You: The Waterfall

Do you ever pour energy into a project, a massive waterfall of thundering effort, a veritable Niagara of activity, and find yourself astonished to realize that only a small stream meandering through the undergrowth seems to result? We all have that experience at some point, if we ever try anything big, challenging, and exciting.

We’ve aimed really high, prepared extremely well, worked endlessly hard, and in the aftermath, only a trickle of result seems to ensue. We’re exhausted and bewildered, and perhaps despondent.

The world can sometimes seem set up not to aid or magnify our efforts for good, but to resist them mightily and filter them down to nearly nothing. It can feel like a force field surrounds us and blunts any attempt we might muster for the new great thing. But then, who said anything worth doing would be easy? Why think progress will ever be automatic, that results are guaranteed, or that any of us can work magic through sheer will?

Maybe the world is set up with quite different ends in mind, and among these are growing us in wisdom and strength, and for that, difficulty is needed. Challenge is required. Obstacles must be plenty, and large, and sometimes scary. Perhaps the process is the point. The waterfall itself is what was wanted. And maybe, just maybe, what the world needs right now is precisely that trickle your gushing has produced, along with all the beauty and noise of its production, that small stream fed by your massive cascade of energy. And that just may set you up for what’s next, and next after that, until there is something so wonderful you could never have imagined it, not for a moment, streaming and flowing from all your tries, failures, disappointments, and hopes along the way.

Circles: And My New Book

Circles. We’ve used the image of concentric circles for a very long time. Aristotle spoke of a goal or purpose as a “telos” or bullseye, or innermost circle on a target. The Roman philosopher Hierocles used the image in an interestingly different way, parallel to the way I use it in my new book, The Everyday Patriot. Imagine your life as mapped by a series of concentric circles. In the bullseye is your inner self, your heart and mind. Order that in a healthy way and you have something good to contribute to the next closest circle out, your family. A healthy family in turn contributes to a broader circle of good friendships, and a healthy neighborhood, which then helps make up a positive, well functioning community, town, state, nation, and world. Each circle should contribute in a positive way to the next circle out. And every outer circle should always be in turn reaching back to nurture and support its innermost circles.

Tribalism of any kind is where people get stuck in a circle and wrongly think its health depends on them shunning, suspecting, disliking, or fighting all broader circles in the world, or the disparate circles within those broader horizons. In seeking to make one’s closest group stronger, tribalism actually corrupts it and makes it weaker, and that corruption then leaks into its own inner circles, ending up in disordered hearts and minds.

By contrast, one of the most ancient virtues is that of hospitality, which just means opening your heart and mind, and your other inner circles, to the stranger who comes from a different inner ring of an outer band. It’s good for the stranger, and it’s very good for you. Remember, you are in most other people’s far outer circles, so you should treat them the way you would want to be treated by them, as a stranger to them. And that means with the attitudes and actions of a warm, welcoming, helping, and caring hospitality. In my book, I try to show how national patriotism, properly understood in any country, isn’t about tribalism, or national narcissism, but is about growing our own garden well for the sake of others as well as ourselves, creating a strong healthy, well functioning broad circle to offer to the even larger circle of the world, and to all its diverse inner circles, more indirectly, as well. It’s about inclusion, care, and health for all. Our own good is inwardly linked to the greater good and in a great many ways. If we could understand that better in our time, and take it to heart, the world would be a vastly more harmonious place, and so would our communities, physical and virtual.

For the little jam packed book, click HERE.

Meaning and Purpose

Meaning is connective. Purpose is directive. And each is also the other. The direction of purpose connects. And the connection of meaning directs. Answers to “Why?” bridge them both.

We all need a sense of both meaning and purpose. Meaning is about connecting up our lives and actions with broader horizons of value. Purpose is about directing our steps in accordance with meaning. Both are about our deepest commitments and ideals in action, within a bigger picture and along a better path.

Meaning connects up the details of your life with a broader landscape of value and importance, and cause and effect, positioning you within a larger story that makes sense, brings a concept of identity, and ennobles. It provides orientation and guidance at the deepest level. Purpose involves the why that leads to the what and when. Its forward guidance and related guardrails come from deep within and enrich everything else.

