Welcome to the Interviews section of Worldguide! You have found the July 9, 1996 interview with Jeff Berner. Perhaps the most unusual of Jeff Berner's talents is the unique role he played in helping to facilitate the naming of the Java programming language, a strong tool in the development of the Internet and a name now recognized by millions worldwide. Questions or comments about Interviews? Feel free to let us know what's on your mind. Please Note: 
 Jeff Berner's Home Office
 Worldguide: Jeff Berner. Lovely evening here on Tomales Bay, Pt. Reyes Station. I want to ask you, you stated to me at one point that you've been working for thirty years, at, to paraphrase, the successful marraige of business, art and technology. I want to call you on that.
What do you mean by this and have you succeeded? Berner: What I mean by it is that when I was in high school I was interested in four hundred different subjects. I didn't want to declare a major for my college studies when I was still fifteen years old, and I saw people around me who were older who were young professionals who were painted into a particular corner, such as law, or poetry or real estate investment, or teaching. And, everyone of them looked bored to me. When they were interested in expressing themselves through other media, they'd have to steal the time to go to the opera, or somehow sneak in a little bit of basketball, or somehow find a way to read philosophy. I wanted my whole life to be like that all the time, but I also had to figure out how to make a living. Since the industrial revolution, specialization has become fiercer and fiercer. In the Renaissance, you were not considered a whole human being unless you knew at least something about everything. Something about medicine and philosophy and art and poetry and warfare and architecture. That has been my nature and I decided to build a whole life around that. So I essentially did it when I was about twenty-four. I was sitting down in a living room with a friend of mine in San Francisco and I told him, you know I've had this great young life, I 'm doing O.K., I'm still trying to get my BA at SF State College, I'm going to have to start earning a living soon. He said -- his name is Michael Cookinham, he's an artist, he said, well, wave a magic wand. What would you really like to do for a living? Do what you want to do. I said oh, I'd like to hold the Chair of Surrealism at U.C Berkeley. Well, we laughed and we laughed and then he said wait a minute, why don't you just do it? I said, "O.K. Dammit, I'm going to do it!" And in fact, I created a course called Astronauts of Inner Space, which was a survey of European Avant Garde art from 1880 onwards. I went to U.C. Berkeley and proposed that I do it for their extension system under the French department since most of the artists and philosophers I knew about where French. They said O.K.! But they said O.K. on the strength of a recommendation from Roger Shattuck who wrote the book The Banquet Years, about the belle epoch in France. A few other people who I met through the years who always said when I was a young student "Hey, Jeff, if you ever need any help along the way just let me know..." And I realized, this was the moment. So, I wrote to ten of them, including Roger Shattuck and every one of them wrote me a wonderful, generous, support letter and U.C. Berkeley let me do it. I did it there for five years, and I've got to say that I was the first teacher in the U.C. Berkeley in San Francisco's extension center who made a profit for the school. My classes were totally packed. There were people sitting in the aisles. It was a seventeen week course ranging from 'Pataphysiscs and Dada, surrealism through Existentialism. And I wasn't just a talking head. I had guests, I had films, I had projects. It was a joy. So in a sense, that is how I launched myself, was, as a promulgator of Avant Gardening. Worldguide: (Laughs.) Berner: And I had a wonderful time doing it and I did it also at SF State College downtown center, experimental college, and also taught one brief semester at the SF Art Institute. It was a joy, and don't forget it was 1965 to 1970 when people were passionately interested in knowing where are the roots of the Avant Garde. We're all pushing to envelope far out in the galaxy M82 but where are our feet? And I was happy to show that our feet were in European culture and Avant Garde activity that was essentially inventing the 20th century -- starting around 1880 with Alfred Jarry and 'Pataphysiscs and Pere Ubu and all that kind of stuff. But you asked the question, "Was I successful?" I'd like to try to answer that briefly. Depending on how you measure success -- In my heart I feel that I've been very successful because I've been able to, once again, blend business, technology and the arts in a very satisfying life that I think if the God of Mammon were looking down on me he would say "Jeff, you've only been working half time." I'm certainly not a rich man, but I have a very rich life, and I have very few regrets about the path that I took. I can't imagine waking up thirty years after launching my life as a professional and saying "Wow, I have thirty years of photography behind me, or thirty years of technology consulting, or thirty years of fine art photography or thirty years of teaching." I think I'd be nuts by now. When I saw those specialists in