Life

What we don’t know

Life, Philosophy, Reading / /

A man arrives at work one day and instead of walking through the main entrance, he goes around back. As another person enters through the back door, the man rushes to catch it before it can close and lock. Once inside, his coworker says to him, “The boss wants to see you.” Without looking up, the man mutters a barely audible, “Yeah, I want to see him too.” In the locker room, he sets down his gym bag—a bag far too large for just clothing—and pulls out a pistol and a handgun. He conceals both under his coat. Then, he goes to look for his boss.

Based on what you know so far, context would assist you if you had to predict what this man would do next. But, as Gavin de Becker points out in The Gift of Fear, (a super fun and engaging read, by the way!) just one small piece of information changes the context of this story: the man is a police officer. Your prediction would likely be different if he was a postal worker. 

The greatest enemy of perception—and therefore, accurate predictions—he says, is judgment. 

And it’s so easy to judge what we think we know. But a theme that keeps coming up in my reading is that we don’t know much of, well, anything.

What if we were more honest with ourselves and others about what we don’t know? If wisdom begins in humility, then it’s more than okay that we don’t know. In fact, it’s the best place to start…

Compassionate Assumption
People can frustrate us. And sometimes when they do, we make harmful judgments about them (the worst of those judgments being that they did something to us). My daughter is purposely trying to make my life miserable. The guy who cut me off is a jerk. My spouse is incapable of understanding why I’m upset. But what if, as Ryan Holiday said in last week’s Daily Stoic email, we fought to defend their side instead of attack it? What if, instead of working to produce evidence against someone, we worked to produce evidence for them? We could follow Seneca’s advice and play the role of public defender, and “plead the case of the absent defendant despite our own interests.” Maybe my daughter is acting out as a way of asking for help. Maybe that guy is having a bad day. Maybe I’m not communicating with enough love toward my spouse. Because we don’t ever really know what someone is going through, do we? Even the people closest to us struggle with things we’ll never know about, let alone comprehend. In any case, we can default to compassionate assumption. If nothing else, it will make us calmer and happier.

What If Five Senses Aren’t Enough?
The sixteenth-century writer and philosopher Montaigne was famous for his skepticism of knowledge. He worked for the court of inquiry and, when a civil case was too complex for a quick verdict by the judge, was tasked with summarizing the evidence for both sides, without passing judgment. Dubbed the king of uncertainty, he knew all evidence was error-prone, and therefore so were decisions based on it. Judges and lawyers were fallible too, and to be doubted. Even the laws themselves were to be questioned because they were made by humans. Perhaps it was this court work that made him skeptical of things, himself included. He vigorously investigated the nuanced, opposing impulses of his soul, but he never took himself too seriously. (He would laugh at his own contradictions and silliness.) Much of his writings end with phrases such as “though I don’t know,” which, Sarah Bakewell writes in How To Live, is pure Montaigne. Basically, he believed that all knowledge should be doubted because it resides in human beings. “We have formed a truth by the consultation and concurrence of our five senses,” he said, “but perhaps we needed the agreement of eight or ten senses, and their contribution, to perceive it certainly and in its essence.” 

Doubt As a Case For Faith
The philosopher Descartes said, “Everything I perceive clearly and distinctly cannot fail to be true.” But, as Montaigne would have pointed out, we can’t possibly know whether we are capable of seeing things clearly, let alone be sure that we do. I think about this a lot when it comes to religious faith. In David Brook’s wonderful book The Second Mountain, he points out that even the most religious people have regular doubts about their faith. Mother Theresa did. Brooks says he still does. But, he argues, faith is strengthened, not destroyed, by doubts. Montaigne likely would have agreed, as Sarah Bakewell writes that he “denied that humans could attain knowledge of religious truths except through faith. Montaigne may not have felt a great desire for faith, but he did feel a strong aversion to all human pretension—and the result was the same.”

