All language subtitles for MasterClass Malcolm Gladwell Teaches Writing_08-15-21

A pattern is something that appears in

uh different worlds simultaneously.

That's what a pattern to my mind is. So

you'll see patterns so long as you

inhabit different worlds.

So a you know a pattern might be

something that shows up in music,

fashion and

you know sports. A trend would be

something that surfaces and those worlds

are connected but

not they don't overlap. They're have

subtle connections but if you see

something popping up in those kinds of

then you know oh that's a trend right?

So in order to see the trend, all you

really need to do is to spend a little

bit of time in those different worlds.

So I always think of part of what I need

to do in order to kind of understand

what's going on is

uh to make sure that I'm regularly

leaving my own little island and

visiting other islands. Um, I don't

always do a good job of that, but um,

sometimes it's just about, you know, but

uh, yeah, I don't know if I always do a

good job of that, but I do try I do

think in my mind about how important it

is to uh, to trespass into in foreign

territories.

The book David and Goliath the original

idea

came from I went to a conference once

and

it was a software conference and I

didn't know anything about software but

they had this kind of mixer that I was

required to attend and I found myself

chatting to this guy it's from India and

he was talking about we talked about

sports because that's all I could talk

about because I didn't know anything

about soccer. So, we're talking about

sports and he told me that he was the

coach of his daughter's basketball team.

And I said, "Oh, cuz I he had a very

strong Indian accent. It was clear he

was an immigrant to this country of

relatively recent vintage." And I was

like, "Oh, did you know that's kind of

interesting, you know, it wasn't like

most basketball coaches are people who

had played basketball as a kid." And I

was like, "Did you play basketball in

India?" He's like, "Oh, no. I played

cricket. Never even." It's like, "So,

wow, you must have mastered, you know, I

got him talking and he told me this

story." He's like, "Yeah, I know nothing

about basketball." He said, "In fact, I

think basketball

as it's played by Americans is crazy. I

don't Once I got the rules explained to

me, I was like, why do they play it in

such a weird way?" He didn't understand

why

one team would advance the ball up the

court and the other team would wait, the

team on defense would wait at the other

end for the play to come to them. If you

know basketball, what he was wondering

was why don't teams on defense play a

fullcourt press the whole game all the

time. The most,

you know, basically he was like, you let

the defenses nine times out of 10 let

the other team advance into their own

end and set up their offense and then

they decide to defend. It would be as if

we waited for Canada to arrive on the

outskirts of Washington DC right before

we mounted a defense. And so for someone

who comes from a different culture he's

like this is the craziest thing I've

ever heard. So he's like I he had this

team and they were all he was from

Silicon Valley. His daughter was like 12

all the all these 12-y old girls. He was

like the other thing I realized was they

didn't know how to play basketball and I

didn't know how to coach it because I

didn't know anything about basketball.

So, I decided we're just going to play

defense. So, he got these girls and he

just told them to play fullcourt press

the entire time. He's like, "All we need

to know was to learn how to shoot

layups, but everything else was beyond

our specialtity." And he was like, what

he discovered was if you play really

maniacal defense all the time and you're

in a league of 12-year-old girls, you'll

win every game because no one can

advance the ball. And so he he had a

group of ragtag nerdy girls from Silicon

Valley and they took he went all the way

to the state championships with a bunch

of girls who had no discernable

basketball skills whatsoever. I thought

this is the funniest thing I've ever

heard.

And of course I did nothing with it

because I'm an idiot. And then I went

home and like a year later was talking

about basketball with my friend Bruce

and I said, "You know, so funny. This

guy told me this hilarious story once at

a conference and Bruce looked at me and

said, "Why have you never written about

that?" I like, "You're right. That's a

great story." So, I called up this guy,

his name was VC, and I was like, "Can I

come and see you because I want to

actually talk about your daughter's

basketball team." So, I went and I wrote

a story. It's fun little story for the

New Yorker. Um, parathetically, VC turns

out to be a guy named VC Ranadiv who two

years later bought the Sacramento Kings

basketball team. He was so inspired by

his experience coaching his daughter's

basketball team that he went out and

bought an NBA team. He was super rich.

