Adam Moss
speaker
88 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Adam Moss’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
There's a kind of mentor-mentee-ship that happens in every dimension of life.
You hope that everybody feels that they're the favorite child. That's what you're trying to do. But everybody responds to different kinds of help, prodding, embracing, all the various things that make for mentorships. Just back to the family thing, you have a different relationship with each of your children, right?
That's not to say that somewhere in there you don't have people that you think have more potential. Generally, they're people who show that they're eager to learn. They kind of put their hand up and say, teach me. And there's no teacher who isn't moved by that.
Import it, yeah, that's nice. I don't have advice except to recognize that it's an essential part of learning, to be open to learning and to teach. Then maybe you have to make a slightly more active effort at it. You certainly have to be open to it. You certainly have to know what you don't know and find ways to ask, maybe not out loud, but to signal your openness to being taught.
I mean, it's an interesting period because... What I witness in younger people these days is that they love their parents and they have, you know, they're very... And very different relationships with their parents. Yes, very, very different. And also they're very comfortable with adults. in a way that was different from when I was young.
But there are certain things they resent, and there's a kind of parenting, as it exists in a workplace, that they would bristle at, which I found very valuable growing up. You know, it's a sort of famous thing at Esquire when I was there, there would be these story meetings, and people would cry.
At the end of the meeting, they would leave and cry because the editors in charge were kind of unstinting in their withering comments.
Well, the point is that I learned from my own mentors that this was the way you conducted a meeting. It was much more efficient to be brutally honest. That's an idea that doesn't work because blah, blah, blah, blah. One thought of that as teaching. I tried to bring some of that stricter method, and people were aghast.
And I would say, look, when I was growing up, you used to cry at the end of these meetings. And they said, I don't want to cry at the end of the meetings, and it's not going to work. And they were right.
It wasn't necessarily the better way to do it, but because it was the way that I learned how to sharpen my mind as an editor, I had an expectation that I should do the same with those people I was trying to get to do the work a certain way. In that case, yeah, they taught me. Meaning the younger people taught you like this doesn't feel good.
But did you stop? Well, I found workarounds. I found other ways to try to accomplish the same thing. For instance, just different language. Probably I learned to praise and then to withhold. So that was a strategy. Come over. It wasn't a conscious strategy, but I realized that's what I was doing. I was certainly told it enough times that I came to realize that, oh, yeah, this is what I do.
care about you anymore because you were not going to be a long-term asset for me? Was I that calculating? I wouldn't say it was that.
Now, is that just natural? Or do you think that you learn certain attributes of a boss person from me? Not natural.
You may have learned some methods from me, but your taste and sensibility was not something I had much influence over at all because it's just who you were.
Even hearing it back to me, I don't think that's a bad thing. I think that's something that... You should wear proudly. I'm very glad to hear that what you felt as a person working with me, for me, whatever. You can say for you. It's okay. Was that you found delight in making something great. That's the main thing that I was trying to teach. Even though it's painful in the moment,
you're going to feel so good at having made something that you put everything into and that you can be proud of at the end. I hope that I conveyed that and that I worked with the kind of people who would feel that and who would be willing to work pretty hard because they wanted to make something they felt really, really good about.
That's not everybody, but that is a certain kind of person and you're that kind of person and I'm that kind of person. And there's a reason we ended up in the same place.
Yeah. One other aspect of this whole business is that artists or any, when we're talking creative people, they need to not be bored. It is incredibly difficult to make something. And you have to have reasons to go on. And one of those reasons is simple interest. You have to feel stimulated.
And if you do the same thing over and over and over and over again, you're just going to bore yourself to tears. The artistic person, creative person, I don't know what you want to call them, person who wants to make something, will constantly... find new ways to do it, because they're trying to keep themselves engaged.
In my book, I mean, everybody remembers their childhood as lonely, of course, but it is definitely true that one after another, they describe childhoods of isolation and of need, and then something came along to fill that need. Among other things, they learn to talk to themselves. This is a big theme of my book.
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