Books Read This Month

I read The Road to Character by David Brooks and it was amazing. He tells the stories of people like Dorothy Day, George C. Marshall, A. Phillip Randolph, and Augustine, and the ongoing inner battles they fought to live a life of meaning and purpose. Reading their stories helped me to better understand what it means to live life to its fullest. I can’t recommend this book enough. I read and enjoyed Admiral James Stavridis’s To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and the Crucible of Decision. He combines his 30-plus years of experience in the US Navy with 9 crucial moments in the Navy’s history, to help answer this question: How do great decision-makers make their decisions? And because it’s a collection of 9 different stories, the pages flew by. I also read a hidden gem I found in a used bookstore: an old copy of Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, which I loved so much that I bought and read Fahrenheit 451 which was so good that I added it to my list of favorite books. (I’m sad to say it was my first reading of Fahrenheit; I was book-averse when it was assigned in high school.) I was surprised that it touched on so many of my favorite themes: slowing down, being still, dancing in the rain and taking walks and being present and doing things for no reason other than to do them. Just a great book. Finally, I read The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and oh my gosh, I had so much fun reading it; I wrote exclamation marks on nearly every other page. It’s a book about what we don’t know and how we handle what we don’t know. And I found a lot of cool ideas to potentially use in my own writing.

The ability to choose is the ultimate freedom

Life, Philosophy / /

In early January of this year, my parents’ 16-year-old cat, Quinn, passed away. Her final week had been gut-wrenching.

The day after she passed, I called my dad and cried on the phone to him. (I felt guilty about this—I should have been the one comforting him and my mom, not the other way around—but I couldn’t help it.) I can’t stop thinking about Quinn’s final week, I told him, and I can’t stop crying. My dad listened patiently as always. When he finally spoke, he said something that instantly calmed me, and has calmed me since. “Em,” he said, “you can’t do this to yourself. We had sixteen great years with Quinn. So we can think about the 1 week of sadness or the 16 years of happiness, you know? We can choose.”

The 1 week of sadness or the 16 years of happiness. We can choose…

Principles or People
If we bend the rules for one person, we’ll have to bend the rules for everyone. That was the position of Gavin de Becker’s client, a mid-sized city that was in a dispute with a former employee. The city had offered the ex-employee, who was retiring due to a mental disability, $11,000. The ex-employee refused to accept the offer because it didn’t include an extra $400 he felt entitled to. The city refused to pay the $400 because it was not approved beforehand and would therefore violate the rule. An ongoing dispute began, and the city hired Gavin de Becker to mediate. He advised them to pay the $400 (they’d already spent more than that fighting it) because it was an inconsequential sum and obviously a matter of pride. One day, the ex-employee showed up without notice and demanded to speak to the administrator who’d made the decision not to pay him. The two argued; neither side would budge. The ex-employee then laid two .38 caliber bullets on the admin’s desk and walked out. De Becker also learned that the ex-employee had recently shown his therapist a gun while talking about the situation. “Right is right, and right always wins,” he said. Still, the city refused to pay. It was a matter of principle—if they bent the rules for this employee, they’d have to bend them for everyone, they said. But, de Becker pointed out, that’s just not true. They wouldn’t need to make concessions for everyone—they’d just need to make them for the mentally unstable man who’d placed two bullets on the administrator’s desk and showed a gun to his therapist. “I don’t expect the city will be paying out on that policy too often,” de Becker said. By ignoring these red flags, the city was choosing principles over people. They were choosing pride over safety. Wisely, the city finally took de Becker’s advice and chose to pay the $400. As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “The young man knows the rules, but the old man knows the exceptions.”

