Two Greek Words

Two Greek Words. Ok, in English letters: Telos ("TEA-loss") means something like Real Purpose. Techne ("TECK-nay") means Rational Process.

Your telos is your true reason for being, the essence of who you are at your best, what you do when you’re in flow and flourishing, and why you properly are and do. It's your overarching aim and goal and calling in life that properly helps you select, organize, prioritize, and balance all other goals and interests. It’s the North Star of your wellbeing and best work.

Techne is the art, craft, and science needed to live your purpose and attain your goals. It's the toolkit for embodying your telos in the world. It's rational in the broadest sense of the word, incorporating logic, information, and intuition properly together, the head and the heart, which both have their reasons, as Pascal once said.

Your Right Path is the result of both, brought together well, in work and in life.

So to sum up: Real Purpose + Rational Process = Right Path. And that’s how philosophy should work. Simple. Deep. Comprehensive. Practical. If you agree and find this post helpful, please share it with friends. I did a shorter version on social media today, but this is the full deal.

Doors Around

There are always doors around. Most may be closed. Some are locked. A few will attract your attention. And there will be an occasional one with a distinctive color or scintillating feature, perhaps the nob, that practically asks you to reach out and take and turn it to see what's beyond. Sometimes curiosity will do the job. At other moments, a measure of courage is required. The doors in life are every bit as important as the rooms, structures, and spaces they guard. Often, it's good to knock first. But follow your best intuition at all times. This may be the door you've hoped and waited for, as it has been awaiting you.

Just remember: Opportunity won't always knock. It's often up to you, and me.

The Necessity of Philosophy

From the time of Plato and Aristotle, astute philosophers have sought the wisdom to understand what makes people feel their best, do their best, and become their best. In our time of massive uncertainties and daunting challenges, every organization of people working together needs to put the most effective tools of such wisdom into everybody's hands and minds. That way, people become much more hopeful, more engaged, more committed, more creative, and more productive because they're truly more empowered.

Wisdom is a force multiplier. Unwise choices never lead anywhere good. Ordinary mindsets aren't optimal for extraordinary times. Only the best of wisdom can bring us the resources for transformative innovation and genuinely excellent work in all its dimensions. The best leaders understand this and do everything they can to introduce the most practical philosophy to all their associates. And I'm grateful for that understanding, because it's allowed me to have a wonderful career for decades as an independent philosopher, bringing people exactly that. The right sort of philosophy isn't after all an elective luxury, but a required necessity for that excellence consisting in and produced only by the inner happiness wisdom alone brings.

Partnering Up With Problems

There's so much great literature about the power of partnership precisely because it's so important in life. In fact, Aristotle's implicit formula in his book "Politics" for the peak of human good is "People in partnership for a shared purpose" (my words but his ideas). So The Iliad is all about partnership. So is The Three Musketeers and Dracula, surprising as that might be. My new novels are the same. People together can solve problems that were impossible to solve alone.

Yesterday, while doing a LinkedIn Live interview on video with the great Jan Rutherford, I had an epiphany. Jan asked whether struggles and difficulties and sufferings can strengthen and improve us. I said yes but added that it's in large part up to us how we use them. My insight, an idea I'd never had before, is that to benefit from a difficulty, we have to partner up with it.

That's quite a different sort of idea. How do most of us deal with difficulties or struggles? We seek to avoid them and when we can't, we seek mostly to endure them, often with lots of inner negativity. But what if we leaned in to our difficulties, our challenges, and even our struggles? What if we partnered up with them in a positive way?

Partnership is all about something beyond cooperation. It's about creative collaboration. All members to a partnership have to bring the best of their minds and hearts, their thoughts, emotions, attitudes, and energies into service to some purpose. Many ancient philosophers clued us in that difficulties can be opportunities well disguised. They come to us, often unexpected. We need to meet them creatively, embrace them, and not just run and hide and hope for the best. What does that mean? In a struggle or challenge, get creative. Open yourself to what the difficulty is bringing you and showing you and perhaps hinting about new possibilities. You'll have to be very active in meeting the problem to ferret out such stuff. Often it will take a further form of partnership with another person, or with a group of people. But it can be done.

A famous parable in the New Testament is about a sower and seed. A farmer throws seed out onto the ground. Much falls on shallow dirt that won't support it, or into weeds, or gets eaten by birds. But some falls on fertile soil. I once asked a biologist what fertile soil is. He said, well, by contrast, sterile soil has no microbes, no bacteria, no worms, no life of any kind. Fertile soil is full of activity and life. When seed hits fertile soil, the soil partners with the seed for a great result, actively contributing to new growth. Consider that you are soil.

One of our most common tendencies when a big new problem arises is to try to evade it or squash it and get back to the way things were before it arrived. But that can be a big mistake. The new difficulty may be hiding a new path forward that won’t take us back to where we were but to where we need to be instead. Partner up with the problem to see how.

Are you in a time of challenge or difficulty? Lean in. Partner up with it. It's bringing you lots of clear negatives, so bring it some positives to balance the energy and break open new possibilities. New growth can result.

Goodness Wins in the End

The Sea-Wolf, written by Jack London, has become one of my favorite novels of all time. It’s about the power of goodness when held onto and lived despite terrible obstacles, and also it's ultimately about the power of moral partnership to prevail over what seems to be invincible evil. It’s a message perfect for our time. I first read this in 2014 but too quickly. On my second read, just finished, I came to appreciate its depth as well as its compelling narrative.

