Emily

10 things I learned, found interesting, or used this month

Monthly Top 10 / /

1. Seneca wrote a few of my favorite quotes about gratitude. He said if we’re not grateful right now, we will never be grateful, even if we’re given the whole world.

2. I’m currently reading the mammoth 1,162-page biography of Robert Moses, “America’s greatest builder”, who shaped most of New York City. I’m about halfway through and so far and it’s fascinating. It’s a jarring, behind-the-scenes look at how government works and how one man came to, and fell from, power.

3. Emotional intelligence doesn’t have to be complicated. It’s mostly a matter of ego.

4. The 100/0 Rule. At eighteen, Darren Hardy went to a seminar where the speaker asked the audience, “‘What percentage of shared responsibility do you have in making a relationship work?’” Audience members shouted out numbers like 50/50, and 51/49, and 80/20. The instructor turned around and wrote on the board: 100/0. “‘You have to be willing to give 100 percent with zero expectation of receiving anything in return’, he said. ‘Only when you’re willing to take 100 percent responsibility for making the relationship work will it work. Otherwise, a relationship left to chance will always be vulnerable to disaster.’”

5. Listen ten times more than you speak. Musonius Rufus said only a slave would be concerned about her voice being heard.

6. Be like a smelly goat. Marcus Aurelius said, “The straightforward and good person should be like a smelly goat— you know when they are in the room with you.” Live straightforwardly, he told himself. Let every utterance be truthful, so no one ever has to question your motives.

7. Contemplate the swings of fortune. Not talking or thinking about loss or death doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It just means it will be all the more distressing when it inevitably does.

8. Love isn’t about someone else. It’s a way of being.

9. Clear the mental and physical clutter. I taped this quote from Discipline is Destiny to my computer: “A person who doesn’t eliminate noise will miss the message from the muses.”

10. Notable books I read this month: The Boys in the Boat by Daniel James Brown, Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford

The quest for personal freedom

Creativity, Philosophy / /

Last month I read Sarah Bakewell’s biography of sixteenth-century philosopher Michel de Montaigne and got so much out of it. Montaigne’s book Essays has influenced some of the greatest thinkers: from Francis Bacon and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Friedrich Nietzsche and Shakespeare. Influential as he was, he was also, another biographer Stefan Zweig wrote, “the sworn enemy of all responsibility.” 

Montaigne’s “irresponsibility” was “essential to his battle to preserve his particular self as is.” Personal freedom is the supreme aim, he said, “to free oneself from fear and hope, belief and superstition. To be free of convictions and parties.” He thought certainty was absurd: all knowledge exists in humans, and because humans are fallible, all knowledge is to be doubted. He loved following his thoughts where they led, and delighted in viewing things from all possible angles. He went with the flow. If a book bored him or caused him to strain, he’d stop reading it, saying, “there is nothing I would break my head against in the name of scholarship.” He played with his cat, and pondered and wrote about his cat’s perspective. And he never worked harder than necessary. “The least strained and most natural ways of the soul,” he said, “are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.”

This idea of not straining yourself reminds me of how Richard Feynman won the Nobel Prize.

The Irresponsible Nobel Prize Winner

After spending 4 years working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Richard Feynman accepted a position teaching physics at Cornell University. During this time, he was offered different positions at top universities with higher-paying salaries. Albert Einstein wrote him requesting he work at Princeton and the Institute for Advanced Study. Despite the wonderful offers, he couldn’t accept them—4 years of intense mathematical work in Los Alamos had left him drained. He was tired, uninterested in research, and couldn’t write more than 2 sentences on a scientific problem without becoming distracted. There was no way he could accept these offers, he reasoned, because they didn’t know he was burned out. “They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas…”

But then he had a thought. These offers, with their high expectations, were absurd. They would be impossible to live up to. And because they were impossible to live up to, he realized, he had no responsibility to live up to them. “It was a brilliant idea: You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.” He realized he could apply this idea to his current work at Cornell.

Then he had another thought. Physics was becoming less interesting to him, but he used to enjoy it. And he used to enjoy it because he played with it—unconcerned with its scientific importance. From now on, he would work only on physics problems that entertained him. “Now that I am burned out,” he thought, “and I’ll never accomplish anything . . . I’m going to play with physics, whenever I want to, without worrying about any importance whatsoever.”

Within a week, he was working on a “fun” project, causing a colleague to question its importance. “‘Hah!’ I say. ‘There’s no importance whatsoever. I’m just doing it for the fun of it.’ His reaction didn’t discourage me; I had made up my mind that I was going to enjoy physics and do whatever I liked.” This project that he worked on for fun ultimately led him to win the Nobel Prize.