Meaning and purpose inspire us, empower us, and draw us together into creative partnerships like nothing else can. Socrates said that the least important things, we tend to think about and talk about the most; while the most important things, we tend to think about and talk about the least. We need to turn that around.

Spend a little time thinking through your own sense of meaning and purpose. It can light your path in vital new ways.

Partnering With Our 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 certainly try 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 and grappling with 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. Are you good 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 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.

Each of us is Unique: Just like Everybody Else

No two of us are exactly alike. I don't know about snowflakes, though, do you? I mean, we keep hearing that claim, but who has examined them all, ever? And yet for people, we know in another way, from how different experiences, however slightly distinctive, form us into different people, different thoughts play a role, and interactions with others can be crucial to our developed uniqueness. I suspect that souls are different even prior to all this. But I'd find a proof of that hard to construct. Maybe you wouldn't. See? We're different.

I mentioned this in a talk once on the ideas in my book If Aristotle Ran General Motors, which was really about fulfillment and happiness through Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity. At one point I was talking about the four basic spiritual needs of uniqueness, union, usefulness, and understanding. Afterwards, two ladies came up to me, dressed exactly alike, even down to the pearls and rings and such. I looked more closely and they were identical twins, impossible to tell apart. They said in unison, "We're sisters and we loved your talk!" I'm not kidding. Then one spoke. "We look exactly alike but we're so very different on the inside, in our personalities and mental lives!" The other was nodding vigorously, though I promise not mouthing the words.

Uniqueness. We need to keep that in mind. Even people who seem completely alike can be very different, distinctive, one in a god-zillion to the nth power, utterly unique on the inside. Maybe we need to recognize and celebrate that more. And I know, you've had the exact same thought. No?

The Astronomical Value of Humor

Over on LinkedIn, a young scientist posted this morning that he'd just been hired as an associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Johns Hopkins University. It brought back vivid memories for me as a keynote speaker.

I've given over 1,200 talks in my role as a public philosopher and one of the most totally delightful events of all was an endowed lectureship, the Meridian Lecture, to an auditorium full of all the cosmologists, planetary scientists, and Hubble space telescope people at Hopkins. Great people, really fun, and super smart.

I like to spice my wisdom talks about success, uncertainty, change, or leadership with funny stories and other unexpected forms of humor. I've cracked up the leadership teams at Ford, GM, Merrill Lynch, International Paper, Hewlett Packard, and at so many companies. But the Hopkins scientists laughed louder at all my jokes than maybe any other group ever. Some of the guys were falling out of their chairs, bright red faces, holding their stomachs in convulsed merriment, unable to breathe. It was like a spacewalk of philosophical humor where the oxygen supply gets kinked. I thought we were going to have to call 911. Super brainy folks who could not find the men's room in their own building, or the door to the auditorium. It was like being in a Monty Python skit. But they can find a way to the stars. And spot the punchlines in any of my jokes from light years away. God bless the scientists of Johns Hopkins. You all set me up beautifully to tell my wife, "Well THEY thought I was funny!"

My point, and I usually have one—unless it’s lost in space—is that well used humor can be a very effective communication device. But like anything else, it must be used carefully and well. Done badly, it can be offensive, insensitive, demeaning, or just awkward. Deployed skillfully, it can be disarming, unifying, and uplifting. Self deprecating humor tends to work well, and it’s especially easy when you’ve made the career choice as I have to be a philosopher, with all the earning potential typically attached to that role in our time. As a professor, I tried to get my students to laugh because I wanted them to learn and remember. And forty years later, many of them still remember “that time in class when” I did something very funny, silly, or semi crazy to make a point. So consider using this powerful tool. It can ease tension and work magnificently, when it’s done well. Seriously.

Independence

It’s a big world. It’s a small world. It’s our world. The energy of life flows all around it on the surface, in the waters, through the air, under the ground. And wisdom traditions across all these lands seek to prod our distinctively human form of life to deeper roots of insight and greater heights of love and compassion. But we struggle with spiritual maturity and openness. We get balled up in the squealing demands of the small insistent self, as if it’s not just a tiny passing visitor on this spinning globe of life. Enlightenment, it turns out, isn’t just about reason, but imagination, emotion, and attitude unfettered by the crass chains of ego, freed to flourish with others in vibrant community and solidarity with all that lives.

The greatest independence frees us “from” in order to free us “for” the greatest and most wonderful liberation there is.

