A few weeks ago I stayed up late reading this on Saturday night (thankfully I took a nap before) and honestly, reading this book felt as if I was eating a delectable hot fudge sundae (lactose-free of course, since I’m lactose-intolerant.) It’s one of those books you have to eat in small bites just as you savor the delectable hot fudge sundae. It is juicy with love affairs, gossip, religion, philosophy that you won’t want to read it quickly at all.
In particular, I really loved the edition I read (it’s the Penguin Classics one translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.) I understand that there’s a saying Don’t judge a book by its cover, but this time this cover enraptured me. It shows a young woman holding a small bouquet of purple flowers, I think they are lilacs, between her knees. I don’t know why I love that cover so much, but I guess because it has this sensual energy about it. It made me feel like, Oh yeah baby I’m reading the 19th century 50 Shades of Grey (disclaimer: I haven’t read one 50 Shades of Grey book. I’m behind the times lol) this is bad look at me I’m so bad haha. I also got this edition because several years ago I was reading Oprah’s Book Club list and this was one of the books on her list.
I was really craving more of Leo Tolstoy’s writing after reading his tome War and Peace. I bought a copy of the Signet Classics version back in my senior year of high school, but I never read it or picked it up, so it pretty much just collected a boatload of dust bunnies, unloved and unread. But during quarantine, I decided it would be the best time to read any large books (or really any books of any length) I had sitting on my shelf that I had not read yet. After reading and falling in love with War and Peace I wanted to read more writing by him, so I bought Anna Karenina. I tend to read multiple books at once, but Anna Karenina was so spellbinding that it was the only book I read for a while. The particular translation I read was excellent, just the style of writing was powerful.
I don’t really know what else to say because this book was so good and there was so much juiciness about it that I’m still trying to digest it. I’m sure I’ll come up with more ideas about it at a later time, but the writing was absolutely amazing and I really loved this book. The ending is pretty sad, but I’m not going to spoil it in case anyone hasn’t read it yet.
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. 864 pp.
A couple of weeks ago I read a book that someone had recommended to me. It is a collection of excellent poems by the U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo. Joy Harjo’s poetry blew me away, and I am so glad that this person recommended her works to me. I first heard of Joy Harjo when I was reading this newspaper called World Tribune, which is one of the Soka Gakkai International’s publications, and in one of the issues there was a short news article on Joy Harjo becoming the U.S. poet Laureate. I was so glad to hear this, especially because after doing my senior thesis in college on Indigenous communities and the environmental justice movement, I was interested in reading more works by Indigenous authors. So someone I knew from a virtual book club told me about Joy Harjo because we were talking about works by BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) authors. They recommended I buy her poetry collection, She Had Some Horses, and her memoir Crazy Brave. I started with She Had Some Horses and wow. All I can say is wow. While I read She Had Some Horses, I felt inspired to get back into writing my own poetry. Reading She Had Some Horses showed me the raw power and vulnerability that goes into writing poetry. I haven’t read many works by Indigenous authors, other than works by the scholar Kyle Powys Whyte, Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko and Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. She Had Some Horses really inspired me to write my poems from my lived experiences and to not be afraid of vulnerability. I worried for a long time about being vulnerable in my poems because I was worried what people would think, so I didn’t write poetry for a while because I thought it all had to sound like roses are red, violets are blue. But of course that’s far from the truth. Poetry is life, it is lived experiences, it is truth, and Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses showed me that. Every word I read in her poems sat with me for a long time. I found myself slowing down in time to take in every word, every syllable, and to listen, just listen openly, as the words moved on the page. Each word stirred an emotion in me, and I just listened, and absorbed, and listened. At the end I felt as if I had encountered this honest deep dialogue with Joy and listened to her narrative on womanhood, tradition, culture and human nature. Thank you Joy Harjo for inspiring me to write poetry again. You have shown me the importance of writing from the heart, from sharing my narrative so I could have a dialogue with myself and a dialogue with others. Thank you.
A few weeks ago I finished this excellent novel called Stay with Me by Ayobami Adebayo. I got a gift card to a Black-owned bookstore and was searching through the online catalog, looking for what books I could buy. I came across a memoir by the late congressman John Lewis and this book. I was looking for something new to read, and I didn’t know the plot of Stay with Me so I went with it. I was also looking for something fictional to read. Some friends of mine saw the book when it arrived and told me they loved the book and how deeply it moved them. Within a few pages I was hooked. It got recognized as a New York Times Notable Book and was rated one of the best books of the year, and I can see why, because the author’s writing is absolutely spellbinding. I have read a few works by Nigerian authors: Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart) and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (The Thing Around Your Neck, Americanah, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Dear Ijeawele), and all the books they wrote were really good. Ayobami Adebayo’s book Stay with Me was published back in 2017, and frankly I don’t know why I waited so long to read it, because it is an amazing novel that left my heart pounding until the last page.
