5 minute read
David Brooks
CONQUERING YOUR SECOND MOUNTAIN
David Brooks has been called one of America’s most influential thought leaders. He is currently an op-ed columnist for The New York Times, as well as a commentator on “The PBS News Hour,” NPR’s “All Things Considered,” and NBC’s “Meet the Press.” He’s had incredible success as a pundit and author. But, for all his success, he hasn’t always felt fulfilled by his career and path.
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In his newest book, “The Second Mountain,” Brooks discusses this phenomenon of getting somewhere you thought you wanted to go and realizing maybe it isn’t everything you thought it would be. When asked about the book, he notes: “Either you achieve your success and find it vaguely unsatisfying, which is more or less my story. Or B, you get knocked off your mat, you fail. Or C, something happens that wasn’t part of the original plan: you could have a cancer diagnosis, you could have a tragedy, you could lose a child. In any case, you’re stuck in the valley.”
Brooks himself has found himself in that valley: “I succeeded in career terms way beyond anything I had hoped I would. I got out of school and knew I wanted to write. … I remember I had a magic number of making $60,000 dollars a year. I thought that would be great. And then I got a job at the New York Times, which I had never contemplated. I got a TV career, and I also got a bunch of best sellers … every writer’s dream.
“I remember the first time one of my books hit the best seller list. I got a call, I was driving in LA, and I got a call saying I was on the list, and I felt absolutely nothing. It was like something that happened out there, and it didn’t directly affect my life at all. It was strangely blah, and you realize that the things you think are going to lead to happiness don’t lead to as much.”
Though his incredible success has not always helped to fill the void inside of himself, Brooks sees himself as a mild case of this phenomenon. “You get pretty awful stories of people who you think should have it all, but they don’t feel they have it all. I certainly know people in that camp.” Kate Spade and Anthony Bourdain are two well-known names who were seen, from the outside, to be very successful, but, on the inside, might have felt quite differently.
That is, largely, what Brooks’ new book focuses on. When asked how he reacted to the feeling of emptiness, Brooks responds: “I was startled. Like, wow, this is supposed to be like eternal joy. But I’ve since learned we have a set point for how happy we are. If you win the lottery, you’re happy for like a week, and then you go back to your set point. And if you have a terrible accident, you have a month or two of really bad times, and then you are back to your set point.
“The set point isn’t determined by short-term best seller lists. It is determined by the strength of your values, the health of your relationships and that sort of thing, which are pretty different from the things that make you good at your career.”
So, what can you do if you find yourself in a valley? What if you climb your mountain only to feel no sense of success or happiness or fulfillment? What matters, according to Brooks, is “how you treat that valley. And some people are broken by it; they just turn hard or disillusioned, distrustful. Other people are broken open and they become more vulnerable and they get past the desires of the ego and decide there are better desires to have. And so, they reorient their lives to get back to the basics. And though the book was written before Covid, Covid has forced us to stay at home for a long time, and I think, through the course of this, many people have reevaluated their lives in pretty fundamental ways.”
One of the important lessons in the book is how hardship makes us stronger and reintroduces us to ourselves throughout our lives if we allow it to do so. “When you have a hard time, you discover depths of yourself you didn’t know,” says Brooks.
One thing you may not expect going into a discussion with Brooks, a television pundit and extremely influential writer, is that he exhibits little to no ego. He will tell you that he is constantly questioning his beliefs, reuniting with himself and growing. And it isn’t lip service. His book is chock full of bits of wisdom from others, quotes he finds useful and hopes others find useful as well. When faced with his valley, it seems that Brooks decided to be one of those who broke open, allowing himself to be vulnerable and questioning his own ego.
In talking to him, one can’t help but wonder what the world would be like with a few more David Brooks to go around: thinkers who hold no ego but constantly search out the wisdom of others to combine with his own learning and experiences and knowledge and tuck it all into one clever package for the rest of us to uncover and use in our own journeys.
In a valley? Pick up a copy of “The Second Mountain” and take some advice from a man who has trudged through it and come out the other side a different person — a few times — and continues to grow and learn. We can’t wait to see what other nuggets he shares in his visit to Tulsa.
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