And I almost forgot. Today is the official publication day of my new book, though Amazon put it up a few days early in honor of the holiday weekend, a formerly secret project to do my part to help reclaim the ideals and values ensconced in the Declaration of Independence, with some great stories and new ways of thinking. I hope you’ll see it soon and let me know what you think! Here’s the link to copy and paste. The paperback and ebook are up, with the hardcover a week away. 134 pages. Packed! https://amzn.to/3aczxNK

A Room With a View

There’s nothing quite like a room with a view. Perhaps this is a good image and model for the mind at its best. The well developed mind should be like a room with a view. It should be a space in which we can safely and comfortably live, with all the necessities and conveniences it's nice to have. And guests should always be welcome to come and visit in it. But it should also be open to vistas beyond where we are and what we possess, allowing us to view inspiring scenes that can lift us up and call us forth with beauty, promise, and hope.

The Road to Wisdom

Many years ago. It was a big leadership meeting for a famous global company. I was at the head table of the large ballroom in the five star hotel, seated with the head poohbahs. Yeah. Cause I'm a philosopher and that's what I do.

A very senior woman says to me across the table, over the beautifully plated meals and glasses of wine: "Tom, you're always talking about the great philosophers of the past, like Socrates and Plato and Aristotle, but where are the philosophers now? Where are the great thinkers of the present day?" I paused a second to allow someone else at the table to point at me, but everyone just looked up from their meals, awaiting my answer, apparently also curious about where a philosopher might be found. I should have worn my "I'm a Philosopher" T shirt. I swallowed my steak and remaining pride and said, "You really want to know?" She then smiled. "Yes, of course!" I said, "They're among the limo and towncar drivers of America." There was a surprised laugh around the table.

"I mean it. What other job to you know of where the person working gets to meet new people constantly and spend often long periods of time with them—an hour, two hours, half a day, sometimes two or three days driving them around, listening to them on the phone, often chatting with them? They drive to weddings and funerals. They take financial people around to their roadshows. They facilitate "Girls' Night Out." They see the good, the bad, and the ugly, human nature in all its facets. They sometimes hear people's stories. Then they get the time to think about what they've seen and heard, time to process it all as they wait for the next client to land or finish dinner or get out of that crucial meeting. Many become wise from what they see and hear and feel from it all. It's like in the Bhagavad Gita, which on the surface is about a great warrior before battle but is really about his driver, his charioteer, who happens to be a deity in disguise. The driver listens to the warrior's troubles then gives him advice, like Bagger Vance, the legendary older golf caddie of fiction and film, whose story was a retelling, in a way, of the ancient tale. When you get into that Uber or Lyft, or that limo or blacked out Escalade, you may be entering the kingdom of true philosopher, even a deity in disguise. Make the most of it. You'll be glad. And, oh, I almost forgot. If you have to go anywhere after dinner, I'll bring a car around."

Hope

We all have hopes, and I think we should have many. Some are small, others are big. Many are superficial, and a few are deep. We have morally profound hopes and others that are just preferences of a personal sort. I can hope that tomorrow will be a mild, sunny day, and that racial justice will come to prevail in America. In an exceedingly fine recent book, Hope Under Oppression, philosopher Katie Stockdale explores the nature of hope, and especially its importance among people in disadvantaged and socially oppressed groups, where hope is often the hardest and also the most important to have and maintain. But her work illuminates the nature and role of hope more broadly in all our lives. And it’s a study that can benefit anyone who wants to think carefully about our moral engagement with the present and future.

The book is also a paradigmatic example of analytic philosophy done well. Katie makes all the conceptual distinctions we need to make, but no more than are required to gain clarity on the topic, and she argues clearly, using those tools, to establish new insights that are vitally helpful. She’s fair to other points of view, but also quick to spot error hiding behind truth in previous discussions of hope. Her guidance is sure footed and reliable on issues of substance, and it encompasses not just hope, but also such equally important human experiences as the very different emotions of anger and bitterness in the face of injustice, along with the roles of faith and courage in pursuing the good against great challenge.

