| The Wisdom of John Barth and How Happiness Will Save the Planet, Part 2 |
| Friday, 13 January 2012 | Steven Kotler | Commentary |
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There are actually two lessons tucked into this one and the second is a lot less obvious than the first. The first lesson is passion. And the best passion story I know actually has nothing to do with Barth, but with a wonderful sculptor named Cork Marcheschi. I once sat through a lecture Cork gave to a room full of incoming art students. There were about 30 people in the room and the first thing he said to them is, “Statistically, half of one of you will succeed.” What he meant was that most people who earn degrees in anything vaguely creative don’t end up doing anything vaguely creative for a career. Success rates, five years out, are miniscule. Then Cork said something interesting—he said the one person in this room who ends up an artist five years from now is going to be the person who can’t do anything else when they wake up in the morning. And I remember sitting in that room (I was around 20 at the time) and thinking—shit, I know how to bartend, that kills my chances. It took me another decade to realize what he meant was that when you wake up in the morning you literally can’t do anything else, as in there is serious physical discomfort produced by avoiding passion. I realized this about the time I was tending bar until 4:00 a.m. and waking up around 6:00 a.m. to work as a writer. And every day that I awoke and wrote made my ability to not do so the next day that much harder. After about a year of this discipline, I could do little else. I’ve walked away from well-paying jobs to keep writing in the morning, and walked away from relationships to keep writing in the morning. But after I gave into my passion—after I was willing to give everything to it—it started giving back to me. And it has never stopped. This enthusiasm, as Barth pointed out, helped me ignore a lot of opinions (see part 1 of this story) along the way. That said, despite its great usefulness, this wasn’t Barth’s main point. His point was that there are a million writers in the world and the only way to have a career is to be none of them. If you listen to other people’s opinions too much, you’re going to get good at doing things that they wish they did better—not the things you need to get better at doing. What he was telling me was to drive my own bus for the simple reason that it was the only one going to the destination I needed to go. He summed that up nicely by saying: “Get obsessed, stay obsessed.” Barth’s third lesson is to pack a full quiver. Barth and I were both obsessed with Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. We were talking about that book, specifically one story tucked into it—a rocket scientist forced to build bombs for the Nazis because the SS were holding his daughter hostage. The thing about this particular story is that, while GR is an unusually difficult book, written with all kinds of literary bravado, the story of this rocket scientist is told in very plain English. Sure, all around it is a lot of fancy footwork, but this little heartbreaker has none of that. Pynchon wrote this portion of his book in a very different style than most of the rest of it because that was the only way to make such an emotionally charged story work. Which was what Barth meant by, “You can never have too many arrows in your quiver.” I took this to mean that whatever the thing that you’re doing, learn how to do it from all angles. For a writer, he said, that meant learning to write both everything and every way. In this regard, a different story comes to mind. My dream job, the one I had and lost, was a staff writing position. I got that position for a number of reasons, but primarily because the editor-in-chief liked my voice. In fact, when I tried to write stories in a different style, he used to say, “Fine, very good, thanks a lot, now go back and redo it and do that Steven Kotler thing.” This guy was a big deal in the publishing world so that kind of praise was wonderful for my ego—but here’s the funny part. I lost that job and it was a little while before I could get another one. The first gig I got was a much-needed break. A different magazine had assigned me a long feature as a tryout of sorts. I worked my ass off, producing the very best “Steven Kotler thing” I could, turned it in and awaited my applause. My new editor called me up a day later and said, “The story’s great, there’s only one problem—I don’t understand one mother-f***ing word of it. Start over.” Nor was he kidding. I didn’t know it then, but this was perhaps the luckiest moment of my entire writing career (thanks Adam, much appreciated). Because of the desperate nature of my circumstances, I had no choice but to start over, to learn how to translate my old voice into his new voice. I didn’t want to try and imitate that new one (see lesson two), I needed to learn how to write that way instinctively so I could then choose when not to write that way. Malcolm Gladwell makes a great argument in Outliers that success starts with about 10,000 hours of practice—how long it takes to master a craft. But what he leaves unsaid is that what really counts is what happens after the first 10,000 hours. It took me 10,000 hours to become the guy who lost that job. I needed to put in another 10,000 to learn how to keep a second one. And everything that has been my life since came from that new voice. Barth’s point was: if you surround your craft instead of cornering it, in the long run, your craft will only get better. This was how he stayed obsessed—he never got complacent. He never got ungrateful. He traded arrogance for curiosity and never looked back. Barth’s fourth lesson is why the other three are actually important. At the end of our meeting, I stopped to look at the two nominations he got for the National Book Award. “So that’s what one of those looks like,” I said. “You know,” he replied, “they look pretty fancy, but they belong to a guy who loves writing, reading, teaching, his family, playing the saxophone and sailing boats. That’s why I got them, not the other way round.” What he meant, I think, is that mostly he only did what he wanted to do—what he was passionate about—and always worked at perfecting his passions (and never worried that they were not yet perfected). His life had become his craft and visa-versa. Success—aka happiness in his story—is a ladder climbed indirectly. That, Barth felt, is the only way up. Is this the best advice ever? Who knows. All I know is that I followed it and am damn happy because of it. I guess, in the end, Viktor Frankl had it right: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued. It must ensue… as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.” Help the Earth, Spread the Word: Share this article with family and friends by clicking on the "Email This" or "Share This" links below right. Then see TODAY'S TOP STORIES.
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John Barth’s second lesson is that enthusiasm matters more than opinion.
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