To Live Wide and Deep, However Long

Today, I want to pass on part of a longer blog post from my favorite blog site, www.brain pickings.org. Go to the source to read more, if you have the time. You'll love it!

The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and The Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long

By: Maria Popova

“The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today… The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.”

“How we spend our days,” Annie Dillard memorably wrote in her soul-stretchingmeditation on the life of presence, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” And yet most of us spend our days in what Kierkegaard believed to be our greatest source of unhappiness — a refusal to recognize that “busy is a decision”and that presence is infinitely more rewarding than productivity. I frequently worry that being productive is the surest way to lull ourselves into a trance of passivity and busyness the greatest distraction from living, as we coast through our lives day after day, showing up for our obligations but being absent from our selves, mistaking the doing for the being.

Despite a steadily swelling human life expectancy, these concerns seem more urgent than ever — and yet they are hardly unique to our age. In fact, they go as far back as the record of human experience and endeavor. It is unsurprising, then, that the best treatment of the subject is also among the oldest: Roman philosopher Seneca’s spectacular 2,000-year-old treatise On the Shortness of Life(public library) — a poignant reminder of what we so deeply intuit, yet so easily forget and so chronically fail to put into practice.

Seneca writes:

It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life, but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.

Millennia before the now-tired adage that “time is money,” Seneca cautions that we fail to treat time as a valuable resource, even though it is arguably our most precious and least renewable one:

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but as soon as it comes to squandering time, they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

To those who so squander their time, he offers an unambiguous admonition:

You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while that very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire… How late it is to begin really to live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!

Nineteen centuries later, Bertrand Russell, another of humanity’s greatest minds, lamented rhetorically, “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?” But even Seneca, writing in the first century, saw busyness — that dual demon of distraction and preoccupation — as an addiction that stands in the way of mastering the art of living:

No activity can be successfully pursued by an individual who is preoccupied … since the mind when distracted absorbs nothing deeply, but rejects everything which is, so to speak, crammed into it. Living is the least important activity of the preoccupied man; yet there is nothing which is harder to learn… Learning how to live takes a whole life, and, which may surprise you more, it takes a whole life to learn how to die.

 Great stuff! Go to www.BrainPickings.org to read more!

Your Uncanny Power to Know

The world is an ocean of information. Waves of it surround us. There’s knowledge everywhere. You just have go be able to read it, to connect with it, to take it in.

Most people float, or, at best, ride a wave now and then. As you swim in this ocean, you should take some time to dive deep. We can know much more than most people think we can know. You yourself may sometimes realize that you know things that may seem impossible for you to be aware of, at least, through "normal" channels. You have hints, glimmers, intuitions. Sometimes, you ignore them. Often, you just wonder where they're coming from.

What's important is to listen. Feel. Really look, deeply. And take the hints you're given.

How does this work? We don't yet know. But that it works, we do. Don't cut yourself off from the currents and eddies of insight you may most need right now. There's always a new tide. Be open. And do what every great religious tradition, at its heart, advises: Pay attention. Then act appropriately. You may be amazed at what can happen. 

The Dangers of Knowledge Without Wisdom

Knowledge can be dangerous. Smart people can do monumentally stupid things. Intelligence can be put to a bad use. But this doesn't mean that knowledge and intelligence are to be avoided. It means only that they need the proper accompaniment - wisdom.

I've written often recently about wisdom. And that's because it's so misunderstood in our time. Because it's misunderstood, it's severely undervalued. And there may be nothing more valuable, in business and life, than true wisdom.

Of course, we use the word 'wisdom,' and its adjectival form 'wise,' in two different ways. It can be used of a statement, an aphorism, or a book. "There is a lot of wisdom in that book." Or: "What he said was very wise." In this sense, the word wisdom means, simply, articulated insight.

But it's possible to know a lot of wise aphorisms, epigrams, and witticisms, while doing foolish things. There was a time in my life where I was a living demonstration of that possibility. And that leads us to an important distinction.