But I really really loved the story and

we called that story The New Yorker when

David meets Goliath or when David beat

or I've forgotten some version of David

and Goliath. And I thought, you know,

the

I always love

um to me part of the challenge with

stories that are about ideas is framing

them in a way that makes sense to people

that simply and quickly communicates to

them what the idea is. So, six degrees

of Lois Weisberg, if you know about the

concept of six degrees of separation and

six degrees of Kevin Bacon and all those

kinds of ideas, you instantly know,

boom, it's about someone who's at the

center of a social circle, right? David

and Goliath is a concept we all know.

The little guy beats up on the giant.

And that I thought, well, if I wanted I

want I think this is a really

interesting idea to explore in a book.

How do little guys beat giants? And so

that led me to the story of David and

Goliath. Now, in my original story about

Becad and his daughter's basketball

team, I had told the story of David and

Goliath the standard way.

David shoots a slingshot and hits

Goliath between the eyes and Goliath

falls over. And I thought, well, I'll

tell a more sophisticated version of

that story in the book. So, I started to

read theological literature on the story

of David and Goliath. I called up my

friend Jim, who's a pastor, and said,

'What should I read? And he sent me all

kinds of things. And I went to the

seminary library and I read all these

texts from 300 years ago. And

there it was just all versions of the

same

story. It was didn't really help me. I

learned something about where the

confrontation between David and Goliath

took place, but wasn't it didn't

transform the story in my own um eyes

until I stumbled across this weird paper

that had been written by uh an

endocrinologist, an Israeli

endocrinologist

who had suggested, wait a minute,

there's another way to see this story,

and that is from a medical standoint.

point. Goliath sounds a lot like someone

who has this really rare medical

condition which is caused by uh a growth

in the pituitary gland which causes you

to lose your eyesight. And if you think

about that and read the story in the

Bible again, you realize there's all

these clues about how the fact that

Goliath is blind. The giant is blind.

And once you understand the giant is

blind, you have this fantastic metaphor

for why why do giants lose? because they

can't see, they're so big and strong and

powerful, they lose the ability to kind

of um properly appreciate the world

around them, right? And that was a

really important lesson to me because I

didn't to me it's the best story in the

book and that insight about Goliath

transforms the biblical story of David

and Goliath in this it makes it even

more beautiful and powerful um because

it's not just a story about David's

courage and greatness. It's a story

about Goliath's blindness, right? It's

suddenly you've got two characters who

teach you something crucial about the

world, not just one. Right? Goliath in

the traditional telling is an empty

vessel. He's just a big dude, an

arrogant big dude who thinks he's going

fighting a sword fight and David changed

the rules, right? It's just about

David's cunning and no, no, he's more

than an arrogant big dude. He is someone

who has been blinded by his strength.

But that was a you don't I didn't get to

that until I stepped

outside of till I stopped reading all

the theological literature and

understood that a story can live in a

variety of different worlds.

Right? It's not just the theologians who

thought about David and Goliath. It's

also the endocrinologists.

Right? Now, that's a really, really

crucial because so often when we try and

tell a story, we think a story belongs

to a world and we stay within that

world. And that's a really good way to

be boring and to miss truths.

I once wrote a a piece I love. I don't

know whether the rest of the world loves

it, but I wrote a piece for The New

Yorker about um a guy named Caesar

Milan. And Caesar Milan had a show, I

don't know if he still does, for many

years called The Dog Whisperer. Um and

it was all about Caesar's incredible

ability to he was always called in when

a dog was misbehaving. And I wanted to

do a profile of Caesar.