It’s about this young woman named Yejide who finds out that her husband is cheating on her with another woman named Funmi in order to bear children. Yejide has a hard time bearing children, so her husband Akin tries to conceive with another woman, partly to please his parents, who dislike Yejide because she doesn’t have any children. Yejide does everything she can to get pregnant, and she finally goes to some people who put her through a ritual to make her pregnant. She notices all the signs of pregnancy over time; her stomach gets larger, she experiences morning sickness, she feels kicking in her stomach. But what she is experiencing is actually a thing called pseudocyesis, or false pregnancy. Akin warns her that she isn’t really pregnant, but Yejide, who has been stigmatized by her community for far too long for not being able to conceive, can finally have something to hold onto, so she keeps saying she is pregnant. Then Funmi dies and Akin’s world falls apart. Yejide finally gets pregnant, but when she does she deals with a trauma that keeps on happening over and over again each time she has a child.
I’m not a mother myself, but reading about Yejide’s struggle showed me that the path to motherhood is definitely not an easy one, especially if you lose your children and have to deal with the grief and trauma that comes with it. I guess that’s why I read fiction, though, because even if I’ve never gone through what someone has gone through, I get to know what their lived experiences are like, and so I’m having to put myself in this person’s shoes. Of course, at the end of the day, I don’t have to carry the trauma and grief that Yejide did for many years, but reading about what she went through gave me a deeper appreciation for women and mothers because they have to go through a lot, and taught me a lot about cultural attitudes around children and marriage and how these attitudes can have a deep impact on people who either don’t want kids or are having a hard time conceiving kids.
Stay with Me. Ayobami Adebayo. 272 pp. Published July 10, 2018
Ok, now let me preface with a shameful disclaimer: I have not seen one episode of Parks and Recreation. Like many people I only know the American comedian Marietta Sirleaf (aka The Actress Known as Retta) from the episode where her and Aziz Ansari’s characters Donna Meagle and Tom Haverford have a “Treat Yo’Self” year where they treat themselves to fancy things such as mimosas and “fine leather goods.”
Little did I know that Retta is pretty sick and tired of people using that phrase so many times around her. That is, until I read her memoir So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know, in which she chronicles her childhood in the projects of New Jersey to her struggle with employment in Los Angeles and her success later on. I honestly think anyone of any profession can learn from Retta’s memoir, and I found reading this book especially helpful as a musician because like any entertainment field, it is competitive and you have to have a sense of humor even when struggling to be successful in the industry. I normally don’t read non-fiction but as of late I have found reading funny but touching memoirs by female comedians (the last one I read was Bossypants and I snagged a copy of Amy Poehler’s Yes Please from the library shelves) to be my go-to for continuing to persevere in the quest for my dreams.
Here are just a few things I learned from reading Retta’s book:
Ask not, you get not. In her next to last chapter “The Year I Went Lin-Sane,” Retta talks about how her friend got her hooked on Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Broadway musical Hamilton but that it was hard to get tickets since they were all sold out. So Retta asked her publicist, which led her publicist to connect with someone who could get her the tickets. She finally got them and, when there were subsequent showings of Hamilton she kept persisting in asking the person who gave her the tickets before if she could see it again with her friends. Retta not only got to meet the entire cast of Hamilton, but also Lin-Manuel Miranda himself, and even got to see him in the last show he would be in. Just goes to prove that when you really need help, you just need to ask because the worst someone can say is “no.” Also, Lin is a sweetie. Never met him, but from how Retta describes him, he seems like a genuinely sweet person.
Love yourself so you can genuinely respect others. Retta has faced a lot of size-based discrimination while in the entertainment industry. In her chapter “Membership Has Privileges” she describes the surreal glamour of being at the Emmys and the Golden Globes and getting to dance, drink, and socialize with the hottest stars (and exchange awkward moments with a few of them, such as when Retta mistakes Julia Stiles for another actress and Julia gives her a deer-in-the-headlights look and tells her coldly she is mistaking her for the wrong person. That moment had me shooketh, like “Wow, Julia Stiles. Just wow.”) One of the photographers at the Golden Globes refuses to take a photo with Retta because she doesn’t like the way Retta looks, and so a bunch of photographers start photographing Retta, and when the photographer lady proceeds to catch up with her peers and finally take one of Retta, Retta holds up a finger and basically tells her “No, you’re good. Everyone else was fine taking my photo, and you didn’t want to, so why bother?” It takes courage to love yourself after all the tears and struggle, but as Retta says in her chapter “Stretch Marks Fo Life!” you have to accept who you are and embrace your own beauty rather than feel pressured to conform to other people’s standards of beauty. She says that exercising and eating right are great, but you also need to splurge sometimes.
