Philosophy

“There are a million different versions, this is mine.”

For the first few years of his career, White Lotus star Walton Goggins would walk into auditions asking himself, What do these people want from me? “And I can tell you it brought me a lot of pain. A lot of pain,” he says.

But everything changed when he flipped the question. Instead of trying to deliver what he thought they wanted, he started asking himself what he thought the role needed. He thought, “You know what? I’m just gonna come from my heart, and this is my version of it. There are a million different versions of it. And if this is not the version they’re buying, at least I can live with myself at the end of the day. And I can walk away without expecting this job, you know? And that’s really where I found my salvation.”

It’s one of the hardest things to do: to pour your heart into something without thinking about the outcome.

But it’s how the best work gets made.

One of the most brilliant physicists to ever live had his biggest breakthrough when he realized the same thing:

“I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be.”

After four intense years working on the atomic bomb in Los Alamos, Richard Feynman accepted a teaching position at Cornell. Top universities were competing for him, offering higher salaries and prestige. Albert Einstein himself wrote, inviting Feynman to join the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

But despite the remarkable offers, he couldn’t accept. The years at Los Alamos had drained him. He was exhausted, uninterested in research, and couldn’t write more than two sentences on a scientific problem without losing focus. “They expect me to accomplish something, and I can’t accomplish anything! I have no ideas…”

Then he had a thought. The expectations attached to these offers were absurd—impossible to live up to. And because they were impossible, 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.”

At Cornell, he decided to return to what had always drawn him to physics in the first place: fun. From now on, he would only work on problems that entertained him. “Now that I am burned out 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, one a colleague questioned for its lack of 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 of “no importance” led him to win the Nobel Prize.

Literally, who cares?

Before she became a household name, Elizabeth Gilbert had no connections in the publishing world. She knew full well that her writing might never make money. “It might never work,” she remembers thinking. “It didn’t matter. No way was I going to give up on my work simply because it wasn’t ‘working.’ That wasn’t the point of it.”

She understood that the reward couldn’t be external—it had to come “from the private awareness I held that I had chosen a devotional path and I was being true to it.” It had to come from the heart. It had to be fun.

“You might spend your whole life following your curiosity and have absolutely nothing to show for it at the end—except one thing. You will have the satisfaction of knowing that you passed your entire existence in devotion to the noble human virtue of inquisitiveness. And that should be more than enough for anyone to say that they lived a rich and splendid life.”

That kind of devotion changes everything. Work of any kind can be discouraging when we’re thinking about the results. With creative work, the doubt can grow louder—the fear that we have nothing new to say, that everything’s been done before.

But as Elizabeth Gilbert says, who cares? Literally, who cares? There’s nothing new. What is new is yourperspective and passion and the stories you tell. There are a million different versions; this is yours.

She once said she can’t understand how people can create something beautiful and then hide it for fear of being criticized. “She advises writers to send their work to agents ‘as much as possible,’” Louise DeSalvo writes. “And when the rejection letters come back, to ‘take a deep breath and try again.’”

Because it’s the writer’s job to complete the work; it’s the agent’s and editor’s job to decide whether the work is good enough to be published.

It’s your job to give your version, to have fun, to pursue the thing that lights you up. It’s your job “to write your little heart out,” Gilbert insists, “and let destiny take care of the rest.”

There’s a story about Socrates’ teenage son, Lamprocles, who complained bitterly that his mother—Socrates’ famously fiery wife—nagged him nonstop.

Socrates, ever the philosopher, gently questioned his son until he admitted she was a loving mother who had his best interests at heart. Even so, Lamprocles maintained he couldn’t stand the constant scolding.

Then Socrates asked a question that, according to cognitive-behavioral psychotherapist Donald J. Robertson, was nothing short of ingenious: “Do actors in tragedies take offense when other characters insult and verbally abuse them?” He notes that the insults hurled onstage were far worse than anything Lamprocles’ mother ever said.

The boy thought this was a silly question. It was obvious they didn’t take offense. The actors knew it was only a performance; no real harm was intended.