my early days as a teeenager, they all had what I considered "dandruff in their eyebrows." They weren't dancing, they weren't laughing, they weren't having a great time, they were just beating the hell out of their expertise and proving to the world that they were experts -- seemed boring to me. I think I've been successful. Worldguide: What about technology? I followed your weave of business and art, I think that's a successful marraige and off you went. Technology, with the increasing boom, how have you woven that into your scheme? Berner: Well, it was by accident to begin with in 1983, I realized that I had been writing one book a year on an electric typewriter. Anyone who remembers typewriters -- by the way the word "typewriter" used to mean the person who operated the machine -- knows that if you make a mistake it's really hard to correct, and if you want the pages to come out even you have to retype the entire manuscript and unless you have a secretary who is extremely masochistic, it is no way to write. So in 1983 I bought a TRS80 Model 2 computer strictly for its cutting and pasting powers. I had no passion for technology other than sports cars and cameras. I bought the TRS80-2 for $4,200 plus a $2,000 daisy wheel printer, so the whole package cost more than an automobile, but what the hell, it had 64K memory! I realized I could write three or four books a year, because I have a passion for verbal expression, but it was excrutiatingly slow on a typewriter. I made that money back in 6 weeks -- much to my surprise! However, when I first opened the box, and I read in the manual the first 12 pages, I read the "Scriptsit" diskette which is the name of the wordprocessing package, the "Source" diskette and the "Main" diskette and I looked among all the packing materials and found only one diskette. I called their headquarters and said "Where are my other two diskettes?" And they said "Oh no, no. That's all the same diskette." I said, "You mean you refer to the same piece of equipment by three different names? That's like calling me Jeff, Jack and John." "Oh, well yeah, it's the documentation." So it dawned on me that I could rewrite those sorts of things as a third party author and make a career. And so my first book was called The Fool-Proof Guide To Scripts At Wordprocessing, my second in that field was Overcoming Computer Fear, and the third was a pioneering 1984 book called The Executive's Guide To Portable Computers. That's when all but one computer was considered portable because it had a handle on it. But I went ahead and bought a TRS80 model 100 for $1,300 that had 32K memory and a 300 baud modem and I used that on the rim of Haleakala crater on Maui to write chapters for The Executive's Guide To Portable Computers. So I fell into computing, it was not something that I sought except as a good cut-and-paste tool. Worldguide: I asked because you are an icon to the home office professional. I want to get your views on the future of the American workplace. Do you see more and more people working from home? Berner: Well, Scott, I've been working from home since way before it was fashionable, and as I pointed out in speeches and in my books, most of my clients have been corporate. When they would ask me well where is your office, Mr. Berner, I'd say well, I work from home, and they'd practically roll their eyes. They'd think well this guy can't be all that serious about his profession, or he's a remittance man, his family pays him to stay out of town, etc. But about six years ago those same types of people started saying you lucky son-of-a-gun you work from home, how lucky you are. You kiss your wife at three o'clock in the afternoon, you go for a bike ride, go wine tasting without a hall pass, isn't that great. I woke up after hearing that for a few times and realized, "Hey, wait a minute, I'm an expert in yet another field." And what is that, well, by default, I've been working from home longer than people in "the professions." Not true in, say, the trades like farmers and plumbers and others, but as a professional, it is pretty unusual. Although it's not so rare for writers to work from home, it is pretty unusual for consultants or explainers of technology or various other roles that I've had. I had five years as a management consultant in the late 60's. So, the future of the workplace, what I'm seeing now is there is estimated 40 million people working from home either full-time or part-time. The fastest growing area, although not the largest area, is telecommuting, where people go ahead and keep working for a salary for a corporation but from home -- one, two, five, eight days a week. Quite clearly people are fed up with being away from their families, they're fed up with risking their lives every day on the freeway, they're fed up with having bosses above them trying to make them feel small, and staff below them hoping they'll have an apoplectic stroke so they can take their nice warm chair. And although I am somewhat sardonic in the way I express these things, I do workshops where people say almost the words that I'm saying to you now, about what it is like to work in corporate America. As you know in the last ten years, the loyalty between corporation and their workers has been completely shattered in both directions. One hundred years ago, 90% of us were self-employed, farmers, physicians, grocers and