And I wanted to be very, very simple. I

wanted to have one idea in it and

I decided the way to do it was to step

outside the world of dogs and of people

who deal with dogs and to talk about

movement

because

what I understood from hang I went to

California hung out with Caesar for like

a week and what I understood from Caesar

was that everything that was crucial

about how he worked with troubling dogs

was not about what he said or what he it

was about what how he moved that he had

a way of moving that calmed dogs, a way

of approaching them, a way of carrying

his body, a way of matching his voice to

his movements. And in response, the dogs

move differently. It was all about the

more I observed it, I realized, oh, this

is about dancing,

right? This is to understand Caesar you

need and the dogs you need the

vocabulary of dancing of people who are

interested in describing and

understanding and communicating through

movement. So I wonder whether there was

uh a language associated with movement.

There had to be people who studied

movement, right? Particularly dancers.

If you think about it,

even something as simple as if you're

doing a ballet

and someone has a particularly intricate

movement in the ballet, how do you

describe it? Like it's not like, you

know, for music you have musical

notation for, you know, I suppose you

could videotape it, but that's a

relatively recent phenomenon. They had

to have some way to describe movement.

So I was like, I got to find that

person. Um, so I found turns out there

is such a language and there are all

kinds of people and they're totally

happy to talk to you if you call them up

and I went to see them and we had long a

lovely conversation with this long um

with a woman who was a kind of an expert

in this and in teaching in using

principles of dance

uh to help people in their communication

in all kinds of realms. and she had a

friend even more crucially who used the

principles of movement to help autistic

children because to be autistic um am

among the many problems autistic people

have is in the management of their own

physicality

um they're very bad at self soothing

they're they all and what they do is a

what this woman was doing was she was a

movement therapist and as I looked at I

went to see her and talked to to her and

watched all kinds of tapes of people

that she had um dealt with. It struck me

that what she was doing on a much more

sophisticated

and meaningful level was exactly the

same as was analogous to what Caesar

Milan was doing with dogs with calming

troubled dogs. Now that's a in some ways

that's a tricky comparison because you

don't want to say autistic kids are like

dogs but that's not what I was saying. I

was saying that the same principles were

being used by this guy on TV as are

being used in much more consequential

settings with people struggling with

real life problems in the world. And

what what was interesting about that was

and what made I think the story so

important was

um I took what would be something that

was trivial dogs like little yappy dogs

in LA like ultimately who cares if they

misbehave and you got to call in someone

who does a kind of reality TV show about

calming them down right that's funny and

it might be interesting it has no weight

and so by stepping outside that world

and saying wait a minute can Can I add

weight to this story? And it turns out

you can. And to my mind, the most moving

part of the story that I wrote was when

I described the work that that woman was

doing with a particular boy, autistic

boy, in teaching him how to move. Um,

ultimately in teaching him how to dance,

right, to relate to music. And suddenly

what you thought of as this little slice

of pop culture was something that

hopefully taught you something

profoundly moving about how to heal

um how to heal people who had real

problems.

And that, you know, that all stems from

an unwillingness to settle for the world

that I was given, right? The world I

started with, which is the world of a a

Mexican guy and dogs in LA, right? And

being determined to find another um uh

universe to to tell a story about. And I

think people should always that's a

question that

uh writers non-fiction writers need to

always ask themselves which is is there

another is there an analogist world

that's dealt with this same question. Um

and that can transform a story into

something u much more powerful.

If someone's a jerk, you can pick it up

in their writing. Just pay attention.

You go like, "Oh, I really don't want to

hang out with this person. They're

they're really high in their own

supply." Or sometimes writers who they

insert themselves gratuitously into

stories and you're like that is just not

you know did you really are you really

that do you really think you're that

important that you have to you know

they'll they'll talk about some

incredibly consequential thing and then

they'll just

start talking about their own something

that happened in their own lives and

it's not equivalent. You're like, you

know, so you you're coming your your

listener is assessing not just what

you're saying, but who you are.

