'Take the Professor, Not the Course'

How I took my father's advice beyond its college context and applied it to my media career.

---

I had a lovely exchange on Substack Notes earlier this month with a Nigerian journalism student named

Yakubu Dakleshelleng Musa

. He shared this advice, which he found compelling:

While I recognize the wisdom of developing a specialty as a writer, there’s another side of the coin, too. After reading the fantastic book Range by

David Epstein

(which I wrote about in my list of 40 authors who had influenced me), I felt compelled to mention it:

Seeing that Yakuba was open-minded to further advice as he was considering paths for his writing career, I decided to share with him the best advice my father gave me when I started college, back in the fall of 2002:

And you don’t have to think of it as an either/or. You can develop expertise in a particular area while still also learning about a range of other subjects and skills.

For example, I’ve developed expertise in antisemitism and the radical ideologies which fuel it. But I’m still able to write about all sorts of other subjects too. See my archive at the news service where I work, writing articles about many things.

And I’ve also developed skills in editing, page design, social media, research, book publishing, using AI, etc.

A great piece of advice my dad gave me 25 years ago: “Take the professor, not the course.” When you find someone you can really learn from (whether in college or beyond, in the work force) then go ahead and try and learn from them even if it’s a subject you don’t seem interested in at first. A Good teacher will inspire you to get into it.

Then Yakuba’s next response I misinterpreted at first—my fault, not his, and a common thing that happens in text-based, internet communications (as I wrote about last month):

Thanks a lot, David. I really appreciate you taking your time to do this. Sometimes we get so stuck with an ideology of this or that - when there can be a balance.

Also, that was a great piece of advice from your dad and, I think the work you do at the JNS is important, too.

Would you mind connecting?

At first I thought he was asking me to connect this “take the professor, not the course” advice and connect it to the journalist work I do today. Then, going back to the exchange I realized he was actually just asking to connect personally. So I messaged him to let him know if he ever had any questions about journalism, writing, career, etc., then he could reach out anytime.

However, by then my head had already started putting together the narrative of how I might connect the advice my dad gave me in college to where I’m at now more than 22 years later. And it seemed better to just lay this out in a post for you all to enjoy rather than just responding in brief on Notes. So here we go…

---

Dear

Yakubu Dakleshelleng Musa

,

I really appreciated our exchange about potential paths forward to consider with careers. This question of whether to specialize in one area or develop a range of skills is certainly a perennial debate. Everyone will find the answer that best fits them.

So as you're considering your own possibilities, I thought it might be worthwhile to lay out the strange path that I've taken, which seems to be something of a hybrid between range and specialization, with a leaning more toward the former.

I've known since I was eight that I wanted to be a writer. The question since then has been much harder, though: What am I going to write? What would be the best way to use my writing abilities?

While I could lay out the jumping around and shifting answers to these questions from third grade through the end of my college years (1992-2006), for the sake of brevity and providing more concrete career considerations, I'll start this when my professional career actually started, after college. So we'll limit this to 2006-2023.

When I graduated in 2006, I had a double-major in English creative writing and political science. I'd also written a weekly column for the student newspaper for three years and film reviews for two years. And I'd learned the emerging medium of "blogging," which came about in the earlier days of the internet, circa 2000-2004. It was revolutionary then to be able to type up an article and publish it to the world right then and there. This was light speed compared to a daily newspaper or weekly magazine.

What did I want to do as a writer when I graduated? I had my weekly film critic gig for a TV station's website—$50 a week was so exciting then!—and a fantasy novel that I worked on, while I had "pay the bills" jobs in call centers for a few years. I kept doing some political and cultural blogging, while also doing a freelance newspaper article every now and then. While I knew how to do journalism, having learned how to do it in high school, I didn’t really care for it. I much preferred writing my opinions than doing a just-the-facts-ma’am article.

My ambitions after graduating were just to write novels, write screenplays - maybe become a film director someday.

But that's not what happened. And it's largely because of the advice my father gave me in college, which I mentioned in our exchange:

“Take the professor, not the course.’

It had served me well in college: I'd become educated and passionate about subjects largely because I'd chosen some good teachers. So I continued in that direction into the career world. I would take positions not necessarily because I would have chosen the job on its own merits, but because I wanted to work with great people. Or at least, people I thought were great at the time! Names moving forward are omitted to protect the guilty.