others were essentially working in front of their house or in their house or on the farm. Then corporate America rose to the max and created a kind of a wage-slave state. The good part about that was you had benefits and you had a job more or less for life. My father's generation if you worked for General Motors or GE or a school system, you did it forever, you did it for life. That is no longer true. Now what we have is a terrific cynicism on the part of almost everyone towards corporations, towards government and all our institutions. So what do we have left? What we have left is ourselves. We have our families, we have our skills, we have our neighborhoods -- in a way we are finding that the only viable way to live is within reach, rather than overreaching our ambitions and our social structures. I think we have to get small, and do things in a caring way. And if I can put a footnote in, I was thinking of this, this morning, one of the biggest joys of working for yourself you can set your own ethical agenda. You can be generous if you feel like it without going through a long policy procedure, you can be ambitious or risk-taking or especially liberal or kind without violating corporate ethics or your own morality. You can do what you really want ot do and you can make that decision in a flash. Just as you can make policy decisions without having to wait six months or beg someone above you to approve of some little change in the policies. I think that is beautiful, that allows you to be a real value-maker. Worldguide: You talked about management a couple of times. Middle-management, particularly, used to be safe. You could work your way up into the next level and hopefully move into an executive position. Not anymore. You can be cut no matter where you are, when trimming the workforce. Berner: Well, middle-management has been replaced by computers, which I warned about in 1984 in Overcoming Computer Fear. And in The Executive's Guide To Portable Computers, where I found out through demographics that most middle aged, middle-management guys thought that keyboard work was for secretaries. I was telling these guys, "Hey pal, that's like giving the combination to your vault to your secretary but not knowing how to turn the dial to the left or to the right so many notches." You have to know computing, you have to know keyboarding, you have to know database management, first by a secretary, secondly by a computer itself. And that has ultimately happened. Worldguide: So what do you think will become of the American workforce? Berner: Well, if we had a good educational system in the grade schools and the high schools I'd say that we are going to become a nation absolutely rife with entrepreneurs and artists and creative people and I'd say more people being more successful, but making a lot less actual dollars. But with no educational system to drive that, I have no optimism whatsoever about the American culture. I have no optimism, period, about what the next thirty years are going to be like. I feel I was very lucky being born in the 1940's and being raised in the 1950's when although it was politically oppressive, it was educationally really together. For instance, I was taught to read phonetically, which has been in and out of fashion for the last fifty years and they keep going back to that. Sound it out, sound it out -- a syllable at a time. So education has to be the fundamental -- otherwise people will just be tripping, tripping, making no money at all. The other thing that breaks my heart about what's happening, although a cerain amount of comfort is important to all of us, we have substituted materialism for spritual values for educational values for religous values, we are all consumers. I remember being raised when we were all called citizens. We are not citizens anymore. We are now consumers, we are now the public, we're the mass market. That's heartbreaking, and the rest of the World is catching our disease. Worldguide: I'm afraid so. Look at the development of Asia. The architects are building that like crazy right now. The Yangtzee River, didn't they build like a sixty-two level dam some time ago, which, when the river flooded during monsoon season, broke every dam down the river. So, now they're building it again, one gigantic dam this time, and as a result dislodging families, major historical monuments and regions, ruining the environment, and they call it commerce, I suppose. Hmmm. Is there one summary piece of advice or core maxim you could offer a fledgling business? Berner: To know when enough is enough in advance. Not to say oh, we're going to make six million dollars, oh boy we can retire to the Bahamas after 90 days. Just one IPO and we're out of here! Those things do happen. There is a hand-crafted silk necktie manufacturer in San Rafael. I remember reading about them about five years ago when they developed a wholesale trade of about six million dollars a year. And the owner got all of his people together, his salesmen, his sewing machine operators, and perhaps 30 or 40 people. And he said "How are we all doing?." They said fine. "Is this about it, is this enough work for everybody? Is this enough salary for everyone?" They said yeah. He says "Fine, we'll keep going, but we won't grow anymore. We are going to stop right here. If we lose a department store, we'll replace it, but we aren't going to