“That’s correct,” replied Socrates, “but didn’t you admit just a few moments earlier that you don’t believe your mother really means you any harm either?”

With a few well-placed questions, as Robertson writes in his wonderful book How to Think Like Socrates, “Socrates helped Lamprocles to examine his anger from a radically different perspective. When assumptions that fuel our anger begin to seem puzzling to us, our thinking can become more flexible, and we may begin to break free from the grip of unhealthy emotions.”

So, what if we got better at leaving things uncertain? What if we stopped rushing to judgment?

This kind of perspective shift is easier when the challenge is circumstantial. When plans fall through, when a door closes, when life doesn’t go as expected, we can take a breath and trust that time will reveal meaning. We remind ourselves that life often has its reasons.

But bringing that same calm to our relationships is harder. When someone’s words sting or their actions feel unjust, detachment doesn’t come naturally. We’re wired to take things personally, to collect evidence for our hurt, to seek justice.

And yet, as Socrates reminded his son, what we see on the surface is rarely the whole truth. We don’t know the full story playing out behind someone’s eyes. Pausing to hold space for that mystery softens us, makes us kinder. That softness is not weakness but wisdom. Clarity.

And clarity and kindness are inseparable.

It’s like that bit of Chinese wisdom: Clarity can be obtained only in a kind person. A person can be kind only with clarity.One helps the other.

One of the most haunting, beautiful stories I’ve ever read about appearance versus reality comes from William March’s masterful novel, Company K—a mosaic of war stories in which each chapter is a different soldier’s account of the front lines.

Private Allan Methot, once an aspiring poet, complained that the “spiritual isolation” of army life was unbearable. He couldn’t talk to anyone. No one could understand him. His fellow soldiers repulsed him—they seemed to care only about food, sleep, alcohol, and women.

As if that weren’t bad enough, he was assigned night watch duty with Private Danny O’Leary—whom he found hopelessly dull.

Methot wrote that O’Leary’s eyes were “unlit by intelligence” and that “he would stand there stupidly and stare at me, his heavy brows drawn together, his thick lips opened like an idiot’s.” Any attempt at conversation was futile. When Methot spoke to O’Leary, “he lowered his eyes, as if ashamed of me, and stared at the duckboards, fumbling at his rifle. . . .” When O’Leary finally spoke, it was to ask Methot when he thought they might get paid.

Methot laughed in contempt. How alone he was! It was as if he lived among aliens. His account ends in despair. He climbed out of the trench and walked slowly toward enemy lines, reciting poems aloud, waiting for the moment when a soldier’s boot would crush his “frail skull.”

And then, in the very next chapter, came Private Danny O’Leary’s letter to Methot.

In it, O’Leary wrote that Methot’s poems were the most beautiful thing he had ever heard. He thanked Methot for his friendship, saying that his faith in him had changed his life.

His letter is so devastatingly beautiful that it’s worth writing in full:

“I would like you so see me now, Allan Methot: I would like you to see what you have created!—For you did create me more completely than the drunken longshoreman from whose loins I once issued.

I was so gross, so stupid; and then you came along—How did you know? How could you look through layer upon layer until you saw the faint spark that was hidden in me? . . . Do you remember the nights on watch together when you recited Shelley and Wordsworth?—Your voice cadencing the words was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard. I wanted to speak to you, to tell you that I understood, to let you know your faith in me would not be wasted, but I dared not.—I could not think of you as a human being like myself, or the other men of the company. . . . I thought of you as someone so much finer than we that I would stand dumb in your presence, wishing that a German would jump into the trench to kill you, so that I might put my body between you and the bullet. . . . I would stand there fumbling my rifle, hoping that you would speak the beautiful lines forever. . . . ‘I will learn to read!’ I thought. ‘When war is over, I will learn to read! . . .’

Where are you now, Allan? I want you to see me.—Your friendship was not wasted; your faith has been justified. . . . Where are you, great heart? . . . Why don’t you answer me?”

Whoa.

As I mentioned, this story really stuck with me. Whenever I talk with someone now—the cashier at the grocery store, a friend, my brother—I try to imagine the boundless intelligence and light behind their eyes. The infinite treasures and possibilities just below the surface.