I consider this to be an excellent and encouraging exercise in moral philosophy. It even ends up by being a bit inspiring. It reinforces my pride to be a philosopher and makes me newly thankful for all the young women who are busy bringing their voices, sensibilities, and talents to this ancient enterprise and broadening its concerns, while at the same time hewing to the highest levels of logical rigor and careful consideration regarding the human condition. This book has taught me a lot. I hope that many of you who are philosophically inclined will give it a careful read. But even if this is not your thing, I wanted you to know of the brilliant young philosophers who are using their talents to shed light on matters of crucial weight in our time.

For the book, Click here.

The Cost of Happiness

I just came across this photo online, this electric sign and its message: Happiness is Expensive. It struck me at first like the petulant complaint of a spoiled diva or dandy suddenly forced to pay their own way in their faux fantasyland of swag and swagger. You just gotta have that shirt, shoe, pant, ring, watch, car, house, travel, meal, bubbly, image, and life. And when you foot the bills yourself, yeah, it’s expensive. But wait. Maybe I’m being too quick with this statement.

And then I paused and pondered. Remember when you were a kid? If you were anything like me, happiness seemed to come free of charge. It was natural, easy, available almost anywhere and anytime. It could be interrupted and often was, but it would naturally descend again on my heart, whether I was playing with friends, reading a book, cavorting with the neighbor’s dog outside in the yard, or lying on the floor of my little house arranging toys in an imaginary game. Then I grew and began to chase things and states of being and to work for approval and success and the resources I would need to work even harder for more of the same. And happiness often stood to the side and watched me, patiently available, if only I would notice. But I thought it would return to me only if I invested in all the right things, paid the price, and then again, at higher and nearly exorbitant amounts as the years passed. And the dopamine came more frequently and bigger and I was giddy, then happy again, I thought, but it was all so expensive indeed in effort and time and resources and plans. And costly in what I had lost along the way.

And then I woke up. And I began to rediscover the real path, the one of my childhood, the one where my natural partner of happiness was keen on accompanying me daily without all those demands that it turns out I had put on myself over the years, following the lead of others who were themselves a bit lost, and when I began to enjoy again the company of my old joyous inner friend, our companionship became again more constant and reliable, and seemingly free again, but really hard earned in the coin of mistake and wisdom. This new walk along the proper path had been expensive to find, indeed.

So my conclusion is that the message of the sign can mean different things at different stages, and while foolish at one, can be wise at another, and deeper, and fuller phase of life.

Self Discipline

A friend asked me this morning to ponder and write something on Facebook on the idea of self discipline. Good place for such a topic. At first, I thought "Eventually, when I get around to it." Then I said, "No, get down to it now!" So, Ok, before you leave due to this opening lame humor, like a philosophical DJ, I’ll spin that platter by request. I’ve posted on social media, and realized I haven’t blogged here in more than a week, so here goes for you wise people who through self discipline stay off social media.

First, I’ll not hyphenate the word, in order to emphasize both components. You can write it either way. Our word ‘discipline’ comes from the Latin ‘disciplina’ (you can see the resemblance already, whether you haven't had your coffee or have had your cocktails; and more implications on that later) which meant “instruction, teaching, training, knowledge.” That eventually gave us the late 14th century meaning of “system of rules and regulations” often used in the Catholic Church, but not before the 12th century French (‘descepline’) and a few Old English had translated the Latin, or added on the additional gloss of “chastisement or punishment.”

I want to suggest that self discipline is a process of guidance and guardrails, offered internally, within our own hearts and minds, for the sake of attaining a state of heart, mind, or body that we desire, or else an external goal that we seek. It is a process in which we act as our own coaches, advisors, and trainers, laying out practices of behavior and monitoring and correcting actual performance to that end. Guidance and Guardrails. And that’s one of my definitions of wisdom. Self discipline is by nature a partner of wisdom, but of course can be used toward foolish and evil ends, and so is never the same thing. It’s a subordinate virtue, depending on its positive value for the other virtues it serves.

We have the ability to rise above ourselves, or stand outside ourselves, and monitor and appraise our own conduct. It’s a secret to positive growth and healthy achievement in any domain of life. But too few people cultivate and use this innate ability in our time. External distractions and unruly passions block the light of the sun, and too many have forgotten the need we often have to strive and work, resisting fleeting impulse and following genuine insight.