When a person, as distinct from a statement or book, is said to be wise, or to have great wisdom, we mean to refer not to articulated insight, but rather to embodied discernment. A wise person discerns good from bad, right from wrong, appropriate from inappropriate, better from worse, and favorable from unfavorable, as well as many other differences, in a way that foolish people can't. And that's a matter of judgment and understanding. But wisdom, when attributed to a person, has to be embodied in action of some sort, or it isn't genuine. There are, you see, two sides to personal wisdom, a side that involves understanding, and a side that involves doing. One side without the other isn't wisdom. Good judgment without good action is surely foolish. And the failure can go the other way, too. Good action that doesn't come from good judgment is just from luck or habit, and not a direct manifestation of wisdom. For true wisdom to be present, thought and action have to mesh.

Knowledge without wisdom, just like action without wisdom, can take a person, or an organization, off the rails as quickly as anything. Because of this, as well as for many more reasons, we ought to be hiring for wisdom, training for wisdom, promoting wisdom, and encouraging it in every way we can, in business, politics, and our personal lives. Any other course is, of course, unwise.

The Tent and the Tower

I wanted to share today a brief passage from one of my novels that I'm editing this week. It's all about outer things and our inner lives. The conversation is taking place in Cairo, in 1934.

The wise, older Ali Shabeezar is speaking to young Walid and his friend Mafulla. They're discussing a man who has immersed himself in criminal activity, because of a lifetime focus on the wrong things. Ali sees the man's life as a cautionary tale and says to the boys:

“One of the great surprises of life is that when you focus and fixate on external things like money, power, status, or fame as your main goals, your ultimate ends, the values that drive you, you diminish yourself, and to the point that, if you actually attain any of these things, you’ll be less likely to handle them well than a person who gains them almost by accident, as a by-product of good work well done. The individual who pursues things of the spirit, and the wellbeing of others, is different. If, along the way, any of these highly regarded external things comes to him, or all of them, for that matter, then he will much more likely be able to be their master, and not their slave. There will be healthy, and not harmful, results.”

“Why do things work this way, Uncle?” Walid was always curious to understand.

“Well, you see, the inner must be the foundation for the outer, or nothing really goes well. Any large building that’s without deep and solid foundations is unstable and can collapse in a storm, or when it’s otherwise pounded and stressed by external forces. A tent needs no foundation. It’s temporary. A tower does. In a similar way, if you want your life to rise high and last long, you must anchor it deeply. Dig down beneath the shifting sands of worldly fortune, glamour, and fame. Establish footings deep in the soul. That way, you can truly flourish. Then, all the riches of the world can come to you, and you’ll never be diminished as a result. You will, by contrast, flourish. A man or woman with inner strength can use all outer things for good purpose, and with beneficial consequences. The world works this way to help remind us where the most important things are to be found.”

Our Daily Routines

Whatever your daily routine is, it's important to remember that there are immense numbers of people alive today whose routines are radically different. It helps us all to keep in mind the vast differences that exist on earth, the amazingly divergent lifestyles that flourish, and the variety of beliefs and assumptions that keep people going. We could all benefit from an expanded mindset, a broader sense of what's possible, what is, and what could be.

It could well be that your routine is exactly right for you, that it will help you to be and do your best in the world. Or it could be, instead, that you need to open your mind and broaden your sense of the possible. We all get in ruts. We all have habits of thought, as well as action. But an expansion of these thoughts and actions can often be a good and beneficial thing.

Wouldn't it be amazing if we could live with the ongoing realization that we're all here to learn and to contribute our own syntheses of understandings to the larger whole? The longer I live, the more convinced I am that there is no one exactly like you, or me, and that if we make the most of our uniqueness, in a positive way, we can change the world for the better, regardless of our jobs, our incomes, our place in the great scheme of things, or the ways others might view us.

Open yourself today. Embrace possibilities. And make your mark.

