You Can’t Math Your Way to Success

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I am about to have a child. By “about to,” I mean in November. And by “I,” I mean I am valiantly making my wife snacks while she grows an energy-guzzling chupacabra inside her. Being a dad was not something I dared to dream of, but now that is upon me, I can’t help but feel giddy. 

I also can’t help but make spreadsheets. My fatherly nesting instincts have manifested not in the selection of strollers or pastel-colored home decor, but in never-ending data analysis. There is a file on my personal hard drive packed with napkin math about raising a daughter in the great state of Massachusetts: stats about graduation rates, career tracks on which women are paid equal wages, high school placement rates to MIT (Harvard is for blowhards), and so on. I promise you the spreadsheet gets stranger tab by tab.

These trackers are all planets, circling around the gravity well of one central question: How can I give my child a happy life? It took me so incredibly long to find personal peace—a decade-plus of stumbling and suffering, of surviving cancer, of learning to let go of the grind. I hope my unhelpful math is an endearing and only slightly deranged attempt to help my daughter have the best possible life. God, please just let her be happy.

The creative state of being

In order to answer the question of how to give my daughter a good life, I sought clarity in essays about the nature of art. Creating great art is just as intrinsically motivated and messy as creating a life is, so perhaps art may have something to teach me. 

You could say that I want her life to be a masterpiece or some other hokey nonsense, but I think a successful artist is perhaps one of the greatest lives humanity has to offer. You spend your day making things, you give back to the world, and (if you’re lucky) you might even be paid to be creative. As someone who has had a modicum of creative success as a writer, it has been so much more fulfilling than a regular job. While many parents only want their children to be doctors or lawyers, I would be thrilled if mine chose a creative profession. 

Adam Moss, who semi-recently retired as the editor of New York Magazine, is considered by many (including Every’s own editor in chief Kate Lee) to be one of the greatest editors to ever live. He recently published the book The Work of Art, in which he profiles 41 artistic projects. In each chapter, an artist shares their story, the early drafts of a work, and how they transformed their initial idea into a finished piece.

Each project was birthed in an entirely different way. Journalist Gay Talese wrote "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" over the course of a month, anxiously pacing around a Los Angeles hotel room. His process of daily editing and note-taking was iterative, handwritten suffering. For A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an art installation that centered around a sphinx made of eight tons of confectioners' sugar, artist Kara Walker started the process off scrawling her feelings about the project in PowerPoint before moving to sketches, miniatures, and finally producing the piece.