Name: Josh Radnor: Fame’s lesson plan
Uploaded: 2024-10-21T07:33:41.000Z
Duration: 16 min 40 s
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Adverbs of manner

I fell in love for the first time when I was 16. It wasn't with another person, it was with the theater. You may have heard the phrase, the acting bug. Well, I got bit particularly hard by it. From the moment of that initial discovery, I never stopped. School plays, college improv troupes, summer theater apprenticeships. Acting was my passion, my obsession, my motor, my mistress, and eventually my wife. My plan following graduate school was to be a New

York stage actor who did the occasional law and order. But circumstances took me to Los

Angeles where when I was 29, I did a pilot for a television show called How I Met Your

Mother. Until that point, I had been an intermittently successful, though relatively working actor.

And then the pilot got picked up, the show went out into the world, and everything changed.

The strangest and most disorienting of those changes was that suddenly a lot of people knew me. Well, they didn't know me, they knew my face. They knew this character that I was playing. By some strange coincidence, the character and I looked a lot alike. So suddenly,

I had this new, weird, vertigo-inducing dimension to my reality. People had been spending a lot of time with me, and I was unaware of having spent time with them. Now, as the show continued to grow in popularity, I realized that if I wasn't careful, if I didn't cultivate a strong group of friends I could trust and a life philosophy that I could lean upon,

I was going to get into some trouble. So I had to ask myself, given that this public thing was, at least now for the time, being a feature, in fact, of my life, what kind of public person did I want to be? Now, an answer didn't announce itself immediately.

I was clear, though, given the menu of options, about what I didn't want to be. I didn't want to be an alcoholic or a drug addict. I didn't want to be an impossible-to-be-around narcissist.

And I didn't want to be a reclusive weirdo who refuses to cut his fingernails or leave the house. Okay, well, what then? How was I to live and grow in the public eye if I had no other choice? Now, one of my favorite things about being on a television show with a global reach is that it's made the world feel smaller in a really nice way. I like meeting new people, and I've had the opportunity to meet fans of the show in India, Singapore,

Mallorca, Tanzania, Italy, Peru, and Texas, just to name a few. I've also connected with some people in some really tough situations, people going through divorce, health crises, losing loved ones, soldiers stationed overseas, who told me that How I Met Your Mother was a huge source of light and laughter in some incredibly dark times. To be a part of something that can offer that, well, I don't take that for granted. But still, like with all things, it has not been without its challenges. When How I Met Your Mother first went on the air,

I ran into an actress that I knew, and she said, are you just like so happy all the time?

And I remember thinking, does she really think that when CBS picked up the show, it left me with an inability to feel anything other than unbridled joy? But the joke was on me because I kind of thought it would. I had bought into the not uncommon notion that when

I taste success, when I get over there, then I'll be happy. But the strangest thing happened.

As the show got more successful, I got more depressed. And I kind of had to keep that to myself. The circle of people to whom you can complain about being on a hit television show is unsurprisingly small. A lot of people think getting famous will save you, that it will grant you the life you feel you're owed and spare you certain indignities. I was pretty bummed to realize that rather than lessening or eliminating my insecurities and least attractive qualities, it basically poured fertilizer on them. The upside was that I could really see them, how competitive I was, how much I compared myself to others, how vain, anxious, and self-conscious I could be in my least attractive moments. The list goes on. And

I saw that if I wanted to live with myself, I was going to have to work on myself. At some point, I realized that all of this was providing me with an intense and fruitful spiritual practice. Fame could be a terrific teacher if I agreed to the lesson plan. Now, part of that lesson plan involved getting used to a different degree of attention. There's this idea about actors that we love and crave the spotlight and welcome any chance to be in it. This is generally false. I want what I do to be seen and appreciated, but I can also be intensely shy and slightly monastic. Partly, this is born of a lifelong allergy to humiliation. Now, any garden variety, insecurity, or self-consciousness I might have felt before I was on television was suddenly multiplied a hundredfold. As the writer David

