【橘猫推书】

The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

THIRTEEN

Mastery

After William Least Heat-Moon lost his teaching job at the University of Missouri, he decided to take time off and travel around the United States, taking the small back roads that are marked in blue on the Rand McNally maps. Near the town of Hat Creek, California, he met an old man who was taking his dog for a walk.

“A man's never out of work if he's worth a damn,” the old man reflected. “It's just sometimes he doesn't get paid. I've gone unpaid my share and I've pulled my share of pay. But that's got nothing to do with working. A man's work is doing what he's supposed to do, and that's why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn't the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man's work.”

That's a useful distinction. A job is a way of making a living, but work is a particular way of being needed, of fulfilling the responsibility that life has placed before you. Martin Luther King, Jr., once advised that your work should have length—something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth—it should touch many other people. And it should have height—it should put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the soul's yearning for righteousness.

We all know people whose real work is hospitality, but they practice hospitality over the span of many different kinds of jobs. Belden Lane's work is trying to write down and describe the spiritual transcendence he sometimes experiences in nature. But he can't just tell people at dinner parties he's a guy who wanders around in the woods seeking transcendence. “My own particular cover is that of a university professor,” he writes. “It's a way of looking responsible while attending to much more important things.” As a professor, he appears to be “engaged in reputable endeavors, locked into acceptable categories. I manage to satisfy my employer, meet society's expectations, sign checks.” But his real work is up in the mountains, stalking that eternity that is seen in not being seen.

DIGGING THE DAMN DITCH

A person who has found his vocation has been released from the anxiety of uncertainty, but there is still the difficulty of the work itself. All vocational work, no matter how deeply it touches you, involves those moments when you are confronted by the laborious task. Sometimes, if you are going to be a professional, you just have to dig the damn ditch.

All real work has testing thresholds, moments when the world and fate roll stones in your path. All real work requires discipline. “If one is courteous but does it without ritual, then one dissipates one's energies,” Confucius wrote. “If one is cautious but does it without ritual, one becomes timid; if one is bold but does it without ritual, then one becomes reckless; if one is forthright but does it without ritual, then one becomes rude.”

All real work requires a dedication to engage in deliberate practice, the willingness to do the boring things over and over again, just to master a skill. To teach himself to write, Benjamin Franklin took the essays in The Spectator, the leading magazine of his day, and translated them into poetry. Then he took his poems and translated them back into prose. Then he analyzed how his final work was inferior to the original Spectator essays.

When he was teaching himself to play basketball, Bill Bradley set himself a schedule. Three and a half hours of practice every day after school and on Sundays. Eight hours on Saturdays. He wore ten-pound weights on his ankles to strengthen them. His great weakness was dribbling, so he taped pieces of cardboard to the bottom of his glasses so he could not see the ball as he dribbled it. When his family took a trip to Europe by boat, Bradley found two long, narrow corridors belowdecks where he could dribble his basketball at a sprint, hour upon hour, day after day.

Deliberate practice slows the automatizing process. As we learn a skill, the brain stores the new knowledge in the unconscious layers (think of learning to ride a bike). But the brain is satisfied with good enough. If you want to achieve the level of mastery, you have to learn the skill so deliberately that when the knowledge is stored down below, it is perfect.

Some music academies teach pianists to practice their pieces so slowly that if you can recognize the tune you're playing too fast. Some golf academies slow down their pupils so it takes ninety seconds to finish a single swing (try it sometime). Martha Graham covered the mirrors in her dance studies with burlap. If the dancers wanted to check out how they were doing, they would have to feel it by concentrating on the movement of their own bodies.

The more creative the activity is, the more structured the work routine should probably be. When she was writing, Maya Angelou would get up every morning at 5:30 and have coffee. At 6:30 she would go off to a hotel room she kept—a modest room with nothing in it but a bed, a desk, a Bible, a dictionary, a deck of cards, and a bottle of sherry. She would arrive at 7:00 A.M. and write every day until 12:30 P.M.

John Cheever would get up, put on his only suit, and ride the elevator in his apartment building down to a storage room in the basement. Then he'd take off his suit and sit in his boxers and write until noon. Then he would put his suit back on and ride the escalator upstairs to lunch.

Anthony Trollope, an extreme case, would sit down at his writing table at 5:30 each morning. A servant would bring a cup of coffee at the same time. He would write 250 words every fifteen minutes for two and a half hours every day. His daily total was exactly 2,500 words, and if he finished a novel without writing that allotment, he would immediately start a new novel to hit the mark.

H. A. Dorfman is one of the great baseball psychologists. In his masterpiece, The Mental ABC's of Pitching, Dorfman says that this kind of structured discipline is necessary if you want to escape the tyranny of the scattered mind. “Self-discipline is a form of freedom,” he writes. “Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt.”