Special or Happy
A highly-respected financier, who’d made her fortune on Wall Street, was beginning to feel as though her work skills were declining. She was in her mid-fifties and younger colleagues were becoming leery of her decisions. She wasn’t as sharp as she once was. Panicked, she reached out to social scientist and author Arthur Brooks. He asked her about her life and learned she was unhappy, had been for years. She “lived to work” and was constantly exhausted from the long hours she put in. Her marriage was in decline. Her relationships with her adult children were strained. And now she was terrified that her career skills were deteriorating. To Brooks, the solution to her unhappiness seemed obvious. He asked her why she hadn’t taken the time to revive her marriage, or repair her relationships with her kids, or cut back on work hours. “I knew that her grueling work effort had made her successful in the first place,” he said, “but when you figure out something has secondary consequences that are making you miserable, you find a way to fix it, right? You might love bread, but if you become gluten intolerant, you stop eating it because it makes you sick.” She thought about his question for a few moments, then looked at him and said flatly, “Maybe I would prefer to be special rather than happy.” Brooks was stunned. For a long while after, he mulled over what she had said. It reminded him of something, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. Then it hit him. Her reasoning—that she preferred being special over being happy—was not unlike the response given by a recovering drug addict when asked why he had continued to get high even though he was fully aware it was making him miserable. “I cared more about being high than being happy,” he had told Brooks. The financier, Brooks realized, was an addict, too. A work addict. Maybe I would prefer being special rather than happy. She was miserable because she was choosing her ego over herself.

Choiceless or Free
Dr. Edith Eva Eger, whom I’ve written about, is a Holocaust survivor turned world-renowned psychologist. We already have the key to happiness in our pocket, she says. The key is knowing that, in every situation, we have a choice. Sent to Auschwitz at the age of sixteen, she writes candidly about the horrors of her imprisonment. “But even then,” she says, “in my prison, in hell, I could choose what I held in my mind. I could choose whether to walk into the electrified barbed wire, to refuse to leave my bed, or I could choose to struggle and live.” This is the same message in psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s classic book Man’s Search for Meaning. Rabbi and author Harold S. Kushner summarizes what he believes is Frankl’s most enduring message:

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you…Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond.

If the Stoics had to boil down their philosophy to just one idea, it would probably be the same as Eger’s and Frankl’s: we don’t control what happens, we only control how we respond to what happens. Our ability to choose our responses, the Stoics said, is what allows us to emulate the divine. No one has the power to take this ability from us. (“No thefts of free will reported!” Epictetus once joked.) And we can access it at any time, if we choose to.

P.S.
My parents have since adopted Piper, who’s now best friends with their dog, Minna.

Books Read This Month

It’s been more than 10 years since I’ve read a Malcolm Gladwell book, and I forgot how much I enjoy his storytelling. One of the things I took from Talking To Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know is how bad we are at reading people and how the flimsiest evidence often skews our judgments. For instance, people who didn’t know Hitler personally knew him better than people who had spoken with him for hours. I also read his excellent book The Bomber Mafia which highlights the complexity of morality, especially in war. I read and loved Thich Nhat Hanh’s The Miracle of Mindfulness, and Winston Churchill’s Painting As a Pastime. Finally, I read Robert Kolker’s Hidden Valley Road, a nonfiction medical mystery about the Galvins, an all-American family with 12 children—2 girls and 10 boys. And 6 of the 10 boys were diagnosed with schizophrenia. Though sad, it’s also a beautiful story of love and family.Your Attractive Heading

Listening to who you are

Creativity, Life, Philosophy / /

A few years ago I read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art, and I remember being just totally floored when he said, “Our job in this lifetime is not to shape ourselves into some ideal we imagine we ought to be, but to find out who we already are and become it.” We can’t just be whoever we want. We have to grow who we already are.

Less designing, more discovering. Less inventing, more listening. 

These 2 themes—becoming who you already are and listening—kept appearing in recent books I’ve read. In fact, these ideas have so inspired me that I’ve started doing my own form of meditative listening in our backyard.

You can’t really see it, but the dip in this rock is perfect for sitting. Every few evenings, I sit down, rest my arms on my knees, palms up, eyes closed, and listen. The first time I did this I was surprised by how much I heard: traffic in the distance, a dog barking, a car door shut, a trash can rumbling, the opening of the sliding glass door, my wife Courtney asking me what the hell I’m doing, the low hum of a plane, birds singing and hobbling around in the tangerine tree.

I breathed deeply. I smiled. Life was humming along, without me imposing, without me judging.

This exercise is part of my resolution this year to create more space in my life. To have fewer commitments, more time to explore and do nothing, more time with family, more time listening to the world around me, and, more importantly, to the world within me.

