Good Life Project - Jesse Browner: What If I’d Taken a Different Path?

Episode Date: June 23, 2016

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if you had chosen another path? Would you have been more successful in your craft? A better writer, artist, musician? Would you have made a bigger impact in the world? My guest today, Jesse Browner, has by all rights been extremely successful. He has a great marriage and family, living in the middle of Manhattan. He is a successful author whose books have been published by some of the biggest houses in New York City and he has a lucrative full-time job.However, as Jesse approached his 50s, he started wondering, "What if?"Jesse spent his 20s in what was known as the heartbeat of Bohemia in New York City (if you have ever seen the movie or the musical Rent, then you know exactly the place I am describing). As he looked back at this time, he realized that although no one he knew was extremely successful or rich, they were all living and breathing their craft.From this reflection came the question, "Is there an untapped wealth of talent just buried within me?"Jesse's exploration of this question over many years led to his latest book, How Did I Get Here?. Today, Jesse guides us through his incredible journey of discovery and letting go. If you have ever been tormented by the “What If?” questions in your life, then this episode is one you cannot afford to miss. So turn up the volume, get comfortable and listen in as we take you on an incredible journey of growth and development. Mentioned in This Episode:Connect with Jesse: Jesse Browner | Facebook | TwitterHow Did I Get Here?: Making Peace with the Road Not Taken by Jesse BrownerScenes From The Life Of Bohemia: Scenes De La View De Boheme (1896) by Henri MurgerDaily Rituals: How Artists Work by Mason CurreyHappiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill by Matthieu RicardThe Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World by Lewis HydeLa BohemeRentWhiplashSeamus Heaney Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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pretty much everything in between. It's this beautiful way to fill your noggin with ideas to live and work better, and a really rare opportunity to create the type of friendships and stories you pretty much thought you'd left behind decades ago. It's all happening at the end of August, just about 90 minutes from New York City, and we're well on our way to selling out spots at this point. So be sure to grab your spot as soon as you can if it's interesting to you. You can learn more at goodlifeproject.com slash camp or just go ahead and click the link in the show notes now. The decisions you've made that have led you to this point were not wrong decisions. They were almost certainly based on a search for something

that you need, that you lack, even if you were not aware of needing and lacking them. By all accounts, this week's guest, Jesse Browner, was living a fantastic life as he entered his 50s. A successful multi-time author with big published houses in New York City, full-time prestigious job, married to a wonderful woman, father of great kids, living in the middle of Manhattan. Everything seemed to be going well, but tripping into this moment in his life, he began to ask some of the big questions. And his attention zoomed back to his early 20s when he lived in part of New York City that was kind of known as being the heartbeat of Bohemia, where actually, if you've ever seen the movie or seen the play Rent, it depicted life in what was then called

Alphabet City, where the writers and the artists and the hypercreators were really living hand to mouth, but living and breathing their art in this extraordinary place and way. And he was one of those people. And he made a series of choices that led to a beautiful, secure life. But he started to wonder, what if I chose differently? And where might my expression of the craft be? You know, what kind of a writer would I potentially emerged into? Is there just massive wellspring of buried potential that I've kept on some level buried because I made different choices?

And his exploration of these questions, which I'm guessing if you're listening to this, you may have some of those same questions, led to a deep exploration that lasted a number of years and to a really fascinating book called How Did I Get Here? We go into this entire journey and the creative process and the writing process and the process of really hitting the middle of your life and asking the really important questions, but at the same time, going through a process of letting go of the questions that are tormenting you and learning to look forward and crafting the next generation, the next evolution of your time here in a more deliberate and graceful way. I hope you enjoy the conversation. I'm Jonathan Fields. This is Good Life Project.

So it's fascinating because there's so many directions that I potentially want to go with you, but I grew up just outside of New York. I've been a New Yorker. I've been in the city for 25, 30 years now myself. So I remember when Rent originally came out with the original cast and saw it. My mind melted. And being exposed to your work and you describing sort of the earlier part of your life just kind of brought me back to that moment. And it almost sounded like you were really kicking around what's now called the East Village,

but back then was Alphabet City, probably similar time. Yeah. I graduated from college in 83 and I went straight to the East Village. That's where everybody went. You're walking down the street, it was like practically like being in your own living room. You knew everybody, you know, at night you would go from one bar to the next and everybody would know each other. It was like having one giant living room. You know, people don't really remember that it was pretty dangerous. I mean, in the space of four years, my apartment was broken into three times. But the fact is, I don't remember that either. I only remember that it was just incredibly intimate and optimistic. Everybody I knew was an artist of some kind or another. I think I mentioned in the book, or maybe in one

of the earlier versions of it, how shocked I was when somebody I'd gone to college with told me he was going to law school because it just seemed so, I couldn't even imagine doing it. The truth is I couldn't imagine ever living any different than the way I was living. And that's sort of what sparked the whole impetus for the book. Yeah. So take me a little bit more into what does day-to-day life look like for you at that moment in your life? I mean, you sort of set the context in terms of the neighborhood being profoundly different than it is today. But take me into sort of like the artist's life, you know, at that moment in time. You know, first of all, it was really cheap.