So, you can't you can't get away with

you can no more get get away with being

obnoxious or egotistical or

self-indulgent in a piece of writing

than you can in a conversation. There's

no difference, right? You can't hide

your personality when you write. It

comes out loud and clear. I read a piece

recently, I won't say where, and it was

about

this controversy at some fraternity,

and the writer,

it was really clear to me, the writer

had

they had about five 4,000 words of

material and they wanted to write a long

story. So they handed in 8,000 words and

the rest was just padding.

They took a trip and the trip

and visited somebody and interviewed

someone and the interview wasn't

terribly interesting.

Didn't add to the story but and they

didn't do anything with it that made it

made me happy to go down that

digression. They just wanted to prove

that they had flown all the way to

California to talk to this person. And I

resented it. It's like, I don't care if

you went to California. I know you I

know you want to show the writer wanted

to desperately to show readers that they

had done their homework. I went to

California. I went to Pennsylvania. I

read this report. That was like loud and

clear in the piece. Time and time again,

we were reminded just how hard the

writer worked. We don't want to know

how. We don't care. We assume

I assume you worked hard. Of course you

did. But you don't have to don't waste

my time on 800 words on your California

trip. That turned out to be a total

waste of time and money, right? It's

just a So there's that the writer wasn't

thinking about how they were coming

across. They were so anxious to make

this kind of um they were so uh insecure

about their status as a writer that they

that they ended up like going on on

these these digressions that had no uh I

I don't want to say had no function

because digressions don't have to have a

function. They just have to be

interesting, right? It wasn't

interesting. It was just serving the

kind of uh troubled ego, fragile ego of

the writer.

Invariably in a public speaking event,

there's a Q&A.

And Q&As's are very difficult. And

they're difficult because you're

essentially selecting a random sample of

people and allowing them giving them the

floor. So some people ask don't ask some

people just go on forever don't really

ask a question some people ask a bad

question and some people ask a question

you can't answer and some people ask a

good question right so you all kinds of

questions and you have to learn how to

manage that and one of the things I've

learned from Q&As's is that

one of the ways you manage the the

impossible problem posed by a Q&A is

with your own tone

Uh

so if you strike the right tone in the

talk before and in the way that you have

answered the questions leading up to the

impossible question, you can answer

impossible questions. I'll give you an

example. Um years ago, I always remember

this one. years ago, I gave a talk to a

group of

uh they were a group of a subsp

specialty within psychology that deals

with what are called human factors.

They're the guys who figure out when you

get into a car,

you know, this is a very simple thing

they will do. Where should the

speedometer be? Where should the gear

gear shift be? So that you don't make a

mistake with it. Well, they also do that

for when I'm designing a missile system

and I want to make sure the guy who

fires the missile doesn't make a

mistake. What should where should the

button be? How should it be designed?

They do all that kind of stuff. Super

super smart people. I gave I know

nothing about that world. I gave some

talk. I was invited to give the kind of

public talk and

I was

self-deprec.

but also because it was important to set

that tone. They legitimately are

exceedingly expert, well educated,

sophisticated people and I'm just a guy

from

New York who's flown in for the day. I

cannot presume to Anyway, fast forward

to the Q&A. Somebody asked me one of the

most brutal questions I've ever been

asked. And you know basically he went

through something I had said and then

something I had written earlier and

proved that I had massively

oversimplified

and basically butchered a very

complicated subject.

And so I was like I mean and the whole

room was like whoa you just got

completely smoked by this guy right? But

the way because I had set the right

tone, I was like basically I basically

said I forgotten the exact words, but it

was something to the effect of um if you

are accusing me of being more

interesting than correct or something

like that, I plead guilty. But

basically, I was like, you got me right.

But that works if you went in with the

right in with the right tone. The tone

was, "Look, I'm happy to be here. Just

to be clear, you all know this stuff way

better than I do. I'm just here to to

amuse you, you know, and if you want to

give me good advice at the end,

fantastic." So, when a guy asked that

question, I was able to turn it into,

you know, thank you for pointing out

stuff that I can do better and and by

the way, you know, this is exactly what

I thought would happen. And it's kind of

fantastic that

in your writing could be the same way.