In 2009, I accepted a full-time job as managing editor of a blog devoted to critiquing cable news shows. I was also an associate editor of the online political magazine where the blog originated, but I mostly focused on assigning/editing/publishing 200-600 word punchy little criticisms of people on cable news shows staying stupid shit. What the fuck was I thinking? I had cable news on all day during those years!

Well, I wanted to work with the site’s editor-in-chief, who was a legendary political author and activist. And in the two years that I worked for him I learned so much about all sorts of subjects—most importantly, the Middle East and the various radical groups fighting to dominate it.

And during that time I found a new "professor" to learn from, only a literal one this time: one of the world's great scholars of the Middle East. I chose to take a new job at another political publication where I could work with and learn from him.

Of course, as with the previous position, I had to manage a goofy blog, too. I was tasked with growing a "lifestyle" section of this political site because the reality was then—and still is today—that articles about stuff like food, movies, religion, and celebrity gossip all get much more "web traffic" (clicks) than scholarly discourses about the wars in the Middle East.

What a surprise that Britney Spears gets more clicks than Bashar al-Assad! Who could have ever guessed?

So I spent four years learning from this site's great scholarly writers, as I also learned how to edit and assign "lifestyle" content that could "maximize traffic." That was a skill I hadn't planned to learn, but did from 2009-2015. What tricks in subjects of articles and framing of the headlines will cause people to click? What will draw in new readers? I spent years going through spreadsheets of articles and lists of how many view and visitors they got, learning to figure out the patterns and the tactics here.

And ultimately, I realized that I didn't like what I saw. In 2015, as the owner of the website was trying to figure out how to relaunch it to perhaps make some money (instead of burning $3-4 million each year as he had for the last seven years), I saw what was working: emotional manipulation. What do I mean by that? Low-quality content with provocative headlines and lowest common denominator subject matter. It was this combination of stuff which would lead to Trump's rise as well as blogging's end. Who needed to write the article when all people really wanted were grabby headlines? Hence the rise of Twitter, something else that I learned how to use expertly, to the point that one of my gigs for five years now has been to write tweets and Facebook posts for an online Jewish newspaper. Just as I'd spent years blogging to the point that I could make a living doing it, so too it went with social media. Tweet enough and it becomes as easy as breathing.

And so this pattern persisted. In 2015, leaving the political site, I came on board as West Coast editor of a start-up publishing company and finally returned to writing a novel and screenplays, work that was part-time and would remain so for years. And I did that because I admired and wanted to work with the company’s founder/owner/publisher.

In 2016, I took a position at a Middle East think tank, which, again, was a take-the-professor-not-the-course situation. I respected the organization’s founder and felt his views aligned with what my Middle East mentor (who had been a fellow there) had taught me. So I took a job tracking "non-violent Islamist groups" in America. These are organizations which are operating legally but advocating for ideologies which terrorist groups believe. They support terrorist groups like Hamas, and many were even set up to act as media and cultural influence for Hamas. I'm talking about the Muslim Brotherhood:

Now, initially I focused on these Islamist groups in a national approach. Every day I would monitor the activists of groups all over the country. And I was coordinating the efforts of a team of guys focused on things like the finances of these groups or doing investigations into them.

After two years, I shifted into a different position where I focused solely on mapping out and analyzing the groups in Southern California where I live.

However, this now entailed on-the-ground investigative journalism, as well as networking with potential activist allies and building relationships to promote the think tank's objectives.

And in this role I would infiltrate Islamist group's conventions, taking photographs and recording speeches. I would go to their protests and photograph everyone who was there. On one occasion, outside the Saudi embassy in Los Angeles, some of the people there even confronted me, accusing me of anti-Muslim bigotry, to which I responded that I knew the Muslim nation of the United Arab Emirates had named their organizations specifically as terrorist groups.

So here I was doing actual journalism: going to events, recording, taking photos, doing interviews. I’d even publish photo essays documenting what I'd seen and identifying the various controversial speakers there. Over the years, I developed a whole map of the various groups and their leaders, how they connected, how they collaborated. I'd see speeches of the same people multiple times, coming to know them much more deeply than I ever expected to understand terrorist-supporting antisemites.

But if this hadn't already been a weird enough range of skills and experiences, there was even more weirdness to come.

At the end of 2018, I took on another position, a part-time one to supplement the work of an investigative journalist. Now I became Director of Research at a start-up Zionist activist group for 20 hours a week.