And it was very easy to find a place to live. And that's what I have two daughters who are more or less the age I was then. And they could never even imagine the idea of living 10 minutes from Midtown in Manhattan. It was amazingly inexpensive. And my apartment was a little bit nicer than a lot of my friends. I actually had a bathroom with a bath in the bathroom. Most people had a bath or a shower in the kitchen. Right. That was the classic, you know. Yeah, absolutely. I lived just in a typical tenement on a decent street, 12th Street between 1st and A. It could get a lot worse the further east you went. I lived for a while on Avenue C with my sister. And there, you know, she was friends with all the drug dealers who would

help her carry her. Yeah. I mean, because from the outside looking in, that part of the city at that time, and actually we're about the same age, I graduated the same year as you, that part of the city was sort of like known as being a pretty scary part of the city.

If you weren't sort of living there from the inside out, I remember walking around back around then and literally it's almost like you're just, you know, kicking spent crack vials out of your way as you're walking down the street. You know, but it's true. It was that way. And if you really make an effort to remember it as it was, rather than the sort of the rose tinted glasses that we tend to put on at our age, it was filthy and dirty and dangerous, but it was so exciting. You know, everybody I knew was a dancer, a musician, a poet, a composer, a writer. And we could all practice that as a community right there in the center of the greatest city in the world.

You know, there was a real reason that everybody wanted to come to New York City. It's just an incredible energy and vibe that you were doing something new and that it was possible to do something new. I think in a way, more than cheap rents or community, what seems to be missing now, and I admit that as a 50 something year old man, I don't necessarily know what's out there, is that sense that you could do anything and experiment in any way you wanted to. Nobody I knew did anything mainstream at all. In fact, we shunned it, sometimes to our detriment, you know, because it would have been smarter for me, probably as a writer, to learn my chops in a more professional way than I did, rather than spend 10 years apprenticing by myself, you know, instead of learning how the world works

when you need to sell your writing. To me, the idea of selling anything was crazy. Yeah, that is still to this day, such a fierce tension that exists in sort of creators, artists, writers, painters, whatever your medium may be. I mean, it's, I hear this conversation to this day going on nonstop is that tension between, you know, being a professional and just wanting to, and being a craftsperson. Well, you know, I think that's a tension that's existed ever since, I don't know, the rise of the middle class. Ever since artists stopped needing the patronage of aristocrats or the church. And had to actually find an audience and a paying patron for their work.

You know, that's, I mean, that's basically what the rise of Western liberal capitalism is all about. And it's difficult, you know, people continue to struggle with it. It's one of those lessons that I think every generation needs to learn for itself. That's part of the reason that I was so fascinated in with my research into 19th century Parisian bohemians because basically they were doing it for exactly the same reason that me and my friends were doing it. They needed to find a way when they were young and they were discovering themselves and learning their work and their craft and who they were, they needed to find a space that was safe and free from the social requirements that is not only the morals and dictates of society, but also the need to make a living. And they didn't want to be what would be corrupted, I guess is maybe a strong word, but that's more or less what it is.

Corrupted by the desires or the need to make a living, to build an audience. All they wanted was a place where they could find their own voice. And they had to shun society for a while, but it was never their intention to live that way forever. They only needed to do it while they were young and learning who they were. And then they were ready to go into society feeling strong and secure about not only who they were, but what they were capable of and how they could have an original independent voice, which I think you can't do if you pl in the idea that that's what success is. So it was fascinating reading in particular, this one quite famous novel that I'd known about for decades and never got around to reading, which is a book called C'est de la vie de Bohème, which is Scenes from the Life of Bohemia.

It was the book that Puccini used to write La Bohème and then, of course, Jonathan Larson for Rent. And it's quite recognizable. The characters are all the same as they are in Puccini. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. But this is the early 1840s. You know, when you think about these people running around Paris, you know, wearing tattered clothes, caging food, playing pranks, doing everything they can to disrupt and disdain society.

You know, in the United States, at the same time, the Western frontier was St. Louis. And when you think about that context, you're like, wow. Yeah, you can't believe it. They're like full-blown, recognizable Western bohemians with all exactly the same morals and standards and ethics as we had in the 1980s and, of course, our forebears going back to the 50s. Except that, you know, it was really, really dangerous to be a bohemian 150 years ago because, well, there was no social security. If you didn't have a coat or wood to burn in your fireplace, you would die in the winter. It was just that simple. And they did. Henri Murgé, who was the author of that, became very, very famous in France. But he still died in his 40s from all of the illnesses that he had contracted living his

life as a bohemian in his 20s. And going you know, going even coming up into the 20th century, there's so many examples, especially in France of bohemians dying young because of their excesses. And it wasn't always drugs. Sometimes it was as simple as, you know, tuberculosis contracted because... Just don't completely forget and lose track of taking care of yourself exactly yeah exactly it was dangerous and they died a lot of them did yeah there's this huge lingering question you know at what cost great art and i guess maybe one of the central questions brought up recently in the movie whiplash right you know where the classic you know that conversation that scene where they're sitting around the table and they're talking about it and then the kid says, yeah, essentially, I'd rather die at 30 years old and have the world talking about me for the rest of generations.