Skill and Confidence

"Skill and confidence make an unconquered army." - George Herbert

Skill by itself may never accomplish much. Don’t you know very talented people who never manage to turn their talents into success? A skilled person with no self confidence will not likely try anything new and difficult. And every path to major success involves the new and difficult.

But confidence by itself can be downright dangerous. Confidence without skill is a recipe for disaster. It’s the combination of skill and confidence that makes for great achievements.

Make sure that the people around you understand this. Our skills and our attitudes are equally important for our overall success in life.

Making Your Mark in the World

Let me quote from the New York Times columnist David Brooks who is quoting from someone else:

“I believe the really good people would be reasonably successful in any circumstance,” the detective writer Raymond Chandler wrote in his notebook in 1949. If Shakespeare came back today, “he would have refused to die in a corner.”

That's a striking image, and a fascinating perspective.

This week, I spoke to a great group of people one day for five hours. We were talking about business and personal success - in all its definitions and contours. Our topics included the two frameworks of ideas that I call "The 7 Cs of Success" and "The Four Foundations of Greatness." We laughed, we pondered, and a few times, I quoted long passages from Shakespeare to throw some unexpected light on a hidden facet of our subjects, and of our lives. And I do think that Raymond Chandler was right. Whenever he might have been born, in any alternative possible world, Shakespeare would most likely have made his mark.

At one point in the five hours of philosophizing, not counting the extra hour of pondering the mysteries of life at lunch over barbecue, baked beans, and cole slaw, I mentioned what I like to call my "3-D Conception of Success" - that, however different personal success may look for different people, it's always about three things:

1. Discovering your talents

2. Developing those talents

3. Deploying them into the world for the good of others as well as yourself.

Circumstances may facilitate this process, or inhibit it terribly. But really good people have a way of prevailing in almost any circumstances. What do we mean here by "really good"? Simply, the people who insist on doing the process of 3-D living well. Those who work at it, and keep at it, and pour their hearts into it.

But maybe, you might wonder, it's just the people like Shakespeare, the people who have that extra spark and talent and wisdom and even "genius," who will stand out, no matter what. Yeah, maybe. But maybe, also, more of us have that in us than we ever might imagine - our own versions, for sure, but a spark worth fanning into a flame that will provide its own light in the world.

How will you handle your circumstances now? To be or not to be: that is the question.

The Wisdom Around Us

"No man is wise enough by himself," Plautus once wrote. He could have added, no woman, either, but they may come closer, at their best.

His point is an important one. It’s amazing how often we approach life as if we have to make it all up ourselves as we go along - like no one has ever trod this path before us who might have some advice that can help us along the way. I believe that the great thinkers of the past have left us the equivalent of a huge bank account of wisdom for living, but we rarely ever draw on that account. We live in existential rags while the riches of the ages are available, waiting for us to use them.

When I was growing up, I heard a story about a poor farmer in Texas whose little ramshackle house was sitting on one of the largest oil reserves in the country, but he didn't know it for a very long time. That's another great image for our untapped resources. But our reserves of wisdom from the past represent a much more renewable form of energy. We need to access what we have, in order to power our endeavors and lives forward in the best ways.

We also too often neglect to draw on the wisdom of the people around us. I’m typically astonished at how much smarter I feel after I’ve been talking to wise people, hearing what they’ve been learning about life. We're not here to go it alone. Many of the world's greatest creative endeavors have been collaborative, drawing on the insights of others, and perhaps a variety of perspectives that can come together only through open conversations fueled by true curiosity. When we seek out wise people and really talk to them, amazing things can happen.

Is there anything perplexing you in your life or work right now? Or do you just feel like you could use a little extra wisdom as you steer through the shoals of the day? Make it a point to talk to someone whose wisdom you admire. Or perhaps give someone a chance whose wisdom you haven’t even come to suspect. Share a concern, or just bring up a topic of interest. 