Dorfman advises pitchers to adopt the same pregame rituals, game after game. Walk from the locker room to the same spot on the bench, put your water bottle in the exact same spot, stretch in the same way. He tells pitchers to structure the geography of their workplace. There are two locales in a pitcher's universe—on the mound and off the mound. When a pitcher is on the mound he should be thinking about only two things, pitch selection and pitch location. If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should get off the mound.

The mind is focused when it is going forward in a straight line, he argues. The discipline is to put the task at the center. The pitcher's personality isn't at the center. His talent and anxiety aren't at the center. The task is at the center. The master has the ability to self-distance from what he is doing. He's able to be cool about the thing he feels most passionate about.

If you do this long enough, you begin to understand your own strengths and limitations, and you develop your own individual method. A few years into writing, I came to see how bad my memory is, and how hard it is to organize my thoughts sequentially. Ideas occur to me in some sort of random order, when I'm least expecting them. So I took to carrying around little notebooks in my back pocket, where I can put my jottings. When I research a piece, I collect hundreds of pages of printed documents. If a read a book, I photocopy all the important pages.

It turns out I think geographically. I need to see all my notes and pages physically laid out before me if I'm to get a sense of what I have. So I invented a system that works for me. I separate all my relevant papers into piles on the carpet of my study or living room. Each pile is a paragraph in my column or my book. My newspaper column is only 850 words, but it may require fourteen piles on the floor. The writing process is not sitting at the keyboard typing. It is crawling around on the carpet laying out my piles. Once that's done, I pick up each pile from the floor and bring it to the big table on which I write, and I separate the paragraph piles into sentence piles. And then after I've typed the ideas on my keyboard, I throw out the pile and move to the next pile. Writing is really about structure and traffic management. If you don't have the structure right, nothing else will happen. For me, crawling about on the floor working on my piles are the best moments of my job.

THE VOCATION MAKES THE PERSON

Work is the way we make ourselves useful to our fellows. “There may be no better way to love your neighbor,” Tim Keller put it, “whether you are writing parking tickets or software or books, than to simply do your work. But only skillful, competent work will do.”

Vocation can be a cure for self-centeredness, because to do the work well you have to pay attention to the task itself.

Vocation can be a cure for restlessness. Mastering a vocation is more like digging a well. You do the same damn thing day after day, and gradually, gradually, you get deeper and better. “In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself,” Emerson wrote, “add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, happy enough if he can truly satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly.”

Emerson underlines one of the key elements of the commitment decision. At the beginning it involves a choice—choosing this or that vocation. But 99.9 percent of the time it means choosing what one has already chosen. Just as all writing is really rewriting, all commitment is really recommitment. It's saying yes to the thing you've already said yes to.

Mike Beebe grew up in a tar shack, the son of a teenage single mom. He graduated from high school in Arkansas, got a college degree from Arkansas State, and a law degree from the University of Arkansas. In 1982, he was elected to the state legislature, and in 2007 he became governor. He became one of the most popular governors in state history, and in the nation. In 2010, Republicans were beating Democrats all around the nation, but in Arkansas Beebe swept all seventy-five counties on his way to reelection.

What was his secret? One key factor was that he had no national ambitions. Arkansas was his home and Arkansas was where he would focus all his energy. A Unitarian pastor in New York, Galen Guengerich, read about Beebe and drew the proper conclusion. Sometimes it's right to move on and try something new, Guengerich observed,

but we also need to learn the virtue of staying put and staying true, of choosing again what we chose before. In my view that's one of the main reasons we come to church.

We're here not so much to make spiritual progress each week, though that's wonderful when it happens. Rather, we mostly come for the consistency—for what remains the same from week to week: the comfort of the liturgy, the solace of the music, the reassuring sight of familiar faces, the enduring presence of ancient rites and timeless symbols. We're here to remind ourselves of values that unite us and commitments that keep us heading in the right direction. We're here to choose again what we chose before.

If you watch people over the course of long careers, you notice that people get better at some mental tasks and worse at others. They say the brain peaks early in life, in the twenties. After that, brain cells die, memory deteriorates. But the lessons of experience compensate. We get much better at recognizing patterns and can make decisions with much less effort. The neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg studies the patterns of the brain. Late in his career he wrote this about his own abilities: “Something rather intriguing has happened in my mind that did not happen in the past. Frequently, when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary. The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”

People who have achieved mastery no longer just see the individual chess pieces; they see the whole. They perceive the fields of forces that are actually driving the match. Musicians talk about seeing the entire architecture of a piece of music, not just the notes.