That'd be the greatest. But you actually have to go to that place to create great art. I don't know. That's the question that haunts my entire book and it doesn't really get answered at the end. It's the question that's haunted my entire life because I did make a change in my 30s because for so many reasons, some of which I understand and some of which I don't understand, it didn't really make any sense for me to remain a bohemian for the rest of my life. I guess I learned what I needed to learn. But unlike these young people in Merget's novel, who knew when it was time to quit and understood that they had milked

this lifestyle for everything it was worth and everything they needed to get from it, it took me a long time to understand that I hadn't betrayed myself by making a change in my life, that in fact I was simply building on everything that I had learned in my 20s as a quote-unquote bohemian and moved on. But for a long time, it felt as if I had taken the wrong path, especially because I didn't just stop being a bohemian. I became a civil servant. I've had the same job.

I just celebrated my 25th anniversary in the same job. That's actually proved to be an incredible boon to me. But in any case, I guess I'm getting off the topic. There's going to be a price to pay if you feel like you have it in you to create art that's going to stand out or that's going to last or that's going to mean something both to yourself and to your audience, there has to be some sort of a price. It's hard to say what it is, what price you pay. I don't think that any of us in our own lifetimes are really able to properly judge whether we've made the right decisions. Does it make sense for me to be miserable and unhappy? I have a fantastic family life.

It supports me when I sit quietly by myself. I don't feel lonely because I know that I'm out there loved. Who was it? Was it Anne Beattie who said that the cure to isolation is solitude? The cure to loneliness is solitude. I'm finding it very hard to regret the decisions I made, but I did for a long time. I thought that I had made a mistake by choosing a mainstream lifestyle. I thought that I wasn't ever going to create the work that I needed to create that maybe I was born to create

because I was having to get up every morning at four o'clock and write for three hours before going off to my job. So let's deconstruct that a little bit here so that people sort of listening can understand this path that you've chosen. So you start out living the life of the bohemian in Alphabet City where it's basically you live and breathe community and creation all day, every day. It moves through you. That's your heartbeat for about a decade or so? More or less, yeah. Yeah. And then talk to me about how the evolution away from that begins.

Well, one way, when I was making a living such as it was, I mean, I didn't really need to make much of a living. I didn't publish my first novel until I was in my late 20s. So I wasn't making very much money as a writer. I was a reader. I read screenplays and novels for the film industry. I'd write up little reports saying, you know, this book would be good for a movie and that good. It was a fantastic way to earn a living. You know, I'd go up to the office, pick up three or four books and read them during the course of the week, write two-page synopses of each one. And that's how I made my living. But I was also a translator, a literary translator. And I was very lucky at a very, very young age, in my early 20s,

maybe 23 or 24, to have the opportunity to translate a series of sort of classic French 20th century books. And so sort of made a bit of a name for myself back then as a very young translator. I was very lucky because it was a perfect intro. Anyway. But at that point, that's just the thing that you're doing a couple hours a day to make sure that your rent is covered so that you can essentially- Well, you know, but translation is really literary work. Right. And it's a great apprenticeship for writers because you learn to see your words as a whole different currency.

If writing a novel is choosing words to fit an idea in your head and eventually to build some sort of edifice based on nothing but your own imagination. Translation is choosing words to fit somebody else's ideas and building this edifice on a skeleton that somebody else has put up for you. So it requires a very different set of criteria that comes in really handy to the writer because it teaches you a lot about discipline and to always examine each word carefully to make sure. It's very easy to be cavalier about the words you choose and the way you put them together when you're a novelist because you're not holding

it up to any mirror except this imaginary mirror in your own mind. Whereas as a translator, you have to imagine that you are sitting opposite the writer and he's looking to make sure that you're not making any egregious mistakes. You're always very careful to consider more than your own criteria as a translator. I would imagine too that, I mean, it's fascinating to me because what an amazing way to sort of fill in the education as a writer, like you being a writer also, and like developing the craft and at the same time having this experience. And also because you've got to, when you're doing that, especially with what you're translating, you also, you have to really understand the greater context of the, you know, what was happening in the culture, in the world, in the society around when this person wrote this thing. I would imagine because that's going to inform how you

translate to a certain extent. Well, that's absolutely true. But what you have to remember is that, again, unlike writing fiction or even nonfiction, if you're being very creative about it, you can't do everything as a translator. That's especially true with poetry. I didn't translate a lot of poetry, but you always have to choose something that's not going to make it into the book. Do you want the voice to sound natural and English or American so that it's not jarring to the reader? Well, then you're giving up the idea that you're going to make this person sound exactly like they did in, say, in the 1920s or the 1840s. Do you want, if it's a poem, do you keep the rhyme?

If you keep the rhyme, you're giving up something else. You're always giving up something in order to highlight what you believe to be the salient fact of the work. I think of Seamus Heaney, who translated Beowulf without speaking very much or any Anglo-Saxon. He read what he could, but he had somebody else translate the meaning for him. Because to him, the meaning of each individual word was far less important than the humanity behind the people who were speaking it. That's a very faint voice coming back 1200 years in a language that is not really English at all, even though we often call it old

English. He made a decision before he started translating that he was going to focus on the person behind the voice. And therefore, he had to give up the idea that if somehow Dane from the 12th century – or I think maybe they weren't Danes, they were – anyway, it was written in Anglo-Saxon, which is Germanic. You know, if somebody had come along from that century and read his work, they might not have recognized themselves. But that wasn't important to him, and I happen to agree. But you could disagree and nevertheless understand the process by which he made those decisions. Those are not decisions that you need to make as a novelist, except at the kind of deepest, deepest level that in most cases, you're probably not even aware of

when you're making choices about your voice and about the language you're going to use. But again, it's an incredibly useful way to slow down your reading in a way that we almost never do. I'm a very slow reader and a very in-depth reader. I like to read things slowly. Yeah, I'm the exact same way. But as a translator, you're reading a book at a level that you would almost never read it if you were simply reading it. And again, that's an incredibly useful tool to bring into your own writing. Because you're moving at such a slow pace that you see how every sentence and every paragraph is structured in a way that you wouldn't do unless you were an academic, say. And I'm not an academic even remotely.