You have to when you're writing

something, one thing you need to pay

attention to is how am I coming? How is

my tone coming across?

When the troubles began in Northern

Ireland, Rosemary Lawler was just a

newlywed. That is the first line of a

chapter in my book David and Goliath

that is about

uh the long

bitter bloody conflict in Northern

Ireland between Catholics and

Protestants. And

what I'm there's a number of things I'm

trying to get at in that chapter. Um,

but mostly what I'm trying to get at is

to explain on a human level

um what happens to people when they get

caught up in

um cycles of violence. What does it feel

like? Um and how the failure of people

in power to appreciate that feeling, to

understand what that feeling is like um

is often the cause of further conflict.

is what makes these conflicts so endless

and bloody. And that the people who are

trying to end them or trying to confront

the disorder never stop and think about

um the people that they're fighting on a

personal level. Don't think of them as

individuals and think of them as kind of

faceless representatives of a hostile

force. Um, and this I feel like this

mistake is made up again and again and

again. And in that chapter I was trying

to kind of

um describe that

failing using

um the story of Northern Ireland, the

troubles in Northern Ireland. And so the

tone

that I'm trying to strike from the

beginning is personal.

And the first line,

Rosemary Lawler was just a newlywed.

The two key words are just and newlywed.

Why newlywed? Because newlywed summons

immediately a picture of um hopefulness

and

um enthusiasm

and naive

and innocence,

right? You've just you've just come from

your wedding, right? You were in the

first blush of young love.

So, I wanted to immediately establish

her. We're about to talk about all kinds

of dark and terrible things that

happened to her over the course of her

life and her family and how she gets

caught up in all of this violence. But

before I

implicate her

in all of the horrors of Northern

Ireland, I want to establish her in your

mind as an innocent figure to make it

plain to you that the darkness that she

becomes a part of was not present in her

in the beginning. In other words, it was

imposed on her, not brought by her. She

wasn't a dark person who joined up with

similarly

uh uh dark people to create madness and

terror for 20 years. She was an innocent

who was pulled into this situation that

turned people into hard and cynical and

violent people. That's what the chapter

is all about.

So the there are several ways you can

communicate innocence but newly the word

newlywed is just about

the best and why the word just because

I'm saying she's nothing else at that

moment. She's not a she's not a an

apologist for violence at that moment.

She's not a terrified mother at that

moment. She's not a uh a political

activist at that moment. She's

completely unformed. She is just a

newlywed, right? All of those other

things that we're going to hear about

that happened to her over the course of

her life have not yet begun. So we are

it's a way of saying just says we are

starting at the beginning and we are

going to descend into the hell of

Belfast. Right? That's so that that's

there that to my mind that was the most

effective way to to to signal where I

thought the chapter was headed.

The language of sports is different from

the language of other things.

um that your language as a writer is a

function in part of who your audience is

and the medium in which you're writing,

but also of the subject. That one of the

really fascinating things about to my

mind about

the way Americans or actually anyone

around the world talk about sports is

that sports frees people up. They're

free to be emotional in ways they

wouldn't normally be emotional. They're

free to be to denounce things in the way

they normally would. You know, you you

will scream with the television, you

know, when your own team does something

that you disagree with, you idiot. I

can't believe you would never say that

to someone you worked with or someone in

your family in the same way. And that's

part of what's so lovely and important

about sports, right? that you're so when

I'm writing about sports I reflect that

I don't feel inhibited. I can call in my

other writing I would never call someone

an idiot. I call Roger Goodell an idiot

all the time. Um I have a crus I've been

conducting a crusade against the owner

of the Knicks for years.

um James Dolan and I routinely call him

the dumbest owner in sports and I you

know this kind of Bill and I have done

these back and forth many times and we

always take the time to take a shot at

James Dolan.

