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How to approach the stories you write, and even the life you life.
I’m reporting a magazine profile on an Iowa farmer at the moment, a piece that has a psychological angle as well. What happens to our mindset when we look at our bounty and then our neighbors’. I’m going through old studies on the subject and this week came across one from 1997, a peer-reviewed paper titled “Hedonic Consequences of Social Comparison.” I’m not the first journalist to say it’s a clever study, asking participants to solve puzzles and anagrams and then reporting how they felt solving them. The study found that the unhappiest people were almost always those who paid attention to how they performed relative to other participants.
The study got me thinking of Iron Maiden. I’m not a fan but my friend Ryan Holiday is. He wrote about the band in a book and also dedicated an essay to their success. Iron Maiden has been around since the 1970s and never once cared about radio airplay. They write 10-minute songs about ancient Greek battles and Lord Tennyson poems and they do it, their lead vocalist Bruce Dickinson says, because, “We have our field and we’ve got to plough it and that’s it. What’s going on in the next field is of no interest to us; we can only plough one field at a time.”