Wolf Larsen is a thoroughly amoral leader, the captain of a seal hunting ship, whose only personal value is power and its exercise. He’ll kill a man just to feel that power. In our own time with too many amoral people in leadership positions, Wolf stands apart. He has the body and physical strength of an Achilles and a brilliant mind, though rough and unfinished through being entirely self-educated, even at the earliest stages of reading and writing. He was born of a poor family in a remote region of Norway and lived a rough adventure that led him to the leadership role in a seagoing ship. He has attracted a crew who are mostly as hardened and casually evil as he can seem to be. We learn of him through a highly educated literary man who survives the capsizing of another boat near San Francisco and is “rescued” by the Ghost, Larsen’s ship. The Lord of the Flies has nothing on what subsequently transpires, with our narrator, Humphrey Van Weyden, forced into service on the ship and treated with abominable cruelty.

This castaway is puzzled by the seasoned crew members on board, who seem able to endure agonizing physical injuries without complaint, but will “fly into the most outrageous passion over a trifle” (40, Book of the Month Club Edition). Van Weyden says of a particular seal hunter aboard:

<<He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively to swim. (41)>>

He goes on to comment about the rest of the men:

<<Childish and immaterial as the topic was, the quality of their reasoning was still more childish and immaterial. In truth, there was very little reasoning or none at all. Their method was one of assertion, assumption, and denunciation. They proved that a seal pup could swim or not swim at birth by stating the proposition very bellicosely and then following it up with an attack on the opposing man’s judgment, common sense, nationality, or past history. Rebuttal was precisely similar. I have related this to show the mental caliber of the men with whom I was thrown in contact. (41)>>

And the moral caliber of most of them was much, much worse, with a few exceptions, soon to be roughed up and killed. Later, our narrator says of the ongoing discussion, modeling the political discourse of our own day:

<<The hunters were still arguing and roaring like some semi-human amphibious breed. The air was filled with oaths and indecent expressions. I could see their faces, flushed and angry, the brutality distorted and emphasized by the sickly yellow of the sea-lamps which rocked back and forth with the ship. (43)>>

One of the mates tells the new arrival about the captain, making what he takes to be a useful distinction: “He’s not black-hearted like some men. Tis no heart he has at all.”

Of the amoral and power-hungry skipper and his top henchmen, reflecting again too much that's wrong about our own world now, our narrator says:

<<The callousness of these men, to whom industrial organization gave control of the lives of other men, was appalling. I, who had lived out of the whirl of the world, had never dreamed that its work was carried on in such a fashion. Life had always seemed a peculiarly sacred thing, but here it counted for nothing, was a cipher in the arithmetic of commerce. (64)>>

Later in the story, after Humphrey witnesses the may terrible and unpredictably evil actions of the captain, who keeps our narrator alive only because his education amuses the brute, and this autodidact skipper among fools finally enjoys having someone to talk to about literature and philosophy, an event of great significance happens. The ship spots and picks up some other marooned sailors and a passenger from another ocean going vessel who are bobbing about in the vast pacific clinging to a small boat and hoping for rescue. An elegant and exquisitely educated young woman, Maud Brewster, a famous poet who is by wild coincidence known to our narrator—a literary critic who loves her work—is among them. Humphrey desperately tries to tell her about the captain:

“You must understand, Miss Brewster, and understand clearly, that this man is a monster. He is without conscience. Nothing is sacred to him. Nothing is too terrible for him to do. It was due to him that I was detained aboard in the first place. It is due to his whim that I am still alive. I can do nothing, can do nothing, because I am a slave to this monster, as you are now a slave to him; because I desire to live, as you will desire to live; because I cannot fight and overcome him, just as you will not be able to fight and overcome him.” (208)

The ship was a sort of hell presided over by Wolf Larsen. Maud eventually calls him Lucifer. Humphrey comments on the man and his henchmen:

<<Wolf Larsen it was, always Wolf Larsen, enslaver and tormentor of men, a male Circe and these his swine, suffering brutes that groveled before him and revolted only in drunkenness and secrecy. (243)>>

But the tale is not told with too much gruesome detail. It’s not like what I would imagine one experiences reading a horror novel. There’s psychological complexity and a wonderful narrative flow. Wolf and Humphrey even debate their opposing worldviews marvelously, when alone, the crass materialist and the spiritually sensitive man of morals debating life and death and value. The conversations are fascinating. Larsen enjoys the rare intellectual challenges, but on a whim might thrown his interlocutor across the room or choke him nearly to death, just to display his power.

Humphrey and Maud know they have to escape the ship where their deaths are eventually inevitable. And there the story takes off and becomes one of the most amazing tales of all time. The two of them face the greatest odds imaginable and adversities that would be impossible to imagine in advance, much like Odysseus in The Odyssey, but brought into a more modern and less mythological day.

There are lessons about persistence and resilience and courage and confidence and success again the odds all through the book, but especially in its final third. I wish I could take the time here to share more of the lessons on goodness and partnership in the face of evil and overwhelming adversity, because they’re reassurances we all need right now. But instead of going on and on, I’ll simply commend the book to you in the strongest possible terms. If you buy it on amazon, take care the publisher. There are independent publishers now who mangle the text and make it microscopic, and Amazon has unhelpfully put the same comments on each edition, though the complaints clearly apply only to one or two. I’ll paste here a reliable publisher, and you can just click the pic. At some point, please read this book! And yeah, in advance, you’re welcome!

