I think a lot about Yo-Yo Ma and Gene Weingarten.
Yo-Yo Ma is hands-down the most famous classical musician on the planet, and for good reason. He was a child prodigy, born to musician parents, and he was given every possible opportunity in life. He studied at Juilliard and then Harvard. He recorded perhaps the definitive version of Bach's cello suites, which are themselves about as famous as cello music gets. He has won 19 Grammy awards, including two separate awards for two separate projects in both 1993 and 1995. It's hard to measure how successful or how influential he is, because his is the kind of success that transcends most conventions about just how successful it's possible to become.
But Ma isn't merely famous for being a classical performer. There are many tremendously gifted cellists, many of whom were also child prodigies who got lucky at every step of the way—but none of those are Yo-Yo Ma. Because what makes Ma unique is his sheer relentless open-mindedness: the way that he lends his talents to a dizzying variety of projects in a dizzying variety of ways.
Ma has recorded classical and baroque music, sure. He has recorded American folk and bluegrass. He has recorded Argentinian tangos and traditional Chinese melodies. He has improvised alongside Bobby McFerrin. He has worked with legendary film composers like Ennio Morricone and legendary modern composers like Philip Glass. He collaborates with modern dancers like Lil Buck. He occasionally covers DMX and Britney Spears, just for fun.
It's very possible that, from a sheer technical and artistic standpoint, Ma is better at playing cello than any other cellist. But that would be an asinine comparison: any cellist playing at Ma's level has an extraordinary talent and a style all their own, and there's no meaningful way to declare one better than the others. And that simply isn't what makes Ma special. Yes, his projects are all handled with exquisite intelligence and craft. But Yo-Yo Ma is Yo-Yo Ma because of what he chooses to do with his talent, his intelligence, and above all his enthusiasm. He isn't precious about his gifts—he puts them to use wherever he can find an interesting way of using them.
Most people don't have the raw talents that Ma has. And most people will never be given the endless access to opportunity that he does. But enthusiasm, curiosity, and open-mindedness are available to us all.
Which brings me to Gene Weingarten.
Once upon a time, Weingarten was mostly known as a newspaper editor. He didn't write—he curated other writers. And he was good at it, too! But then Weingarten started to write. And over the course of three years, he won the Pulitzer Prize twice—and for two drastically different pieces. (One was about a world-renowned violinist busking in New York City and commuters passing him by; one was about parents who accidentally kill their children by leaving them in cars.) Few journalists, few writers, will ever be as renowned as Weingarten became, once he wrote.
Yet Weingarten insists that he's really not much of a writer. You get the sense, with him, that this is not false modesty, either. As Weingarten puts it, he learned to write by editing all the writers whose work he touched, over the years. He learned what works. And when he wrote, he wrote in a manner that was unaffected, unstylized, simply focusing himself on the rhythms and color that he'd learned made writing compelling. And, clearly, it worked.
It's telling that Weingarten is a journalist, and writes journalistic features. He writes his features by exploring what he finds interesting; he collects facts, details, anecdotes. His craft is one of assembling what he's gathered in as compelling a manner as possible—a manner that he learned from observing writers, in a similar fashion to how he observes his subjects.
There is a process there, and a craft. Weingarten wrote by following the process. He learned his craft by watching other people's crafts.
Weingarten also has a humor column. It's... amusing. Clearly he enjoys writing it. But any belief that you're dealing with a virtuosic literary talent more-or-less dies when you read what Weingarten thinks is funny.
I don't mean that as a put-down. The fact that Gene Weingarten isn't a Yo-Yo Ma-esque prodigy is inspiring! Weingarten managed to achieve about as much as it's possible for a journalist to achieve, not through some insane gift, but through his willingness to do the work. His success story isn't some romantic triumph of an elite figure shining out, towering above us all: it's the story of a guy who did his job, in between writing some corny poop jokes.
If there's a throughline here, it's that we tend to focus on the wrong things. We obsess over the flashy stuff; we fixate on the mystique. And we ignore the qualities that really matter, even when they could not be more obvious—in part, I suspect, because we're taught to focus on what's exotic and to disregard what's straightforward. We ignore the value of curiosity and enthusiasm, or the willingness to explore what interests us, or the plain old act of learning by observing. We overlook the virtues of generosity and patience and persistence in the name of people being "special" in some way. We put successful people, interesting people, in a category all their own, and treat them like they're inhuman or superhuman, rather than asking what it is about them—what ordinary qualities they have that we share—that made them who they are, and what we know them as.
Gifts alone just don't get you very far. Opportunity makes things easier, but opportunity is neither essential nor enough. What's really interesting, in every case, is what you do with what you're given—and that's true no matter what you've been given. No matter what you have and don't have, there is something you can do. Your story, like any story, isn't about who you are: it's about where you go and what you do. And there's always more to do. There's always a new place you can take yourself. But you're the one who has to do it. You're the one who has to dream of where you want to get. You're the one who has to give yourself permission to try and get there.