The paradox is that what’s most mysterious—uncertain, unlabeled, unknown—is often what’s most real. It’s what most closely resembles life itself.

I try to remember that clarity is probably more about what I cannot see than what I can.

And somehow, that simple truth—that I know so little—makes me calmer, kinder, and happier.

Lately, I’ve been immersed in the diaries of Etty Hillesum.

What unfolds on those pages is one of the most radical shifts in perspective I’ve ever seen. You watch her go from restless and frustrated to calm, confident, and courageous—in the span of just a few years, and under the shadow of the Nazi regime that would eventually claim her life.

“I really must become simpler,” she writes. “We have to become as simple and as wordless as the growing corn or the falling rain. We must just be.”

What struck me most, as I read, was how much she sounded like a Stoic—specifically, Marcus Aurelius. And yet, there’s no evidence she ever studied Stoicism. One of the many parallels I found was this reminder they both wrote to themselves: Uncomplicate yourself. Be free of calculation and pretension.

Then I thought: no calculations. Have no calculations.

I’ve been repeating this to myself for the past month, and it’s been freeing. Not that I think of myself as “calculated” in the usual sense, but I can be calculated with myself. Sometimes I do things that are irrational, either out of superstition or as a way to relieve anxiety and feel in control. I’ll go back and forth in my mind, debating what something means or doesn’t mean, what will happen or won’t.

But now, when those thoughts creep in, I remind myself: no calculations. And I move on.

Isn’t it wild how much power our thoughts have over our life? If you think your life is crappy…it’s only because you think your life is crappy! Our stories are reality.

The other day, Courtney went to the dentist and told me how uncomfortable she felt for the first fifteen minutes. While the dentist was poking and scraping, Courtney was saying to herself, “It will be over in twenty minutes, and then you can feel relief.”

But then she thought: or I can just feel relief now.

She repeated it—I can feel relief now—and little by little, she relaxed.

That shift—changing the story we tell ourselves—reminds me of something Billy Oppenheimer recently shared:

After finishing college, Ezra Koenig took a job teaching middle school in Brooklyn. Outside school hours, he poured his energy into Vampire Weekend, the band he started with friends from college, where he served as the lead singer and guitarist.

“At that phase of my life,” Koenig said, “I was pretty unhappy. I enjoyed parts of being a teacher, but I stressed constantly, thinking, ‘Oh, I didn’t choose this. This isn’t my dream or passion. The band has to take off. My dream has to materialize.’ Everything felt very high-stakes.”

He found himself constantly preoccupied with what would make him truly happy.

“I really wish I could go back and tell myself, ‘Being a teacher would be fine too.’ I wish I could relieve some of that stress and say to myself, ‘Being a teacher is important too. If the band makes one album and you come back to teaching, that can be a really rewarding life as well.’”

Vampire Weekend did go on to become a huge success, and Ezra is genuinely grateful for where he ended up. But looking back, he sees how unnecessary all that pressure was. He could have found happiness on either path—whether as a musician or as a teacher who plays music on the side.

“There’s the belief that happiness only comes from achieving your dreams. The concept of dream achievement is such a double-edged sword. Because the paradox is that most people’s dream, including mine, is really just to be happy. When you strip away all the specifics, the dream is to be happy.

I’ve now met so many people in my life. I’ve met people who are infinitely more successful than me, who are some of the most stressed-out, miserable people you can imagine. And I’ve also met people who’ve watched opportunities come and go but are deeply happy.”

He learned that the state of his mind shapes the state of his life.

“I think that’s why I now have that impulse to go back and tell myself, Vampire Weekend or teacher in Brooklyn—on both paths, it’s about your attitude.”

It’s about the story you tell yourself.

“Obviously, both could be rewarding because you see that being a musician and a teacher are both incredibly fulfilling jobs for many people.”

Whether it’s getting a handle on OCD, or feeling okay at the dentist, or finding satisfaction right now, in this moment…the thing holding you back might be the story you’re telling yourself.