go looking for more and more to make more ties and more money, we'll just let it be right here." And everybody said yes, this is right on. I'd say that if you're starting out a business have that in mind, even as a rule of thumb -- you can always change it. Say "O.K., by the time I've got my house at the beach and a little rental apartment in Paris, that will do it." Or, "By the time I've got five horses in my back yard I'll know I've succeeded." Give yourself a reachable goal, and don't expect yourself to be on the cover of Fortune magazine. You may ultimately win those big prizes. But as someone once said, hearses have no luggage racks. I also know that when people are on their death beds, they rarely say "Oh, I wish I'd worked harder, I wish I'd shuffled more papers, I wish I'd made more money, I wish I'd spent more time in front of the computer." Not at all. People want more time for love and to walk on the beach and to hold the hands of their loved ones and friends. I'm not waxing romantic: I've spoken with people who were dying, and I've also spoken to people who are 100 years old and have all their faculties, and I bring you this message: Get your perspective first, before you become a successful person, and you will not have mortgaged your life. Worldguide: That's great. What have been the most difficult issues to deal with as you worked outside the corporate halls? Berner: A totally erratic income. It is almost impossible to budget. One of the reasons is, is that I've had a habit from my youth, where if I made a thirty thousand dollar contract, I had the self-deluding notion that I just made thirty thousand dollars. I wasn't thinking about expenses and I sure wasn't thinking about taxes. So I would say oh boy, I just made $30,000! Not true. So I would sometimes make $30,000 one month and have no more income for 4 months or longer. These are today's figures. The figures were tiny in the 60's, but relatively speaking, I'm probably no more successful now than I was thirty years ago. In the long run though, it has been very steady. In the long run, I've always had what I've needed. Then there are times when I had way more than I needed, then other times when everything was so quiet for months on end that I thought it was the end of my career. But in my heart I knew that so long as I was healthy I would always have people coming to me or I could knock on doors and say hello, there Mr. Editor, I'd like to write a book for you about photography, or I'd like to teach here, or I'd like to help your company become a more humane place. So through all of those years, I'd say the hardest thing has always been budgeting. Sometimes I didn't know how I'd keep my phones connected, and there were other times when I would pay my rent a year in advance. So that kind of erratic money management has been my weakest point, but it's kind of hard to do it any other way. It is hard to do it when you don't have a predictable income every month. And I'm not even sure I would have managed a predictable income very well. I feel quite free, I really do. At this point I'm so secure, forgive the expression, for saying it out loud, that I can genuinely pick and choose my clients without too much sleeplessness. Worldguide: Is it true that you were involved in the Fluxus art movement with Yoko Ono and other lesser known celebrities of that art movement? Berner: Since 1966 I've been involved with Fluxus. It came out of my teaching Art History, and people told me about the Fluxus movement in New York and Europe, so in 1966 the founder, George Machunis, asked me to join, and I started essentially collecting different art movements and objects and documentation from around the world to show my students. In 1989 I sold the collection to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis which became the heart of the a very much bigger show called "In The Spirit of Fluxus," which has been travelling for two years to a lot of major museums including the Whitney and other museums. But I should never be confused with an important part of Fluxus. What I was doing essentially was advertising Fluxus. I was letting people know that Fluxus as a concrete and performance art movement was alive and well and burgeoning. When I joined, I think there were probably twenty of us. Although I've corresponded with Yoko, and I spoke to her on the phone exactly once, I really don't know her. But the people I know in Fluxus who are most famous are Dick Higgins and his wife Allison Knowles, Ben Vaitier and Milan Nizak, currently the Minister of Culture in Czecholslovakia, and some people like that from various parts of the World, France and Czechoslovakia -- mostly New York. It's very playful and right now it's almost retro. You look at these little staged performances where people wrap string around the entire audience and then start pulling the strings from the stage, breaking the tradional division between the audience and the performer. I always thought that was kind of fun. Anything that was Avant Garde made me happy because I wanted to tell people about it. I wasn't buying into it, I was saying hey, change your perspective. If you love fauvism and cubism and impressionism, try Fluxus. If you love Fluxus, go to an exhibition of impressionism and fall in love. Whatever will give you a change of perspective is going to be a creative experience for you, whether you