Imposter syndrome comes with a nasty price tag. Spend your money and time on bouncing back from rejection, not on imposter syndrome. In the very first chapter “Eff You Effie!” Retta says that her manager called her out of the blue about fourteen years ago to tell her he booked her an audition to play Effie White in the film Dreamgirls. Even though Retta at first thought it was her dream to star in this film, she started doubting herself and her qualifications even though she had been working as an actor for ten years. Retta says that “the fear of rejection is real, my friends. When you’ve had your fair share of soul-crushing, self-esteem-destroying experiences, it’ll do a serious number on your psyche.” She experienced rejection after rejection many times during her acting career, and it can be hard to bounce back after rejection so many times, so she didn’t put herself out there for the longest time until the Dreamgirls opportunity came along. She also injured her ankle one time while dancing and thus thought her sprained ankle would ruin her acting career, and also worried that the costume department wouldn’t find a dress for Retta’s size. More importantly, though, Retta didn’t feel she deserved to be acting alongside Jamie Foxx, Beyonce and Eddie Murphy because she felt she wasn’t what they wanted in Effie White. According to Retta:
“I never said no. I was way more chickenshit than that. I just kept avoiding it, putting it off. For about three months I never made myself available, and it got to the point where they had a movie to cast and so they did. They went with the seventh-place finalist of season three of American Idol. They cast Jennifer Hudson. She had no credits. But you know what she did have? The balls to show up to the audition.” (So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know, page 11)
Now, to be fair, and Retta does acknowledge this of course: Jennifer Hudson kicked serious ass in that movie and won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Hell, her performance throughout the film gave me chills and all I could think was “Woah. She is hella talented.” I then saw her in the film Chi-raq, in which she plays an incredibly gut-wrenching role as a mom who daughter got killed in gun violence. Jennifer Hudson is truly an incredible actress, and her approach to the audition was that simple: Just perform. Don’t try and craft a perfect image of Effie White. Just play the role and be confident even when you feel that you aren’t the right person for the role. Or, as Retta says,
“I did not win an Oscar but I learned a valuable lesson that stays with me to this day and plays a loop in my head anytime I have a big audition. It goes a little something like this: Bitch stop wasting time fearing the worst. Living through the worst is never as hard as fearing it. Fight the fear and go do what you gotta do. That’s what you came here for.” (So Close to Being the Sh*t, Y’all Don’t Even Know, p. 13)
Honestly I think this quote will stick with me for the rest of my classical music career. In classical music the focus is on mastery and perfection, so it’s no surprise that people in conservatories spend their whole lives working at their craft (with some time to have fun and enjoy life, of course). However, we live in an age where anyone anywhere, regardless of of whether or not they think they have enough expertise, can record themselves performing with their phones. There are people out there who create video blogs and even if they talk about things such as what so and so said to me or what I had for lunch today, they make millions off of it. I’m not saying that get-rich-quick stories are applicable to everyone (ya girl is one example). The work doesn’t have to be perfect because someone will tell you whether or not they like your work and you just need to keep creating and pitching yourself until you find someone who does like your work and wants to offer you an opportunity better than you ever thought possible. I get that classical music auditions are competitive, but at what point does perfection become an illusion? Because a lot of times we can’t afford to stay at home and work on something until it’s perfect; we’ve got mouths to feed, jobs to work, errands to run. Yes it’s important to practice, but you still need to get your work out there so that the experts can see it and help you fine-tune your technique. And if you don’t end up making the orchestra audition? Don’t beat yourself up; do other things besides just music because people want a well-rounded person nowadays. If you’re going to be a successful artist you need to learn to promote your work using other mediums, such as writing and other things.
Keep in touch with the people you work with. Retta and her Parks and Recreation co-stars communicate via group text even to this day because they were with each other through thick and thin during all of the seasons.
Have an attitude of gratitude and keep an open mind. Retta got to attend several hockey games, meet famous hockey players and present at the National Hockey League awards. Before, she thought she would have no interest in hockey. But after communicating with the LA Kings hockey team through Twitter, Retta came to the games and thoroughly savored every moment she was at the games, even trying to get past a security guard to go directly towards the glass to see the players in full action. She got to attend several incredible ceremonies (and meet her dream bae, Michael Fassbender. Although I will say I had a hard time thinking of him as a dream bae after seeing him play a beyond-hostile slave owner in Twelve Years a Slave. But that’s just my opinion.) After growing up in such difficult circumstances and struggling even when she moved to LA for her acting career, achieving success was truly a life changing thing for her, so she was able to appreciate gaining so much access to Hollywood and getting so many amazing acting opportunities along the way. She says that as an actor, what is most important is not getting smug and complacent with your success and quitting your work, and that as long as she is alive, she will keep being a working actor because it brings her joy. I remember the personal finance expert Suze Orman saying something similar: keep working, even if you have all this money, always keep learning new things and always keep doing work that you love.
This blog post is by no means a comprehensive review of the book because I literally love it so much I couldn’t stop guffawing in the library while reading it. But it gives a snapshot as to why I think you should drop everything you’re doing and treat yo’self to this epic book (gosh why did I make such a bad joke about that meme? Please forgive me Retta and don’t tweet this. I promise to not stop you in a store one day and have you say it in my camera-pone like that one fool did. I pinky-promise.)
If you have ever seen Tina Fey perform on Saturday Night Live, you know that she is an incredibly funny individual. But have you ever wondered how she became so successful?
In her memoir Bossypants, Fey talks about growing up in a Greek community in Pennsylvania, awkward relationships and being a woman in the entertainment industry (she gives a lot of good backstory about 30 Rock and her sketch in which she plays Sarah Palin.) I normally don’t read nonfiction, and I put off reading the book even when it came out back in 2011. But after watching one too many tearjerkers and reading one too many sad books (and the news), I was desperate to read something funny.
