commitments that keep us heading in the right direction. We’re here to choose again what we chose before.
If you watch people over the course of long careers, you notice that people get better at some mental tasks and worse at others. They say the brain peaks early in life, in the twenties. After that, brain cells die, memory deteriorates. But the lessons of experience compensate. We get much better at recognizing patterns and can make decisions with much less effort. The neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg studies the patterns of the brain. Late in his career he wrote this about his own abilities: “Something rather intriguing has happened in my mind that did not happen in the past. Frequently, when I am faced with what would appear from the outside to be a challenging problem, the grinding mental computation is somehow circumvented, rendered, as if by magic, unnecessary. The solution comes effortlessly, seamlessly, seemingly by itself. What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”
People who have achieved mastery no longer just see the individual chess pieces; they see the whole. They perceive the fields of forces that are actually driving the match. Musicians talk about seeing the entire architecture of a piece of music, not just the notes.
BECOMING THE BOSS
Bruce Springsteen’s life neatly traces the path from inexperience to mastery, and illustrates what happens to a person when he has given himself to his vocation. Springsteen had his annunciation moment when he was seven. He was watching The Ed Sullivan Show, and suddenly Elvis Presley appeared. It was astounding, as Springsteen put it in his memoir, “a new kind of man, of modern human, blurring racial lines and gender lines and having…FUN!…FUN!…the real kind. The life-blessing, wall-destroying, heart-changing, mind-opening bliss of a freer, more liberated existence.”
Little Bruce Springsteen looked at Elvis and had a visceral sense that that’s what he wanted to be. “All relationships begin in projection,” James Hollis observes. Springsteen dragged his mother to the music store and, with almost no money to spend, rented a guitar. He took it home, practiced on it for a few weeks, and promptly quit. It was too hard.
Springsteen came from the sort of house that seems to regularly produce childhood misery, a lifetime of analysis, and phenomenal success. That is, he had a loving and doting mother and a cold and distant father. They were so poor their house was literally falling apart. They had to carry hot water from the kitchen to the bathtub. As a child he was nicknamed “Blinky” because he had a nervous tic of blinking hundreds of times a minute. He was a shy, awkward teenager.
But then lightning struck again. In 1964, the Beatles appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Springsteen felt the same call he’d felt with Elvis, the same devouring curiosity. He went to the local five-and-ten-cent store, made his way to the small record section in the back, and found what he later called “the greatest album cover of all time.” All it said was Meet the Beatles! and all it showed was four half-shadowed faces. “That was exactly what I wanted to do.”
When we talk about these moments afterward, we tend to emphasize the low ambitions in them and get shy when talking about the high ones, because we don’t want to sound pretentious. When you ask musicians why they went into music, they invariably say that they did it to get girls or be loved or make money, but those low motivations are often tales they tell because they don’t want to appear earnest about their high and powerful idealism—the need to express some emotion in themselves, to explore some experience.
One of the best pieces of advice for young people is, Get to yourself quickly. If you know what you want to do, start doing it. Don’t delay because you think this job or that degree would be good preparation for doing what you eventually want to do. Just start doing it. Springsteen, with no plan B options and no distractions, got to himself quickly.
He bought a beat-up old guitar and tried to teach himself to play. Five months later, his fingers were callused and hard. He joined a band, played a gig at his own high school, was completely terrible, and got kicked out of the band.
That night, he pulled out a Rolling Stones album, heard a Keith Richards guitar solo,