How did that – I mean mean this is such a hard question to answer but i'm gonna ask it anyway because you know you've only lived one past you only know that the way that you've learned to write and the experience that you've had but do you have a sense for how that experience affected your approach to so i think it was vonnegut who said you know like there are two types of writers they call call them bashers and blanking on the other one. But basically there's the writer who vomits everything in their head onto the page and then goes back and spends months and months, sometimes years rewriting, rewriting, rewriting, rewriting. And then there's the writer who goes very slowly, very deliberately, very meticulously. They're thinking through and editing in their head.

And when the word hits the page, it's near finished. So that when they finish a manuscript, it's pretty close to done. It still needs editing, but it's pretty much there on the page. Do you have a sense for whether your experience translating moved you towards one extreme or the other? Do you even buy into that distinction? I'm curious. Actually, you know what? I don't really. That distinction doesn't entirely work for me. And of course, I can't speak for any other writer. Even when people do talk about their writing process, we tend to, our eyes glaze over. It's like listening to somebody's stories about their pets or their dreams. You don't really want to know how other writers work. So I'll keep this short. I am very focused on the elegance of a sentence. Most sentences that go down on the page for me are written slowly and thoughtfully. But at the same time, I'm not always aware of the structure

of the book. What I found in my experience, I'm working now on my seventh book, is that almost always I end up having to discard the whole first third of the book because the characters aren't alive yet and the arc of the story for what it's worth is undetermined, which is the right way to go about it. I mean, you have to let the story guide itself to a certain extent, and you have to let the characters come to life at their own pace. Eventually, they will. I mean, if they don't, there's a much bigger problem than the first third of your book. But things don't tend to come alive in a way that I can rely on the characters to move the story forward by themselves until at least the first third of the book. So I might as well have bashed it out because I have to restructure the entire book after I finish the first draft. In case of this particular memoir, which I'd never written a memoir before, I wrote it very quickly so that I would have time. Normally, I don't write under a deadline because nobody's waiting for the novels.

I sell them after I've finished writing them. But in this case, I had a contract and I had to have the book finished at a certain time and I wrote it fairly quickly so that – What's fairly quickly? About 18 months. Okay okay maybe two years i can't really i think maybe from the beginning to the end i had three years to write it but maybe it was two years i'm you know yeah it's already several years ago and um but i gave myself six months after i finished the first draft so that I would have plenty of time. And it turned out that was barely enough time. There was something really wrong with the book. I have a small group of trusted readers, including my wife and close friends who always read for me and give me their version of a blunt truth. And there was something wrong with the book. I think even then at that late stage, I didn't really know what the book was about

or what I was groping for. And so I had to completely restructure it. And I was really lucky. I did figure it out in those six months. And the book in the end came out fairly, I mean, I was quite pleased with it. I'm not very gentle with myself. As most writers aren't. whether it's successful in an overall way, I leave that to other people to decide. But I was pleased that I was able to find some real truth in it for me. But I mean, that's living by the skin of your teeth. I mean, the chances of my starting out with a book that was as flawed as this was,

and being able to completely turn it around in six months, we're pretty slim. And I mean, that speaks well for the need to meet a deadline. It's interesting because I'm a writer also. I haven't written nearly as much as you and I'm generally a different focus. But what's fascinating to me, this is a curiosity of mine. I'm a huge believer in constraints, force, creativity, constraints, force, problem solving. So on the one hand, I'm thinking, okay, you know, like, it is the likelihood that, you know, you were able to turn it around in six months, you know, it tough, really challenging, but you were able to

do it. You know, had you not had that constraint, you know, would you not have felt the pressure of the need to actually push through all the fierce emotion and cognition and recreation and conversations that would have led to that. I often think that so many people have these profound songs in their heart that never get out because they don't have the constraint to force it out. You know, I think you're right. Only to a certain extent. I mean, the truth is that if I didn't have the constraint, I probably wouldn't have written

the book at all. This book came out of an essay that I wrote in Poets and Writers. Right, I read the originals. Obviously, the book is very different. It would not have occurred to me to turn that into a book because that essay was very much about me and my own experience. I would never have considered the idea of writing about, you know, the life of a civil servant slash novelist to be of very much interest to anybody else. But a publisher of mine who had published several other books read the essay and asked me to consider turning it into a full-length book.

And, you know, when people ask me to write a book, I wouldn't know why. Yes. Yes. And it was only after I had signed the contract that I began to regret the idea. And obviously, I don't regret it now. I'm very pleased that I did it. But writing about I grew up, although I'm a New Yorker, I spent a lot of my childhood in England. And, you know, when you grow up in England, talking about yourself doesn't come very naturally. It's not a culture that encourages that, doesn't really encourage you to dwell too much on your own emotions or on emotional truth. At least that's how it was 50 years ago. It's like the opposite.