become an accolade or not. Worldguide: If I could keep you general on this question, which means don't mention specific cases, I'd like to get your ideas on some of the ways in which you facilitate ideas for corporations or other businesses who hire you as an idea facilitator? Berner: So I'm not supposed to mention being a branding facilitator for the most important piece of Internet software on the planet? O.K. Well, as a branding facilitator if that's an area I can discuss abstractly or would you prefer as an art teacher or would you prefer working with children, or teaching people how to be entrepreneurs, what area would you like me to focus on? Worldguide: I'm very interested in the specific cases, so I'll hit that in a second. But for now I want to know the process, mainly of idea facilitating. How do you draw and extract these little gems out of these minds? Berner: Well, I will say as guilelessly as I can, that when I go into a room and there are some creative types and there are some academic types and there are some financial types, I act like they are all a bunch of children, and that I am a child, and I just happen to be the brightest kid in the room. I want to encourage them to be bright kids also, and I want them to know that anything goes, and that they all have a wellspring of creativity and playfulness and wisdom in them and I'm here to bring it out -- whether they like it or not. The business of whether they like it or not is a ploy, it gets their attention, it galvanizes them, it gets their emotions going. They don't like me or they love me or I remind them of a teacher or their father. They respect me. They like it. They don't like it. I get them so stirred up, that I start poking into their subconcious. And the synergy between and among them and me starts bubbling up and just as my father said when I got him a Shiatsu massage, "I hated the process but I loved the result." So, what I do, I am like an orchestra leader and I'll say, "O.K. Scott, what do you think would be a good name for this product?" And you say, "well, er , um," and I say fine, how about you Marsha? "Well, I think P.D. Associates." I say fine, why do you say that? And Scott, do you think that's a good idea? And I start doing it as if we were all very, very bright eight or nine or ten year olds. I am sort of a stand-up comic, a lightning rod, I ground out all the kind of tensions between and among the people who either have been working together or do not know each other in these companies or who are meeting each other for the first time. It's almost like a nudist colony, like everybody has to be exposed. I make it safe, and I make it playful , and I'm patriarchal one minute, and I'm passive and feminine the next minute and I just go through all these roles to let them project their creativity. So far it has always been successful. I don't remember it not being successful. There have been close calls, but it has resulted in a satisfied group. Worldguide: Forgive my tack, but I wanted to flush that out so that I could understand the process of your unique role in aiding Sun Microsystems with the naming of the programming language Java, which, as you know, Java and it's offspring HotJava is sweeping Internet development, programming languages, etc., poised to become a strong tool in the Web environment. Could you tell us a little bit about that naming process and how you experienced it? Berner: Well, I should begin by saying the unit of Sun Microsystems that created it was called First Person. And Java's code name was Oak, and I should start also by saying that they get most of the credit for that name, because it is not a name that I brought into the room. It was one of the names they had been kicking around with dozens and dozens of other names. There were eighteen people in the room, only one marketing person, a lot of software people, and a lot of systems people, and one legal person. The legal person had a laptop that was connected to a database that could do online copyright, trademark and servicemark checking as the names came up. The process was that I stood at the front of the meeting room at Sun with a huge green blackboard and started putting names up, and I would hammer on them as a hostile witness. I'd say well, why would you call a piece of software "Webster." Oh, yeah because it goes on the Internet and it has something to do with the World Wide Web, but all people are going to think of Webster the dictionary. All they're going to think of was, oh, a definition and I was wrong, and all kinds of cultural levels that apply to words like web, and webster and -ster and all the kind of syllables that could be misunderstood because, don't forget we have non-native English speaking people who are going to be hearing this and people all over the World. We have to come up with something that will not go wrong in their ears and that can be spoken easily, will trip over your tongue easily on the telephone, is not a mouthful. It's not a mouthful. It doesn't take a lot of expertise to name something intelligently. There are some very simple ground rules, two or three syllables at most if at all possible. What I would do is I would pound on it verbally, phonetically, culturally, poetically, surrealistically. There are words that sound O.K. but if you dreamed that word it might have a Freudian or some kind of subconscious connection