As I see it, self discipline uses at least four tools: reason, imagination, accountability and habit. Reason is for understanding what we truly need, as distinct from what we merely want. Imagination helps us vividly depict the path we’re on and where its taking us, along with where we’d be better off going instead. Accountability brings us buddies and partners who care about us enough to encourage us, point out our inconsistencies, and help us get back on the path. And finally, cultivating a healthy habit can be the ultimate tool of self discipline, and can help us avoid even having to fight big battles in order to follow consistency the way we’ve chosen. Self discipline is a key and pervasive ingredient in a life well lived, and is far too little understood and practices in our day. Sorry I couldn’t say it all more succinctly, but I didn’t have enough, well, you know.

Summer Book Club? Reading my novels together.

Summer Book Club? Someone suggested here the other day that I host a summer book club for my novel series of philosophical fiction that I often characterize as the best practical and deeper philosophy I've ever written. It came to me as a mental movie and changed my life. So I'm going to ask you all to let me know if you'd like to be part of such an adventure. We'd read together The Oasis Within and The Golden Palace between now and the end of June for a first meeting (Oasis is short, GP is medium length), then do a book a month for succeeding months, digging ever deeper into the ideas. If enough people are interested, I'd try to find a day of the week and time that would work for international time zones. Just let me know if you'd be interested and if there are enough of us, I'll announce within a week or two. And we'll gather around the Zoom campfire, just us, and dig deep. Please forward to friends you think might be interested. Summer Book Club!

If you’re interested, drop me a note at TomVMorris@aol.com!

Boris Becker and Beowulf

The Editor of Germany's prominent paper Die Zeit emailed me in 2001. The German tennis superstar Boris Becker, as big in his country at the time as Michael Jordan was here, had just suffered a bankruptcy of his company, seemed headed for another, his marriage had just broken up, he had fathered at least one child with a model in a hotel linen closet (reportedly), and his world seemed poised on the verge of collapse. The editor asked me to write a short column of advice. He said:

<<So, the question to you would be: How can Boris Becker get back on track? Assuming that perhaps his personal exploits are his own private thing: How should he approach another go at a career as a businessman? His stated goal,now that his career as a tennis player is definitely over, IS indeed to be a successful entrepreneur. And he does seem in desperate need of some Wisdom! Do you think you (and the great minds of the history of philosophy!) could help Boris Becker turn his currently rather bleak situation around - with less than 800 words? And would you be willing and able to write this short piece listing a few pieces of good philosophical advice by this coming Sunday? That would be just terrific!>>

I decided to get creative. And I guess Boris didn't take my advice. Because he was just sentenced to a prison term for criminal conduct. But the advice was simple:

Boris Becker and Beowulf

Tom Morris

The newspapers, magazines, and television networks of the world first carried stories about Boris Becker because of his many triumphs. Now they seem to be filled with accounts of his troubles. A bit of reflection on the pattern to be found in this turn of events can yield a measure of wisdom for us all, perhaps including even Mr. Becker himself.

One of the great cautionary tales in European literature is the ancient Anglo Saxon epic of Beowulf. As a young man, Beowulf was a powerful warrior whose tremendous victories won him widespread fame and deep respect. But with accomplishment always comes danger. At one point in the story, a wise old king warns the young conqueror about the challenges that life can hold for anyone who experiences great success in their early years. He explains that God sometimes allows a man to enjoy extraordinary worldly accomplishments, indulge all his desires, and temporarily forget about such realities as illness, old age, and death. But then a sort of pridefulness creeps in - what the Greeks called “hubris,” and this poet refers to as “overweening” - and this attitude renders the great man vulnerable to tragic failure and unnecessary unhappiness.

As the story progresses, we learn that, in many ways, Beowulf is a good man, but that, as a result of his unparalleled success in one area of life, he is filled with exactly that form of pride about which the king had warned. He is not able to learn and change as the years pass, or put himself, his talents, and his natural human limitations into a proper perspective. Because of this, his actions end up being responsible for his own very public failure and death, as well as for extremely damaging consequences in the lives of many other people. A younger warrior, commenting on his great fallen comrade, gives us the last words of the poem by saying, “Often, when one man follows his own will, many are hurt.”