Foster Wallace once said, nothing stimulates your what-will-I-look-like gland more than being on television. Now that I was on television every week and that gland was in overdrive,

I really had to look at this in earnest. So I came to see that it was pride that was holding me hostage. Pride is a word we've turned into a virtue, but throughout much of human history it's been considered to be a vice, the capital defect, in fact, the one from which all the others spring. And it expresses itself in my life in a number of ways. First off, I want everyone to love and praise everything I think and say and do, and I feel there must have been some great cosmic error when they don't. The flip side is I can also feel like a world-class fraud who can't believe anyone lets me on primetime television or invites me to speak at fancy conferences in India. It really just depends upon the day. So there's a great spiritual master who gave some practical, if startling, advice regarding dealing with pride. He advised his students to find a way to get insulted every day. Now he took this quite seriously. There's a wonderful story about this master that apparently he had an enemy in the town in which he lived. This man hated the master and never missed an opportunity to gossip and spread reputation-destroying lies about him. The master knew of this man and what he was saying, and he was shaken by it. So what did he do? Once a week he would go to this man's house, he would knock on the door, the man would open the door, see the master standing there, and he would scream at him, call him names, say what a horrible fraud of a person and teacher he thought he was, on and on. The master would stand there for as long as the man had the energy to scream at him, and he always said nothing. He didn't object or defend himself. He remained completely silent. One day after years of doing this, it came time for the master to go to the man's house, and he didn't go. His students noticed and said, Master, it's four o'clock. Aren't you supposed to be at so-and-so's house getting screamed at? And he said, No, I don't need to go anymore. They said, Why not? And he said, I was there last week, and as he screamed at me, I felt nothing. Now, I didn't have to put myself through such an arduous exercise in exposure therapy, because fortunately there's the Internet, where you can get insulted for free on a very regular basis. The Internet,

I've come to realize, is the perfectly designed pride-reduction technology. When my show first went on the air, I thought I would go on the old WWW and check out what people thought.

What could be the harm, right? And so I'm reading messages on some comment thread or another, and there were some very nice things about the show and about me, and you can probably guess where this is headed. It started to get meaner and meaner, until I arrived at this one, which quickly embedded itself in my cranium and has to this day never left.

It said, Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what it is I don't like about this guy, and I think

I finally figured it out. His face. Nice, right? Now, there is, of course, an easy solution to all of this. Don't read it. And that was my policy for years and basically still is.

But there's also a usefulness in letting it toughen you up, in draining it of its power to chip away at your sense of self. The master didn't bury his head in the sand and wish his enemy went away. He stood there and he listened to him until it didn't affect him anymore. I'm never going to succeed at silencing my critics, but I can get a different relationship to criticism, one where I'm not rattled so easily. On the other side of that has been a new kind of freedom. As Winston Churchill said, nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result. Now, if you're visible in any way, you can be assured that people you've never met are going to come out of the woodwork and tell you you suck.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing. In today's world, if people are drawn to say negative things to you and about you online, it's actually a weird sign of success. People are paying attention. And it's my belief that that attention confers upon us a certain level of responsibility. You become a kind of ambassador. But for what? Now, many celebrities just want to sing or act or do whatever it is they do and be left alone. That's entirely reasonable.

But at the very least, I think one should consider adopting the physician's credo. First, do no harm. I got a big lesson in this the second year of my show. I was giving someone a ride home from a party where I'd had a few drinks, and I got pulled over by the police.

