Today, I interview John Seabrook, who is a writer for The New Yorker and book author. The theme for today is inspiration. I think everyone needs some inspiration in their lives to get them through the good and bad times. The problem many people have is that they don’t know where to find inspiration, in part because they are looking in all the wrong places.
John, where does inspiration come from?
I am inspired by my family. Both the family I grew up in — my Mom and Dad and their stories and struggles, and how they relate to modern life — and by my wife and son and the kind of stuff they talk about. And also from my life — usually before I was twenty-one. I find, in looking for inspiration, I often revisit my younger years.
“Note to kids: pay attention to what’s happening to you right now. You’re going to be thinking about it for a long time….”
When you become inspired by a person, place or thing, what causes them to take action, while another person doesn’t?
It has to connect to something that you are already interested in. You can gain that interest by a close study of a particular subject — once you know almost any subject really well, the tiniest changes — things you would never have noticed before — become very interesting. Or you can come to an interest in a subject by longtime interest, and experience — which you may not even realize exists, until you start thinking about what subject to write about.
Can you give a summary of the story of Bob Kearns and what workers or entrepreneurs can learn from it?
Bob Kearns was a lone inventor with a good idea. It came from an unfortunate personal experience — his interest in the way the eye works. As I explain in my book Flash of Genius, he got interested in the poor quality of windshield wipers in the 60’s — how they couldn’t be adjusted to the amount of moisture on the screen, in the way the eye can adjust to the amount of moisture on the eyeball — through his own eye injury, when he was opening a champagne bottle on his wedding night and the cork went off in his eye, damaging it permanently. From pain and loss comes inspiration.
What are 3 things that stop innovation and 3 things that foster it?
Three things that stop it:
- 1. Loss of personal inspiration: ie, I can’t do this, it’s too hard.
- 2. NIH: Not Invented Here syndrome– the feeling (and built-in incentive to believe) that your work within corporate research can’t possibly be topped.
- 3. Belief that corporations are more worthy than individuals…
Three things that foster it:
- 1. Connecting your personal interests and your work interests
- 2. A happy family life
- 3. A good hard run in great weather
Was there ever a time in your life, where you had a roadblock and you had to figure out a way around it? What did you do and what did you learn from it?
I have this problem literally every time I set off on writing a story….I come to a point where the material I have doesn’t seem to fit the story I want to tell. When that happens, I try to go to sleep early and wake up early with a nervous feeling and then get to work as early as possible. My body is sending an all hands on deck message to my brain. It’s a tense day or couple of days, with wild swings of emotions both ways. But in the end it has worked out (so far) if you just throw yourself into it
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John Seabrook has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1993. He is the author of Deeper: My Two-Year Odyssey in Cyberspace (Simon & Schuster, 1997), Nobrow: The Culture of Marketing the Marketing of Culture (Knopf, 2000), and Flash of Genius and Other True Stories of Invention (St. Martin’s, 2008).
His work has also appeared in Harper’s, The Nation, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Travel + Leisure, and The Village Voice. He has taught narrative nonfiction writing at Princeton University and lives in New York City.
