And

why do you think you were so driven as a child to be the best? I don't

know. I mean, you're asking me to be, I just was. I mean, I don't think that I was an insanely ambitious child. I just believed very strongly that if you're going to do something, you should do your best and you should. And I did a thing that I think, and this is going to be sound odd, but I think it's very male to conflate what you do well with what you like. So I always think the great one of the great things that women have over men is that women are able to separate those two things more easily. They don't necessarily feel that because they do something well, that's what they should like. But as a man, you at a very early age, it seems like your options are narrowed and you're kind of instructed by society that your choice of options is limited to those things that you could excel at. And that was the trap that I was in. And then I discovered, it's funny because I think so much about this mediocrity argument, I was at a, it's a little college, not far from where I live, called Bard College, which is a sort of famous artsy kind of, it's a place where you go and write poetry and smoke lots of pot and, you know, form a bad rock band. It's that kind of place. It's like 1200 students. I was watching them one day, I went to the campus to do the live years and again, I was watching their soccer team play and they were terrible, terrible. As you can imagine, a tiny school full of super artsy kids to be. And my first thought was they're terrible. Like this is embarrassing. Like, whoa, my second thought was, no, no, no, this is brilliant. That at a school like this, you could do whatever you want. You could enjoy soccer. Every other serious university in America has got a soccer team full of absolutely brilliant players. And if you just like soccer, you're not very good at it. You can't play at Bard. You could play even if you're bad. It's fantastic. It's the best place. And by the way, at a school that small, and that's only interested in this, these kind of amorphous artsy things, you can do whatever you want, right? If you want to be on the debate team, you can join the debate team. No one's on the debate team. They're all off smoking weed and making bad music. There's something incredibly liberating. And by the way, when you're 20, that's what you should be doing. You should be trying a million things, especially the things you're not good at, just to see if there's some wonderful little thing you can extract from the experience. Like I said, it breaks my heart that it took me this long to learn that lesson. Do you

enjoy writing? I do, yes.

And you're

a phenomenally successful writer.