For the book, click HERE.

"Why Do the Wicked Prosper?"

"Oh, God, why do the wicked prosper?" This was the repeated worry and lament of the psalmist, who can sometimes come across as a real complainer, falling into a common form of philosophical confusion.

We all know, or know about, people of whom it's said that "He gets away with everything!" At least until he doesn't, like Bernie Madoff. We can even be tempted to say of such a person that he's crazy lucky or strangely blessed to get away with everything he does. Plato and Epictetus, by contrast, say that he's cursed, because "getting away with stuff" makes him a worse and worse individual, corrupting his soul even more with every "success."

The classic philosophers would often say: Bad is the man who wants to do evil, worse is he who gets it done. In what can appear to be a run of unethical achievement, there is no true success but only corruption, the degradation within that Socrates warned us about.

As the poet Terence once said, "Wealth is a blessing to those who know how to use it, a curse to those who don't." The same is true of any worldly accomplishment. Those who seem to get away with wrong, if we look closely, also seem to grow more and more desperate as time passes. They don't feel inner contentment, or fulfillment, or genuine happiness, in even a small measure. I've seen this up close. They can't maintain true friendships, or deep relationships of any kind. They aren't free at all but are rather enslaved to false, blighted, and immensely unhealthy motives. Their very progress down the road of their urges takes them farther and farther from their true good. They are to be pitied and not resented or, last of all, grudgingly admired. They become shells of who they could have been, and almost ugly, contrastive caricatures of human excellence. They are never flourishing, but at best can only maintain the outward counterfeit of that. So, God let the psalmist complain, and then calmed him down and turned him around with a little more of the wisdom he needed and that we all could benefit from, as well.

For more on what’s wise and otherwise, visit me any time at www.TomVMorris.com!

How Business Can Save the World.

Actually, let’s think about how we can change the world. This unpredicted and unprecedented time we're all in right now gives us the possibility of a big restart, a massive reset in our attitudes and outcomes around business.

Years ago, I often lamented that sport had become a business, that even law had turned into the same, that healthcare of all things had transformed itself in too many ways as well from profession to profit machine. And actually, that's the precise problem. It isn't that everything has become about business, but that we misunderstand what business is supposed to be.

Business is supposed to be about human flourishing, building a better world for us all. It's meant to be about collaboration and partnership, about giving people structures and processes for discovering their talents, developing those talents, and deploying them into the world for the good of others as well as themselves. It's not about money or power or status at all. We've turned it into that. None of those side effects of work done well are to be the essence of enterprise. It should be seen as our greatest creative engine for attaining and encouraging human well being across all groups, and healing our divides rather than increasing them. Understood properly, business can save the world, not destroy it. But it's up to us to use this disruptive moment to re-engineer our worldviews to make business what it should and can be, and to save it from what it's devolved into, so that it can then return the favor.

As we're all seeing by absence as well as occasional presence, even the best business community can't replace the legitimate roles of good government, done well. And bad governance can make good business practically impossible. There are some things that can be done only by all of us acting in concert through our freely chosen representatives, and the specialists and experts they can marshal through broad reaching distinctive structures and processes. There are things so big and comprehensive that only government at each of its ascending levels can get the job done right, when it's been itself made right. But that's a part of our challenge now. If we don't understand business properly, we won't understand government properly either. The same lens of human flourishing should be used to view and assess them both.

We're all in a position to approach our work more wisely, and vote with our energies and dollars to encourage those running businesses who do so, as well. In that way, we can help business to change the world, and governance to facilitate the process in the best ways, rather than serving as an obstruction or a warped booster of all that's wrong, which comes to the same thing.

A Brief Thought for Our Fraught Moment, or Any Challenging Time

Remember: Don't mistake a frame in the film for the film itself, a chapter of the story for the whole tale, or a moment in your life for more than it is. We're all in some way the co-creators of what comes next and can make a positive difference to the outcome in the overall flow of things.

In many great stories, the hardest things happen before the most wonderful things come to be. And we tell such stories and love to hear them because they reflect the strange movements of our world in a way that we need to be reminded of, time and again. It’s always darkest at some point before the dawn. Things look hopeless for the hero when he’s down, and then there’s a great turnaround.

Courage. Faith. Hope. Love. Creativity. Openness. Peace. Positive Action. Many things can float our boat well.

Your Attention, Please!

YOUR ATTENTION, PLEASE. The great spiritual traditions have all wanted us to pay attention to how we pay attention and to what. They've asked us to focus on what we focus on. Attention matters. Focus bring can bring us great good or terrible ill.

The philosopher and novelist Irish Murdoch even suggests in her little book The Sovereignty of Good that what we habitually pay attention to and focus on creates most of our ethical life. We build up through our focused attention, or lack thereof, structures of value and commitment that may or may not be healthy and helpful throughout our days. And when the time comes to make an ethically charged decision, the choice has often already been made by those freely but often unconsciously adopted structures of value and commitment.

Pay attention to what hooks your attention. Focus on what you habitually focus on. And ponder why. You may learn a lot as a result.

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.