Yeah, exactly. I don't think British culture is like that anymore. I think they've come a lot closer to who we are. But that was the first of many walls that I had to tear down in order to get at what I really – what I wanted to say, which of course I had no idea what I wanted to say. So that's an enormous constraint. I agree with you completely that I always tell my students that you imagine a river that overflows its banks and spreads out over 100 square miles, or imagine a river that has concrete banks and the full force of the current is channeled, those banks are the constraints that either you set yourself or which most of us have to learn to create those constraints

ourselves because there's no constraints in the outside world. It's absolutely essential. So I mean, I was always very good at school. I like writing essays. I liked having deadlines. I don't have very many of them in my life. And so having this was very helpful. But without them, I kind of feel like I probably would never have written the book at all. Which is interesting too, because until this was your first nonfiction book, right? I wrote a history book many years ago. So, and it's such a different world. For those who aren't sort of familiar with the behind the scenes working of publishing, as a general rule with nonfiction, you don't sell the book.

You write a proposal. That's right. And you sell the proposal. And then you turn around and you agree to write the book by X date. Whereas with fiction, it's the exact opposite. You write the book and then you hand over a finished product and say who wants it. Exactly. You know, so on the nonfiction side, you've got constraints legally and financially imposed by an agreement that you've signed to create by X date. But in the fiction side of things, you've got to engineer, you've got to fabricate that yourself.

It's absolutely true. Because so having written both, do you create that same constraint when you're writing fiction, when you're writing novels? And do you find it harder? Well, I'm very disciplined. I have to be because I have to go to my office every day. I've been doing it now for a long time. I barely even think about it.

One thing that I've found to be exactly the opposite was having finished the book, I would often rest emotionally and physically from it. And sometimes these hiatuses would stretch out over a year or even more, during which time I was incredibly brutal with myself. And I felt like I was doing something wrong. And I was being lazy. And this was no way for a writer to comport himself. I should be writing every single day. And it took me a while, when I say a while, I mean, a decade or two decades to understand that that hiatus was actually part of my writing process. I was not resting at all. I was thinking all along about my next book. But you know, writing is the word writing means taking up a pen

and putting it to paper. You don't normally think of the time that you spend simply daydreaming about a story to be part of the writing process. And it took me a long time to recognize that that was the case. And that was what I was doing. And then I became much less strict with myself, I allowed myself the time to work it out in my head. And then when I'm right there, now, I'm just about to sit down and really start putting pen to paper. But it's been, I mean, I've been writing smaller things, but it's been over well over a year since I actually was writing another book. Right. I'm so glad that you brought that up because there is this illusion that if you don't have your words every day, you know, you're not writing, you're not doing your job as a writer also. But there's so much, so much of it comes from the space that you create

for the ideas to dance in your head and play with each other and, you know, permute and just like figure out. And, you know, if, and I think some of that can happen through the process of just writing and through emptying that conversation onto the page, just because, you know, morning pages is essentially to a certain extent that, but also for me, I've never done morning pages. I've tried. It's not my process. For me, and maybe we're similar in this way, my head is just filled with, it's working things out 24-7.

By the time I actually start to put something on paper or these days just start typing, a lot of it is formed because I've given myself that significant amount of time to just dance with all of these ideas and people. But like you said, I think that it takes a long time for you to not beat yourself up and understand that you're writing when you're doing that, at least in my mind. To me, it's a critical part of the writing process. Yeah. I don't read very of, it's a critical part of the writing process. Yeah, you know, I don't read very many writers who write about the process of writing what they tell their students. I don't teach that much. But this idea of waiting for something to

come is, I don't think that that is considered to be mainstream advice. You know, whenever you do read a writer talking about what they tell their students, they say, the one thing you have to do is write every single day. And they're probably right. If I didn't have a job, I would probably be writing every single day. It's certainly true that nothing I do before I put pen to paper is anywhere near as important as afterwards in the sense that I can't imagine a character coming to life or a story being honed down to its finest edge just in my mind. That stuff, the book only comes to life on the page. Sure. So I would hesitate to tell anybody how to write.

Clearly, I don't write the way other people do. I hope not. It's probably not the optimal way to do it. It's the way I have to do it, at least until such time as my books pay for themselves. But if there's anybody out there who spends a lot of time worrying that they're doing it the wrong way, I think my experience could be helpful to show not only that there isn't one right way of doing it, but that also you can be doing the serious work of a writer even when you don't have a pen in hand, a writer's work is the main part of it is putting pen to paper. But there's more to it than that, I think. And a lot of it is about allowing your

mind to expand to its ultimate capacity for expansion, which isn't necessarily going to be facilitated if you're constantly beating yourself up and thinking that you're doing it the wrong way. Well said. And that really kind of brings us to really, I think a lot of the focus of your last book and the essay that teed it off, which is really this exploration of, you know, so sort of filling in the story a bit for you, you know, you transitioned eventually into moving out of the life of a bohemian, you know, so sort of filling in the story a bit for you, you know, you transitioned eventually into moving out of the life of a bohemian, you know, and taking translation as something you were doing on more of a literary basis and actually eventually woke up fundamentally saying,

wait a minute, this is my full-time job. Yeah, it was, I met a guy at a party, literally, and he said, oh, you know, we have, there's always freelance translation work at the United Nations is by sitting for a competitive international exam, which in my office only comes around maybe once every 10 or 12 years. There happened to be one two years after I started, and I had an insuperable advantage because I had all this experience already as a freelancer. And I took the job because how could I not? And back in those days, this was still during the Cold War, or right at the very end of the Cold War in any case. It was really good pay for not very much work. But the work gradually became more and more as

the Cold War ended and the United Nations had started having to deal with all of these proxy wars all over the world that would have been suppressed when everybody was a client of one of the two superpowers. So my job became more and more demanding. But by that time, I had two children, I had a mortgage, and it would have been almost impossible for me to extricate myself from it. And that's when I started living with some regret about the choice that I had made. Were you still writing on the side at the time? Oh, yeah. I didn't even publish my first book until I was already a staff member at the United Nations.