that would have a negativity to it. They came up with names that they thought were positives, and I could tell them 28 other contexts in which that was a negative sound. We also had a very intense deadline, and my job was to start at something like ten in the morning and by 5:30 that afternoon, we had to make a decision. It had already been many months late in being named and they were having product roll-out. There was a lot of pressure, a lot of deadline pressure. We'd come up with a name, the person with the laptop would type it into a database, within 3 minutes he would get a response back as to whether Java had been used or not. Java was one of the early names that they seemed to have liked when they were talking with each other around the shop. There were also many, many other names. One of the reasons that I pushed for a name that wasn't too specific and was not an acronym for instance -- like what does J-A-V-A stand for? I pushed against that because I felt that if they wanted to grow the company, they wanted to diversify their products they didn't want to nail down something that was already limited in the minds of the market. That was one of the major considerations on that particular thing. I was really honored to be asked. I think that one of the reasons I was asked is that I was know to some of the principals there as a very creative person, but I wasn't known as a branding facilitator. I've sort of made a career out of being a beginner, in the sense that when I was offering my services in writing software manuals, someone who was developing an expert system building shell would say, "Jeff, what do you know about about expert systems?" And I'd say well, absolutely nothing, and that is to your advantage my friend because as I learn what you're doing I'll be able to articulate it to the person who is just behind me. I'm an advanced beginner, that is the best teacher for something where the learning curve is so straight up. So whether it is that, or branding facilitation, shortly after Java, I was brought in by another company to name a new national cable TV network which is now called Onset. It has to do with set top boxes and so forth. There were other names I preferred, but that is what they narrowed it down to. But the creative process is essentially just giving yourself permission to be right, and to be right, and to be right until you analyze all of those correct answers and pick out the best one. Rather than oh, that's no good. Now it is true, if I have eighteen people, I have to say, "That's no good, we've only got six hours left and I can't let you defend that for the next thirty minutes." And the other thing is, you have to rise above your ego to solve these problems, you can't be like, "Oh, I'm going to be the one among these eighteen people -- it was MY idea." They're still arguing right now about who came up with Java. I'm the only one who knows for sure that I didn't come up with it. But what I did come up with is the process which revealed it among the group. I revealed the tea leaves and the name Java came out, and I'm very happy that I had that skill and did not for example push too hard for the ideas that I preferred. Worldguide: Your book The Joy Of Working From Home is a highly appreciable book. Your familiarity and humor have made something of a Home Office guru in your own right. What do you mean by your subtitle of the book "Making a Life While Making a Living?" Berner: I had considered making that the title of the book, "Making A Life While Making A Living," and the subtitle was going to be "The Joy Of Working From Home." I'm talking about balance, I'm talking about pay as much attention to your girlfriend or your wife or your sweetheart or your husband as you do to making your computer work right. I'm saying pay as much attention to your children as you do watching TV because you just want to relax after a long day's work. I'm saying do not become the tool of your tools if at all possible, although I can't tell you how often I'm on my knees in front of my computer trying to boot it up again. I really believe that once again if you're on your death bed your not going to say, "Gee, I wish I'd spent more time on the computer, or watching reruns of 'I Love Lucy.'" I think what we really want is to look back on our lives and say, "That was sweet." And how can it be sweet? It's not sweet simply because you're racking up miles on the odometer commuting, or racking up dollars in your mutual fund. Although that helps -- because we have painted ourselves into a technological and economic corner. It is not like you can very easily live beyond these systems. What I mean by "Making a Life While Making a Living," is work half time and play half time. When I was growing up, one father could take care of a wife and two kids on one salary, or in one entrepreneurial effort. Well, that doesn't seem to be true anymore. Why isn't it true anymore? It is not exactly inflation, it is ambition. It is that people just don't feel that they are successful unless they have two cars and three TVs and this and that. And although I do live well, and I have collections of things, they're mostly art things, which doesn't make them any better, probably, than fifty-six Rolexes. I really believe that I could live with almost nothing and be very happy person. I know my wife feels that way. Even at our age -- I'm fifty