Bergdorf Goodman Magazine (they have one--who knew?) approached me several months ago about writing a first person secret-of-my-success article on, say, how I broke into journalism with blogging. I told them that I thought it would sound too much like an after school special and would erroneously presuppose that there was some level of intelligent planning on my part. So instead I wrote the following:
On the Virtues of Being a Dilettante (The Secret of My Success: An Utter Lack of Focus.)
Bergdorf Goodman Magazine Spring 2004
I could tell you that I'm a Jack of All Trades and a Master of None, but that would be a bald-faced lie. I am, in fact, a Jack--or Jill, as it were--of Enough Wildly Disparate Trades to Be Thought Somewhat Eccentric Yet Not That Terribly Interesting and Master of Three or Four Obscure Areas of Specialization, Most of Which, If My Career Trajectory Is Any Indication, Have No Practical Applications.
In centuries past, there existed a certain type of person sophisticates called a "Renaissance Man." The Renaissance Man was an artist and a musician, a scientist and a mathematician--all at the same time. He was respected, admired and heavily subsidized by powerful Italian bankers.
But the Renaissance days are gone, and with them, the respect and admiration once showered upon Renaissance men. (The Italian banking industry, surprisingly and against all conceivable odds, still exists.) Renaissance men are now wrongly and unfairly maligned as "dilettantes."
They are not dilettantes.
I, however, am.
In December of 2002, I became editor fo a weblog (an online journal that provides readers with news and commentary) called Gawker.com that purportedly chronicled what I then described as "the darker Manhattan-centric themes--class warfare as recreational sport, pathological status obsession, and the complete, total and wholly unapologetic embrace of decadence." Frankly, I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote that, but it looked good (or at least spell-checked) at the time.
During my nine-month tenure as the editor of Gawker, I accumulated a small following of loyal readers, a disturbingly expansive repertoire of bad jokes about the recreational abuse of trendy narcotics and a cease-and-desist letter from Catherine Zeta-Jones. (I also thumbed my nose at the oppressive--dare I say, fascist--style conventions of most traditional publications and used parentheticals with ruthless if not wild and gratuitous abandon.)
My tendency to mock New York-based magazines and newspapers made Gawker a masochistic pleasure for Manhattan media people, and, as a result, a number of ostensibly sane editors at otherwise respectable publications hired me to write for them. I awoke one morning to the startling realization that I was, professionally speaking, a journalist. (Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find himself a cockroach, and I imagine that the experience was not entirely dissimilar.) It was at that point that I left the weblog for the milk-and-honey of free office supplies.
Gawker was, career-wise, the inevitable product of a series of statistically improbable circumstances and my own crippling inability to focus on any single subject for more than five minutes. As a dilettante, I had assiduously built a resume by taking a progressively unlikely series of unrelated jobs, until the only remaining unturned stone involved writing satire about the Hilton sisters.
I've been a tech equity analyst, I've screened deals for venture capitalists, and I've written business plans for companies that needed capital. (I also wrote turnaround plans for the same companies after they got funding and spent the money on bad technology and overpaid employees--the former of which didn't work and the latter of which didn't work, either.) Prior to that, I was the fifth employee hired into a Silicon Alley dotcom at the height of the tech boom--a job I got because I co-founded an industry-related nonprofit while still at Duke University. My lingering hopes of working for a nongovermental organization in a foreign country had been dashed by a failed attempt at the same, and my plans to become a spy were curtailed by the CIA's repeated insistence on ignoring my resume. (I had written a senior paper on the ethics of terrorism, an award-winning policy paper for a state agency on chemical weapons disposal and could say "Where are you going with my luggage?" in Italian, Spanish and Arabic. You'd think this would have made a difference, but no.) I exhibited, at the time, a certain moral flexibility that would have made me an excellent candidate for investment banking, but I was apparently allergic to exceedingly large paychecks and health insurance. (Thus my latest career in journalism.)
Popular Western philosopher David Byrne asked American radio audiences in the 1980s How did I get here? "This is not my beautiful house," he added. "This is not my beautiful wife." To Byrne’s existential query, the audiences responded that they had no idea how they got here, that their beautiful houses unfortunately belonged to Charles Keating’s S&Ls, and that their beautiful wives were in fact characters in made-for-TV movies starring Meredith Baxter-Birney. But it’s not a bad question, and my answer is fairly simple. I know exactly how I got here: I tried everything else.
Posted by espiers at March 12, 2004 02:58 PM