crusading desire to empower all of womankind (page 11O). But is drive alone enough to succeed? If you have a tank full of petrol but no discernible path down which to take it, then all that passionate grinding away becomes lost.

I only realised this when I hit my mid-twenties. Exhausted, with no clear sense of an ending in sight (I had no plans to be an editor at that point), I felt frustrated and adrift. And so, in the dramatic fashion that only youth can pull off, I booked a one-way ticket to Australia, where I stayed for almost four years. I had failed to discern the crucial lesson that drive is nothing without purpose. It needs a direction of travel. If ambition is the gap between where we are and where we want to be, drive is the thing that closes it. But one thing I’ve learned over the past 4O years is that both are ultimately futile if they do not have a clear end point in sight.

So welcome to the October issue of ELLE, for those who understand that a dream is nothing without the drive to get you there, and that the drive to get you there needs to be clearly signposted along the way.

“DRIVE IS nothing WITHOUT PURPOSE. IT NEEDS A DIRECTION of TRAVEL”