BECOMING THE BOSS

Bruce Springsteen's life neatly traces the path from inexperience to mastery, and illustrates what happens to a person when he has given himself to his vocation. Springsteen had his annunciation moment when he was seven. He was watching The Ed Sullivan Show, and suddenly Elvis Presley appeared. It was astounding, as Springsteen put it in his memoir, “a new kind of man, of modern human, blurring racial lines and gender lines and having…FUN!…FUN!…the real kind. The life-blessing, wall-destroying, heart-changing, mind-opening bliss of a freer, more liberated existence.”

Little Bruce Springsteen looked at Elvis and had a visceral sense that that's what he wanted to be. “All relationships begin in projection,” James Hollis observes. Springsteen dragged his mother to the music store and, with almost no money to spend, rented a guitar. He took it home, practiced on it for a few weeks, and promptly quit. It was too hard.

Springsteen came from the sort of house that seems to regularly produce childhood misery, a lifetime of analysis, and phenomenal success. That is, he had a loving and doting mother and a cold and distant father. They were so poor their house was literally falling apart. They had to carry hot water from the kitchen to the bathtub. As a child he was nicknamed “Blinky” because he had a nervous tic of blinking hundreds of times a minute. He was a shy, awkward teenager.

But then lightning struck again. In 1964, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Springsteen felt the same call he'd felt with Elvis, the same devouring curiosity. He went to the local five-and-ten-cent store, made his way to the small record section in the back, and found what he later called “the greatest album cover of all time.” All it said was Meet the Beatles! and all it showed was four half-shadowed faces. “That was exactly what I wanted to do.”

When we talk about these moments afterward, we tend to emphasize the low ambitions in them and get shy when talking about the high ones, because we don't want to sound pretentious. When you ask musicians why they went into music, they invariably say that they did it to get girls or be loved or make money, but those low motivations are often tales they tell because they don't want to appear earnest about their high and powerful idealism—the need to express some emotion in themselves, to explore some experience.

One of the best pieces of advice for young people is, Get to yourself quickly. If you know what you want to do, start doing it. Don't delay because you think this job or that degree would be good preparation for doing what you eventually want to do. Just start doing it. Springsteen, with no plan B options and no distractions, got to himself quickly.

He bought a beat-up old guitar and tried to teach himself to play. Five months later, his fingers were callused and hard. He joined a band, played a gig at his own high school, was completely terrible, and got kicked out of the band.

That night, he pulled out a Rolling Stones album, heard a Keith Richards guitar solo, and stayed up all night trying to copy it. Springsteen spent every weekend at YMCA or high school dances. He did no dancing. He just stood off to the side studying the lead guitarist. Then he'd rush home alone to his room and play everything he'd seen. As Oswald Chambers once noted, “Drudgery is the touchstone of character.”

Springsteen joined more bands, and by the time he was twenty, he'd played in every conceivable small venue—YMCAs, pizza parlors, gas station openings, weddings, bar mitzvahs, firemen's conventions, the Marlboro Psychiatric Hospital. He began, slowly, to get good. He knew no one in Asbury Park, New Jersey, but there was a bar there with a set of speakers. Musicians could just sign up for a half-hour slot, plug in, and play. Springsteen walked into the room, where no one knew him, and let loose. As he wrote in his memoir, Born to Run, “I watched people sit up, move closer, and begin to pay serious attention.” What followed, he recalled, was “thirty scorching minutes of guitar Armageddon, then I walked off.” A new gunslinger had come to town.

Springsteen gathered the best musicians he could find—others who had also closed off all the other options. They toured Jersey relentlessly. They went to Greenwich Village in New York, ninety minutes and a world away, and were hit by the hard truth that most of the bands there were better than they were. There are (at least) two kinds of failure. In the first kind you are good, but other people can't grasp how good you are. Melville's Moby-Dick sold only 2,300 copies in its first eighteen months and only 5,500 copies in its first fifty years. It was savaged by reviewers. Some artists have to create the taste by which they will be judged. In the second kind, you fail because you're not as good as you thought you were, and other people see it.

We all want to imagine that our failures are of the first kind, but one suspects that something like 95 percent of failures are of the second kind. One of the character tests on the road to mastery involves recognizing that fact.

You can be knowledgeable with other men's knowledge, but you can't be wise with other men's wisdom. Springsteen's early struggles taught him to pay attention to the parts of the job that are not the fun parts, but are the stuff you have to take care of to make the thing work. He spent more and more time thinking about how to craft a band. He fired a manager. He fired a drummer who was occasionally brilliant but often inconsistent. He thought about management structures. The band would not be a democracy. He would run it.

We like to think that rock stars, of all people, work hard and party hard. But the master almost never lives in the same body as the swinger. Mastery takes too much discipline and usually involves some form of asceticism. Bruce Springsteen worked in bars throughout his early career, but he never had a drink. He sang about factories all his life, but he never actually set foot in a working factory. He sang song after song about cars, but as a young man he didn't know how to drive. Rock and roll is about wildness and pleasure, but after his concerts Springsteen has a ritual. He's in his hotel room alone—with fried chicken, french fries, a book, TV, and bed.

