Erik Michielsen: How are your priorities changing as you get older?

Yoav Gonen: I think one thing that I've realized recently is that it's very important to have goals, and to have something to strive for. I reach a point at the newspaper where I felt like it was okay to coast for a little bit, mainly because I've been working so hard to get to this point. And I said, you know what, I deserve a little bit of a break, let me just kind of do the job and do it well, but let me not keep kind of trying to strive and climb the ladder, or what have you. But, it-- And I haven't even been doing that very long and I've already realized, you know, I'm so much more engaged with everything, with my life, with people, when I do have kind of that fire in the belly, like something that I'm striving for, something I'm really excited for, you know, it just makes every interaction better because it's something that you enjoy talking about, it's something that people can help you think about, you can bounce ideas off of them, and so I've gotten to a point now where I'm realizing I need to kind of figure out my next big thing, maybe - I don't know exactly what terms to put it in, 5-year plan or just kind of next step, but it's - I think it's important to have something that I'm working toward.

Erik Michielsen: What do you find challenging about moving into that goal-oriented environment?

Yoav Gonen: Figuring out what the goal is, is bigger the challenge. I mean, I realize I wanna strive for something, but I don't exactly know what that is. I've kind of divided it into short term and long term. And I realize in the short term, I want a little bit more of a variety in my reporting, in my writing. I've been writing, you know, in The Post format for 5 years, it's kind of a simple style which actually people don't realize how challenging it is to write that way but it is a challenge, but also, you know, short space and a simple style, and I don't quite get to do as much reporting as I'd like to do, and I've realized that writing differently and also doing more reporting is very important to me, it's one of the things that drew me to the job. So, I realized I'd like to re-engage to those things on my own time essentially and that's why I am starting to build a website, basically to have another creative outlet, I mean, it's related to work and probably there'll be a lot of crossover between the two, but, I realized that it's important for me to branch out, get a little bit more creative with my work. So, that's the immediate goal, but right now I'm still trying to figure out beyond that what more I wanna do. I mean, definitely one of the things is more creativity in my life, that's where the music comes in and that's where this website, it's gonna be kind of like a blog or just another outlet for my writing.