Or, alternatively, pick up an old book, like The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, or some essays from Seneca, or even my own summary of Marcus, Seneca, and Epictetus, The Stoic Art of Living. You may be surprised at what results. 

We need each other’s insights, across town and through the ages. 

Our Desires

"Of our desires, some are natural and necessary; others are natural but not necessary; others, again, are neither natural nor necessary." Thus spake Epicurus.

This is something worth thinking about. We all have desires. And many of them properly lead to goals. But not all of them. There are some desires that should not be pursued. Many people make themselves miserable through a failure to understand this.

The ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus had a way of helping us to classify our desires. Some are natural and necessary. We should have them and must pursue them. Others are natural but not necessary. It’s perfectly fine to pursue them, but it’s also no disaster if they go unsatisfied. The last class encompasses those that are neither natural nor necessary. We don’t have to satisfy them, and it’s not even natural for us to pursue them. Too many of our desires in the modern world fall into this last category.

Epicurus wants to free us from the tyranny of the unnatural and unnecessary things we chase. There's nothing natural about fame. There's nothing necessary about it. Yet, people sacrifice all for it. There's nothing natural about having more resources than you could ever use. There's certainly nothing necessary about it. Yet, people aspire to it, risking what they do have in lotteries and in relentless jobs that take away their lives for the remote promise of windfall gains. 

The philosopher wants to help us to understand our desires better, so that we can manage them better, for our own good, and not allow them to manage to ruin our lives. Use his categories to enhance your own thinking today. It's both natural and necessary to do so!

The Structure of Goals

Yesterday, I wrote a short blog post on having clear goals. I'd like to follow up on that today. The great novelist Dostoyevsky wrote:

Without some goal, and some effort to reach it, no man can live.

You certainly know the old story: Two college friends had moved to Los Angeles on a quest to become actors. But they couldn’t find work. Sitting around their dingy little apartment, hanging out with friends, they finally came to the conclusion that they needed something worthwhile to structure their days. Since no one would cast them in a movie, they decided they’d write their own screenplay. That goal, and their daily effort toward reaching the goal, put Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on the road to movie stardom, a life they continue to enjoy years later. Their film, Good Will Hunting, launched it all. They used their power of will, did some hunting, and good resulted.

And, of course, the great comedian and actor Robin Williams totally changed their lives by agreeing to act in the film, and thereby also gained for himself an Oscar.

So, yeah, Ok - it doesn't always go like this. Stardom, wealth, and fame don't lurk around every corner of goal-oriented activity. And some people preach the virtues of what they call "Goal-less Living" - as if it's their goal to convince the rest of us not to have any.

We need times of structure and times of no structure. We need time to just be, as well as time to do. But the doing should be congruent with our being, and it should be structured as such.

It’s often said that there are three kinds of people in this world - Those who make things happen, those who just watch things happen, and those who go around wondering “What happened?” Do whatever you can today to place yourself in the midst of that first category.  Focus your day and your week around some worthy goal or goals and the effort it takes to move in the right direction, making useful things happen as the result of your energies. It's indeed good hunting for the will.

Our Need for Goals

The great inventor of the essay, Michel de Montaigne, once wrote:

The soul that has no established aim loses itself.

Vagueness is a disease of modern life. We're surrounded with so many possibilities, we don’t know what to actually pursue. We may have a general idea, but But thoughts can't guide specific behavior. The actress Lily Tomlin once said, “I always wanted to be somebody. I should have been more specific.” Doesn’t that capture the way so many people think, these days? They want to be somebody. They want to do something important. But they may have no clue exactly what.

The great thinkers from Aristotle to the present day have recognized that we are essentially goal oriented beings. Unless we have a clear target to shoot at, we quickly get lost in literally aimless living.

Make sure you're aiming at some clear and specific goals in what you do today, and this week. Also, take any chance you might have to engage in a conversation with a co-worker or family member about some new personal goal, or some shared goal you're both pursuing, or should be pursuing. Conversations can clarify. When we put things into words, we gain focus. In discussing something you've been thinking about, you can find a new sense of clarity and purpose that's so easily lost amid the demands of the day.

