The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life

by David Brooks

When you are looking for a vocation, you are looking for a daemon. You are trying to enact the same fall that is the core theme of this book—to fall through the egocentric desires and plunge down into the substrate to where your desires are mysteriously formed. You are trying to find that tension or problem that arouses great waves of moral, spiritual, and relational energy. That means you are looking into the unconscious regions of heart and soul that reason cannot penetrate. You are trying to touch something down there in the Big Shaggy, that messy thicket that sits somewhere below awareness.

consciousness is like a snowball sitting on an iceberg. In other words, most of what guides us is not our conscious rationalization; it’s our unconscious realm.

Ultimately, you get used to the buffer you’ve built around yourself, and you feel safer leading a bland life than a yearning one. The result is not pretty, and was best described in a famous passage by C. S. Lewis: There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket—safe, dark, motionless, airless—it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.

Nobody makes a conscious decision to entomb the heart and to anesthetize the daemon; it just sort of happens after a few decades of prudent and professional living. Ultimately, people become strangers to their own desires.

If you really want to make a wise vocation decision, you have to lead the kind of life that keeps your heart and soul awake every day. There are some activities that cover over the heart and soul—the ones that are too analytic, economic, prudently professional, and comfortably bourgeois. There are some that awaken the heart and engage the soul—music, drama, art, friendship, being around children, being around beauty, and, paradoxically, being around injustice. The people who make the wisest vocation decisions are the people who live their lives every day with their desires awake and alive. They get out of boring offices and take jobs where the problems are. They are the ones who see their desires, confront their desires, and understand what they truly yearn for.

Sometimes an artist can awaken the heart and soul.

Mill got depressed when he felt his desires go lukewarm. He pulled out of it when he discovered the existence of infinite desires, which are spiritual and moral, and not worldly desires.

Sometimes you see someone you really admire, and it arouses a fervent desire to be like that. In Mary Catherine Bateson’s book Composing a Life, she describes a woman named Joan who was studying to be a gym teacher. She liked dancing but never thought of herself as a dancer because she was husky, while dancers were petite. Then a dance teacher came into her school, as husky and as tall as Joan, but light on her feet. “I watched her move around, and I thought, well, you’re no bigger than she is, maybe you’ve got what it takes,” Joan recalled. “So I began really taking my dancing seriously, and after a while I began to be commended, I mean I was doing good. I think it was toward the end of that year when I really latched on and I said, Boy! That’s it. That’s what I am. I’m a dancer. I just knew it like that. And after that, everything was just sheer bliss that I had to do.”

in most of the cases I’ve been around, people take the promotion. Their new job as a principal (or editor, or manager, or what have you) will be a lot less fun, but it will be more rewarding. They went into their vocation for the immediate aesthetic pleasure of some activity, but over time, they realize they are most fulfilled when they are instruments for serving an institution that helps address a problem. They have found their vocation. At that point a feeling of certainty clicks in. When that happens, you aren’t asking, “What should I do with my life?” Instead, one day you wake up and realize the question has gone away.

The best advice I’ve heard for people in search of a vocation is to say yes to everything. Say yes to every opportunity that comes along, because you never know what will lead to what. Have a bias toward action. Think of yourself as a fish that is hoping to get caught. Go out there among the fishhooks.

Simple questions help you locate your delight. What do I enjoy talking about?

When have I felt mos...

What pains am I willing t...

What would you do if you weren’t afraid? Fear is a pretty good GPS system; it tells you where you true desires are, even if they are on the far side of social disapproval.

it’s not about creating a career path. It’s asking, What will touch my deepest desire? What activity gives me my deepest satisfaction? Second, it’s about fit. A vocation decision is not about finding the biggest or most glamorous problem in the world. Instead, it’s about finding a match between a delicious activity and a social need. It’s the same inward journey we’ve seen before: the plunge inward and then the expansion outward. Find that place in the self that is driven to connect with others, that spot where, as the novelist Frederick Buechner famously put it, your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.

“A man’s never out of work if he’s worth a damn,” the old man reflected. “It’s just sometimes he doesn’t get paid. I’ve gone unpaid my share and I’ve pulled my share of pay. But that’s got nothing to do with working. A man’s work is doing what he’s supposed to do, and that’s why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn’t the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man’s work.” That’s a useful distinction. A job is a way of making a living, but work is a particular way of being needed, of fulfilling the responsibility that life has placed before you. Martin Luther King, Jr., once advised that your work should have length—something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth—it should touch many other people. And it should have height—it should put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the soul’s yearning for righteousness.