Yesterday, The Beatles, and Me

The Movie Yesterday and My Very Own Beatles Story. No. Really. Well, sort of. "Let me take you down, 'cause I'm going to, Irish Green Fields ... [Sing along now]." So. I had a great relationship with the Notre Dame Marching Band. I had taught lots of its members Intro to Philosophy, where we had tons of fun. In fact, one semester, I was worried about the second exam in that huge class. Lots of students had done poorly on the first exam, and I knew they'd be nervous. I had to change the atmosphere. So, once the hordes had taken their seats in the large auditorium and we were ready to hand out the hundreds of exams, lots of doors suddenly banged open in the back, scores of young thinkers swiveled around to see what was going on, and the Notre Dame Marching Band came into the room, playing the famous fight song! The Freshmen jumped onto their chairs, yelling and clapping and singing along. The song ended in a thunderous ovation and the band left. It was shocked, happy pandemonium. And everyone scored higher on that exam. Everyone.

But that's not the story I want to tell. I had just written the first rock and roll fight song for a university, called The Fightin' Irish Are Back, to celebrate our new coach Lou Holtz turning the team around and returning it to its legendary greatness. I had talked to previous championship coaches like Ara Parseghian and Dan Divine to get the lyrics just right. Champion sportswear had decided to make up a special T Shirt to celebrate the song, with a big version of the mascot Leprechaun on the front, playing my sunburst 1964 Fender Stratocaster rock guitar with my initials on the headstock: TVM. The front of the shirt would say The Fightin' Irish Are Back. The back of the shirt would announce: Bringing Back the Rock and Roll. I would assemble a studio band and record it soon. An NBC Affiliate would do a music video. It was all planned out. But then that October I got a call from the famous Coach Holtz himself. He had heard about the song. He asked me to wait a year to release it. I asked why. He said, "This year, we'll have a winning season, but next year we'll win the national championship, so if you can hold it for a year, it can be our celebration song." I said, "I will if you will." And that was football history. National Champions: 1988.

But that's not the story I want to tell. I had written out the song and decided I wanted to start it with a guitar solo borrowing from the classic Notre Dame Fight Song. I'd call the Band department and get permission. They were my buddies. It would be no problem. So I told them my plan and that I probably needed written permission to use part of the famous tune they played all the time. "Boy, Professor Morris, your song sounds great! But we don't own the rights to our fight song."

What? "Who owns it?" The band guy said, "Paul McCartney." Whaaaaaaat?

He had bought it as an investment. So I had to talk with his lawyer in New York to get the permission I needed. A Beatle owns the rights to our fight song. Notre Dame has to pay him every time it's played in the stadium. Yep. SIr Paul's attorney turned out to be a nice guy. He said to me, "We'll give you seven bars of the song for free. But if you use one note beyond that, it will cost you more money than you can even imagine." I used exactly seven bars. I sang and played the guitar part and we had great musicians to fill out the band. When it was mixed in my absence, another musician had come into the studio and listened and said, "How the hell did you get Boz Scaggs to do a Notre Dame song?" Yeah, that was me. Boz Tom. And so we released the recording just in time for the championship season and the song was launched with the T shirts and Regis Philbin played it on his national morning show and danced to it, and whenever you went to a game you could hear it on the radio and on boomboxes around the stadium in lots of the tailgate parties.

And so, I know from first hand experience how utterly remarkable it was for Paul and Ringo to give permission to the new movie Yesterday to use SO MANY of their songs. MUCH more than seven bars. There's a reason you never hear Beatles songs in movie, soundtracks or on tv commercials. The rights are that dear, that controlled and pricey. But then, one movie comes along and does the impossible and uses song after song after song. Paul and Ringo loved the concept and made it happen. Relationships do rule the world. The seemingly impossible can happen. After all, the Beatles did. So if you see it or have seen the new film and agree with me that it's a remarkable movie, I wanted you to know how remarkable it really is that it got made at all. The gang who wrote and produced it had the luck of the Irish for sure. And, there's only one thing left to say.

Hey, Dude: Go Irish!

PS: Someone just posted on FaceBook a low tech digital conversion of the original tape, with its cover and liner notes pictured. Just so you guys will know that I'm not just making this up. Ha! So for The Fightin' Irish are Back, go here and turn on your speakers loud:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnO3awjlFi4&fbclid=IwAR3VlLIUPNjqPeIM0ylICixMM5PB3wq243oD5QMoge81AWRMW0572CoW3II&app=desktop

The Ambiguities of Language

I was googling something about top public speakers today, focusing on various popular keynote speakers (my competition), and came across a Google question on my screen that gave me pause:

<<What are the best small speakers?>>

I thought, "Really? That's a thing?" I had instant visions of little people on stages all over America. I remembered one five year old boy in the news years ago who was a fiery gospel preacher.

Then I suddenly realized I had transitioned into the audio/stereo section of Google Results. Oh, Ok. Speakers. Yeah, I see. Klipsch. JBL. Sony.

And of course, this happens all the time in business and life. We hear something different from what was intended and then we keep running down that path without checking to make sure we heard it right or interpreted it as it was intended. Natural languages are useful tools, and are among the most useful we have. But we have to be aware of how we're using our words, and of how others might be using theirs. Context can be misleading. Perhaps even the smallest of speakers would urge caution as another useful tool.

Success, Failure, and Effort

The most important distinction in this world isn't between success and failure, but effort and inertia. Forward movement counts. Destinations can change as we learn and grow. But growth requires movement. And that depends on effort. So rev it up and go.

Noble Failures

Sometimes, we fail through no fault of our own. We try something and it doesn’t go as planned. It may be the overall economic environment, or local conditions. Or it could be that the enterprise is undermined by someone with money and connections whose plans are contrary to our own.