Formation, Not Transformation
Sports commentators like to talk about Andre Agassi’s personal transformation. At age 16 he turned pro and, without intending, became an image of rebellion. On the tennis court, he wore jean shorts, a headband tied at the back of his neck, a mullet hairpiece, and a dangle earring. Later in his career, with his wig long gone and his baldness embraced, he founded Agassi Prep, a charter school for at-risk children. When people say he transformed from punk to paragon, he cringes. He never thought of himself back then as a punk, any more than he thinks of himself now as a paragon. “Transformation is change from one thing to another,” he says, “but I started as nothing. I didn’t transform, I formed.” As a teenager, he rebelled for the same reason we all did: he didn’t know who he was. He was a work-in-progress, not a finished product. “What people see now, for better or worse, is my first formation, my first incarnation.” He didn’t become something new, he became more of what he already was. “I didn’t alter my image, I discovered it. I didn’t change my mind, I opened it.” 

The Songwriter Who’d Never Written a Song
At seven years old, long before founding the Grammy award-winning rock band Wilco, Jeff Tweedy would tell people he was a songwriter. Not that he was going to be one when he grew up, but that he already was one. “It turns out that the reason I started writing songs,” he says, “is because I happened to be a songwriter.” Never mind that he’d never written a song, he was a songwriter and that was a fact. As Robert Greene wrote in Mastery, “You have nothing to create. You merely dig and refine what has been buried inside of you all along.” Perhaps Tweedy intuited self-knowledge the way children do, the way they hear their hearts clearly, unmuffled by analysis. He knew he was a songwriter; he’d been one all along.

Permission to Listen
Security specialist Gavin de Becker helps to keep people safe. He does this, in large part, by giving people permission to listen to themselves, to their intuition. The great thing about our intuition is that it always has our best interests at heart. The problem is that we don’t always listen to it, and even when we do, we can be quick to dismiss it. Why is that? Take, for example, the myth that dogs have better intuition than humans. Our intuition is vastly superior to any animal because we’re vastly more knowledgeable. (Dogs simply respond to our intuition). It’s just that we have something that dogs don’t have: judgment. “With judgment comes the ability to disregard your own intuition unless you can explain it logically,” de Becker says in The Gift of Fear. (An awesome book by the way, especially for women). Relying on the intuition of a dog “is often a way to find permission to have an opinion we might otherwise be forced to call (God forbid) unsubstantiated.” In fact, it’s common for victims, while recalling the day of the crime, to “remember” something they weren’t consciously aware of at the time. ‘Now that I think about it, I spotted that same car earlier that day…’ De Becker isn’t saying, of course, to be suspicious and afraid of everything. (To do so would just be giving in to an overactive imagination.) But he is saying that when your gut is telling you something, listen. It can save your life.

Do This Every Day
Carl Jung said, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.” In other words, when we don’t recognize our own agency, we’re at the mercy of circumstance. Our question becomes, Why me? instead of, What am I going to do about it? Having a sense of control over our lives is essential to our well-being. It allows us to take initiative and reassures us that regardless of what happens, we’ll adapt and be okay. One of the best ways I’ve found to develop agency is by journaling. Journaling makes the whispers of the heart audible. It forces you to pay attention to your life, to listen to it. If you don’t journal already, give it a shot. A quick 10 minutes each morning can have a profound impact on your life. (Trust me, it’s more important than any report, email, meeting, etc.) It might be the most important thing you do all day.

Books Read This Month

I finished The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin and I cannot recommend it enough. (I underlined or put a star next to something on almost every page.) My biggest takeaway is that art, like life, requires us to listen. To be still and to listen with our whole body. To surrender and open ourselves to what the universe is saying. I read Steven Pressfield’s memoir Govt Cheese, and loved it. He’s one of my favorite authors, and his work inspired the theme for this newsletter. I also read From Strength to Strength by Arthur C. Brooks, and so far it’s the best book I’ve read this year. It’s full of practical wisdom and I promise you’ll get something out of it that will improve your life.

Being isn’t as real as doing

Creativity, Life, Philosophy / /

Ralph Waldo Emerson said personal energy “resides in the moment of transition from the past to a new state.” It resides in the creative process. The finished product, he said, is dead in its completion. But the process of creating? That’s ripe with growth and opportunity.