Belden Lane’s work is trying to write down and describe the spiritual transcendence he sometimes experiences in nature. But he can’t just tell people at dinner parties he’s a guy who wanders around in the woods seeking transcendence. “My own particular cover is that of a university professor,” he writes. “It’s a way of looking responsible while attending to much more important things.” As a professor, he appears to be “engaged in reputable endeavors, locked into acceptable categories. I manage to satisfy my employer, meet society’s expectations, sign checks.” But his real work is up in the mountains, stalking that eternity that is seen in not being seen.

All vocational work, no matter how deeply it touches you, involves those moments when you are confronted by the laborious task. Sometimes, if you are going to be a professional, you just have to dig the damn ditch.

All real work has testing thresholds, moments when the world and fate roll stones in your path. All real work requires discipline.

All real work requires a dedication to engage in deliberate practice, the willingness to do the boring things over and over again, just to master a skill.

When he was teaching himself to play basketball, Bill Bradley set himself a schedule. Three and a half hours of practice every day after school and on Sundays. Eight hours on Saturdays. He wore ten-pound weights on his ankles to strengthen them. His great weakness was dribbling, so he taped pieces of cardboard to the bottom of his glasses so he could not see the ball as he dribbled it.

Deliberate practice slows the automatizing process. As we learn a skill, the brain stores the new knowledge in the unconscious layers (think of learning to ride a bike). But the brain is satisfied with good enough. If you want to achieve the level of mastery, you have to learn the skill so deliberately that when the knowledge is stored down below, it is perfect.

The more creative the activity is, the more structured the work routine should probably be.

In his masterpiece, The Mental ABC’s of Pitching, Dorfman says that this kind of structured discipline is necessary if you want to escape the tyranny of the scattered mind. “Self-discipline is a form of freedom,” he writes. “Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt.”

The mind is focused when it is going forward in a straight line, he argues. The discipline is to put the task at the center. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent and anxiety aren’t at the center. The task is at the center. The master has the ability to self-distance from what he is doing. He’s able to be cool about the thing he feels most passionate about. If you do this long enough, you begin to understand your own strengths and limitations, and you develop your own individual method.

It turns out I think geographically. I need to see all my notes and pages physically laid out before me if I’m to get a sense of what I have. So I invented a system that works for me.

Writing is really about structure and traffic management. If you don’t have the structure right, nothing else will happen. For me, crawling about on the floor working on my piles are the best moments of my job.

Vocation can be a cure for self-centeredness, because to do the work well you have to pay attention to the task itself. Vocation can be a cure for restlessness. Mastering a vocation is more like digging a well. You do the same damn thing day after day, and gradually, gradually, you get deeper and better.

of the key elements of the commitment decision. At the beginning it involves a choice—choosing this or that vocation. But 99.9 percent of the time it means choosing what one has already chosen. Just as all writing is really rewriting, all commitment is really recommitment. It’s saying yes to the thing you’ve already said yes to.

Sometimes it’s right to move on and try something new, Guengerich observed, but we also need to learn the virtue of staying put and staying true, of choosing again what we chose before.

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.

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.

We like to think that rock stars, of all people, work hard and party hard. But the master almost never lives in the same body as the swinger. Mastery takes too much discipline and usually involves some form of asceticism. Bruce Springsteen worked in bars throughout his early career, but he never had a drink. He sang about factories all his life, but he never actually set foot in a working factory. He sang song after song about cars, but as a young man he didn’t know how to drive. Rock and roll is about wildness and pleasure, but after his concerts Springsteen has a ritual. He’s in his hotel room alone—with fried chicken, french fries, a book, TV, and bed.

Art is, as Springsteen says, a bit of a con job. It’s about projecting an image of the rock star, even if you don’t really live it.

many artists have trouble disappearing naturally into their lives. They feel separate from others and want to be connected somehow. It’s precisely the lack of social and emotional flow that can propel creativity. As the poet Christian Wiman puts it, “An artist is conscious of always standing apart from life, and one of the results of this can be that you begin to feel most intensely what you have failed to feel: a certain emotional reserve in one’s life becomes a source of great power in one’s work.”

There’s a moment in many successful careers when the prospect of success tries to drag you away from your source, away from the daemon that incited your work in the first place. It is an act of raw moral courage to reject the voices all around and to choose what you have chosen before. It looks like you are throwing away your chance at stardom, but you are actually staying in touch with what got you there.

