Stephen does not have a life coach. But he does have Noël Coward. And a quotation from him, which Stephen has above his desk, guides his approach to life: Work is more fun than fun.
‘If you can make that true of your work, you will have a wonderful life. I know how lucky I am to have found that, and how unlucky so many are to have not found that. People talk about work–life balance. But the idea of balancing one against the other makes no sense. My work isn’t against my life – work is my life.’
Of course, just loving your work is not enough; if you want to get anywhere, you have to be prepared to work really hard at it too. ‘Everyone I know who is successful works, and works hard. Really hard. Maybe that should be my advice: work your bloody bollocks off.’
But the strongest recommendation Stephen has is to avoid the trap of thinking it is somehow easier for other people.
‘It is never right to look at someone successful and think “That person’s got money, that person’s got looks, that person’s good at cricket … so it’s easier for them.” Chances are, 90 per cent of the time you’re wrong. But even if it is somehow true, thinking that is a very self-destructive thing. It leads only to resentment, which is corrosive and destroys everything but itself.’
Stephen believes it is better to try and put yourself in their shoes. Imagine what life is like for them.
‘It is the secret of art, and it is the secret of life: the more time you spend imagining what it’s like to be someone else, the more you develop empathy for others, the easier it is to know yourself and to be yourself.’
Which is the best thing for us all to be.
‘Work your bloody bollocks off.’
– STEPHEN FRY
THE EROTIC INTELLIGENCE OF ESTHER PEREL
THIS IS PERHAPS THE ULTIMATE sign of the times: I am at an international tech conference, featuring literally thousands of founders of cutting-edge internet companies, but the talk everyone wants to hear is Esther Perel’s, the world’s most renowned relationship therapist and advisor-in-chief on handling intimacy in the modern age.
Esther is ready to speak, but the organisers won’t let her. We’re in the main auditorium and there are 500 more people than there are seats. Founders are sat on the steps, stood at the back, crammed into the doorways. However, the fire regulations won’t allow for such numbers, so an announcement is made: until the extra 500 people leave, Esther can’t start. But no one is prepared to miss out and a stand-off ensues. It’s resolved only by Esther promising to repeat the talk later for the people who can’t stay. In fact, such is the demand that over the weekend she ends up giving four talks. In comparison, the founder of Uber gives just one.
I catch up with Esther later, in her current hometown of New York. I ask her why she thinks so many people were keen to get her advice on sex and relationships. She explains, ‘We have gone, at this point, into a digitalised way of life, a generation that has been clicking away forever, in environments that are sensorially deprived. And it creates a corrective need, for human contact, for face-to-face relationships, but after the digital world we can often struggle with the imperfect nature of real people.’
The fact that people immersed in the online world sometimes need help with handling real life is not something she judges or condemns, but it is something she occasionally worries about. ‘There can be something beautiful about the immediacy of connection that the digital world allows, but on the other hand dating apps where we swipe left or right can leave people feeling disposable, commodified even, and that commodification is hurtful and degrading.’
Esther first received international acclaim for her insights into relationships when she published her book Mating in Captivity, an exploration of ‘erotic intelligence’ and how to keep sex alive in long-term relationships. Esther brought into the open the underlying contradictions in coupling-up: the fact that we crave both freedom and security, the predictability love needs yet the novelty desire longs for. It gave some straight-talking solutions and has been credited with saving countless relationships ever since.
Beyond the actual content of her work, the most fascinating thing is why Esther was drawn to studying people and relationships in the first place. ‘My interest in people, in humanity, in the way people live, whether they create a life of meaning or not, it goes back to my two parents, who are Holocaust survivors. They both spent four years plus in concentration camps and came out with nothing. All they had was themselves, their sense of decency and their relationship. That is what endured. And my dad said that was all that mattered.’
And her father’s wisdom echoes in the advice Esther gives, which is among the best and most profound I’ve heard:
‘The quality of your life ultimately depends on the quality of your relationships. Not on your achievements, not on how smart you are, not on how rich you are, but on the quality of your relationships, which are basically a reflection of your sense of decency, your ability to think of others, your generosity. Ultimately at the end of your life, if people commend you, they will say what a wonderful human being you were, and when they talk about the human being that you were, it won’t be the fact that you had a big bank account, it really won’t. It will be about how you treated the people around you and how you made them feel.’
‘THE QUALITY OF YOUR LIFE ULTIMATELY DEPENDS ON THE QUALITY OF YOUR RELATIONSHIPS. NOT ON YOUR ACHIEVEMENTS, NOT ON HOW SMART YOU ARE, NOT ON HOW RICH YOU ARE, BUT ON THE QUALITY OF YOUR RELATIONSHIPS, WHICH ARE BASICALLY A REFLECTION OF YOUR SENSE OF DECENCY, YOUR ABILITY TO THINK OF OTHERS, YOUR GENEROSITY.’
– Esther Perel
INSIDE HESTON BLUMENTHAL
IT’S NOT GOING WELL. THE score is 10–1, match-point to Heston Blumenthal. The Michelin three-starred chef and owner of the best restaurant in the world (as voted for by the best chefs in the world) turns out to also be a fiend at table tennis. In my defence, before the match started he plied me with strange-coloured cocktails and confessed to having table-tennis lessons up to three times a week. At least the humiliation is swift: his final serve goes the way we both know it’s going to, and I retire to the bench and to the solace of my next cocktail.
The experience of going to see Heston at home is the British middle-class equivalent of visiting Hunter S. Thompson: liquor is drunk, cigars are smoked, deep chats are had, and while no guns get fired, he does have his table-tennis serving machine, a device that shoots out one hundred balls a minute. We turn it on and it causes a hailstorm of the little blighters pinging off every wall and surface in his table tennis-dedicated basement.
I’ve known Heston for a while now. His brain is like that ping-pong machine, capable of throwing out a hundred ideas a minute. His curiosity, creativity and appetite for learning are greater than in anyone I know. The first time we met was at a company meeting, where I watched him get 300 people to each eat an apple holding their noses, to demonstrate how flavour is what we smell, not what we taste. He is a man who lives and, literally, breathes sensory experiences. And to illustrate the point, we’re now back in his kitchen and he’s teaching me how to smoke a cigar so you can appreciate all the different flavours. It involves repeatedly pulling a lit cigar from his lips with a pronounced ‘schmack’ sound; the trick apparently is to ‘keep the smoke