One of the sections I really liked was when she talks about her Kotex Classic ad on SNL. For those who haven’t seen it, Tina Fey and other female comedians on the show, including Amy Poehler and Maya Rudolph, starred in a fake SNL ad for Kotex-brand pads. These pads were the old-fashioned 1960s kind that had a complicated belt and snaps (I’m too young to remember this happening lol.) In the commercial, we see the various women wear the incredibly tacky Kotex Classic Pads, and it’s incredibly hilarious because these pads are easily noticeable and just look plain bad. The women in the commercial pretend that this pad makes them feel more confident and sexy, but in reality they’re making fun of the ways in which sanitary products have been marketed to women, as well as the pervasiveness of the term “classic” in advertising (Reebok, Coke.)
In the book Tina Fey says that comedy writer Paula Pell came up with the idea, and Fey rooted for her idea in meetings only to have people (most of them men) say it would be “too difficult to produce.” (Fey 140) However, Pell and Fey (fortunately) persisted, and after convincing people that it wasn’t going to be a graphic sketch about menstruating or actually showing women putting on the pad, they let the ad air. After you watch it, you’ll be glad it got the chance to air live because it’s funny A.F.
I also really loved her discussion on motherhood. Personally, I’m not a mom, but reading about Fey’s experiences as a mom taught me to embrace the individual experiences that women have with motherhood, as well as the sensitive motherhood topics that people normally stigmatize. In one part she talks about how people would be nosy and ask if she was going to have another kid instead of just letting her daughter stay an only child. She reminds us that no one should judge people for only having one kid and that each family is going to be different from one another, so we shouldn’t base our status on how many kids we have. Another thing that she discusses is breastfeeding; she talks about how the upper middle class moms she ran into would be super judgmental about her weaning Midge, her newborn daughter, off of breastmilk and switching to infant formula. These are incredibly personal matters though, and Tina lets mothers know that they don’t have to feel obligated to answer such nosy questions about why they’re missing out on the joys of breastfeeding their toddlers or why they don’t want another child.
This kind of unnecessary judgement reminded me of Bad Moms, when Gwyneth, a super privileged and arrogant mother, makes Amy, a regular old working mom, feel bad about bringing donut holes to the school bake sale. In another scene Amy is already super-flustered because she just dropped her kids off at school and is trying to do a lot of things, and when she tries to drink her scalding hot coffee, Gwyneth pops up out of nowhere, scares Amy and causes Amy to spill hot coffee all over herself. As she watches Amy scream in pain, Gwyneth doesn’t offer to help or ask if she is ok. Instead she bugs Amy about running the bake sale and condescendingly asks “How do you juggle it all as a working mom?” Now, of course, again, I’m not a mom, so I can’t speak for any working moms, but this has got to be a super irritating question for many of them. In fact, Tina Fey devotes a whole chapter in Bossypants, called “Juggle This,” devoted to that question. Her daughter checks out a children’s book called My Working Mom, and Fey’s description of the book had me howling because the book’s plot actually sounds quite terrible (the working mom is a witch who makes it to her daughter’s school play at the last minute while still juggling her work commitments) and, as Fey reminds us, was written by two men.
Fey didn’t grow up with a babysitter and so she feels alone when she cannot spend time alone with her daughter. When the babysitter, or “Coordinator of Toddlery” as Fey calls her, cuts her daughter’s nails too short, it causes her stress because she doesn’t want to spend the whole evening telling the babysitter how to cut Midge’s fingernails. Even though Fey says she is gifted with an incredible dream job in the entertainment industry, she says it is hard to “juggle it all” and even though she dreams of quitting her job, she knows she is incredibly fortunate to be working her dream job while her other coworkers, whether they enjoy the work or not, have to have the job so that they can pay their bills. And Fey argues that she has had exhausting moments taking care of her kid as much as she does tender moments (the “Me Time” part on page 243 was rib-bustingly funny but also so real), so she makes time in the morning to clip Midge’s nails while they tell stories to one another and it has helped them develop a good mother-daughter relationship. Asking working moms how they juggle it all, according to Fey, is a way of making moms feel bad for not always doing everything perfectly and for not always being there for their kids. However, at the end of the day, working moms are still human and deserve to be treated as such. The stereotype of the working mom depicted in that My Working Mom book that Fey describes is actually a very harmful stereotype to women, because it implies that if working moms aren’t staying home with their kids 24/7 then that means they don’t deserve to have a perfectly normal beautiful relationship with their children. Stay-at-home moms struggle just as much as working moms do, so it’s pointless to make it seem the former is better off than the latter; motherhood in general is no joke, based on what many moms have told me over the years, and all you can do is your best.
Overall, this book was amazing and brilliant, just like Tina herself. You will howl at a lot of things she says and also feel for those tender serious moments in the book, such as the aforementioned discussion on motherhood. And check out her Kotex Classic ad (it’s also cool that she wrote “Excedrin for Racial Tension Headaches,” another great SNL ad starring Queen Latifah.)