I was put through the whole battery of sobriety tests, and my heart was beating so fast that

I didn't actually do all that well. The officer gave me a breathalyzer test, which I passed barely. The next morning, I realized that had I been arrested, there's a good chance my mugshot would have ended up splashed across myriad gossip websites. I thought about a young kid who was maybe a fan of the show and of mine and him seeing that and what that would look like to him. It was a reminder that my life was no longer entirely my own, that my missteps would be there for many people to see. First off, it made me take a good hard look at my drinking, which had ticked up considerably since the show went on the air. The rates of drug and alcohol abuse among celebrities are well-documented. I didn't want to be another sad statistic. I realized after the incident that I was much more interested in being an example rather than a cautionary tale, that my behavior off-screen was as vital and consequential as my behavior on. In my more awakened moments, I try to remember that everything that comes my way is potentially my teacher. Everything is an opportunity to go against my tired habits and practice something new. When a reporter misquotes or quotes me wildly out of context, I can practice surrender. When a fan behaves strangely around me, I can practice compassion. When a beautiful woman approaches me with a big smile and says,

I've never seen your show, but my boyfriend is a huge fan and he was too shy to come over and ask, but can he have a picture with you? I can practice acceptance. When the girlfriend's camera on her phone won't work and I'm standing awkwardly shoulder to shoulder with her grinning boyfriend for what seems like hours, I can practice patience. When I feel overwhelmed with attention or scrutiny, I can practice gratitude. When no one knows who I am or cares what I'm doing, I can practice humility. When people say all manner of offensive things in the guise of a compliment, such as, you're much more attractive in person or you're much thinner than you look on television, I can practice everything.

The other options available to me in those instances are anger, frustration, resentment, disappointment, and a feeling of hopelessness and victimhood. One choice gives me some agency in my life, the other does not. One choice moves me forward, the other does not. Life is constantly offering up these fork in the road moments, and I've realized that which path I choose is a really big deal. I love what I do and I am immensely grateful I get to do it. I would like to stay sane and creative and energized and employed. The last decade for me has been a journey of busting through illusions, of getting my priorities straight.

I try now to save the dysfunction for the art following Flaubert's wise dictum, be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work. So you may be asking yourself, why should this matter to anyone not on a long-running television show? Well, consider this. We're all pretty much visible at this point. Everyone has and curates an audience of sorts. Given this new weird visibility we all have, I think it's useful to ask ourselves, what are we putting out there? What are we emitting from our little control towers and what effect is that having on those who come in contact with it? I'm an optimist, but not of the delusional variety. The levels of suffering, hurt, hunger and ignorance in the world are outrageous and unacceptable. Given all of this, if a large or even a small number of eyeballs are on me for whatever reason, I feel deeply moved to offer something nourishing, something healing, something inspiring, something kind. Will this change anything? Will it move the world forward in any way? It's my belief that it can't not. I recently came across the psychological term behavioral contagion. The gist of behavioral contagion is essentially what it sounds like. Our behavior is contagious. Now we think we're these autonomous, independent-minded operators who are making clear-headed decisions. It's actually not true. We are porous, highly susceptible creatures whose words and actions are affecting each other constantly. We are in every moment taking cues from each other about who and how to be. The implications of this, if you really consider it, are pretty staggering.

Everything is contagious. Every word, every action, every tweet, every Facebook post is a contribution to the collective. Every encounter affects us in subtle and not-so-subtle ways, and then that encounter affects the next encounter, and so on, and so on, and so on. We are wildly underestimating the impact we have on each other. Those of us who are visible, and by that I really mean all of us, have a beautiful and holy opportunity. We can be contagiously good. I believe in the power of words. I believe in the molecule-altering properties of kindness, compassion, selflessness, and forgiveness. These are not headline-grabbing qualities, but they're what I believe we're hungering for beneath the shouting and the finger-pointing and the fence-building. A celebrity is one who is celebrated. What about us is worthy of celebration? I think there's a lot. I don't believe we're these miserable animals wired to maximize self-interest. I think that actually goes against our nature and causes us a lot of pain. Scientists who work at eradicating disease, they're not doing it so we can have a couple more years of being cruel to each other. We want more life, more time, so that we can have more stories, more inspiration, more opportunities to be kind. I believe deeply there can be no outer peace without inner peace, and that we always have a choice, that in every moment we're making the world with our thoughts, our words, and our actions.

 I think we can all take a little better care of each other, be better examples for each other. I don't know about you guys, but this to me is really exciting stuff. This, I suspect, is how we remake the world. One word, one sentence, one story at a time. Thanks.