Bend The Goal To Conform To Your Abilities and Desires
Prefacing it with the reminder “that all advice can only be a product of the one who gives it,” the writer Hunter S. Thompson offered his advice to a friend feeling a little lost and “disenchanted.” Instead of blindly pursuing this, that, and the other goal, Thompson told his friend to determine if those goals have anything to do with his true desires and abilities. “In a sense, the tragedy of life,” Thompson writes, “is that we seek to understand the goal and not the person…[We] adjust ourselves to the demands of a goal…[We] conform to the goal.” Given how much the friend had bent and conformed to worldly goals and expectations, Thompson said, “it isn’t any too difficult to understand why you seem to feel the way you do.” To stop feeling that way, Thompson writes, “the formula runs something like this: [you] must choose a path which will let your abilities function at maximum efficiency toward the gratification of your desires…Rather than bending [yourself] to meet the demands of the goal, bend the goal to conform to [you].” Bending and conforming—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Make Your Fortune, And Then Write Your Books
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.’” When he graduated in 1982, “because I hadn’t the first clue what I should write about,” he took a job at a giant Wall Street investment bank called Salomon Brothers. 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. “I stumbled into my next senior thesis.” After a year and half of carefully observing the madness, Lewis decided he was going to quit his job and write his first book. When Lewis told his boss, his boss was worried about the sanity of a person walking away from hundreds of thousands of dollars and advised Lewis to see someone to make sure he wasn’t going insane. When he told his father, his father’s advice was to wait. “Stay at Salomon Brothers for 10 years,” he said. “Make your fortune, and then write your books.” Lewis first thought back to the feeling he felt when working on his thesis, he said, “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 the advice and bent his path toward the gratification of his desires. It took a year and half to write his first book, and during that time, “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, and I’ll figure out a way to make it work.’” That first book was Liar’s Poker—it sold millions of copies and bent Lewis’ unknown future to conform to his desire for a life spent writing books (Moneyball, The Blind Side, The Big Short, and many others in the years since).
This Has Nothing To Do With “Making It”
In the back of a comedy club, the comedian Orny Adams got a chance to talk to his hero, Jerry Seinfeld. Adams was struggling to break through. He committed his twenties to trying to “make it” as a big-time comedian and at the age of 29, he was starting to wonder if he’d taken the wrong path. “I see my friends,” Adams says to Seinfeld in the documentary Comedian. “I see people making a lot of money on Wall Street. I see people with a wife and kids and a big house. I just see people moving up.” “They’re moving up?” Seinfeld asks. “Are you out of your mind?” “This has nothing to do with your friends,” Seinfeld says. He points in the direction of the stage—“this is such a special thing. This has nothing to do with ‘making it.’” Seinfeld and Adams are in comedy for different reasons. Seinfeld bends his path to conform to his true desires and abilities. Adams bent his to the goal of making it, to external expectations and markers of success. It isn’t any too difficult to understand why he felt the way he did.
There’s Just No Way We’ll Learn Everything About Everything
Of course, sometimes you do have to bend and conform. The chef Wylie Dufresne began working in kitchens as a teenager and immediately knew he found his path. He went and apprenticed under some of the world’s great chefs, “and working for them, yes, you get to a point where you can start to ask questions,” he said. “As long as you realize that maybe during peak hours on a Saturday is not the best time to play 20 questions with a French guy. But for the most part, you keep your head down and do what they tell you to do. That’s useful when you’re starting out. You need to do that for a while, but eventually, you should start asking questions.” Dufresne eventually started asking questions, “and eventually, there weren’t great answers. That’s what’s interesting about cooking: even the world’s great chefs make amazing food without knowing what’s really happening in the cooking process.” When his mentors could no longer answer his questions, Dufresne began to seek answers on his own. He immersed himself in subjects like chemistry, physics, and biology to try to understand the principles and mechanisms underlying the cooking process. He took familiar dishes and explored making them in unfamiliar ways. He spent time with experts across disciplines like food science, math, design, and art, seeking to learn from what they know about how they do what they do. Through all this seeking, naturally, Dufresne’s cooking style bent and conformed to meet the demands of his increasingly vast understanding of cooking. And eventually, people started asking him about his unfamiliar dishes. They started bending their style to conform to his innovative techniques. And they started calling him one of the world’s great chefs—a chef who seems to know what’s really happening in the cooking process. To which he admits that he has a deep but still incomplete understanding. “That’s the beauty of it: there’s just no way we’ll learn everything about everything. It’s too vast. So if you are interested and you are curious, you have an opportunity to learn forever. That’s exciting to me. That’s what’s always driven me.”
It’s Like, My Job Is My Job Because of The Person I Am
The music producer Rick Rubin is constantly listening to music, reading books, watching a movie, going to museums, or driving around just to look at beautiful architecture. “It’s all I do,” he said. “But not because it’s my job. It’s like, my job is my job because the person that I am loves to do those things…I try to be as true to my interests as possible.”
Make A Life
“Beware of looking for goals,” as Hunter S. Thompson wraps up his advice to his friend. “Look for a way of life. Determine how you want to live and then see what you can do to make a living within that way of life.” Determine what your true desires and abilities are, what captivates you, what you could be curious about learning forever, what the person that you are loves to do—then see what you can do to make a life that bends and conforms to those things.