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.

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.

We feel lousy when we think other people are doing better than us. We feel superior when we think we are doing better than other people. Basically, as Ryan Holiday put it, there are only two ways that comparing yourself to others can make you feel: crappy or egotistical.

Comparing ourselves to others is the gateway to competing with them. And if we’re not careful, we end up competing for the sake of competing. Instead of a means to an end, it becomes an end in itself. We end up playing a game we don’t actually care about—and dulling our shine to stay in it.

Lamborghini’s Refusal To Compete

Before becoming one of the world’s best carmakers, mechanic Ferruccio Lamborghini built tractors. He also drove and modified Ferraris. Souping up his red Ferrari 250 GTE Pinin Farina Coupe, he would speed past the best drivers in the world—Ferrari test drivers—and leave them in disbelief. But, as Luke Burgis writes in Wanting, Lamborghini had been having mechanical problems with his Ferrari. One of those problems was the clutch. It didn’t feel right. Upon inspection, he realized the clutch in his $87,000 luxury car was the same clutch he used in his $650 tractors. When he brought this to the attention of Ferrari founder, Enzo Ferrari, he would hear nothing of it. So, Lamborghini decided he would make his own luxury car.

He founded Automobili Lamborghini in 1963 and made his first car in 1964. Four years later, in 1968, he released the Miura P400s—an iconic car that both Frank Sinatra and Miles Davis bought. With the success of the Miura, Lamborghini’s engineers pleaded with him to make a car that could hold its own in a race against a Ferrari. But Lamborghini refused. While he knew that, to a point, competition could be good (after all, Lamborghini used Ferrari’s inadequate clutch as fuel to start his own company), he also knew the dangers of rivalries and how quickly competition could devolve into one. So he didn’t give in. (Future leaders of Automobili Lamborghini were eventually lured into the race car business, but not while Lamborghini was still alive and running things.) Rivalries, he knew, had no end. Lamborghini invested his energy into opportunities and craftsmanship. The result was that he built not only a successful business but also, on his property, a barn that he filled with his favorite models of Lamborghini automobiles. And he was able to spend the last twenty years of his life in peace, giving fun tours of his favorite cars to visitors.

How To Have a Good Shot at Building the Best

Builder of the world’s best racing shells for crew teams, George Pocock was “all but born with an oar in his hand.” Both his paternal and maternal grandfathers were competitive boatbuilders. His father built competitive racing shells for Eton College. George followed in his family’s footsteps by combining his boat knowledge with his peerless love of craftsmanship. At the height of his career, he was building and supplying racing shells to almost every top crew university in the country (including Washington University, whose crew team won a stunning victory at the 1936 Berlin Olympics). His racing shells were superior to others. Each shell was built with care and patience—possibly because of the advice his father had given him when he was younger: “No one will ask you how long it took to build; they will only ask who built it.”

Pocock, like Lamborghini, would not compromise his craftsmanship for competition. When a crew coach all but demanded Pocock reduce his $1,150 per-shell price, arguing that other racing shells weren’t nearly as expensive, Pocock wouldn’t budge. He flatly refused to lower his price to compete with other suppliers. “I cannot build all of them,” he said, “but I can still have a good shot at building the best.”

Pocock, like Lamborghini, would not compromise his craftsmanship for competition. When a crew coach all but demanded Pocock reduce his $1,150 per-shell price, arguing that other racing shells weren’t nearly as expensive, Pocock wouldn’t budge. He flatly refused to lower his price to compete with other suppliers. “I cannot build all of them,” he said, “but I can still have a good shot at building the best.”

False Desires are Limitless

Seneca said that natural desires are limited, but false ones are limitless. Vanity, pleasure-seeking, rivalries—all these are limitless. How, then, are nature’s desires satisfied? By sticking to your own reasoned principles. “When you would know whether that which you seek is based upon a natural or upon a misleading desire, consider whether it can stop at any definite point,” Seneca said. “If you find, after having traveled far, that there is a more distant goal always in view, you may be sure that this condition is contrary to nature.”