The Wise Make Time to Play

Just as Marcus Aurelius wrote about not being “all about business,” Seneca advised his friend Lucilius that the mind will fracture if given too much work and that “it will rise improved and sharper after a good break.” Montaigne wrote, “There is nothing more notable in Socrates than that he found time when he was an old man to learn music and dancing, and thought it time well spent.”

Perhaps it was playfulness that gave Montaigne some of his philosophical insights. Summarizing Montaigne’s thoughts on world conflict, Bakewell writes, “To believe that life could demand [homicide in the name of religion] is to forget what day-to-day existence actually is. It entails forgetting that, when you look at a . . . . cat in the mood for play, you are looking at a creature who looks back at you. No abstract principles are involved; there are only two individuals, face to face, hoping for the best from one another.”

The real source of freedom

Philosophy / /

In The Virtues of War Alexander the Great comes to a river crossing only to be stopped by a philosopher who’s standing in his way. Irritated, a man from Alexander’s crew shouts, “This man has conquered the world! What have you done?” Unmoved, the philosopher looks at him and says, “I have conquered the need to conquer the world.”

Though a fictional conversation, it’s an accurate representation of the difference between Alexander the Great and Diogenes the Cynic. Unlike Alexander, Diogenes wasn’t concerned with his image or his ego. He had few wants. He was more powerful than the ruler of the world—because he was the ruler of himself.

Last month I read and took notes on Ryan Holiday’s Discipline is Destiny. For this post, I filtered out everything but a few key takeaways and tied in ideas from The Daily Stoic and Ego is the Enemy.

Ambition Requires Balance

Ambition, Ryan writes, can easily become an addiction. And it’s the worst kind. Because, unlike gluttony or drinking, society rewards ambition. When it comes to successful people, he says, “we don’t ask them what they are doing or why they are doing it, we only ask them how they do it. We conveniently ignore how little satisfaction their accomplishments bring them, how miserable most of them are, and how miserable they tend to make everyone around them.”

It’s important to note that ambition is a good thing; what’s harmful is unfettered ambition. It’s the millionaire who has time for everyone except his own family. It’s the professional athlete who won’t retire. This isn’t freedom—it’s slavery. Slavery to ambition. On the flip side, however, lying around all day with no aspirations is not ideal either.

Ambition, like virtue, requires balance. It requires what Aristotle called the “golden mean”—the middle ground between excess and deficiency. For example, when it comes to pride, the virtuous person isn’t excessively proud, but neither is she excessively humble. She has a modest, self-respecting confidence. The same with courage—the courageous person is somewhere between recklessness and cowardice.

And living within this golden mean is easier when we’re aware of what we—not other people—value.

What We Actually Require

The All-Star forward Kawhi Leonard signed a four-year contract with the L.A. Clippers for $176 million. Still, Ryan writes, he drives his 1997 Chevy Tahoe that he’s had since high school. Not because he’s cheap, but because, “the things that matter to [him] are cheap”. 

When it comes to money, all you really need is enough to not have to do what you don’t want to do, and enough to stick with your main thing (e.g. painting, coding, writing, fund-raising, filming, care-taking—whatever it is that gets you out of bed in the morning). If we don’t know the answer to how much money is enough, the default answer becomes more.

Again, it’s a balance. Extreme generosity on one end, extreme greed on the other. If you give away everything you own, it would be impossible for you to live a good life and flourish. You would end up depriving yourself, and the world, of your best. On the flip side, if you sweat every penny or are a slave to consumption, you’re also not doing yourself, or the world, any good.

Self-discipline, temperance, moderation, whatever you want to call it, is not about deprivation. It’s an opportunity for freedom. “In the last analysis,” Bernard Baruch said, “our only freedom is the freedom to discipline ourselves.”

Unrestrained Moderation

Marcus Aurelius was the literal ruler of the world. He had more responsibilities than anyone. Yet he would remind himself to “not be all about business.” To have “unrestrained moderation” in all things. Not to be too selfless or too selfish, not to be too timid or too reckless, not to work too hard or too little. “Not to be constantly telling people (or writing them) that I’m too busy, unless I really am. Similarly, not to always be ducking my responsibility to the people around me because of ‘pressing business.’”

What’s incredible is that he had unlimited wealth and power, yet his focus was on being a good person. “Just that you do the right thing,” he told himself, “the rest doesn’t matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored.” He knew, like Diogenes the Cynic, that good character—not money or power—was the real source of freedom.

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