There’s a word for something done solely for the end result: chore. This theme has come up again and again in recent books I’ve read, and I want to share two of my favorite takeaways.

How to Reduce Intrinsic Interest
There’s a classic psychology experiment involving children who liked to draw. They were given pens and paper and split into two groups. The children in the first group were given a reward for their drawings, which they were told about beforehand. The children in the second group received no rewards nor mention of them. After a few weeks, the children in the first group (those rewarded for their drawings) were less interested in drawing than those in the second group. The first group’s drawings were also judged to be of lower quality. The second group not only produced better work, but showed continued enjoyment in the activity. “The hypothesis,” says Matthew B. Crawford, “is that the child begins to attribute his interest, which previously needed no justification, to the external reward, and this has the effect of reducing his intrinsic interest in it.”

Being Isn’t as Real as Doing
In How to Write One Song, Jeff Tweedy says the question is not, Who do I want to be? It’s, What do I want to do? “Do you want to be a “star”? Don’t bother. You’re going to lose,” he says. “Even if you make it, you’ll lose. Because you’re never going to be exactly what you’re picturing.” Let’s say you want to be a rockstar. If by rockstar you mean you want to play music in front of people, you can do that. You can probably gradually play to larger groups of people too. You can experiment with new musical forms. You can dye your hair and create your own persona. Basically, you can do nearly everything “rockstars” do. Rockstar is a title. It’s not real. Doing something is real. Creating is real. You can be someone or you can do something.

Just That You Do the Right Thing
Stoicism is built around doing. Its goal is not to make you sound smart or help you debate abstract theories. It aims to solve problems in the real world. It doesn’t matter that you know Seneca’s letters by heart if you’re still worried about things you don’t control. 

Epictetus said don’t talk about your philosophy, embody it. “If your choices are beautiful, so too will you be.” And anything that is beautiful, said Marcus Aurelius, is beautiful by itself; beauty needs no title or recognition. “Does an emerald lose its quality if it is not praised?”

Doing the right thing—that’s what matters. That someone notices? Not your concern. That you’re given a reward because of it? Yawn. “Just that you do the right thing,” Marcus said, “the rest doesn’t matter. Cold or warm. Tired or well-rested. Despised or honored. Dying…or busy with other assignments. . . . There as well: ‘To do what needs doing’.”

(If you want to learn more about Stoic philosophy, these are the best books to start with: The Daily Stoic, Meditations, Letters From a Stoic, Discourses, Enchiridion, On the Shortness of Life.)

Books Read This Month

I needed a distraction this month, and John Grisham’s The Reckoning did the trick. Jake Brown’s Rick Rubin: In the Studio was a fascinating look at the why behind Rubin’s creative decisions, and how these decisions created and revolutionized multiple music genres. (I’m eager to read his new book The Creative Act: A Way of Being.) I’m also slowly making my way through Gary Provost’s 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing, which is short but rich. And I’ve just started reading The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker which I’m really enjoying so far. He uses real-life crime stories (which read like thrillers) to explain the psychology of human violence, and how to recognize the warning signs that can keep you safe.

The best of 2022

Life, Philosophy / /

This year I tried to be extra mindful of how I spent my time. The Stoics said if you don’t want to waste your time, don’t focus on things that aren’t in your control. So I stopped looking at crypto updates. I stopped (or was at least mindful of stopping once I started) trying to figure people out. I stopped paying attention to the news. And I stopped being so tight-fisted with services that save me time (I had groceries delivered, hired professionals instead of doing it myself, etc.)

The result was that I got a lot done and had tons of free time. I spent every evening this year with my wife, saw my parents nearly every week, ran ~550 miles, read tons of great books, and started a newsletter.

The ideas I learned and used this year helped me so much, so I put together a list of the best ones. Below are the 22 ideas that helped me most in 2022. Enjoy.

1. The first rule for everything: don’t stress.

2. Focus on insignificant things, get insignificant results. Instead of tracking how many days you made your bed, track how many hours you spent reading a good book. Instead of a house-cleaning schedule, make an exercise one.

