The Art Of Not Taking An Interest
In a collection of essays and aphorisms on a wide range of subjects—philosophy, psychology, politics, law, religion, reading, writing, and more—Arthur Schopenhauer writes, “The art of not reading is a very important one. It consists in not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. When some political or ecclesiastical pamphlet, or novel, or poem is making a great commotion, you should remember that he who writes for fools always finds a large public. A precondition for reading good books is not reading bad ones: for life is short.”
The art of not taking an interest in what the majority of people are taking an interest in—and vice versa: taking an interest in what the majority of people are not taking an interest in—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Mother Of All Questions
Throughout her career, the writer Rebecca Solnit has frequently been “interrogated” and “hounded”—on book tours, in interviews, and casual conversations—about why she hasn’t had children. At some point, she began to wonder why questions about her not taking an interest in what the majority of people expect her to take an interest in so predictably get asked. “Maybe part of the problem is that we have learned to ask the wrong things of ourselves,” Solnit writes in The Mother Of All Questions. “Our culture is steeped in a kind of pop psychology whose obsessive question is: Are you happy? … Questions about happiness generally assume that we know what a happy life looks like. Happiness is understood to be a matter of having a great many ducks lined up in a row — spouse, offspring, private property, erotic experiences — even though a millisecond of reflection will bring to mind countless people who have all those things and are still miserable.” Maybe the mother of all questions, Solnit continues, should be: Are you getting what you want out of life? Though she hasn’t always taken an interest in what the majority of people take an interest in, “I have done what I set out to do in my life.”
Get Away From The Daily Confusion
While working for a quantitative hedge fund, in 1994, Jeff Bezos began taking an interest in starting a company selling books on the internet. On a two-hour walk around Central Park, Bezos told his boss he was thinking about leaving his job. “I’m going to do this crazy thing,” Bezos told him. “I’m going to start this company selling books online.” At the end of the walk, Bezos’ boss said, “This actually sounds like a good idea to me. But it sounds like it would be a better idea for somebody who didn’t already have a good job.” He encouraged Bezos to think it over for another 48 hours before making a final decision. During that 48 hours, Bezos said, “I was trying to find the right framework in which to make that kind of big decision…And the framework I found—which made the decision incredibly easy—was what I called a ‘Regret Minimization Framework.’” Essentially, “I projected myself forward to age 80, and said, ‘Okay, now I’m looking back on my life, and I want to minimize the number of regrets I have.’ And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this. I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal. I knew that if I failed, I wouldn’t regret that. But I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried. And I knew that that would haunt me every day. So when I thought about it that way, it was an incredibly easy decision.” When thinking about pursuing an interest the majority of people might not pursue, there can be a lot of uncertainty and confusion. “And I think that’s a very good framework,” Bezos said, “because it gets you away from some of the daily pieces of confusion. You know, I left this Wall Street firm in the middle of the year—when you do that, you walk away from your annual bonus, and that’s the kind of thing that in the short term can confuse you. But if you think about the long term, then you can really make good life decisions.” (Related: Bezos on the energy it takes to maintain your distinctiveness.)
Don’t Walk Away From The Feeling
Michael Lewis was an art history major at Princeton. During his senior year, while working on a 166-page thesis paper on how the Italian sculptor Donatello took inspiration from the ancient Greeks and Romans, he discovered he loved the process of researching and writing. He said, “I remember thinking, ‘I now know what I’d like to do for a living: write books.’” But when he graduated in 1982, “because I hadn’t the first clue what I should write about,” he did what the majority of his peers were doing and took a job at an investment bank in New York City. When Lewis got there, Wall Street was booming with chaos, excess, and “recent Princeton graduates who knew nothing about money making small fortunes,” as Lewis put it. After a year and half of carefully observing the madness, Lewis decided he was going to quit his job and write his first book about it. When he told coworkers he was thinking about leaving the firm to be a writer, they laughed at him, genuinely thinking he was kidding. His boss—worried about the sanity of a person walking away from hundreds of thousands of dollars—advised Lewis to see a psychiatrist. And when he told his father, his father’s advice was to wait: “Stay for 10 years,” he said. “Make your fortune, and then write your books.” As he considered his father’s advice, Lewis first thought back to the feeling he felt when working on his thesis, “and I wanted to feel that interest in something again.” He then looked around at the people 10 years older than him, “and they seemed completely stuck. Their lives had completely adapted and depended on the money, the position, the status. Had I stayed 10 years, I knew I’d get trapped too. I’d lose the desire to do the other thing. I would have forgotten the feeling.” Lewis ignored his father’s advice and followed the feeling of interest. It took a year and half to write his first book, and during that time, Lewis said, “I was aware of my unknown future, but I never felt like, ‘if this thing doesn’t succeed, I’m screwed.’ It was, ‘I’m doing exactly what I want to do.’” This is something he now tells his kids and anyone who asks him for advice, he said: “Success should just be thought of as a byproduct of doing something you’re really interested in doing. And the goal is to move through life in a way that you don’t miss the thing, that you don’t walk away from it by mistake, that you’re alive to it when it walks in the front door.” That first book was Liar’s Poker—it sold millions of copies and launched Lewis’ prolific career writing bestselling books (Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, and many others in the years since), a byproduct of doing something he’s really interested in.
And Yeah, I’m The Freak
The comedian Hasan Minhaj is the son of Muslim Indian immigrants. His father is an organic chemist and his mother is a physician at Mather Air Force Base. “The choices,” Minhaj says of his parent’s expectations for him, “were doctor, lawyer, engineer, failure.” So, “for my first decade as a comedian,” Minhaj says, “it was real rough between me and my parents.” For his first decade as a comedian, more than things like comedic ability and work ethic, he said he needed the ability to be okay with everyone around him consistently expressing their disapproval and contempt of what he was most interested in. After he became a big-time comedian, Minhaj would talk about what it took to get there: “you have to be cool with being like, ‘I went to the family wedding, and everyone made fun of me, and yeah, I’m the freak.’”
Being Perceived As Foolish And Ignorant
In one of my favorite passages in Epictetus’ Enchiridion, he writes, “If you wish to make progress, be content being perceived as foolish and ignorant.” Be content not taking an interest in whatever may be engaging the attention of the general public at any particular time. Be content taking an interest in what the majority of people are not taking an interest in. Be content trying to get what you want out of life. Be content doing what’s really interesting to you. Be content being the freak.