This is the aspect of our common condition explored in the delightful little novel, The Bookshop, written by Penelope Fitzgerald, a British lady who first published, I believe, at the age of 60 and went on to win several awards for her short books, including the prestigious Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

I happened across this gem at Costco, where I was loitering after the purchase of three forty-two pound bags of kitty litter and pondering the wisdom of trying a $7.99 bottle of Kirkland Bordeaux with a beautiful black label. I got the book instead. It was more pleasant that I reasonably could have expected with the Bordeaux.

It’s about a lady who opens a book store in a damp old haunted house in a small town on the coast of England, a place that hasn’t had a bookshop before.

I offer here some nearly random free samples, which you won’t get with the Bordeaux, although, there were some tiny sausages being cooked up and offered for tasting in another part of the store. Our lady referred to below is a Ms. Florence Green.

She drank some of the champagne, and the smaller worries of the day seemed to stream upwards as tiny pinpricks through the golden mouthfuls and to break harmlessly and vanish. (20)

Will power is useless without a sense of direction. (37)

Back in the shadows went the Stickers, largely philosophy and poetry, which she had little hope of ever seeing the last of. (43)

He might be grievously disappointed, possibly after a lifetime of disappointments. (92)

“Understanding makes the mind lazy.” (101)

She looked with shame at the rows of patiently waiting unsold books. “You’re working too hard, Florence,” Milo said.

“I try to concentrate—Put those down, they’ve only just come in and I haven’t checked them. Surely you have to succeed, if you give everything you’ve got.”

“I can’t see why. Everyone has to give everything they have eventually. They have to die. Dying can’t be called a success.” (133)

For the book, CLICK HERE. And enjoy. Cheers.

My Morehead-Cain Weekend

I had a weekend with the most remarkable people. It was the 8th triennial Morehead-Cain Forum, bringing together over 700 Morehead-Cain Scholars from across the nation and around the world. Originally funded by John Motley Morehead III of Union Carbide fame, the Morehead-Cain Foundation exists to bring great students to UNC Chapel Hill and pay all their expenses, launching them into summer adventures and building them up during the academic year as the people they're capable of being.

No one in my family before me had ever been to college. We had farmers, truck drivers, and mechanics in the family. I grew up in an 800 square foot rented house on a street that had ditches rather than sidewalks. It seemed that most everyone on the street worked for one of the two tobacco companies in town, Liggett and Meyers or The American Tobacco Company. The dads came home in their khaki uniforms at the end of the day, weary of work and ready to rest. Durham High School nominated me for what at the time was called simply The Morehead Scholarship, now The Morehead-Cain, and I went through a local interview, a regional, and a final interview with prominent people in business, government, the military, and academia asking me hard questions about myself, my plans, and my world. My mother told me there was no money for college. The scholarship paid for everything, absolutely every expense I had, and being a Morehead got me a free six years of graduate school and a double Ph.D. at Yale, which led to a teaching career at Notre Dame and an unexpected adventure after that as a public philosopher, worldwide. Not bad for a poor kid who had been facing extremely limited prospects, and due to the trust put in me by the great people of the Morehead-Cain.

Every three years, we Morehead-Cains have an amazing weekend together full of talks and panel discussions, impromptu conversations that are utterly mind-blowing, and incredible meals. Last year, we ate dinner on center court of the Dean Dome and one of our group who founded Ancestry.com spoke, right before another of our cohort, a wonderful Broadway performer, sang. This year for our Saturday night dinner, we completely took over the UNC Football Stadium, ate in the Blue Zone where all the donors and celebrities and top leaders watch games through the huge glass walls, and then we went out into the stadium under a clear Carolina Sky in the crisp of the evening to hear another of our Morehead-Cain cousins, as we now fondly refer to each other, NC Governor Roy Cooper, speak about public service, right before a band of more cousins performed. Coop, as expected, was funny, energetic, and inspiring.

The 2018 weekend as always was full of wonder. I got to hang out with people who have made major contributions to almost every facet of modern life, across industries and nations. One old friend is about to revolutionize safety margins in medicine. Another cousin as a young woman had ridden a bicycle across Asia and some of the middle east, over closed borders and through forbidden wastelands and she lived to tell the tale. The cuz next to me at dinner told me about his 3,300 jumps out of airplanes and his subsequent heart attack. I would have had 3,300 heart attacks. Entering the men's room, a young man came up to me to say, "I read everything you write on Twitter and really love it!" I asked his name and occupation. Global Research and Optimization for Twitter. Well, then. A wonderful couple called me over to their table at another meal, and then another later in the weekend. He's the Chief Product Officer for GoDaddy, the people who host my websites, and most of the world's websites. I met a young cousin who is bringing baseball to Egypt for the first time. He showed me a picture of kids swinging bats in front of the Pyramids. I met a man whose house was built in the 13th century, but whose barn goes back much farther in time. I walked across campus and talked and laughed for half an hour with one of the most creative television directors in England, who tried to film his new comedy about Brits moving to Florida in my own town of Wilmington NC, but it was too expensive for their production budget. It turned out that it was cheaper to recreate Florida in Southern Spain. I talked to the Editor of Outside Magazine about her history of selling stories to Netflix and other movie and TV companies. I had a whirlwind conversation with a UNC senior who says she wants to solve global warming. And I think she might be able to.