I started at the UN at 30. At that point, my first novel was already done, but it wasn't published until I was already at the UN at 30. At that point, my first novel was already done, but it wasn't published until I was already at the UN. And I've written all six of my books, published books, plus several books that were not published during that time. So that's exactly 25 years right now. So what would a representative day look like in terms of when you're writing, when you're working, when you're working?

Normally, I would get up at four o'clock in the morning and write for three hours, and then go off to my job. My work is very seasonal, because of my specific job at the UN is something that's very unusual and doesn't exist pretty much anywhere else in the world. So I have a peak season and a quiet season. And during the quiet season, I'm often able to find three or four hours a day when the sun is out to write. But normally, that would be what I would do. I would get up at four. And I do that not because I'm some sort of crazy martyr.

It's because I've always woken up early and my mind is at its best. So I give my writing my best mind and my profession a slightly lesser mind. So I mean, it seems like from the outside looking in, you know, you're waking up early, you're getting your hours writing, you've got a great job, you've got a great family, you're moving into life, you feel like you're honoring your responsibilities. What is it that triggers you to start to wonder if you've made the right choices? Well, the truth is, I would have to say that that's behind me now. That's why I was able to write this book. Writing the book itself helped me put a lot of it into perspective. I don't question myself so much anymore. But my job can be very demanding. And there are times that no matter

what I say about giving my best self to my writing, that's probably not always the case. My idea had always been from the first day I took the job was looking at my friends and peers who were writers. And, you know, as you probably, as I'm sure you know, and as probably most of your listeners know, it's very, very difficult to make a living as a novelist. You know, you can be lucky like me and publish most of what you write. It still doesn't even come close to being enough to raise children. Especially in New York. Especially in New York. I mean, I don't get paid nothing, but it doesn't even come close to covering the cost. Virtually every writer, with only one or two exceptions, every writer I know has to earn a living. If you're cobbling together a living,

either doing freelance writing, say travel writing or interviewing or whatever, or if you're teaching, your time isn't your own. In many cases, you won't have a tenured job, and I never had to worry about where my next paycheck was coming from, that was an incredible advantage as a writer. Because I could wake up in the morning, even if it was four o'clock in the morning, and not be consumed with worry about money, like so many writers I know. To me, I felt, especially given a background of childhood that was sometimes a little bit tenuous economically, that that would be a really great advantage to me and that it would counterbalance the limits on my time that were put on me by having a full-time job. And to that extent, I've been right all these years. It's a job, and it doesn't allow me to set my own time. And there are times when it prevents me from writing full-time, and that's what I was always worried about. I thought that because my time

was not my own, I was not giving my writing the disciplined focus that it required. And I worried that it suffered from that. So you're like asking the question, like, what if I had chosen differently the whole time? Asking what if is not the same as regret. And it took me a long time to figure that out. Regret is basically exclusively a negative affect. There's nothing positive about regretting, you know, a regret is somebody who's sitting at a bar, you know, worrying about something that they have no power over because it happened years ago.

I wanted to be able to think clearly about the choices that I had made and try to understand why I had made them so that at my age, I still have, you wrong, so that I could take this pause in the middle of my life and look at where I had come from, try to understand why I had taken the direction I had taken, so that I could go on unburdened by those doubts, so that I could focus exclusively on my work and not on regret. I also wanted to be happy. And it's very difficult to be happy if you're shackled by bitterness or regret. And so that was the exercise that prompted writing this book. There have been several people, I remember when the essay came out,

and there were a lot of comments about maybe you would be happier if you didn't spend so much time regretting what you had done in the past or complaining about what a difficult life you have because you have to go to this great job every day. And I was very defensive about that. I've said, no, that's not what I'm doing at all. I'm not- I didn't get that from the original essay. Yeah, but you know, I've gone back to the essay. And the truth is that there is a little bit of that. There's a little bit of self-pity that I was not aware that it was there. I'm lucky enough to

be married to a book editor. So she's able to give me extremely directed, targeted advice. And so if she says, no, people don't want to read about bitterness or about your mistakes. People want you to be able to find a positive message in your experience. And so I think there was a little bit of it in there. And I was able to purge it completely from the book. So sure, wasn't perfect. Having a full time job for the last 25 years was not the best way to write books. But show me what is the best way. You know, I don't know what the best way is. And I never will know. Again, my wife has always said, you know, you've had the advantage of being plugged right into the world. You go out there every day, you meet people, you see people. I mean, that's how a writer finds subject matter. That's how a writer understands

that he or she is living in a society that's greater than the individual. And so there is an advantage to that that I might not have had if I had been sitting in a room by myself up in the country with a dog and some whiskey for the last 25 years. The same with raising children. You know, raising children is not,

you know, if you want to do it the right way, it certainly does draw away some energy from thinking about yourself and thinking about your writing. But it also opens up an entire wing of the mansion of life that you would never have been able to explore if you hadn't done it. So the main thing is that I think that I've learned from the book is that ultimately there isn't any right way to do this, but there are wrong ways. And the wrong way is to make yourself too unhappy, unhappier than you need to be. If you're constantly worrying about issues of life and death and fairness and truth. You're never going to be completely happy,