When I was taking a course in web development, one of my projects was to re-create a poster known as The Holstee Manifesto, a series of short affirmations that stand out with big, small and medium-sized fonts. These affirmations often say things like “if you don’t like your job, quit” or “live your dream and share your passion.”
In Cal Newport ‘s 2012 book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, he argues that this idea that one should pursue only what they love, aka the passion hypothesis, is not only total B.S. but also harmful to people’s self-esteem and ideas of genuine happiness. Instead we need a much more realistic discussion of what the words success, happiness and passion actually mean. Before I read the book, I poo-pooed Newport’s idea and became sick and tired of hearing that my dreams of moving to New York City for my music career were unrealistic and I was just setting myself up to struggle miserably. After reading this book, I can’t even fathom why I would become so overly optimistic about such an ideal without considering how to put bread on the table, pay my rent or heck, even learn how to survive at all.
Newport opens his book with a true story of a young man named Thomas who travels the world after college in search of a career he enjoys. He finds his true calling at a Zen monastery in the Catskills Mountains of New York. He practices meditation and studies day and night to pass his koans, or word puzzles in the Zen tradition. However, this did not bring him true happiness and he found himself yet again asking, “What should I do with my life?” Newport uses this example at the beginning in order to support his argument that just because we think we have landed out dream job or found our passion does not mean this guarantees absolute happiness. In fact, he explains that people who find their true lifelong calling at a young age are rare and most people who are successful use a craftsman (or craftsperson, to include women and non-binary people) approach to their career instead of just simply starting off “doing what they love.”
Having a craftperson mindset, unlike a passion mindset, means focusing on the value you can bring to your job (i.e. what you can offer an individual or company) rather than focusing on what the job can bring to you. Newport interviews a professional guitar player named Jordan and although he, Newport, started guitar at the same age as Jordan, took lessons and performed a lot of repertoire in various shows, he explains that he did not reach the level of proficiency that Jordan did. It wasn’t so much the number of hours they practiced their instruments, but what they did during those hours of practice. As a musician myself, I know how tempting it can be to just run a piece straight through during practice sessions and then move on to the next one because it seems fun to do so. However, I finally had to come to the conclusion that playing a piece straight through just isn’t efficient practice, and when you get on stage in front of an audience, you end up messing up worse than you did in the practice room, and soon later, burning out.
Jordan, however, practices in order to get better. According to Newport, when Jordan plays a wrong note or out of tune, he goes back and fixes it. Simple as that. He also seeks new opportunities to experiment with his technique, such as playing by ear. I myself have found it helpful to practice music by ear because it not only helps expand my repertoire (give me some P!nk songs any day of the week to hash out classical-style), but also gives me a chance to step out of my comfort zone. Even just by experimenting with how accurate the pitch I am playing is is an exercise in and of itself. I remember getting extremely burned out during my first professional orchestra audition because I just played all these difficult pieces at the last minute, straight through, no taking breaks for myself, and I burned out before my audition. However, two years later, I have been working diligently with my mentor on practicing with the specific intention to get better rather than just perform.
In my lesson one day, my teacher talked about the advice that famous comedian and actor Steve Martin gives to people who ask how they can be successful in their careers. Martin’s advice is always “Be so good they can’t ignore you” (hence the book’s title), and it’s the kind of advice most people don’t want to hear. Martin says that most people want advice on how to get an agent and write a script, but it really just came down to persistence and thinking outside the box that helped launch Martin’s career. His new act took ten years to actually achieve success, which goes to show that there really is no shortcut to fame.
Another key thing people need to have in order to find a job they actually can succeed in and love is career capital, aka the rare and valuable skills you can bring to the table. Alex Berger, a successful television writer, took on multiple projects that forced him to get out of his comfort zone and use feedback from his peers as an opportunity to improve upon his work and build his portfolio. According to Newport, how you leverage your skills depends on what kind of market in which you acquire career capital. A winner-takes-all market only has one type of career capital that people want and people compete to perfect this one career capital so they can get all the opportunities, the call-backs and so forth. Alex was writing for a winner-takes-all market, and the only thing that matters to employers in this industry is the quality of your scripts. An auction market, however, lets you acquire various types of career capital so that each person can generate their own original portfolio of varied skills that people in their field could be looking for.
Newport further argues that one also has to have a clear mission when they pursue a career. Pardis, a 35 year old biology professor at Harvard, enjoys her hobbies of playing guitar and volleyball, and that in part because her work has a clear purpose and provides her the energy to keep pursuing these hobbies. She does her work not just so she can get grant money or recognition but because she wants specifically to use technology to fight some of the oldest diseases, such as malaria and the bubonic plague. However, Pardis began by building career capital, aka the rare computer algorithm she created to find disease-resistant genes, and using the knowledge she acquired over time to develop her research. In short, she focused on one small niche and then gradually expanded her work to fit a broader mission.