Love

Love is the spirit of compassion, care, and forgiveness.

It unfolds in service to others and the best growth of the self.

It is the deepest and only wellspring for true greatness in life.

It seeks the best in others, and for them, while cultivating its own garden well.

To live without it is a struggle. To live with it is a better struggle, in the warm light of hope.

Love is first a commitment, then an attitude, then a belief, then a feeling, and then everything.

Love conquers all. Eventually.

Love transforms all. Now.

Love is the transcendent source of all good things.

It is the only enduring form of strength.

It is the sole source of peace and happiness.

To love is to live in full.

The Unexamined Life

Socrates famously said, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

He was not one to mince words. Born in the fifth century, BC, he already lived in a time when people hustled through the day, too busy with the demands of life to ever take a break and think over what it’s all about. This philosopher would stop strangers on the street in Athens and urge them to examine their lives. What were they chasing? And why?

Socrates believed in a simple scale of value. At the low end of the scale are our possessions. One step higher, are our bodies. And higher yet are our souls.

He was convinced that the least important things are the things that we tend to think about and talk about the most, and that the most important things are those that we tend to think about and talk about the least. If we examined our lives more carefully, he was confident that we’d be able ro rectify this common and profound mistake. 

When we buy something, or invest in something, we typically ask whether it's worth the price we confront. And we often make negative judgments. "That car is not worth what they're asking." The famous statement made by Socrates can be understood in the same way.

The unexamined and confused life, the life on automatic pilot, on cruise control, following the crowd mindlessly, is, according to his claim, not worth the massive investment that goes into it - the entire process of living. It's not worth all the time and energy that go into living it. 

Living an unexamined life is just making a bad investment. So, heed Socrates’ advice today, and examine your priorities. Are your commitments in line with a proper scale of values? Are you living the sort of life that is well worth living? In this examination, you can pass or fail yourself. It’s finally up to you.

Money: Blessing or Curse?

Today, the Roman poet Terence weighs in on money. He once wrote, "Riches get their value from the mind of their possessor; they're a blessing to those who know how to use them, a curse to those who don't."

Money, of course, isn’t the meaning of life. And it’s not evil, either. Its value depends on how it’s used. We’ve all seen it destroy people. And we know how a lack of it can make a life so much more difficult. Any form of wealth is a resource that can be used or abused. How are you, typically, using yours?

Ultimately, it’s up to each of us what attitude we adopt toward money. It can serve us, or we can serve it. How does it function in your life right now? Is it merely a great and useful resource, or a number one focal goal? Is it an obsession or a tool? Does it control your life, or do you control it, for the good of others as well as yourself?

Most of us worry about it too much, one way or the other.

It can indeed be a blessing or a curse, and that's up to each of us.

The Inner Circle Principle

Imagine life as involving a series of concentric circles representing your spheres of action and involvement. At the center is the inner and outer you. The next circle out is your family - both of birth and of choice - along with your closest friendships. The next circle yet is your neighborhood and your workplace. The next one out is your overall community. Then there is your state, or province, your nation, and the broader world, and perhaps even more.

Each circle, starting with the first, is to be tended to, nurtured, and grown in a healthy way, and is to be helpfully open to the next larger circles to come. We're never to get stuck in ego, or just in a family, or a neighborhood, or in a nation, in our sense of self identity and affiliation and value. As the ancient philosopher Diogenes once said, "I am a citizen of the world." Healthy self identity, and healthy affiliation at each level, is open to, and allows for, greater affiliations as well. Then, those come back and enhance the inner circles they encompass.