There was just one absolutely absurd fucking catch: the entire block of 20 hours a week was going to be spent on researching antisemitism on Wikipedia. As if dealing with the cretins of cable news hadn’t been obnoxious enough, now I had to investigate the anonymous assholes wasting their lives editing Wikipedia for free.

And that was life from the end of 2019 through summer of 2021, when my boss and mentor died from a heart attack while he and I were in an epic argument about the path forward for the organization.

By then, I'd also had further professional experiences and skills. For example, a larger start up media company hired me to write scripts for 5-minute YouTube videos. They were about some legal nonprofit’s cases and I had to explain them simply. I did over a dozen of those and only did so because I respected the media company’s founders, whom I’d first met back in our blogging days. A veteran terrorism investigative journalist also hired me to help him research and co-author articles with him. Again—I took that gig because I wanted to learn from him.

And that novel publishing company? Well, when the owners were wanting to shut it down, I offered to take it over, and then had to learn all the various skills necessary to do that. I had to learn how to run and operate a small publisher, and then doing so in the years that followed, I had to figure out how to relaunch it and rebuild it multiple times.

So where did this range of professional experiences lead me? Today, in addition to still running this start-up publishing company, I make a full-time living through working as a journalist for a Jewish wire service. On any given day, I will write 5-8 "news briefs." These are short articles, usually 150-400 words in length, that can be about just about anything related to Israel, the Middle East, the Jewish world, or, especially, antisemitism. Yes, I spend most of the day now writing as many short articles each day as I can generally about neo-Nazis, people on the far left, or these Islamist groups.

And getting here was yet another "take the professor, not the course" scenario. I would not have applied to a job to write "news briefs." But I fell into this by accident. I had first just submitted an op-ed to the wire service. But then the U.S. News editor informed me that she needed articles and news briefs—and that they paid well for them. So I started writing them up. I soon found that these news briefs were easy, and I could get them done fairly quickly.

So when the opportunity came to do it full-time, I came on board, primarily because of the people: the editor-in-chief and CEO of the wire service, and then the editor who I was working with at the time, who had replaced the one who first brought me on as a freelancer.

And now it's been two years of writing these short articles, mostly about hate groups and bigots, and it's the best job I've ever had, working with the best colleagues I’ve ever had.

Now, the narrative above certainly reads as a case study and argument for the "range" approach, and it certainly is. However, a funny thing can happen as one develops range across a lot of skills: expertise, a niche, and specialization can then develop, too.

In my case, I accidentally developed an expertise in antisemitism and the numerous radical ideologies in which it manifests. Over the years at those publications and those think tanks, I learned way more about war, hate, and evil than I ever could have imagined. And I still don't really feel like I have expertise here. While many people might suggest that I'm some sort of antisemitism expert, I most certainly do not claim any such descriptor. There are real experts out there, with Ph.Ds who have lifetimes of experience and multiple books on the subject. I can’t hold a candle to them.

But it is what it is. In writing about, editing, and researching all these sorts of things, I've now accumulated enough experience and confidence in myself on the subject that, if I want to go for other positions just in this niche area of antisemitism, then I could compete and stand out.

And so I've come to an odd place now given this range of experiences: I don't know anybody else in my field who is comparable to me. Nobody has the range of experiences that I've described above. There isn't anyone I look to and think, "Oh, if only I had their career! They're so much better and further along than me."

As useful as the "take the professor, not the course" aphorism has been, it's now led to another:

"Don't be the best, be the only."

Don't try to beat others in a race down the same path. Carve a new path for yourself. Explore new territory where others have not gone or are too afraid to go. Become something that others are too afraid to be, or even too terrified to understand.

I'm calling my particular interpretation Psychedelic Zionism. I am taking the ethos of the 1960s, mystical psychedelic culture and applying it toward the war to defeat all these hate groups, evil ideologies, and authoritarian states that I’ve spent so much time studying. I know there is nobody else doing it, because if there were, then I would have found them by now and we'd be friends.

You can do the same thing with what most interests you. You can find the subjects and style that you care about, that move you, and then do things with them that nobody else can do.

I suspect you probably already have a pretty good idea what those subjects might be. Now is the time to go out and pursue them with originality, determination, and courage.

Reach out any time if I can ever offer any assistance or guidance.

with respect,

David

---