And then, as in all the other Forum Weekends I've attended over the past twenty-some years, I got to give the closing talk for this magical weekend, to all those astounding people, which itself was an out of this world experience. And afterwards, on the drive home, in the words of the narrator in Willa Cather's novel, My Antonia, "I was left alone with this new feeling of lightness and content."

The young man, Jim Burden, goes on to say:

"I was entirely happy. Perhaps we feel like that when we die and become a part of something entire, whether it is sun and air, or goodness and knowledge. At any rate, that is happiness; to be dissolved into something complete and great. When it comes to one, it comes as naturally as sleep." (pages 19 and 20).

Amen. And it's a bonus to be a part of something entire that partakes of sun and air and goodness and knowledge while we're here. May more of us find communities of the like minded who can help us flourish, be our best, do our best, and experience that elusive state of dissolving and yet also empowering soul flourishing we often call happiness.

For more Willa Cather: https://amzn.to/2CWjcuo

Flying High

Wilbur and Orville Wright were two small town bike mechanics with a dream. Everyone said they were “nuts” and “crackpots” and even people who knew and liked them as people could not figure out why they were “wasting their time” chasing an absurd impossibility. Man would never fly. It was ludicrous. But they were determined and worked hard at their dream, despite frequent setbacks, mistakes, accidents, and trials and miseries beyond anything they had ever imagined.

They might feel disappointment for a moment or hours, but the next day were back hard at work. Resilience, persistence, an attention to detail, and a courage that would not give up began to have their effects. But on one difficult day, Wilbur had been worn down and actually said that the dream might not happen for a thousand years. And then, within a year or two, it did.

But even when they were successful, most people didn’t believe it. They were ridiculed, castigated, demeaned, and called liars and worse. And yet they kept their heads up, maintained their inner poise, and kept working to improve their flying machine, pushing it to greater and greater accomplishments. When finally their success was public and undeniable, they became huge celebrities, which brought big financial payoffs, but actually got in the way of their work. And still, they found ways to persist and fight through fame as they had fought through infamy and failure.

Even though Wilbur died of typhoid fever at the age of 45, he left a lasting legacy that changed the world for us all. Orville carried on but it was never the same as the great partnership they had enjoyed, in bad times and good times. It’s a great lesson and encouragement to any of us who dream impossible dreams and struggle to bring to the world the best we can create. It helps to find a great partner who can share the dream, the work, and the eventual results. And when we face turbulent strong headwinds, we should remember what Wilbur once wrote in his notebook: “No bird soars in a calm.”

For more, go read The Wright Brothers, a great book on these guys by David McCullough.

https://amzn.to/2ExMdhQ

Misplaced Loyalty: Ego Centered Leadership and Its Demise

There is a phenomenon that we see around some corporate leaders and others in high social leadership positions in our time. An ego driven personality can weave a web of promises and appeal to the real values of good people in a way that's wholly deceptive and ultimately self defeating. His or her rhetoric and promises create a loyalty in others who then seek, in the classic mode of confirmation bias, to retain their belief and hope in the face of ongoing and disconfirming evidence, but can manage it only for a time. Then the truth prevails.

In about 2015, the Muse gave me a part of my epic novel series that will be published in October. In the forthcoming book, The Magic Ring, there is an immensely greedy and power hungry man named Santiago who has inspired his followers with his lofty claims about greatness. On page 396 we begin to see misgivings form in the mind of one of his top followers, a Miguel Abad, as he begins to ride into Cairo, Egypt on a hot day in 1935, with a few others on camel. He is thinking about his leader and teacher.

<<Miguel had been attracted at first to the man’s brashness and lofty rhetoric about what the world needs. And then he had been sufficiently enticed and lulled into acquiescence by promises of greatness that he had long ignored the small warning signs and feelings of ambivalence that continued to crop up in his heart. Like all men, he was a master of self-deception and rationalization, and had long deceived himself, as Santiago had sought to deceive him. In fact, he had been living proof for years that no one else can fool us unless we are willing first to fool ourselves. And that’s how we become fools, indeed.

Deep down, Miguel knew that there was instability in his teacher, and basic untrustworthiness, but he had long masked this knowledge from himself, pretending that everything was fine and that the glories of their collaborative triumph in the future would make all things right. But the thefts of the animals had deeply bothered him. And now, many things cumulatively had been troubling him about the current mission of revenge they seemed to be pursuing. Where was this taking them? What was the outcome to be? How would any of this benefit the followers who had entrusted their lives to this man who now ultimately seemed to care about no life other than his own?

Miguel was still going along, and to all outward appearances seemed loyal. But inwardly, he was experiencing a combination of doubt, anger, and a growing sense of rebellion against what he had been caught up in.>>

For the books in the series leading up to this one, with an extended adventure about leadership, go to www.TheOasisWithin.com

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The Con Man and Moral Contagion

It's a phenomenon based on an increasingly popular philosophy of life. And it's sadly contagious.

I’ve just read a remarkable book for our time. The title is First Person. It’s about a young author named Kif who’s hired to ghost write the autobiography of a major con man business tycoon in Australia in the early 1990s. The man’s name is Siegfried Heidl, known to his close circle as Ziggy. On the surface, he’s a prominent character in the culture who has been arrested for his outsized, gaudy, outrageous, flashy business endeavors that, it turns out, have bilked and defrauded banks of at least seven hundred million dollars. But deeper down, the man represents an increasingly common philosophy of life. As in the case of every grifter, the con man has first conned himself, and then he corrupts everyone around him with a sort of moral contagion. We see it happen all the time. It even gets played out in the daily news now, in a constant drip of tawdry revelation.