We're never to be stuck in any form of narrow thought that cuts us off from others. One of the biggest mistakes seen around the world is exactly that - an exclusivity of allegiance that turns others into threats and enemies. But, as my friend Vinod put it in a conversation we just had in the gym, "There are places where Sunnis work with Shiites in harmony and with shared purposes. This is how it should be." International business wants to bring the world together. International rivalries and exclusivist tribalisms want to pull the world apart. We can never fully flourish without being, in turn, tolerant, open, appreciative, and even celebratory of our differences. Tolerance is never enough, though it's the logical place to start, and hard enough for many people. But it's meant to be a door into a more positive understanding and appreciation, and even appropriation. We all have insights. And we all have errors. We can learn from each other. And we need to, in order for things to go well.

But of course, when we speak of being tolerant, open, appreciative, and even celebratory of others, we don't mean that we should ever embrace what strikes our most enlightened moral sensibilities as just wrong or unjust. What we're to learn from each other should never take us to a worse place, only to a better stage in our own understanding and sensibilities.

I hope you'll go through the day with an enhanced appreciation of all your concentric circles. You are a citizen of the world.

Failure and Success

The pond guy, Thoreau, once said, "Men are born to succeed, not to fail," and he got it mostly right. But here's the problem. We're actually born to fail a lot along the way, because that's the only way we truly succeed. We have to take our lumps to learn our lessons. But that's not meant to be the end of the game. It's not meant to be easy, but it is meant ultimately to be about success, in the right ways.

Don’t we sometimes feel as if the cards are stacked against us in this life? Think about the obstacles you’ve had to face whenever you’ve tried to do anything new and different. It can sometimes feel like life itself is just one long uphill battle.

It’s interesting in this regard to look into the biographies of very successful people. What’s amazing is that there is a nearly universal pattern to so many of their lives. Talent and hard work initially get rewarded with encouragement and nurture, only to be set up for rejection and failure. Repeated rejection. And perplexing failure. The talented individual almost gives up in a Dark Night of the Soul. Any “reasonable” person would. But somehow, our hero shows an almost supernatural ability to stick it out though all the tough times, and finally emerges into public view as an overnight sensation.

You know the old saying: “It’s always darkest before the dawn.” The fact is that we're all born multi-talented. No one utterly lacks talent. And nobody has just one. We’re also born with the ability to discover our talents, along with the will power that it takes to develop them. If we don’t give up. If we stick with the process. We finally learn what we were born to achieve. And in that respect, Thoreau was right. It's ultimately not failure that's meant for us as the last verdict, but success - a form of success that is right for each of us. But it takes that ongoing process. And that process will involve lots of trouble along the way. Remember that today. You were born to succeed. After all that failure. So go do it.

The Breathtaking Joy of Existence

Check out Albert Einstein musing on the faith of his birth and how he expands out from it:

Judaism appears to me to be almost exclusively concerned with the moral attitude in and toward life. […] The essence of the Jewish concept of life seems to me to be the affirmation of life for all creatures. […} There remains, however, something more in the Jewish tradition, so gloriously revealed in certain of the psalms; namely a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation. It is the feeling from which genuine research draws its intellectual strength, but which also seems to manifest itself in the song of birds…

That one clause made me smile: "a kind of drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of this world, of which man can attain but a faint intimation."

Here's what's both humbling and exciting to ponder: We can sometimes have a huge, intense, soul enlarging experience of that beauty and incomprehensible sublimity, a mystical realization coming to us unheralded, and stopping us in our tracks. I recently wrote on one such experience I had during a daily walk, some weeks ago (click here). And sometimes, like Saul, on the road to Damascus, it's a life changing experience that reorients everything for us, opening us up anew and turning us onto a path we hadn't really seen before.

Just like the Psalmist, we can feel that "drunken joy and surprise at the beauty and incomprehensible sublimity of the world." And yet, however great and overwhelming the experience might be, Albert E considers it merely "a faint intimation" of the true reality that encompasses us. Just think about that, and its implications.

Wouldn't it be great to carry with us every day that sense that we're living and working amid immensities whose grandeur and scope are so great that our highest mystical experiences capture only a glancing glimpse of the hem of its garment? Then, perhaps, we'd really have a new moral attitude, and an affirmation of all life that would make us lights in the darkness that so sadly seems to engulf many in our time.