That's a function of the fact that if

you own a sports franchise, part of the

contract you've made with the fan base

is you've opened yourself up to that

kind of criticism. You get all kinds of

breaks. Taxpayers will pay for your

stadiums. You get to hang out with

celebrities. You get to make, you know,

deals for athletes, which is super fun.

You do all these amazing things. You get

an incredible business deal. You get to

buy into a monopoly, and it rises in

value every year. But on the downside,

there's one downside and that is you are

you become uh you can be a uh the uh

object of completely uninhibited

emotional responses from your fan base.

That's the rule, right? I'm I wouldn't

say of a CEO of

some Fortune 500 company that what they

do for fun is dump a pile of cash in the

middle of the boardroom and roll around

in it. No, would never. It would be

completely inappropriate. But if I'm

talking about Roger Goodell and the NFL

owners, everyone is completely fine with

that. Like that's appropriate

conversation.

Your writing style is a is an instrument

that needs to be honed and trained and

and one of the ways I think you can

train it is by moving back and forth

between different forms.

um write between writing in a very very

buttoned up formal voice and writing in

the most

kind of freeing voice imaginable.

Imagine in fact taking the same story

and writing it five ways. Write it as a

series of texts. Write it as three

emails.

Write it as a a letter to a friend.

write it as a something that's going to

be published in a pretentious literary

magazine.

That's that you know that story if it's

if you do the exercise correctly, the

form in a broken down in a series of

texts is going to be unrecognizable when

placed next to the formal version for

the pretentious literary magazine. They

should the same things will be said,

same story will be told but the tone

and the everything about the manner in

which the story is told will be

completely different.

Another

thing to practice is find another writer

and do an email exchange back and forth

on some some topic where each of you

writes a paragraph, no more than a

paragraph, and each of you has no more

than 15 minutes to write that paragraph.

And just see just it'll get you. And so

you're you're you're practicing

responding to someone speaking in a

you'll quickly you'll find the two of

you will converge on a tone, right? And

that's a kind of fun exercise. But just

that notion of coming up with something

interesting to say in the moment um and

you know hitting the send button and you

got to live with it. Once you've hit

send, it's an email exchange. You can't

go back and you know revise it. You got

to keep going. And that's a very I think

that's a really can be a very fun way of

of practicing your craft.

I always I think that of if you're in

the business of writing then you're in

the business of creating comparative

advantage for yourself. Um, so I always

ask the question, what can I do to make

sure that I'm different from everyone

that I'm competing with? Um, I the that

always should be the first question that

you ask yourself. What is it about what

I'm doing that will make me stand out

that will not necessarily be better. I

think that's way too high a bar. I don't

even imagine that I'll be better than

everybody else, but I do want to be

different from everybody else. I want

there to be a reason for people to turn

to me. They're getting something they

can't get anywhere else. So when when I

immigrated to America when I was 20, um

it did I was sort of aware that I was

less typical partly because I'm came

from Canada, partly because um I am

biracial and it matters more in this

country. Um but more

and I have consciously tried to defend

my differentness now um because I

realize it's very useful.

Um I still I never became an American

citizen

even though I've lived here now for 35

years. um in part as symbolic as a

symbolic statement not because I hate

America but because it is important for

what I do for me to continue to think of

myself as an outsider and so carrying a

kind of Canadian passport is a symbol of

that um that reminds me that um that's

necessary in the work I do that people

read me or uh not because I because they

want something that's unusual. They're

trying they want to see a get a glimpse

of a perspective different from their

own. Um now not every writer I think

necessarily represents difference in

that same way but that's what

that's what I think the meaning of my

writing is to people. And uh I don't

think I think I I think that I can't

change that. I think that's

that is that is the identity I have

established in the minds of those who

read my work and it's not something I

should ever

um mess with.

