Range - David Epstein Page 0,67

know who I am when I see what I do.”

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Full disclosure: after researching the Dark Horse Project, I got recruited into it, by virtue of a winding career path of short-term plans. The work resonated with me, partly because of my own experiences, but even more so because it describes a roster of people I admire.

The nonfiction writer and filmmaker Sebastian Junger was twenty-nine and working as an arborist, harnessed in the upper canopy of a pine tree, when he tore open his leg with a chainsaw and got the idea to write about dangerous jobs. He was still limping two months later when a fishing vessel out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, where he lived, was lost at sea. Commercial fishing provided his topic; the result was The Perfect Storm. Junger stuck with the theme of dangerous jobs, and made the Oscar-nominated war documentary Restrepo. “That cut was the best thing that ever could have happened to me,” he told me. “It gave me this template for seeing my career. Virtually every good thing in my life I can trace back to a misfortune, so my feeling is you don’t know what’s good and what’s bad when things happen. You do not know. You have to wait to find out.”

My favorite fiction writers might be darker dark horses still. Haruki Murakami wanted to be a musician, “but I couldn’t play the instruments very well,” he said. He was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in Tokyo when he went to a spring baseball game and the crack of the bat—“a beautiful, ringing double,” Murakami wrote—gave him the revelation that he could write a novel. Why did that thought come to him? “I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.” He started writing at night. “The sensation of writing felt very fresh.” Murakami’s fourteen novels (all feature music prominently) have been translated into more than fifty languages.

Fantasy writer Patrick Rothfuss began studying chemical engineering in college, which “led to a revelation that chemical engineering is boring.” He then spent nine years bouncing between majors “before being kindly asked to graduate already.” After that, according to his official bio, “Patrick went to grad school. He’d rather not talk about it.” Meanwhile, he was slowly working on a novel. That novel, The Name of the Wind (in which chemistry appears repeatedly), sold millions of copies worldwide and is source material for a potential TV successor to Game of Thrones.

Hillary Jordan just happened to live downstairs from me in a Brooklyn apartment building, and told me that she worked in advertising for fifteen years before beginning to write fiction. Her first novel, Mudbound, won the Bellwether Prize for socially engaged fiction. The film version was purchased by Netflix and in 2018 received four Oscar nominations.

Unlike Jordan, Maryam Mirzakhani actually expected to be a novelist from the start. She was enchanted by bookstores near her school when she was young and dreamed of writing. She had to take math classes, but “I was just not interested in thinking about it,” she said later. Eventually she came to see math as exploration. “It is like being lost in a jungle and trying to use all the knowledge that you can gather to come up with some new tricks, and with some luck, you might find a way out.” In 2014, she became the first woman to win the Fields Medal, the most famous math prize in the world.

Of the athletes I met when I worked at Sports Illustrated, the one I most admired was British Ironman triathlete (and writer and humanitarian) Chrissie Wellington, who sat atop a road bike for the first time in her life at age twenty-seven. She was working on a sewage sanitation project in Nepal when she found that she enjoyed cycling, and could keep up with Sherpas at altitude in the Himalayas. Two years after returning home, she won the first of four Ironman world championships, and then proceeded to go 13–0 at the Ironman distance over a career that started late and spanned just five years. “My passion for the sport hasn’t waned,” she said when she retired, “but my passion for new experiences and new challenges is what is now burning the most brightly.”

I’m a fan of Irish theater, and my favorite performer is Irish actor Ciarán Hinds, more widely known for his HBO roles—Julius Caesar in Rome and Game of Thrones’ Mance Rayder, the “King Beyond the Wall”—and as a star of AMC’s The