Art is, as Springsteen says, a bit of a con job. It's about projecting an image of the rock star, even if you don't really live it.

Some people achieve flow socially. They are out with a bunch of friends at dinner or at a party, or dancing with a gang, and self-consciousness fades away. But many artists have trouble disappearing naturally into their lives. They feel separate from others and want to be connected somehow. It's precisely the lack of social and emotional flow that can propel creativity. As the poet Christian Wiman puts it, “An artist is conscious of always standing apart from life, and one of the results of this can be that you begin to feel most intensely what you have failed to feel: a certain emotional reserve in one's life becomes a source of great power in one's work.”

In 1972, at age twenty-two, Springsteen was finally discovered. His first two records were not commercially successful, so the fate of his career hung on the third. It turned out to be Born to Run. Springsteen was on the cover of both Time and Newsweek in the same week, back when that meant something.

He was suddenly a star. The next obvious step was to take it up a notch, to broaden his appeal even more. This, of course, is what the record company and everybody around him wanted. It's the natural progression. If you're a beginner, you become a star. If you're a star you become a superstar.

What followed was the crucial moment in Springsteen's climb to mastery. Instead of going outward and national, he went down and local. His next album would be a deeper dive into his own people, the people on the margins of small towns in central New Jersey. He would pare back the music to make it reflect the solitary characters he was writing about. There's a moment in many successful careers when the prospect of success tries to drag you away from your source, away from the daemon that incited your work in the first place. It is an act of raw moral courage to reject the voices all around and to choose what you have chosen before. It looks like you are throwing away your chance at stardom, but you are actually staying in touch with what got you there.

“Here was where I wanted to make my stand musically and search for my own questions and answers,” Springsteen writes. “I didn't want out. I wanted in. I didn't want to erase, escape, forget or reject. I wanted to understand. What were the social forces that held my parents' lives in check? Why was it so hard?”

Here was the paradox: Springsteen grew up in the height of the “I'm Free to Be Myself” era. Rock music was the classic expression of that ethos. Springsteen himself sang about escaping and running away to total freedom. But personally, he never fell for that false lure. He went back deeper into his roots, deeper into his unchosen responsibilities, and to this day lives ten minutes from where he grew up.

“I sensed there was a great difference between unfettered personal license and real freedom. Many of the groups that had come before us, many of my heroes, had mistaken one for the other and it'd ended in poor form. I felt personal license was to freedom as masturbation was to sex. It's not bad, but it's not the real deal.” Springsteen felt accountable to the people he'd grown up with, few of whom had been to college, most of whom were struggling, and so he went back and planted himself in that ground.

A few decades later, I watched him perform to sixty-five thousand screaming young fans in Madrid. Their T-shirts celebrated all the local central Jersey places that pop up in Springsteen songs and lore—Highway 9, the Stone Pony, Greasy Lake. It turns out he didn't really have to go out and find his fans. If he built a landscape about his own particular home, they would come to him. It makes you appreciate the tremendous power of the particular. If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place, if you embody a distinct tradition, if your concerns are expressed through a specific imaginative landscape, you are going to have more depth and definition than you are if you grew up on the far-flung networks of eclecticism, surfing from one spot to the next, sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft commitments or none at all.

One of my students, Jon Endean, once told me about a college professor he had at Rice University named Michael Emerson. Emerson, who is white, is a sociologist who taught about racial justice. To demonstrate the power of identity, he invented a label for each student in the class: “Kentucky Guy,” “Fried Pickles Gal,” and the like. He called himself “A Common Guy” or just “Common.” He walked them through a series of exercises to show how labels shape lives. For example, they created black and white online dating profiles so they could observe the differences in how people reacted. Endean told me that Common was one of the best teachers he ever had, and his work, on the role of race, religion, and urban life, is prominent in the field.

Common not only taught about racial justice, every house he and his wife, Joni, have ever bought was in a black neighborhood. As a result, every one of those houses lost value over the time of his residence. Common and Joni also sent their children to nearly all-black schools. When they were five or six, they self-identified as black. For them racial identity was not a skin tone; it was who all their friends were.

Rice's sociology department has a fund of money for research that it splits up equally among the faculty each year. Common, who already had a tenured chair, gave his money to junior faculty, figuring they would need it more in order to get tenure. He eventually left his chair at Rice to go to work at North Park University in Chicago. He gave up a prestigious job at a prestigious school for a job at an obscure school because he thought the students at North Park could be served in different ways than the students at Rice.

Endean told me about Common several years ago, but he stays in the mind, a vision of a person who has found a total commitment, and an example of the way a vocation, when lived out to the fullest, connects all things, comes together in one coherent package, overshadows the self, and serves some central good.