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“I’m saying that’s ‘art.’ Someone didn’t just copy it. Someone had to take various components and put them together, to create something that was worth experiencing, and sharing, and talking about. On the back of that, you can build a business that makes tons of money selling food.

“The art here, the experience of seeing it, that’s free. Anyone can walk in this place, look around, get it, and leave. The souvenir part—the experience part, the owning-the-table-for-two-hours part—that’s what they make money from.

“McDonald’s fooled us into believing that the purpose of industry was to churn out standardized quantity at low cost. This place reminds us that, no, there’s an alternative to racing to the bottom. And that is, racing to the top.”

Are you ready to race toward the top and combine money with meaning? Keep reading—the remaining stories and skills in this book show you how.

■ PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG FUCKUP: HOW I WENT FROM BROKE, MISERABLE WANNABE SUPERSTAR TO FINANCIALLY SECURE, CREATIVELY ENGAGED PROFESSIONAL AUTHOR

I told you I wouldn’t recommend anything to you that I hadn’t applied in my own life. So here is my own story of how I applied the Four Steps to Aligning Your Money and Meaning, in my own life. Through following these steps, I was able to transform myself from being basically a miserable, broke loser, just four years ago, to having my current career, which is both profoundly meaningful to me and financially lucrative.

■ Pre-Step 1: Broke and Miserable Loser

Seven years ago, at age twenty-seven, I became possessed with the idea that I wanted to write and publish my first book, a manuscript of creative nonfiction I was working on, and become a literary superstar.

Laid off from my first postcollege job in corporate America, after the dot-com bubble, I moved back with my parents into the room I lived in as a teenager, with the idea that I would enjoy subsidized rent while I pursued my passion of writing and tried to make it as an author. My parents tolerated this because I also offered to use my writing skills assisting my father on a professional project for which he needed help; this was my day job, which also paid my basic expenses and some rent to my parents.

I ended up writing a wildly sexual, experimental, caffeine-potand-wine-charged attempt at autobiographically based comedic nonfiction, almost wholly devoid of any structure, weaving in manic political rants and fragments from my senior honors thesis in international relations at Brown (“Black Masks, White Guilt: Cultural Appropriation, Multicultural Consumerism and the Search for a Meaningful First World Existence”). My literary idols were Henry Miller, Hunter S. Thompson, Michel Houellebecq. I was certain my name would be joining their names at the table of “bad boys” in literature. The manuscript was titled, ironically enough, Rock Star Envy.

Here is a selection from one of the twenty-two rejection letters sent to my agent at the time:

“I couldn’t tell whether he was trying to write a satire/be humorous when he discussed things like his ecofeminism, or whether he was trying to write a straight memoir. His story picked up speed and kept me interested when he let his too brief anecdotes breathe and become a linear narrative, but the asides, rants, and portions of his college thesis distracted me and stopped the story in its tracks.”

Another letter, from a famous literary editor at a major New York publishing house, in its entirety:

“I’m going to pass on this project. Mr. Ellsberg’s writing is not strong enough to overcome the simple fact that he is not a very likable person.”

At the time, of course, I viewed these letters as pure confirmation of my worst suspicions: the corrupted aesthetics of middle-class consumerist mediocrity and philistinism, the complete venality of corporate publishing pandering to those tastes, the wickedness of the profit-motivated media-entertainment complex—unable to recognize the genius of Art