Pay Attention To What You Pay Attention To
“For anyone,” Amy Krouse Rosenthal once wrote, “trying to discern what to do with their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That’s pretty much all the info you need.” Discerning what to do with your life by paying attention to what you pay attention to—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6.
The Night That Has Never Ended
The screenwriter and playwright Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Social Network, Moneyball, Molly’s Game, etc.) didn’t start writing until after college. “There was this one night,” Sorkin said, “where I was staying in this very, very tiny studio apartment. It was one of those nights in New York City where it just feels like everybody has been invited to a party you haven’t been invited to.” In this apartment, there was a semi-automatic electric typewriter. The TV was broken. The stereo was broken. “The only thing to do was to put a piece of paper in that typewriter and start typing,” Sorkin said. “Out of pure boredom, I stayed up all night writing, and I feel like that night has never ended.” In every Sorkin interview I’ve watched or listened to, he says some version of, “My parents started taking me to see plays when I was very young…I always loved the sound of dialogue. It sounded like music to me.” In hindsight, Sorkin says, his unique attraction to the sound of dialogue should have clued him in to start writing earlier in his life. If he had paid attention to what he paid attention to, he would have discerned what to do with is life earlier in his life.
The Next Thing You Know, The Day Is Gone
After the final episode of “Seinfeld” in 1998, Jerry Seinfeld didn’t know what to do next with his life. With the success of the show, he had options. “What do I do?” he asked a friend. “Well what’s been the best experience you’ve had so far?” the friend asked. Seinfeld said, Two things: First, writing—“I just see something and I write it down—I like a big, yellow legal pad—and once I get that pad open, I can’t stop…the next thing I know, the day is gone.” Second, performing stand-up—“I just love the life of it,” Jerry said. “I love the joy of hearing laughs and making jokes. So, despite the cool and lucrative opportunities to further an acting or screenwriting career in Hollywood, Seinfeld moved back to New York City where he returned to writing jokes by day and performing in comedy clubs by night. For anyone trying to discern what to do with their life, pay attention to what you can pay attention to so that, as Seinfeld put it, “the next thing you know, the day is gone.”
Work That Doesn’t Feel Like Work
At one point, the comedian and writer Will Ferrell thought he wanted to be a sportscaster. But then, he’s not entirely sure why, he had the idea to sift his memories for clues—any information that might help him discern what he’s meant to do with his life. “There was a moment in high school,” Will said. The high school’s class president asked Will to write short comedy sketches that they would perform over the intercom system during morning announcements. “One night,” Will said, “I was writing a little sketch. I thought it’d been about 20 minutes. At one point, I stopped and looked at the clock, and it was midnight. I’d spent four hours writing and rewriting and revising that little sketch.” Will said he realized it was one of the few times where work didn’t feel like work, where he started working on something, and the next thing he knew, the night was gone. “And I thought, ‘Oh, don’t ignore that feeling. Find a way to follow that feeling of doing work that doesn’t feel arduous in any sort of way.’”
Ton-goo-ey
When I sift my memories, this is one of the most vivid. When I was in second grade, multiple teachers recommended I start seeing the special education teacher (I’ll call her Mrs. S), who worked out of a trailer detached from the school. It was clear that I couldn’t really read or spell, but to assess exactly how illiterate I was, during our first session, Mrs. S put a list of words in front of me and asked me to read them out loud, one by one. Four words down the list, I got tripped up—I tried to sound it out, “Ton-goo-ey.” “Tongue,” Mrs. S gently corrected. I often think about how there’s easily a parallel universe in which I don’t pay much attention to this moment of ineptitude and simply move on with the rest of the list and then the rest of my day. Instead, I was overwhelmed with a sense of humiliation and determined right then to do whatever might help me avoid feeling that feeling again. I regularly met with Mrs. S. I started the Hooked on Phonics program at home. In my head, I practiced sounding out words. In the margins of my copybooks, I practiced spelling. In the margins of textbooks, I rewrote full paragraphs to practice stringing sentences together. I became obsessed with finding misspelled words and misplaced commas. It was work but it didn’t seem arduous for some reason, and so, I eventually got my college degree in English and became a writer and researcher.
A Divining Rod
The mythologist Joseph Campbell talked about how reading is like “a divining rod,” a way to find what you are uniquely attracted to and meant to do. “You’ve got to read,” Campbell said. “Find [what] excites you. And if it doesn’t excite you…It’s not yours.” If it doesn’t grab your attention or etch into your memory, it’s not yours.