As a modern philosopher, I spend my time advising some of the most accomplished people alive on how not to follow in the footsteps of the older Beowulf. Nothing is more common, or more surprising at first thought, than the dramatic failure of people who have formerly been very successful. But it is an ancient pattern. And it shouldn’t be so surprising. What worked in the past may not continue to work for even the most talented individual in the present, and may become actually self-destructive in the current situation. Life is adaptation. And that is one lesson Beowulf never absorbed.

But there is a deeper lesson about life success that we all must learn. With even the best adaptiveness to the context of new circumstances, we need always to hold fast to a few ultimate principles that never change, and, in particular, four transcendentals discovered by philosophers long ago - the ancient principles of Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity.

We all experience life in four dimensions. The intellectual dimension of our experience demands Truth. The aesthetic dimension of our lives needs Beauty. The moral dimension requires goodness. And the spiritual dimension of our experience moves in the direction of a deep need for a sense of connectedness, or Unity. Each of these four principles must be pursued in the context of the other three. And if we lose sight of any one of them, we suffer.

Extraordinary athletic accomplishment can cultivate an extreme physicality in our sensibilities, and that in many ways can lead to an immersion in the aesthetic dimension of life to the neglect of one or more of the others. This is always dangerous, and has implications for our overall success in life that can become quite problematic. As a philosopher, one thing I would advise Boris Becker is to renew his personal commitment to all the values that need to structure life in the world, and not to let himself be derailed from anything that really matters in the long run, in the pursuit of something that might otherwise seem attractive in the short run.

The great American psychologist and pragmatic philosopher William James realized that it is normal for very talented people to encounter great difficulties along the way in life. No one enjoys uninterrupted success in everything. But in a study of the sports champions in his day, James also discovered that the greatest of them shared in common an ability to renew their personal confidence in any challenging situation, find a path that can work, and once again attain victory. Any champion fallen from grace can, with the help of an enlightened pragmatism, triumph once more.

In a book called True Success, I have drawn from the thinking of James and many other philosophers to show that, in every situation, we need seven things to guide our path and raise the probability of appropriate and sustainable success: a clear conception of what we want that is firmly rooted in self-knowledge, a strong confidence in our prospects, a focused concentration on what our goals will require, a stubborn consistency in the orientation of all our actions, an emotional commitment to the importance of what we’re doing, a good character to guide us and keep us on a proper course, and a capacity to enjoy the process along the way.

Six of these conditions are never enough. All seven must be respected and followed. If Boris Becker, or any accomplished person who may now likewise be struggling with new difficulties and challenges, can cultivate a faithfulness about the four principles that never change, and follow these seven conditions of success that have been handed down to us by so many of the great thinkers of the past, he can move into the future with renewed hope for success yet to come. Otherwise, the nature of the news coverage will never change, until it just eventually ends.

I'm Proud of You

I’m proud of you, those of you I know, and many of you I’ve never met in person, and I feel that pride well up whenever you do or say something noble and good, or show your spirit of creative love or compassion to another person, or in reference to some event that brings out the deepest and best in you, though it might not affect everyone that way. And this raises a question.

What does it mean to be proud of another person, or for someone else to be proud of you? Proper pride seems paradigmatically to do with our own actions and hard won accomplishments. Is pride in someone else then just metaphorical, a poetic tip of the imaginary hat? No, actually, I suspect not. I think it’s literal, real, and true. If you have invested any measure of time, attention, energy, or kindness in the life of another person, however directly or indirectly, and they go on to do especially good things, it’s natural and proper to think that, in however small a way, you have tended the garden. And even in the most extended sense, to the extent that we all invest in the human family, I think we can even feel something like moral pride for a stranger seen in doing something fine, something good, compassionate, and honorable. As a self-regarding attitude, pride can be a healthy thing, within its proper measure, but beyond a healthy dose, it can become dangerous and distorting. By contrast, well placed, morally and spiritually keen pride for another person is itself at no risk of unhealthiness, whatever its measure, even though it could in principle give way to something else that is a distortion rather than a grace. But in a well formed heart, boundless pride for the goodness in others can flourish and inspire the heart itself that honors the good.

You and I are Artists

I posted this on social media today, and wanted any of you who are not social media browsers to be able to see it. It’s a lesson that took me far too long to learn. But it now enriches every day.

