Don Quixote and Our Job Daily

What if every human life is of infinite value? What if the billions of the billionaire and the cultural accolades of the celebrity add nothing at all to his or her intrinsic worth? What if we're all here for creative love and loving creativity, and the results of each of our actions aren't to enhance our own value at all, which is impossible, but are meant to lift up the lives of those around us and add to the sum total of good in the human and animal earthly adventure? What if the deepest truths are after all spiritual, and that the small things can mean the most?

I'm on page 500 of my second reading of the classic and first modern novel, Don Quixote. It's a comic tale that's all about the deepest human delusions and our desperate efforts to win praise, glory, and honor. It's all about 21st century contemporary politics and business, and the various sicknesses of the heart to which we're vulnerable. Don Quixote was right that the knight errant wandering the world is to right wrongs and save the innocent. He was wrong not to see that this is the job for each of us, but guided not by the heated imagination of grandiose delusions, but rather by the wise imagination tutored by truth and goodness. What if we could all see this? What a difference it could make!

Get the best translation of the book here.

Give Your Best. Consistently.

I'm editing a book manuscript on what a successful life is, in our time. In the book I'm interacting extensively with six great thinkers throughout the centuries, including Lao Tsu, Confucius, Cicero, and Emerson. In a passage on Confucius, while explicating some of ideas, I made a point that I'd like to pass along today.  We enter amid the passage. So here goes.

<<When there’s action to be taken, give your best. This is great, basic advice for any endeavor. Early in my career as a public speaker, someone occasionally would tell me in advance of a talk, “This is a really important group”—as if I should take care to be on my game for this one. My response was always, “Every group is a really important group.”  And I meant it. Whether I’m earning the equivalent of a year’s academic salary from speaking to an international group of powerful leaders for an hour, or I’m giving a free talk to a local school or charity, I can’t even conceive of not doing my very best.  

Each group I speak to is, in my estimation and for the duration of that presentation, the single most important gathering of people on earth—regardless of their worldly status as measured by any other standards. I have my own standards. That group is of unrivalled importance to me. The same goes for sitting at home alone with a book, or typing away at the computer. My level of commitment is always the same. Why? First, it’s a matter of personal identity and professional honor. I am who I am. And my work is what it is. No external circumstance can change that. I bring to any situation the utmost of respect for all the people involved, or even potentially involved.

But there’s a second reason as well. A consistent effort in all things on a daily basis can make a huge difference to the ultimate outcomes we experience. Consistency is akin to what military thinkers call “a force multiplier.” It’s a source of leverageand power. And yet, it’s oddly and surprisingly rare to come across this quality in people’s lives – which truly astonishes me. Whether we think of consistency as harmony, fidelity, or constancy, this characteristic is as vital as it is widely ignored in our day.>>

The Size of Your Life

I live in many ways a small, snug life. And I'm happy in it. But one of the hardest things in the modern world is to be content with the size of your life.

People contact me all the time to tell me about their grand plans, their world-historical ambitions and dreams that will likely play out on a stage so big that the earth itself will seem too small to support it all. And even our own galaxy, in contrast, may appear to be a bit modest and out of the way for the immense grandeur that is to transpire, if their goals are realized. 

This has been going on for decades. Really. My wife says I'm some sort of a magnet for grandiose dreamers. I don't know why. I do enjoy hearing of their ambitions. I deeply appreciate unfettered enthusiasm. I love thinking big. But as I listen to the various magnificent plans, I always wonder: "How?" And sometimes: "Why?"

Most days, I work at home. And most of my day involves working on very little things. I realized long ago that if I was going to personally change the world for the better, it would have to be very slowly. And so now, on the brink of my 63rd birthday, you've got to give me credit for sticking to my own plan and sense of timing. I've been slow, indeed. The world is not yet, it seems, quite changed in the way I've intended. Maybe I've planted a few seeds over the years that will germinate. And it could be that the results of those seeds will go far beyond anything I can currently imagine. But then again, if not, that's fine, too.

I've come to suspect that there is a way in which the smallest lives can be among the biggest, and what play out as the biggest may often be missing out on the real adventure. You see, surface appearances don't tend to be reliable guides to deeper realities. There may be a spiritual transvaluation of values that's always going on. Focus on the right things, and your life, however humble it seems, is in reality infinitely expansive. Chase the wrong things, however grand, and you've shrunk it down to a pinpoint of value. And then, in the realm of the right things, any little action can have ripples that don't stop. My hyperbolic dreamers, by contrast, often aspire to the role of demi-gods, and want to make huge waves that could end up with the effect of a tsunami.

So, my thought for the day, if I actually have one here, is to enjoy, relish, and value the small things in your life. Maybe you are changing the world, whether you're advertising it in huge letters of skywriting for us all to read or not. Maybe your small is really big.

Small is good.