Newport tells an earlier story about a young woman named Jane, who dropped out of college to pursue ambitious goals such as surviving the wilderness and learning how to breathe fire. She launched various businesses, freelance and blog posts to fund her own journey, but unfortunately lost motivation because she didn’t have anyone who was willing to financially support her ambitions. What makes Pardis’s story different from that of Jane is that Pardis was patient with herself and developed her passion as she went along in her research so that she could build quality material to show people. She started small so that she could later enjoy succeeding big rather than just merely “dreaming” big. Jane, however, tried to dream big from the beginning and soon came up small. I found myself relating to Jane because I started off after college with this unrealistic idea that I was going to become a professional soloist and travel the world and play for various orchestras just to become rich and successful. But two years down the road I have done more research on the field and sought guidance from professional musicians, and have concluded that it is unrealistic (and downright horrible for your mental health) to magically expect your dreams will come true by quitting your day job and striking it out on your own with your instrument and knapsack.
I have come to embrace Pardis’s story because she acquired a specific skill set and developed her findings over time while still pursuing what she loved on the side. Even as a musician, I have found using this blog to be helpful in developing my voice in writing and cultivating the art of patience. I know this blog will not be perfect overnight and it takes time to build a good blog, but as someone who tends to be a perfectionist I honestly have to remind myself of this every day. As a philosophy major I was constantly writing, editing my papers and learning how to craft a well-founded argument, sometimes until two in the morning. As a musician I have learned to take criticism, practice more efficiently, and perform under pressure. Working in customer service has enabled me to communicate on a human-to-human level and work well under pressure. Right after college, I assumed things would magically fall into place with my degree and a single orchestra audition and I got cynical and depressed when they didn’t. However, even my small accomplishments along the way have been immensely formative in helping craft a larger picture of what I want my life’s purpose to be. I believe that finding creative and valuable ways to use my skills in order to create career capital will help me confront my perfectionist tendencies, stay curious and open to feedback and ideas, and help me develop a clearer mission for my career.
Finally, Cal Newport talks about how developing a clear mission requires using small and achievable projects (little bets) to explore an idea of interest that could be of interest to the public. He discusses how the actor Chris Rock, for example, prepared a successful comedy set for one of his HBO specials. Rock made several surprise visits to a comedy club in the New Jersey area and took notes on a legal pad while onstage so he could figure out what material the audience was willing to see. Even though the audience didn’t really like most of his jokes during these visits, he actually admitted to them onstage that the jokes need improvement, and even the act of admitting it was all awkward for him made the audience laugh. Over time, Rock’s series of mini-flops and mini-successes went into developing an original set that people actually enjoyed. Had he had the perfect set from Day 1, Rock wouldn’t have learned how to appeal to his audience, and moreover how to create capital for his career.
One thing I liked about this book is the absence of a clear cut plan for how to achieve success. While it was nice reading Richard Bollas’s What Color Is Your Parachute? at first, I stopped doing the exercises and reading the book altogether. Even after taking all the self-assessments in the book, I still didn’t feel like I had a clear idea of what my ideal job would look like, and this depressed me even further. So Good They Can’t Ignore You cuts straight through the sugary fluff of “follow your passion” and gives concrete examples of people who have succeeded by starting off with realistic goals and following through with them, and also gives examples of those who didn’t do this and ended up struggling.
There is this awesome video by Chelsea Fagan and Lauren Ver Hage of the popular personal finance site The Financial Diet in which the two elaborate on the flawed passion hypothesis by giving specific tips how you can realistically achieve your goals, even if that means going against what some “inspirational” manifesto poster tells you to do.
Agree or disagree with the passion hypothesis? Comment below!
So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love by Cal Newport. Grand Central Publishing, 2012. 304 pp.
I probably mentioned in an earlier post that I usually watch film adaptations after reading the books they are based off of. However, there are some books that were so graphic and intense that I’m too faint-hearted to watch them on screen. Maybe someday I will watch these films but as of now, these four books were sufficient enough to stay forever lodged in my memory.
The Last King of Scotland by Giles Foden. This novel is narrated from the perspective of a Scottish doctor who is employed by Idi Amin, who in real life was the president of Uganda in the 1970s. I read this book in high school in world geography class because I wanted to learn more about Uganda’s history during our unit on Africa. We had a list of movies we needed to see as part of our grade for the class, and I overheard a classmate ask my teacher if he could see The Last King of Scotland for his film grade (it wasn’t on the list because it was school district policy that the teacher couldn’t recommend any R-rated features). She approved but warned him to be prepared because “Idi Amin was a really nasty dictator.” Reading how the doctor, Nicholas, has to witness individuals endure incredibly brutal torture under Amin’s regime, and after seeing Forest Whitaker play Amin so accurately in this trailer, I decided that the book was enough to sit through. I love both Forest Whitaker and James McAvoy’s acting (Whitaker took home the Best Actor Award at the Oscars in 2007 for his depiction of Amin in the film), but this is a movie I’ll have to sit out until I can officially muster the guts to stomach it.
Schindler’s List (the Australian version is called Schindler’s Ark) by Thomas Keneally. A poignant novel based on the true account of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and member of the Nazis who saved 1,200 Jews from concentration camps during the Holocaust. Like all works about the senseless killing of millions of human beings, expect graphic scenes of torture, murder and abuse. The book was enough to keep me up at night and honestly I wish I had finished it in the daytime because it was enough to bring me to tears. After reading it, I was too emotionally exhausted to think about seeing the film.
Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh. A black comedy that doesn’t adhere to the traditional linear narrative format, Welsh’s various characters share how they are either directly or indirectly influenced by heroin abuse and other forms of addiction. I know that black comedy is technically supposed to be funny, but weirdly enough I couldn’t remember laughing at any point during this book (except for the scene where one of the female characters, Kelly, gets back at a bunch of slimy dudes who harass her during her waitressing shift by putting gross stuff in their food). One scene that will never leave my memory is when Mark Renton, one of the main characters, goes to see a drug dealer who explains how he lost his leg from abusing heroin. I was already having a hard time dealing with the male characters’ poor treatment of women and their abuse of heroin, but this particular scene had me breaking down in tears so badly I didn’t think I would ever get to finish the book. Reading this one scene was worse than any anti-drug PSA I ever saw, and believe me, I’ve seen some pretty intense ones. Sounds melodramatic, I know but the novel had an impact on me and I can’t ever forget it, so I don’t think I will be able to handle the movie that well. I am now in my long hiatus from Irvine Welsh novels, but I want to read more of them because he’s a really good writer. Next time I read one of his works I will read it during the daytime when I can better process it.
Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby, Jr. I know trailers don’t always say a lot about a film, but the trailer for the movie adaptation of this novel was haunting. Even the poster gave me chills, with that big blue eye staring out at you like those of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg in The Great Gatsby. But that’s the point. Like Trainspotting, this novel scared me out of my wits because of how its characters’ lives spiral out of control when they abuse heroin. It’s supposed to scare readers and raise awareness of how abusing these drugs can make people feel a false sense of security with themselves, when in reality they miss out on life because they are dealing with the severe psychological, physical and emotional effects of heroin (and the effects of withdrawal). I read a synopsis of the film adaptation because I knew I’d be too chicken to actually sit down and watch it, although it would have probably scared everyone if they had shown it as part of our health class’s unit on drugs and alcohol. Like a lot of kids, I grew up with D.A.R.E. programs, drug-free pledges and D.A.R.E. bracelets in school, but Hubert Selby’s work is essentially the whole D.A.R.E. program in just 200-300 pages. Phenomenal book; however, until I can manage to get my stomach muscles in order, I remain too shooketh to see Darren Aronofsky’s film.
Got any more film adaptations to add to the list? Let me know in the comments.
A couple of days ago I finished a book called Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. It’s a really excellent book reflecting on the institution of racism and how it actually is a caste system very similar to caste systems of India and Nazi Germany. Before I read the book I only knew about caste from learning about India in my world geography and history classes. But Caste showed me that the caste system wasn’t just limited to India, but also exists in other countries.
The book opens up with something that happened in the Siberian tundra the same year that the U.S. faced an unprecedented election, as well as the political divisiveness that came with it. A strain of anthrax had killed a lot of the reindeer in the tundra during the 1940s and people buried their carcasses under the ice, thinking it would solve the problem and the anthrax would never return. But then in 2016, a massive heat wave hit the tundra and then that heat hit the permafrost and released all that anthrax, making many people in the community sick. At first I didn’t know what to expect when Wilkerson gave this story at the beginning, but then she draws a parallel between the heat from the anthrax outbreak to the heat of the 2016 U.S. election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, where there was a lot of political divisiveness in the country.
This parallel really stuck with me because in Buddhism, we talk about the interconnectedness of all life and how nothing exists in isolation. As much as I focused on the 2016 election, I didn’t pay much attention to what other parts of the world were dealing with, so the anthrax outbreak in Siberia I didn’t know anything about until I read this book. It showed me that no part of the world exists by itself and each event is connected to another. When I thought about this, I also thought back to this movie I watched a long time ago called Babel. Even though it takes place in four different parts of the globe (Morocco, Japan, Mexico and the U.S.) the people in each of these different countries have stories that overlap with one another and they are each connected to each other in seemingly unexpected ways. Just like Babel, the anthrax outbreak in Siberia may have seemed to me at first to not have anything to do with the book, but then Wilkerson compares the heat of the Siberian tundra and the heat of the election and the divisive political rhetoric and I came to find that those two events in 2016 were in fact deeply connected with one another.
In Buddhism we also talk about karma. At first, my surface understanding of karma was “what goes around comes around” or that karma was the same thing as payback. But I found the Nichiren Buddhist concept of karma to be a little deeper than that. Karma from this viewpoint consists of the causes we make through words, actions and thoughts in past lifetimes, and the effects of these causes we make in our past don’t manifest as effects until certain conditions are met, and until then the effects remain latent. The anthrax never really left the tundra; it had been in the ice since 1941 and had killed several reindeer, and decades later, the heatwave hit and the pathogen spores from the anthrax got into the land and infected a lot of reindeer that grazed on the land, and consequently, infected the herders. As Wilkerson explains, “the anthrax, like the reactivation of the human pathogens of hatred and tribalism in this evolving century, had never died. It lay in wait, sleeping, until extreme circumstances brought it to the surface.” (Wilkerson, p.4)
I feel that caste has been like the anthrax because it never goes away. According to Wilkerson, a caste system is a social construct with arbitrary divisions to give certain groups a sense of superiority over other groups. Wilkerson uses three examples of caste systems to illustrate how caste has operated throughout history and how these deeply embedded caste systems continue to impact 21st century society. The caste systems she discusses and draws connections between are the caste system in the U.S., the caste system in India and the caste system in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. Like I said I lacked an adequate understanding of caste before reading this book, and even when I took classes on slavery and Jim Crow in the U.S., I had always just called it racism and thought caste was a separate thing having to do more with what socioeconomic class certain people belonged to.