God forbid. But you're not a master of your own emotion if one of them, say, unhappiness or bitterness, is always the predominant one. I don't think I could ever have written a book as, again, I can't speak for the success of my book. I can only speak for how far it goes towards being what I would want it to be. I do know that if I hadn't learned these lessons about the importance of being happy, they wouldn't have been anywhere near as successful as they are. And that also goes against so much that we think we know about writing and artists in the modern world. You know, we've spent 100 years being told that the geniuses are the people who are miserable and who focus on their art to the exclusion of all else. Now, it's possible that artists and writers and musicians and poets

who have given up everything else for their writing, and I can name dozens of them off the top of my head, it's possible that they wouldn't have been able to create what they created if they had been quote-unquote happier. I spend a lot of time talking in this book about Franz Kafka, who is the perfect – he's the template. When people think about the tortured artist, they think about Franz Kafka, and rightly so. But Kafka would have been – he likely would never have been satisfied with himself, no matter what he had done. The fact is that he had plenty of time to write.

And if he had not had tuberculosis, he probably would have achieved some success in his own lifetime that he did not enjoy, didn't have time to enjoy it. And maybe he would have enjoyed that success. Maybe he wouldn't have been a source of misery and conflict for him. When he died, he was actually on the threshold of a new life. He might well have lived to fulfill one dream, which was to go to Palestine and open a coffee shop. And who knows what his writing would have been like then, you know? So you can't worry that what is good for other people is going to be good for you. I had thought for a long time that my writing would have been better if I had made it my top priority instead of an equal priority with raising a family and being happy and perhaps, you know, although

I don't love to psychoanalyze myself or anybody else, you know, maybe healing some wounds from a difficult childhood. But I did what I had to do, you know, and there is a lot of pressure out there to live the way other people think is the right way to live. And it takes a long time. In my case, it certainly did, to figure out that, for lack of a better word, the arc of my life was actually moving in exactly the direction that I wanted it to move. I just didn't know what it was that I wanted. And that seems extremely esoteric, or perhaps...

But maybe that's actually the center point. I mean, maybe... You know, but I mean, the truth is that once you see it, like most great truths, it's a very simple truth. But it can be so difficult to see that you are actually moving in the direction that you should be moving. You just don't know what it is that you want, really. That was absolutely the case with me. I didn't realize that I could never have done it any other way than the way I've done it. And, you know, I'm just intensely grateful that I was forced to examine that by writing this.

When I wrote the essay, it was kind of a, I didn't realize it at the time, but I see it now. It was a crisis point. I didn't feel like I was in crisis. I've never gone through a midlife crisis. I've certainly spent a lot of time complaining to my wife about why I have to live this way, but I don, I don't have to anymore. And I, and I've stopped mostly. Still human, still living in New York, still writing. It's still a family, man. So it's, yeah, but I, I love the notion of just stepping back and owning the fact that like the fact that you're here doing what you're doing, like there's a certain honoring of the path that letting go of the shoulds and the prescribed

path and saying, there's got to be a reason that I've taken the path to get me here. And then looking forward, like you said, really just saying, okay, at this point of inflection, what have I learned? And how can I deliberately, how can I let go of whatever angst I've been torturing myself with about not potentially having chosen this other path and just saying, you know what? It is what it is. I'm actually pretty good. And let me focus on just building more joy along the way as I move forward.

I think there's this wonderful book called Daily Rituals. I don't know if you've ever read it. No, I haven't. It looks at the, like a 24-hour span in the lives of, I think it's a couple of hundred of the world's greatest creators from writing to art to science to entrepreneurship over many, many generations. I was surprised when I read that book at the number of people who had full-time workaday jobs and did exactly what you've done. You know, they write for two, three, four hours in the morning, and then they write in the evening and have produced astonishing work and would never dream of leaving the main gate. In part, it's a money thing.

You know, in part, you get to a point in your life where you want to feel you're supporting your family, you're honoring it. When your value system says, part of what I believe in is that I want to provide whatever illusion of security and whatever it may be for my family. So part of it is sort of an honoring of that belief system that I'm responsible and that's important to me to actually play the role of that, however you may define being a responsible adult in whatever role you're in. Part of it also, at least from my perspective, is the experience of knowing that it's the freedom that you potentially allow yourself to not edit, to not censor, when you know that you're writing

because it's the thing you can't not do. And that if it gets sold at the end of the process, awesome. But even if it doesn't, you know, you haven't centered, you haven't directed what you've written by whether you're going to be able to honor that sense of value to be a responsible adult. You haven't gone through the process and said, well, but if I tell the story this way, will it be more sellable? And there's a freedom that comes from just saying, this needs to be read the way it needs to be read. Yeah, it's true. Again, it's a shame that we always have to learn all of our lessons for

ourselves. You don't seem to be able to pass down these lessons genetically so that nobody else has to go through them. And if you try, both as parents and on either side, if you try, you're almost doing the exact opposite. Oh yeah, what am I going to tell my children? When I was your age, I had a job since I was 14. Why are you so- Right, right. That doesn't work. No, it doesn't work. One thing that I found, what I figured out from writing this book was that my vision of who I was had kind of been frozen at a certain point. And I was looking at myself as a 50-year-old man through the eyes of who I was when I was 25 years old. And so I tended to judge myself rather harshly as we did when we were young.