The book begins with the young writer, who is trying to write a first novel, getting hired to work on the other book project instead and commuting from his home on a poor island to labor during the week in Melbourne, where he is to interview this celebrity CEO before his coming trial and imprisonment, take notes, and draft out a book quickly. But the con man doesn’t want to reveal anything about himself at all. And so the writer struggles. He comes to hate this blowhard, authoritarian, CEO/Grifter, and yet gradually begins to become like him in the end. I’ve copied down some sentences throughout the book that you may find fascinating, individually, and then especially in their cumulative epiphanies. The main voice is that of the young writer. No quotation marks are used. When first confronted with this man, he is astonished. Here are the passages he jots down from his early encounters with the man:

He contradicted his own lies with fresh lies, and then he contradicted his contradictions. (110)

Flattery, he said. So obvious, so easy. It’s not foolproof, but it is proof of fools. (115)

Without secrets, how are we to live? he said. (125)

And the more I saw of him, the more I found every smile, every gesture full of falsity, and each day the more frightened of him I grew. (126)

A man of unexpected shadows, in another life he might have risen to be a self-help expert, topping the New York Times bestseller lists and giving overpriced motivational lectures. And who knows what else? Personal branding. Perhaps even fragrance lines. (128)

I think he just lies. Maybe he doesn’t even care about the money and it’s just a game. (136)

And with that, he leaned back, performance done, puddles of arguments drowned in a sea of nonsense. (153)

It couldn’t last, though, I said.

Why not? So much does. (154)

He said that a coward was the most terrifying man, because there was no end to the things he might do to prove both to himself and others that he had courage. (173)

Put a corpse behind a desk and people will see their superior, he told me brightly as he put the phone down from another call to the media. (175)

… and with a seeming pride out of character he told me that for every con man born so too are a thousand fools willing to be deceived. (176)

It was his need in some fundamental way to possess everyone he encountered. At times, he felt more a contagion than a human being. (179)

(Heidl Speaking in the next three quotes):

Look around you, Kif—sickness, war, the poverty that makes people savage, the riches that make them worse. Do you think the evidence of the world is that the good are rewarded? Oh no! They’re punished. They’re beaten and tortured. They have the skin peeled off them and they’re left hanging in trees to die. The evidence of the world is that the world is evil. Cheats and liars win out, Kif. Money wins out. Violence wins out. Evil wins out. (181)

Make your choice: be a fool, lie to yourself that the world is good, and go with the good. But you will lose. … Everyone and everything is destroyed in the end by evil. You can choose good. Or you can be like me and accept the world as it is. (181)

Why deprive myself of anything, that’s what I think. Would you like a car like that? A woman? Money? You would, wouldn’t you? (182)

He went on about how he was just an ordinary man who just happened to see the world a little more clearly than other men. (183)

That was what was so confusing about him—what was genuine? What was fantasy? What was fact? All I knew was that whatever or whoever he was, I was fed up with him. (185)

Exhausted by his unbelievable laziness, his lies, his greed, his selfishness, his lunatic melodramas, I felt my frustrations transform into a wild hatred. (185)

Now I think that was precisely the point of all Heidl’s stories: to make me believe my life was based on illusions—the illusions of goodness, of love, of hope. And persuaded of that, I would betray something fundamental within myself and embrace his world as my real life. (187)

He was crazed, impossible. I was exhausted by him, angered by him, insulted by his continuing idea of me as one more credulous goon who would believe any garbage he spun. (230)

I couldn’t stomach the falseness of it all, the toying with people it involved, the perverse curiosity of placing people in extreme situations to see how they might react. (233)

Nothing about him was real. I yelled at him all that I thought: about his cowardice. His laziness. His lies. His greed. His manipulation. (235)

You’re a monster, I spat.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. (236)

You want to live without enemies, Heidl said, that’s your problem. You think if I am good and kind and don’t speak ill of others I won’t have enemies. But you will, you just don’t know it yet. They’re out there, your enemies, you just haven’t met them. You can seek them out or pretend they don’t exist but they’ll still find you. Trust me. You want to be like a dog everyone likes, but there’s not a dog alive someone doesn’t want to kick or kill. You want everyone to be your friend? Why? Why bother? (256)

I stole the sun, he said. Souls, I stole souls. I ate them whole and no one saw. I am eating the world. I am eating myself. (257)

I want grandeur, he said. To shit grandeur. (257)

All the rules, all the morals, all the mysteries, they didn’t apply. For a short time I flew above them, beyond them. I was the world and the world was me … (259)

Everything they pretended to hold dear, I trampled beneath me. (259)

The world will burn. And why? Because of me … (259)

There was nothing there. His whole life had been a lost search. (267)

He wasn’t evil. That was too grand an idea when his truth was much more mundane. He was just pathetic. (291)

-------

TM Note: The Writer’s Life Itself Later On. Kif becomes a television show writer, then a prominent producer, giving up his literary ambitions for the sake of money. He has become like the man he hated and now, looking back, writes (and in the second passage quotes an old childhood friend, Ray, who was the bodyguard of the con man):

--------

I’m not saying thought that what I did was a con. I am asking the question: what is not? (311)

At the time I wanted to succeed, and I had thought that life was about success. Later I came to a different point of view. Living is about being wrong, as Ray once said. But hopefully getting away with it. To live is to be defeated by ever greater things, and it may be that you learn from your defeats, but mostly you are defeated by what you learn. Perhaps the soul purpose of life, I came to think, is learning to understand the measure of your own particular failure. (311)

I rode out the good years, the golden decades, rode them hard, had fun, made money, and lost most everything else. (319)

You can do that, you know. Lose some fundamental part of yourself. and you cannot have it back. Ever. (319)

In my own humble way, retailing lies as reality, I see I have become just another con man. (320)

First Person: https://amzn.to/2MZosyG

The Arts, The Humanities, and Business Success

When young people study the Arts and Humanities, they can prepare themselves in deep, untold and currently unappreciated ways for a successful business life.