Truth is a wildly blazing sun. Carry with you at least a small candle in its honor. Cast light in the darkness wherever you go.

Fame and True Success

Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle wrote long ago about fame. He said, "Fame, we may understand, is no sure test of merit, but only a probability of such: It is an accident, not a property of man."

Fast forward to now, when fame bears almost no relation to merit. You can be an instant celebrity online with no more than a knack for getting people's attention. What's the relationship, really, between widespread attention and what we know, deep down, to be success?

True success resides, first and foremost, in who we are, not in what other people say about us, or even in whether they know we exist. The deepest form of success is always a result of three things: (1) Discovering our talents, (2)  Developing those talents, and (3) Deploying them into the world for the good of others as well as ourselves. I call this “The 3-D Approach to Life.” It's first about being, second about doing and becoming, and only third about getting or having.

We live in a culture obsessed with fame. It's the famous who get our attention and too often fuel our imaginations. But back in the nineteenth century, Tom Carlyle saw more deeply. Fame may or may not signal real accomplishment of substance, and even when it does, it does so accidently.  A person’s real properties, the accomplishments they truly own in virtue of who they are and what they’ve done, are always distinct from any recognition they’ve received. 

Of course, there's nothing inherently wrong with fame, however heavily it may weigh on many shoulders. Like most things, it can be a resource or an obstacle. But it should never be pursued in absence of worthier aims that are more intrinsically within our control. In fact, the world is full of good things done to no acclaim whatsoever. And they are often the things that make the most difference. 

Today, think about doing something good anonymously, with no thought about how it makes you look, and however small it might be. There, as Carlyle might say, is where you'll find true merit, and a small piece of true success.

Are You Wise, or Otherwise?

Questioner: Are you a wise man?

Answerer: I'm only a few short steps down the path, and it's a very long road.

Questioner: You respond in the best way.

Answerer: And you.

What Few Understand About Wisdom

Through the millennia comes a recommendation:

"Make wisdom your provision for the journey from youth to old age, for it is a more certain support than all other possessions."

That's a quote from the ancient philosopher, Bias of Priene. But maybe he was just biased, you could be thinking, if you're cleverer than it's good to be. No, he was simply right.

And many people these days don't quite get the importance of wisdom because they misunderstand what it is. It isn't the memorization and mental retention of catchy aphorisms or epigrams. The wisest among us isn't the person who can come up with the most quotes, like that one above from Bias of Priene. Wisdom isn't the same thing as recitation. A bird can be taught to recite quotes. It isn't even a matter of theoretical knowledge at all, as if there's a certain number of insights about life, a discrete number of wisdom facts, and to have wisdom is just to have learned them all.

And, most of all, wisdom isn't the ability to think and say obscure sounding things that can be interpreted by others as profound. What then, is it?

Wisdom is a skill set involving perceptive discernment, healthy emotion, and appropriate action.

It took me a while to come up with that, which is probably the wisest thing I've ever said about wisdom.

That's why it's impossible to come across a wise man or woman who always acts like a fool. If a person is foolish, then, to that extent, he or she isn't wise. But again, it isn't an all or nothing matter. It's not like the proverbial light switch, either on or off. It's more like a spectrum. You can grow wiser. When we call someone wise, we don't mean to imply perfection, only a preponderance of insight and appropriateness in judgment, emotion, and action.

The fact that wisdom is a skill set is good news. Any skill can be cultivated. Some people seem to be born with an innate endowment toward such skilled behavior, but hard work and practice can bridge the gap. And it's important for us all to cultivate this skill set throughout our days, because a fully good and happy life is impossible without it.

Wisdom, then, is not to be found just in words, but in lived insight. The words that best convey those insights are merely markers pointing to the skills we all need to acquire through their help. The sayings of the wise are our breadcrumbs along the path of full living.