We judged the whole world harshly. Everybody betrayed their ideals and everybody was corrupt and nobody was honest and true. And that's how I had looked at myself for a long time. I would look in the mirror and I would not see myself with my own eyes, but see myself with the eyes of a 25-year-old and judge myself very harshly. And I think one thing that I learned was that, you know, there's a way to kind of clean those lenses off and see yourself afresh.

And I guess, for lack of a better word, is to forgive yourself or to accept yourself as who you are in a way that, in my case, I had not for a long time. I had felt like a failure, even though there was nothing in my life that could possibly suggest failure. I had raised two fabulous children. I've had this magnificent marriage for decades and decades. I wrote the books that I wanted to write and I was incredibly lucky to have them published. There was nothing to suggest to me, there should have been nothing to suggest that I had done anything wrong at all, except for the fact that I could bottle and sell, I think that would be a very popular product. And in the book, I describe the process of learning to see myself anew,

but it's just mine. It's not prescriptive. And maybe it's also possible that other people don't have to do it. The book certainly isn't. People have asked me if it's a self-help book. And I have to say, well, it's self-help because it helped me. It helped myself. But I couldn't possibly prescribe that for anybody else. But I would suggest that if you reach our age, and I think this is a really good age to really take a step back and look at where you've come from and just stop moving for a few minutes and look around you. Because in your early 50s, you're exactly in the middle of your adult life,

more or less. Try to find a way to look at yourself the way you might look at a potential new friend. You're looking for reasons to like this person. You're looking for reasons to admire them. You're not, why would you meet somebody and look for reasons to dislike them or to judge them on the basis of some superficial characteristic? If you could look at yourself and, oh God, it sounds so new agey. It's not at all what I mean. I don't mean to say, look at yourself and find reasons to like yourself because I mean, that's- But I think it's almost look at yourself and actually see yourself for who you are now. That's it. And also see that the decisions you've made that have led you to this point

were not wrong decisions. They were almost certainly based on a search for something that you need, that you lack, even if you were not aware of needing and lacking them. Again, it was absolutely the case with me that after beating myself up for so long about the possibility that I had shortchanged my career as a writer, I finally came to see that every single decision I had made that had led me up to this point was leading me somewhere where I needed to be. And the fact is, I mean, I'm about to turn 55, which to some people might sound old. To me, it sounds old. But there's a lot of time left to make use of those lessons that you've learned if you can hold on to them into the rest of your life.

I think it's a great place to come full circle as well. So the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer that term out to you, to live a good life, what comes up? To be perfectly honest, I would say the life that I've led, I'm finally beginning to see that it's been pretty good. You can't do very much good for anybody else if you're unhappy.

I was lucky enough to translate a book by a French Buddhist monk named Mathieu Ricard. He's a man who gave up a very promising career as a neurobiologist, and he is now the abbot of a Tibetan monastery in Nepal. He's the personal interpreter of the Dalai Lama, and he wrote this magnificent book called Happiness. And just being the translator of that book changed my life. I would get up again at four and literally jump out of bed for the opportunity to translate this book about the very simple yet hard work it takes to understand that happiness should be your highest goal. Learning to be happy is not about learning to be selfish. I don't think you can be very happy if you're selfish. Learning to be happy is about recognizing that it is the precondition, it's the foundation for everything creative and constructive that you can do in life.

So I would say the Good Life Project has to start with learning to be happy. I suppose that was relatively easy for me because whatever traumas I experienced as a young person were nowhere near as bad as so many people have to deal with and recover from. Most of us are recovering from something, even if it's very mild discomfort as a child. And after that, just simply, once you learn to be happy, you realize that you can't be happy unless you share it with other people. Being creative, being a writer is my way of sharing it. What I have to offer, I can't say it was necessarily of great value to anybody else. But again, in the book, I talk a lot about this book from the 1970s called The Gift by Lewis Hyde. And it's an anthropology book about gift economies where the currency has no value unless it's gifted.

We're not talking necessarily about money. We're talking about goods or stories even. Unlike in our society where currency has value if you hoard it. In a gift economy, it has no value unless it's shared and given away. And it eventually comes back to you. And again, that sounds like something very simple. But the truth is that the only wealth you have is the wealth that you were able to give away. Nothing else really has very much value at all.

It's beginning to work for me. I hope it will continue to work. But that's a good life. It's not everybody's idea of a good life, but you have to find out what your own idea of a good life is. Indeed. Thank you. Pleasure, of course. Hey, thanks so much for listening. We love sharing real, unscripted conversations and ideas that matter. And if you enjoy that too, and if you enjoy what we're up to,

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And if you haven't yet subscribed while you're there, then make sure you hit the subscribe button while you're at it. And then you'll be sure to never miss out on any of our incredible guests or conversations or riffs. And for those of you, our awesome community who are on other platforms, any love that you might be able to offer sharing our message would just be so appreciated. Until next time, this is Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

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