five and in a certain sense I should be retiring by now, but I love my work so much that I'll probably do it when I'm one hundred. My father is 84, he's still doing what he's been doing all his life. He doesn't need to, but he's an active guy and has a great life and goes fishing and he does business, and why not? But "Making a Life While Making a Living" -- I suppose simply means keeping perspective. You don't have to become a workaholic to become a success in this life. If you're in Bangaladesh, I can truly understand that you might wet your finger and go around the ground and pick up every grain of rice that blows in the wind. But that should not be the case in a culture that has been founded on what is essentially a middle class technological consumer oriented, education oriented, presumably family-value oriented culture and everybody is going in different directions. People say, where does the American family go? I'll tell you where they went, the kid went to school in the morning, the husband went to work, the wife went to work and they don't come back until they're ready to eat at the trough, and watch TV and crash so they can get up in the morning and do it all over again. That's not making a life while making a living. And my feeling is for instance when I meet people where the husband works and the wife doesn't. I say congratualtions. I have friends right now who are in their late twenties and early thirties who were in fact making $70,000 - $80,000 a year at Sun Microsystems or elsewhere who said, "Hey, wait a minute, I could make half that much money and have time to play my calssic guitar and go sailing and hike in the woods and not be pounded on by endless agendas that never get done!" And one of my other sardonic images is you can see people falling off they're gurneys into their graves catching a glance at their watch and saying, "Oh. Made it!" Worldguide: (Laughs.) Berner: I've used that image in speeches constantly and it always gets a tremendous laugh, because it isn't funny. Which is probably true of most of my material. Another part of Making a Life While Making a Living -- it's a terrible cliche but it's true -- are you working to live or living to work? Now a lot of people do become workaholics to try to bury emotional pain or do various other things to work a kind of elaborate denial around their suffering. I do not have a judgment on that I just wish it weren't necessary. It is also true that a lot of people feel that unless they are working 14 hours a day -- and by the way, being self employed allows that quite easily -- is the only way you'll be successful. But what happens to your sex life, or your love life, or your social life, or your family life when you're doing that all the time and you're so exhausted or nervous that you don't have an affectionate bone in your body. And that's an epidemic in our culture. Worldguide: Is there anything you would have done differently? Berner: I would have been a little bit more focused on investing my money. I didn't invest very much. I used it for experience, I used it to grow my experience, or grow my business and grow my expertise and grow my education. Which I don't regret. The fact that I was able to build a house without a mortgage is more or less a miracle, sort of dumb luck. I sold off an art collection, I did some other things to make that happen. I would have been a tougher negotiator. Even in the early parts of my career I was far more interested in the work itself and the people I was going to work with, than on the money they were going to pay me. I wish that I had not been quite so mellow. Worldguide: What are your plans for the foreseeable future? Berner: I want to write more books about photography, I want to write a book about concentration, not meditation, because as someone said to me once, "What do you know?" He was right. But I do know about concentration, I really have that skill, partly as a photographer, partly as a writer. I want to write a book about photography, I want to write a book about concentration. I want to write another book about home-based or self-employed business because in a way there are probably one hundred more ways that I could articulate the tools, the survival tools that I 've managed to develop. They are certainly not all original by any means, but I have an original way of saying them, in the same way that my way of writing about technology is totally conversational. I avoid jargon whenever possible, whether it's about photography or computing, or anything else. I'm not a literary writer, I've really only written a couple of presumably literary books, if I dare say that about my own work, and that was a book called The Photographic Experience, which was a very gently academic look at the photographic experience and I have a great affection for that book. Most of my other books are totally conversational, and probably not unlike the tone we're having in this conversation. I would rather communicate, than show off. I don't mind showing off a bit in my art, but in verbal communication I think it is really important to empower the person who has honored me by asking a question and would really like an answer. So I try to do that in my books, especially about technology which is even confusing to people in the world of technology. Jeff Berner's Home Office
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