The American lionization of the entrepreneur is to ignore its foibles - the narcissism, the workaholism, the neglect of family, the imbalance, the obsession. These are not universally good things, though they are frequently universal to building great companies.
The act of founding a company is its own act of narcissism: 'I alone can do this.'
A little narcissism is good. At least that's what I am telling myself.
Being a founder is about being so driven to distraction by the world that you want to put something new in it. It's an act of creation, of irreverence, of defiance, of hope, and arguably one of narcissism.
People often think that looking in the mirror is about narcissism. Children look at their reflection to see who they are. And they want to see what they can do with it, how plastic they can be, if they can touch their nose with their tongue, or what it looks like when they cross their eyes.
This may sound a little harsh, but I don't care about my career. Really, I don't like actors who are always planning what they're going to do next or always worrying about doing something that will go against the image they've created. To me, that's almost like an attack of narcissism.
I tend to approach giving interviews with the same sense of circumspection and restraint as I approach my writing. That is to say, virtually none. When asked what I made of blogs like my own, blogs written by parents about their children, I said, 'A blog like this is narcissism in its most obscene flowering.'
Narcissism is the part of my personality that I am the least proud of, and I certainly don't like to see it highlighted in everybody else I meet.
There's a kind of journalistic narcissism that New York-based journalists are guilty of.
I need theatre for my equilibrium, because in theatre the actors don't care so much about image, about celebrity - you are more independent. There is not the narcissism, maybe, that you find in cinema.
