David Sedaris uses, not a real stove but, a stove metaphor to talk about work-life balance:
One burner represents your family, one is your friends, the third is your health, and the fourth is your work. The gist … was that in order to be successful you have to cut off one of your burners. And in order to be really successful you have to cut off two.
James Franco seems to defy burner-isms. A recent piece raises at least two questions: 1) Can he be for real? And 2) If so, then just how is all of this possible?
For instance:
[G]raduate school. As soon as Franco finished at UCLA, he moved to New York and enrolled in four of them: NYU for filmmaking, Columbia for fiction writing, Brooklyn College for fiction writing, and — just for good measure — a low-residency poetry program at Warren Wilson College in North Carolina. This fall, at 32, before he’s even done with all of these, he’ll be starting at Yale, for a Ph.D. in English, and also at the Rhode Island School of Design.
And this isn’t new:
See also:
Balanced people don’t change the world
According to his mother, Betsy, Franco has been this way since he was born. In kindergarten, he wouldn’t just build regular little block towers — he’d build structures that used every single block in the playroom. At night, he would organize his Star Wars toys before he slept. When Franco was 4 years old, a friend of the family died. Betsy gave him the standard Mortality Talk: no longer with us, just a part of life — yes, but hopefully not for a very long time. Little James burst into tears. He was inconsolable. Eventually, he managed to choke out, between sobs, “But I don’t want to die! I have so much to do!”
This is no two-burner strategy. This is everything-ism.