Yo-Yo Ma is hands-down the most famous classical musician on the planet, and for good reason. He was a child prodigy, born to musician parents, and he was given every possible opportunity in life. He studied at Juilliard and then Harvard. He recorded perhaps the definitive version of Bach's cello suites, which are themselves about as famous as cello music gets. He has won 19 Grammy awards, including two separate awards for two separate projects in both 1993 and 1995. It's hard to measure how successful or how influential he is, because his is the kind of success that transcends most conventions about just how successful it's possible to become.
But Ma isn't merely famous for being a classical performer. There are many tremendously gifted cellists, many of whom were also child prodigies who got lucky at every step of the way—but none of those are Yo-Yo Ma. Because what makes Ma unique is his sheer relentless open-mindedness: the way that he lends his talents to a dizzying variety of projects in a dizzying variety of ways.
Ma has recorded classical and baroque music, sure. He has recorded American folk and bluegrass. He has recorded Argentinian tangos and traditional Chinese melodies. He has improvised alongside Bobby McFerrin. He has worked with legendary film composers like Ennio Morricone and legendary modern composers like Philip Glass. He collaborates with modern dancers like Lil Buck. He occasionally covers DMX and Britney Spears, just for fun.
It's very possible that, from a sheer technical and artistic standpoint, Ma is better at playing cello than any other cellist. But that would be an asinine comparison: any cellist playing at Ma's level has an extraordinary talent and a style all their own, and there's no meaningful way to declare one better than the others. And that simply isn't what makes Ma special. Yes, his projects are all handled with exquisite intelligence and craft. But Yo-Yo Ma is Yo-Yo Ma because of what he chooses to do with his talent, his intelligence, and above all his enthusiasm. He isn't precious about his gifts—he puts them to use wherever he can find an interesting way of using them.
Most people don't have the raw talents that Ma has. And most people will never be given the endless access to opportunity that he does. But enthusiasm, curiosity, and open-mindedness are available to us all.
Which brings me to Gene Weingarten.
Once upon a time, Weingarten was mostly known as a newspaper editor. He didn't write—he curated other writers. And he was good at it, too! But then Weingarten started to write. And over the course of three years, he won the Pulitzer Prize twice—and for two drastically different pieces. (One was about a world-renowned violinist busking in New York City and commuters passing him by; one was about parents who accidentally kill their children by leaving them in cars.) Few journalists, few writers, will ever be as renowned as Weingarten became, once he wrote.
Yet Weingarten insists that he's really not much of a writer. You get the sense, with him, that this is not false modesty, either. As Weingarten puts it, he learned to write by editing all the writers whose work he touched, over the years. He learned what works. And when he wrote, he wrote in a manner that was unaffected, unstylized, simply focusing himself on the rhythms and color that he'd learned made writing compelling. And, clearly, it worked.
It's telling that Weingarten is a journalist, and writes journalistic features. He writes his features by exploring what he finds interesting; he collects facts, details, anecdotes. His craft is one of assembling what he's gathered in as compelling a manner as possible—a manner that he learned from observing writers, in a similar fashion to how he observes his subjects.
There is a process there, and a craft. Weingarten wrote by following the process. He learned his craft by watching other people's crafts.
Weingarten also has a humor column. It's... amusing. Clearly he enjoys writing it. But any belief that you're dealing with a virtuosic literary talent more-or-less dies when you read what Weingarten thinks is funny.
I don't mean that as a put-down. The fact that Gene Weingarten isn't a Yo-Yo Ma-esque prodigy is inspiring! Weingarten managed to achieve about as much as it's possible for a journalist to achieve, not through some insane gift, but through his willingness to do the work. His success story isn't some romantic triumph of an elite figure shining out, towering above us all: it's the story of a guy who did his job, in between writing some corny poop jokes.
If there's a throughline here, it's that we tend to focus on the wrong things. We obsess over the flashy stuff; we fixate on the mystique. And we ignore the qualities that really matter, even when they could not be more obvious—in part, I suspect, because we're taught to focus on what's exotic and to disregard what's straightforward. We ignore the value of curiosity and enthusiasm, or the willingness to explore what interests us, or the plain old act of learning by observing. We overlook the virtues of generosity and patience and persistence in the name of people being "special" in some way. We put successful people, interesting people, in a category all their own, and treat them like they're inhuman or superhuman, rather than asking what it is about them—what ordinary qualities they have that we share—that made them who they are, and what we know them as.
Gifts alone just don't get you very far. Opportunity makes things easier, but opportunity is neither essential nor enough. What's really interesting, in every case, is what you do with what you're given—and that's true no matter what you've been given. No matter what you have and don't have, there is something you can do. Your story, like any story, isn't about who you are: it's about where you go and what you do. And there's always more to do. There's always a new place you can take yourself. But you're the one who has to do it. You're the one who has to dream of where you want to get. You're the one who has to give yourself permission to try and get there.