So, I’m 70 years old today. And it occurred to me: I’m an artist and, strangely, also a work of art. So are you. My life is full of attempts and erasures and start-overs. I’m a painter, sculptor, and composer, an author and architect, a dancer, an actor, a gardener, even a puzzle creator and solver. And so are you. There’s no museum for what we do, and no set awards or prizes with ceremonies beamed across the globe. But there is the great and wonderful satisfaction of the art itself. To live is, at its best, to love and create, to create with love, and to love the creating, even when it’s just a start and will need a retry and restart. It’s good to learn to release all the rest. That’s one gift we can give ourselves.

Chronos and Kairos

I love watches. I typically wear 2-5 different ones in a day. Yeah. Crazy. I change them to suit my moods. Today I began with a simple, beautiful Timex, stainless steel 38mm case with a white face with black hands and numbers, held on by a great thick reddish brown strap with a small touch of light blue stitching near the lugs. Pictured below is the next one up, the Gerald Genta (pronounced "Zheeral Zhenta"), seconds before I changed into it. GG was by most estimates the great watch designer of the 20th century, creating the Constellation for Omega, the Royal Oak for Audemars, the Nautilus for Patek, and on and on. Then he formed his own company and made wild nonstandard watches, like the jump hour, where the hour numeral would pop into a window, and a horseshoe of minute numbers with one standard hand indicating them kept you apprised of how that hour was progressing. Sometimes both the hour and minutes would jump. My GG sports watch here on a rubber strap (with his name in raised letters in the rubber) is the only watch he made that was "normal" - nonstandard for him among his nonstandard designs, looking like a regular watch but with the numbers configured to allude to the jump hour versions. Steel fluted 38mm case, domed and beaded crown, carbon fiber dial—all sorts of idiosyncratic details adorning an ordinary looking watch. But it's special to those who know.

And now, with that lead in, my topic: The Greeks had two words for time, chronos which meant normal clock time, watch time, your smart but not wise phone time, and what leads to the calendar, the increments of seconds, minutes, hours, and days that pass the same for all regardless of how we experience them. Then there is kairos, a very special time, maybe a sacred time, a unique thread that weaves through the world, behind the scenes, and if you can pick it up and respond to it, you find unusual synchronicity, special coincidences, you meet with unusual successes helped along by unseen forces. That person comes into your life, that thing happens just when it's needed, whether you realized the need in advance or not.

There is a statement in the New Testament, in Galatians I think: "When the time had fully come, God sent forth his son." If I recall, the term here is one ordinarily used for a pregnant woman ready to give birth. It's a concept of readiness, or fullness. When the everyone is running around doing things too soon or late, the person with a keen sense of kairos does them at the perfect time, the Goldilocks time, and succeeds. Most of us just do when we do and hope for the best. And often we have to be patient because the best will happen in the kairos time, not in the chronos time, the clock time or calendar time we have in mind. Faith, hope, love, and the culmination of them in patience are required to get us to the kairos. So be of good hope. Seek the special, unusual, unique kairos, which I see alluded to in my old Gerald Genta watch, the one that tells me it's now kairos time to stop.

Interpreting With Humor

Imagine Jesus Laughing. Ok, not a lot in water. His was mostly a dry humor. But if we can't imagine this, I think we misunderstand a lot of his words as recorded in the Bible. Everyone who seriously reads the Gospels comes across passages that seem to make no sense, given the background belief of the writers that Jesus was somehow literally God, a divinely perfect being, as well as being fully human. He can come across as rude to his mother or disparaging about his family, or sound like a hellfire Puritan preacher on rare occasions. But what if he had a great sense of humor? What if was often playing around with his conversation partners, using metaphor and simile and lots of other off-literal forms of language to evoke insight through irony or mirth or exaggeration or sounding like he was saying the opposite of what point he wanted his friends to get? We most often often read him as if he was a grim faced somber individual with a harsh disposition. What if that's the opposite of the truth?

Socrates as represented by Plato was very playful and funny. So then was Plato for so representing him. Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius can make you laugh out loud. So can Pascal or Kierkegaard, and on and on. When I was a professor, I used to tell my grad student TAs that philosophy is serious, but that doesn't mean it's somber. We can have fun doing it and we should. Great minds are often playful minds and we all move in their direction by a proper playfulness.