Springsteen writes. “I didn’t want out. I wanted in. I didn’t want to erase, escape, forget or reject. I wanted to understand.

Springsteen himself sang about escaping and running away to total freedom. But personally, he never fell for that false lure. He went back deeper into his roots, deeper into his unchosen responsibilities, and to this day lives ten minutes from where he grew up. “I sensed there was a great difference between unfettered personal license and real freedom. Many of the groups that had come before us, many of my heroes, had mistaken one for the other and it’d ended in poor form. I felt personal license was to freedom as masturbation was to sex. It’s not bad, but it’s not the real deal.”

If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place, if you embody a distinct tradition, if your concerns are expressed through a specific imaginative landscape, you are going to have more depth and definition than you are if you grew up on the far-flung networks of eclecticism, surfing from one spot to the next, sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft commitments or none at all.

he stays in the mind, a vision of a person who has found a total commitment, and an example of the way a vocation, when lived out to the fullest, connects all things, comes together in one coherent package, overshadows the self, and serves some central good.

beautiful marriage is not dramatic. It is hard to depict in novel and song because the acts that define it are so small, constant, and particular. Marriage is knowing she likes to get to the airport early. Marriage is taking the time to make the bed even though you know that if you didn’t do it she probably would. At the grand level, marriage means offering love, respect, and safety, but day to day, there are never-ending small gestures of tact and consideration, in which you show you understand her moods, you cherish his presence, that this other person is the center of your world. At the end of the day there is the brutal grinding effort of surrendering the ego to the altar of marriage, giving up part of yourself, the desires you have, for the larger union.

Marriage comes as a revolution. To have lived as a one and then suddenly become a two—that is an invasion. And yet there is a prize. People in long, happy marriages have won the lottery of life. They are the happy ones, the blessed ones.

Passion peaks among the young, but marriage is the thing that peaks in old age. What really defines the happy marriage is the completeness of a couple who have been together for decades. Gabriel García Márquez captured it when describing an old couple in Love in the Time of Cholera: In the end they knew each other so well that by the time they had been married for thirty years they were like a single divided being, and they felt uncomfortable at the frequency with which they guessed each other’s thoughts….It was the time when they loved each other best, without hurry or excess, when both were most conscious of and grateful for their incredible victories over adversity. Life would still present them with other mortal trials, of course, but that no longer mattered: they were on the other shore.

Another problem with the individualistic view is that it doesn’t give us a script to fulfill the deepest yearnings. The heart yearns to fuse with others. This can be done only through an act of joint surrender, not through joint autonomy. The soul desires to chase some ideal, to pursue joy. This can happen only by transcending the self in order to serve the marriage.

Before you are married, as Alain de Botton notes, you can live under the illusion that you are easy to live with. But to be married is to volunteer for the most thorough surveillance program known to humankind. The person who is married is watched, more or less all the time. Worse, the awareness that you are being watched compels you to watch yourself. This new self-consciousness introduces you to yourself, to all the stupid things you do, from leaving the cupboards open, to the way you are silent and grumpy in the morning, to the way you avoid any difficult conversation or play passive-aggressive when you are feeling hurt, as if life were some elaborate game of victimhood in which if you can make your spouse feel guilty for hurting you you will get a slice of cherry cake at the end. Marriage involves fighting and recovery, small and large acts of betrayal, and apology.

Things get even harder when your spouse, who loves you so much, wants to help you become a better person. Your spouse wants to give you service. But we don’t want to receive service! We want to be independent and take care of our own lives. Back when we were single nobody gave us gifts, at least not the kind that required a humiliating acknowledgment of our dependence on another person. But in marriage the big humiliation is that you need help from somebody else.

Great marriages are measured by how much the spouses are able to take joy in each other’s victories. They are also measured by how gently they correct each other’s vices.

And that is why marriage works best when it is maximal. It demands nearly everything and gives nearly everything.

Marriage is the sort of thing where it’s safer to go all in, and it’s dangerous to go in half-hearted. At the far end, when done well, you see people enjoying the deepest steady joy you can find on this earth.

It starts with a glance. You take a little look at a person—like any of the million little glances you take each day—but, this time, unexpectedly, a spark is struck, a flame is lit, an interest is aroused. Some kindling that was already somewhere inside you gets lit in a surprising way. The person you’re looking at seems thrillingly new, but also feels familiar. Love begins with seeing. Love is a quality of attention. In some cases, maybe when the glimpser is a little older, there’s also a premonition in that glance that is a mixture of “Behold! My joy appears!” and “Uh-oh. Here comes trouble.”