The Arts: Every art involves complexity and mastery, two of the deepest features of any highly accomplished business life. We can think of a painting as a solution to a problem—or better yet, as thousands of solutions to thousands of problems. When it embodies Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity, it succeeds best. And this is true of a business, or a business deal. The same is also true of a piece of music, a dance, or a sculpture. Art hones many intellectual qualities and personal traits like perseverance in the pursuit of perfection, or even happy imperfection.

The Humanities: Let's begin with what's broadly called literature, encompassing poetry and prose, short stories, essays, and novels. Let's even throw in the best of film. When we study great literature, we can prepare ourselves for deeply satisfying business success. First, in reading well-told stories, we learn to tell stories well. And there's nothing more important in business life than telling powerful stories about what we're doing, want to do, and can possibly do. One famous film producer, Peter Guber, has said in his delightful book "Tell to Win" that during his career, whenever he went into a meeting with facts and figures, he never got what he wanted, but whenever he showed up with a great story, he got everything he wanted and more. Secondly, we come to understand character more deeply through the lens of a masterful story. Great literature is full of cautionary tales for leaders and high achievers: Gilgamesh, Beowulf, Don Quixote, Frankenstein, Moby Dick, and Jack London's Sea Wolf, among many others. And in these tales of greatness and tragedy, we see the truth of what Heraclitus said long ago, "Character is Destiny."

History: Of course the lessons here are obvious. The long-term link between character and excellence throughout the course of our world up to now, The Law of Unintended Consequences, from even the most modest decisions, the balance of risk and reward that attends any bold action, the inevitable mess that arises from wild interventionism, and the catastrophes that democracy is intended to prevent.

Psychology: Coming more deeply to understand what motivates people just might be the most important key to business success. It's crucial for forming more positive relationships, building a great business culture, and diagnosing what can go wrong between people. The recent turn to positive psychology has provided us with new tools for excellence in everything we do.

Philosophy: As a philosopher, what can I say? When young people encounter the best of world philosophy, they learn about belief and skepticism, appearance and reality, love and purpose, evidence and folly, wisdom and virtue. They prepared themselves for a deeper and more lasting form of success in whatever they do. And the same is true for older people. The more we learn the insights of the great practical philosophers and use them relentlessly, the better we can be at anything we do. The truth of this has been on display in the talks I've given to business groups over the years, at this point far surpassing a thousand. One company has had me speak more than sixty-five times, offering me for each of those hours more than my annual salary once was at Notre Dame. Why would any business do such a thing? Because of the fact that they see the great value of philosophy. You can't have a great business without great philosophical foundations.

Ethics in Business and Sport

Today while walking the dogs, I was thinking about parallels between business and sport. No, not the aspect that first might leap to mind, about winners and losers. And you know, I don’t think either business or sport is primarily about those two categories in the first place. 

Imagine that an industry or even a profession is like a sport. Healthcare, tech, banking, investments, law, medicine, academics, manufacturing, are in a sense analogous to big overall team sports like football, baseball, basketball, and soccer. Individual companies, firms, or practices in those industries or professions are akin to teams, and they have within them more teams. An industry, or profession, like a sport, provides us human beings with a framework where we can develop our talents, grow, and make a difference in the world.

Hang with me for a minute. Let’s think of business and sport as frameworks, or matrices, within which human talent can be developed, molded, and unleashed to pursue excellence, and perhaps greatness. As such, they are spiritual endeavors. Leaders are needed in all such frameworks. So are strategies and tactics and education or training. And I think talent then has to be developed in three ways:

1. Through the development of skill.

2. Through the development of character.

3. Through the development of intellect.

Excellence depends on all three. The skill component is the most obvious. Football players need to learn to tackle, and block, and handle a ball. Basketball players need to develop skills of moving, defending, passing, rebounding, and shooting. But character is just as important. Excellence in any competitive sport or industry requires courage, grit, tenacity, determination, persistence and honesty. At its highest and broadest levels, it requires empathy, kindness, and fairness to others. And then there is the mind. Great performers hone their minds, cultivate their intellectual understanding, and then know how to use the deeper realms of the mind, such as the unconscious, or the imagination, to go where no one has gone before and do what no one has done before.

Ethics in business, a profession, or a sport, is about being true to those three forms of development, while being true to yourself and others. Nothing less is ever genuinely great. So ethics is never just icing on the cake. It’s a crucial aspect of the entire baking endeavor, and the cake itself. Of course, the Greek word from which ethics derives, ethos, meant character. The character of a team, business, or professional endeavor depends on the development of individual skill, character, and intellect on the part of all the players involved. Their proper personal growth makes possible great teamwork, which then makes possible further growth, in what philosophers call a virtuous circle of flourishing. This is the power of ethics in everything.