The mother of Jesus comes to him at the wedding at Cana and says, "They're running out of wine." I think this happened a lot wherever Jesus was. Draw your own conclusions as well as a little of the red from that wineskin. He says "Woman, what is that to me?" My mother would have smacked me on the spot. First, he doesn't address her as his mother, and secondly he acts like he has no idea why she's telling him this odd factoid. And it just sounds rude. But what if there is this rich history between the two of them, of playful joking around, and he knows she knows exactly who he is and what he can do. And, yeah, it's been a secret they've kept but he takes her cue after this head fake that it's time. And the wine flows. I imagine her smile or laugh. Let's call this the hermeneutics of humor. Interpretation that has to get as creative as the text. Did the Gospel writers intentionally make all this up and put such stuff into the mouth of their savior? I don't think they were that clever or sophisticated but I do think he was.

The Lesson from Moscow

In Moscow, hollow men with empty hearts play their desperate ego games on fantasy chessboards in their heads, making their moves with easy orders at a safe distance but using real lives that are deeply harmed and cut short. It's not just Putin, though it is of course primarily, but also those who put him into power, and those who serve him, who acquiesce and obey eagerly for their own false sense of power and ego.

When Lord Acton wrote that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, it was after he had extensively read and studied the letters and private papers of those considered politically great, or massive in their undertakings, throughout European history. His conclusion was that in this precise sense great men are seldom good men. The sad truth is that it is badly damaged egos, the hollow men, who claw their way to the top far too often, where they can do immense damage to those around them and to the broader world. We see it in our own nation and in many of our states. Containment is a messy and partial solution once such people have power and act on it. The key is to keep them from amassing power in the first place. On every level, we need to resist and suppress the ambitions of damaged, grandiose egos - from local elections and small business endeavors to the institutions that span a national and global scale. Such people come to power from two sources, by appealing to the sadly like minded, and because the rest of us are too careless and distracted to act early enough to stop their ascent. And there are always heavy costs as a result.

I've been quietly working on these issues for twenty years and have finally compiled what I've learned in a book manuscript called "The Frankenstein Factor: Monster Success and Massive Failure." It's all about grandiose ego, and the motives, means, and methods that repeatedly create havoc in the world. In Mary Shelley's famous novel about the production of a monster, which is one of the greatest cautionary tales about ambition and success ever written, we are given insights we can use to comb history for the wisdom we need right now. With Putin's invasion of Ukraine, we're seeing the Frankenstein Factor on a large scale. And if history tells us anything clearly, it's that this will not go well for the perpetrators, as well as a great many innocent people, in the long term. Without wisdom and the virtue to act on it, suffering spreads unfettered through the world. With the right measure of caution and courage, we can do something about it instead.

Living Without Goals?

Goals. As a philosopher who has studied goals and goal setting for more than 30 years, I’ve occasionally come across books with titles like “Goalless Living” and “Living Without Goals.” The idea of these books seem to be that goals lock us down in a world of constant surprises and that instead of chaining ourselves down with goals, we’re better off just going with the flow and letting serendipity do with us what it will. We can just be in the moment and let good stuff find us.

But imagine that I was impressed with such a book. What would I do, set it as my goal to live without goals? And what about normal life? Imagine that my wife asks me to take out the trash in a few minutes and later on today pick up three items she needs from the grocery store. Now imagine me saying, “Sorry, honey, I’m living now without goals.” Finally, imagine me with spouseless living. The first problem is that it’s impossible to live without any goals. So why not pick good ones? And the point about serendipity is this: I tend to find good luck come my way, serendipity and synchronicity, precisely when I’m pursuing clear goals. In fact, the clearer the goals I have, the better I’ll recognize good luck as such.

Finally, goals don’t lock us down, they get us going. It’s hard to see what life has in mind for you when you’re utterly passive. And that’s because, for one thing, life does not have in mind your being utterly passive. You and I are supposed to be planning trips, finding paths forward, setting and revising goals, dropping some, and attaining others. As Aristotle saw, human life is essentially teleological, or oriented toward purposes and goals. With an inattention to them, we end up largely aimless. So if goals are necessary, and they’re important, we might as well do our goal setting wisely, and not to chain us down, but to open us up and get us going forward, where serendipity awaits.

For more on goals, please see books of mine like “True Success” and “The Art of Achievement,” along with “The Stoic Art of Living” and “The Oasis Within.”