I was a history major in college. Uh,

and the day I graduated from college, I

swore that I would never set foot in

another

uh classroom again. Um, I was done with

school. Um, not done with learning, but

done with school. Um, and I entirely by

chance got a job at a magazine, a little

obscure magazine in Indiana called The

American Spectator. And they sent a long

form to fill out with all, you know,

essays about why this and this, who I

was. And the last question, which you

had a full page, was why do you want to

work at the American Spectator? And I

didn't know anything about it. And I was

all a bit of a lark. So, I simply wrote,

"Doesn't everyone want to work at the

American Spectator?" And I got the job.

So, I went there and I worked there for

a couple of months before I got fired

because I couldn't uh handle the

transition to 9 to5 because in college I

used to go to bed at like 4 in the

morning and wake up at

1 in the afternoon and it just was too

much. Couldn't. So then I went to

Washington DC

where I vaguely knew I camped on

someone's floor who I knew, got a job at

a think tank just doing their newsletter

making I made $12,000 a year and then I

um I started to freelance and

I started to freelance first for the

magazine that fired me because they

still liked me. They just understood

that I was not cut out for the world of

9 toive work. So I wrote for them for a

while and then what happens is

my observation about the writing world

is that it's that if you

write something that people find

interesting the system will find you.

System is pretty efficient. Um and

that's even more it's even easier now.

You know my friend Bill Simmons runs the

website the ringer which is the probably

the most important sports website in the

country. He hires people. He's hired

people because he reads their Twitter

and thinks it's great. You know, he he

was wide open. He hires

he's sort of in the forefront, I think,

of where the world of journalism is

headed, but he will read he'll look at,

you know, some people who've just had

their personal blogs that he stumbled

across and thinks they're fantastic. Um,

he'll, like I said, he'll hire someone

because he thought they had he thought

thinks they have really hilarious

Twitter. You know, he's that's the if

you do something that catches people's

attention,

um, you know, I I the world will find

you. Not always, but the world's pretty

good at finding talent.

My attitude from the in the beginning of

my career was that um there were two

separate things I had needed to do. One

was to establish myself as a writer and

one was to make money, but they wouldn't

always overlap. In other words, for much

of my early career, I had a job, a day

job that paid the bills, and then I

freelanced at night. And if I had waited

for a job, a writing job that paid my

bills, I would have waited forever, I

think. So, and also freelancing gives

you a lot of freedom, particularly if

you're making if you're if you're making

your living elsewhere. Then I was free

to write for whoever I wanted for as

little as

possible. I didn't have to take jobs for

the money. I could take jobs because I

thought they would advance my career.

And very often the kinds of assignments

that advanced my career didn't pay at

all. You know, the kind of magazines

that in Washington there's lots of

magazines that are widely read by people

in the business, but you essentially

write for them for free. Um, Huffington

Post is like that today. But I just

wanted to generate I want to get better

and I wanted people to eventually be

seen. Um, so I would write on the

weekends and in the evenings. Um, and I

would do my and I would also write a

work when no one was looking. Um, but

um, but I but I think it was a very

um, the best decision I made as a young

writer was to have a day job that

relieved the economic

burden of writing.

Writing on assignment is made possible

because of experience. So that you write

most successfully on assignment on

things that you have on topics and

subject areas that you have already

written about. So that you're not just

drawing on what you've managed to gather

in the four hours you have to write the

story, the two days you have to write

the story. You're gathering on the

mountain of knowledge that you've

gathered over the course of writing on

that in that particular area. And so

it's uh there's just a learning curve

and you have to accept the fact that

that learning curve is necessary. Um you

have and by the end you know when I was

at the Washington Post after one point I

covered NIH and the Food and Drug

Administration and the National

Institute of Health after three years of

that my kind of implicit database was

enormous. And so you could give me a

story and I could write something

intelligent in three hours because I was

drawing on three years of knowledge. Um

that's this is just more more evidence

of the virtues of growing old.