But Wilkerson illustrates that although the U.S., Nazi Germany and India had some differences in their approach to caste, there were also a lot of similarities. She attends a conference one time with several scholars from India, and meets some people from the Dalit, or untouchables, caste, and others from the Brahmin caste. She observes in her interactions some of the behaviors of the caste system, like when a member of the Brahmin caste interrupted Wilkerson’s one on one conversation with a member of the Dalit caste and started giving orders to the Dalit caste member even though everyone at the conference held some kind of scholarly reputation. It didn’t matter at that moment because at the end of the day, the Brahmin caste member felt she had a right to treat the Dalit caste member like that just by virtue of being born into a higher rank than the Dalit was. Wilkerson, being a Black woman in the U.S., empathizes with the Dalit person and finds common ground between her and his experiences in the respective caste systems.
One thing I do have to let you know about the book though: many of the depictions of acts of harm and injustice done to members of a lower caste rank are quite disturbing. Wilkerson describes lynchings of African-Americans in the 19th and 20th century in the most descriptive way possible, and even after taking many Afro-American Studies classes where I had to read every day about the inhuman subjugation of Black people, I still had to collect myself emotionally and spiritually many times while reading this book. There are also disturbing depictions of injustice done to Jewish people in Nazi Germany and injustice done to the Dalits in India. However, this book reminded me through these deeply disturbing depictions of torture and a lack of respect for people’s lives that studying history is essential to creating a more just, more peaceful society because history shows us what went wrong and gives us an opportunity in the present to learn from that history so that it doesn’t get repeated. This book actually gave the phrase “history repeats itself” a whole new meaning because the injustices that kept happening in these caste systems still happens today. We can see it in many events that happened over the past few years: the 2017 Charlottesville riots, the Charleston AME Church shooting, the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting and the list goes on. Namely we have seen the caste system repeat itself at the worst possible degree with the murders of Black men, women, youth and trans people over the past summer in 2020. While history has shown that police brutality of Black people isn’t anything new and has been going on for years, in 2020 we were also dealing with a public health crisis that impacted everyone to some degree, particularly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities.
To be honest I’m still processing the book, so this review isn’t as comprehensive as I wished it would be. But something made me think; so I was really glad that the book club I’m part of assigned this book, and then I thought about how impactful this book was for me, and so I wondered, are police departments assigning this book in their trainings? Are workplaces with unconscious bias training assigning Caste as mandatory reading? If not, they should because this book also forced me to reexamine some of my own biases and preconceived ideas about race and caste. I only put out there that police departments should assign this book as mandatory reading during academy training because last summer TV show host John Oliver had an episode on U.S. police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. In one part of the episode he shows a clip from a police training seminar in Ohio, and in the clip the police officer tells the trainees that the whole point of their training is to condition themselves to kill another human being. Obviously I won’t go into anymore detail because even remembering that clip gave me goosebumps, but that clip stuck in my mind and after reading Caste, I think reading it would help address the racial bias in many police killings.
I’m not saying reading Caste would be enough to change the entire system of racism and police brutality overnight. I’m just saying that police might want to read up on the history of caste because police brutality has existed in many different forms throughout history, even dating back to slavery because slavery was a way of controlling black people’s bodies and depriving them of freedom. Reading about this history might give officers a broader understanding of how unnecessary force has been used in the past and why different training methods are necessary. If they read about how the caste system in the U.S. has operated for centuries, they would gain a deeper understanding of how racial bias has shaped police departments and how police have interacted with communities of color in the past and the implications of these past interactions in the present. I found in doing my thesis on environmental justice that in order to gain a broader understanding of the environmentalism that was more inclusive of people of color, I had to go back to the history of the environmentalism movement and the very important role that Black and Indigenous communities have played in this movement for years even when history textbooks rarely gave them credit for their contributions in the environmental movement. Studying history was freeing for me because up until then, I didn’t know about settler colonialism, Jane Addams or Hazel Johnson. Reading about Indigenous people’s centuries-old struggle for environmental justice especially was eye-opening because I hadn’t studied about it before, so it showed me how colonialism has severely impacted Indigenous communities’ culture, education, and access to resources. When police departments (hopefully there are some who are) read a book like Caste, they are already taking a crucial step in addressing racial bias because Caste will challenge any assumptions they may have had about race.
I’m still processing the book myself but hopefully I can write about it another time. Although after reading it, I understand more why it’s been the #1 New York Times Bestseller; it’s truly a book like no other.
Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents. Isabel Wilkerson. 2020. 476 pp.
The Arts Are Life 