3. Habits are only habits if they’re done daily. Habits done once a week are obligations.

4. John Steinbeck said overwork is the falsest of economies. When you work, work hard. When you’re done, be done.

5. 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.”

6. Be ruthless about what you give your attention to. If an email is not addressed to you specifically, or if it starts with “Please Read…”, you probably don’t even need to open it. Open a book or a journal for a few minutes instead.

7. It’s better to read books that will enrich your life, rather than your career.

8. In order to have 1 good idea, you need to consume 10. 

9. If someone tells you a book has changed their life, read it.

10. Everyone is doing their best with what they’ve been given. Socrates said that no one does wrong on purpose. The logic, of course, is that people who do wrong are harming themselves, and since people don’t harm themselves on purpose, they don’t do wrong on purpose. I really liked how Ryan Holiday wrote about it: People are doing the best they can with what they’ve been given. They weren’t given your brain, your experiences, your circumstances, your influences. The friend who repeatedly makes destructive choices, the sister who just can’t seem to get it together—surely they wouldn’t act this way if they knew the harm they were causing themselves. They wouldn’t act this way if they could help it. They’re doing their best, as we all are. If they’re open to advice, give it. If they’re not, let them be. Focus on the good in them. There are things that they’re better at than you. Learn from them. Most of all, love them. And be grateful with all your heart for the opportunity to share this beautiful, brief existence with them.

11. The higher tempo wins. If everything feels under control, you’re not going fast enough.

12. No two people can read the same book, see the same sunrise, or watch the same movie and get the same thing from it. Basically, nothing has been explored until it has been explored by you. Only you can find the treasures that will help you with your magnificent task or weird little thing.

13. There are fools and there are seekers of wisdom. Everyone else suffers. As Sadhguru put it in Inner Engineering, “An idiot is incapable of drawing conclusions. A [wise person] is unwilling to draw conclusions. The rest have glorified their conclusions as knowledge. The fool just enjoys whatever little he knows and [the wise person] enjoys it absolutely. The rest are the ones who constantly struggle and suffer.”

14. Only by being present can we live life to the fullest. As Oliver Burkeman put it in Four Thousand Weeks, a great experience “can still end up feeling fairly meaningless if you’re incapable of directing some of your attention as you’d like. After all, to have any meaningful experience, you must be able to focus on it, at least a bit. Otherwise, are you really having it at all? Can you have an experience you don’t experience? The finest meal at a Michelin-starred restaurant might as well be a plate of instant noodles if your mind is elsewhere; and a friendship to which you never actually give a moment’s thought is a friendship in name only.”

15. Let it float on by. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about discarding thoughts: if a toxic thought pops into my head, I can immediately discard it. When I told my wife about this, she pointed out that in order to discard something, I first had to possess it. It’s better, she said, to watch the thought from a distance, and let it float on by.

16. Don’t let anyone tell you reading isn’t work. I schedule a half hour each day to read (instead of just reading when I have time) and try not to miss it. Reading is hard work. And it’s some of the most important work you can do.

17. Reflective thoughts are truer than everyday thoughts. As we go about our day, thoughts pop into our heads seemingly out of nowhere. These thoughts can be irrational or impulsive, which can lead to feelings that are irrational or impulsive, which can lead to actions that are irrational or impulsive. That’s why reflection is so important. It’s why journaling or meditating or taking 5 minutes to ourselves is so important. So we can slow down. So we can be present. So we can take our brains off autopilot and hear the whispers of our hearts. So we can stay in touch with ourselves. As Anne Morrow Lindbergh said in her beautiful book Gift from the Sea, “If one is out of touch with oneself, then one cannot touch others.”

18. Only fools constantly regret their actions.

19. Seneca said if we’re not grateful right now, we will never be grateful, even if we’re given the whole world.

20. Love is a way of being.

21. Slow productivity. Do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. And if you’re a creator, focus on what does not yet exist.

22. Many mickles make a muckle. Keep going, even if it doesn’t seem like you’re making progress. You are. It’s slowly adding up. The interest is compounding. Keep going.

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