The Obstacle is the Way

Author: Ryan Holiday
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: September 2015

Quick Summary: The Obstacle is the Way is an accessible introductory book to the philosophy of stoicism. Ryan Holiday draws from the stories of various historical figures and relates them to key principles of Stoic philosophy. I find Stoicism to be a very helpful mindset to cultivate in my own life, and it is nice to see accessible books popularizing the wisdom of the Stoics.

If you like this book, I definitely recommend checking out the Meditations (Marcus Aurelius) and Enchiridon (Epictetus)

See things for what they are.
Do what we can.
Endure and bear what we must.
What blocked the path now is a path.
What once impeded action advances action.
The Obstacle is the Way.

My Highlights

Whatever we face, we have a choice: Will we be blocked by obstacles, or will we advance through and over them? –loc 113

Let’s be honest: Most of us are paralyzed. Whatever our individual goals, most of us sit frozen before the many obstacles that lie ahead of us. –loc 124

Objective judgment, now at this very moment. Unselfish action, now at this very moment. Willing acceptance—now at this very moment—of all external events. That’s all you need. –loc 223

“Oh, how blessed young men are who have to struggle for a foundation and beginning in life,” he once said. “I shall never cease to be grateful for the three and half years of apprenticeship and the difficulties to be overcome, all along the way.” –loc 279

You must realize: Nothing makes us feel this way; we choose to give in to such feelings. –loc 288

Seen properly, everything that happens—be it an economic crash or a personal tragedy—is a chance to move forward. Even if it is on a bearing that we did not anticipate. –loc 311

There are a few things to keep in mind when faced with a seemingly insurmountable obstacle. We must try:
To be objective
To control emotions and keep an even keel
To choose to see the good in a situation
To steady our nerves
To ignore what disturbs or limits others
To place things in perspective
To revert to the present moment
To focus on what can be controlled
–loc 313

Choose not to be harmed — and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed — and you haven’t been. —MARCUS AURELIUS –loc 322

Nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so (Shakespeare) –loc 357

What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool headedness. This he can get only by practice.
—THEODORE ROOSEVELT
–loc 377

During the Overland Campaign, Grant was surveying the scene through field glasses when an enemy shell exploded, killing the horse immediately next to him. Grant’s eyes stayed fixed on the front, never leaving the glasses. There’s another story about Grant at City Point, Union headquarters, near Richmond. Troops were unloading a steamboat and it suddenly exploded. Everyone hit the dirt except Grant, who was seen running toward the scene of the explosion as debris and shells and even bodies rained down. That’s a man who has steadied himself properly. That’s a man who has a job to do and would bear anything to get it done. That’s nerve. –loc 384

Don’t forget, there are always people out there looking to get you. They want to intimidate you. Rattle you. Pressure you into making a decision before you’ve gotten all the facts. They want you thinking and acting on their terms, not yours. So the question is, are you going to let them? –loc 395

We must possess, as Voltaire once explained about the secret to the great military success of the first Duke of Marlborough, that “tranquil courage in the midst of tumult and serenity of soul in danger, which the English call a cool head.” –loc 400

Defiance and acceptance come together well in the following principle: There is always a countermove, always an escape or a way through, so there is no reason to get worked up. –loc 408

Would you have a great empire? Rule over yourself.
—PUBLIUS SYRUS
–loc 416

America raced to send the first men into space, they trained the astronauts in one skill more than in any other: the art of not panicking. When people panic, they make mistakes. They override systems. They disregard procedures, ignore rules. They deviate from the plan. They become unresponsive and stop thinking clearly. They just react—not to what they need to react to, but to the survival hormones that are coursing through their veins. –loc 418

Uncertainty and fear are relieved by authority. Training is authority. It’s a release valve. With enough exposure, you can adapt out those perfectly ordinary, even innate, fears that are bred mostly from unfamiliarity. Fortunately, unfamiliarity is simple to fix (again, not easy), which makes it possible to increase our tolerance for stress and uncertainty. –loc 430

‘What am I choosing to not see right now?’ What important things are you missing because you chose worry over introspection, alertness or wisdom? –loc 450

If an emotion can’t change the condition or the situation you’re dealing with, it is likely an unhelpful emotion. Or, quite possibly, a destructive one. –loc 454

Real strength lies in the control or, as Nassim Taleb put it, the domestication of one’s emotions, not in pretending they don’t exist. –loc 456

We defeat emotions with logic, or at least that’s the idea. Logic is questions and statements. With enough of them, we get to root causes (which are always easier to deal with). –loc 460

It might help to say it over and over again whenever you feel the anxiety begin to come on: I am not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this. I am not going to die from this. Or try Marcus’s question: Does what happened keep you from acting with justice, generosity, self-control, sanity, prudence, honesty, humility, straightforwardness? –loc 472

Don’t let the force of an impression when it first hit you knock you off your feet; just say to it: Hold on a moment; let me see who you are and what you represent. Let me put you to the test. —EPICTETUS –loc 481

Perceptions are the problem. They give us the “information” that we don’t need, exactly at the moment when it would be far better to focus on what is immediately in front of us: the thrust of a sword, a crucial business negotiation, an opportunity, a flash of insight or anything else, for that matter. –loc 495

Epictetus told his students, when they’d quote some great thinker, to picture themselves observing the person having sex. It’s funny, you should try it the next time someone intimidates you or makes you feel insecure. See them in your mind, grunting, groaning, and awkward in their private life—just like the rest of us. –loc 505

Man does not simply exist but always decides what his existence will be, what he will become the next moment. By the same token, every human being has the freedom to change at any instant. —VIKTOR FRANKL –loc 523

Perspective has two definitions. Context: a sense of the larger picture of the world, not just what is immediately in front of us Framing: an individual’s unique way of looking at the world, a way that interprets its events Both matter, both can be effectively injected to change a situation that previously seemed intimidating or impossible. –loc 554

Perception precedes action. Right action follows the right perspective. –loc 571

In life our first job is this, to divide and distinguish things into two categories: externals I cannot control, but the choices I make with regard to them I do control. Where will I find good and bad? In me, in my choices. —EPICTETUS –loc 573

To argue, to complain, or worse, to just give up, these are choices. Choices that more often than not, do nothing to get us across the finish line. –loc 620

The trick to forgetting the big picture is to look at everything close up. —CHUCK PALAHNIUK –loc 633

Yet in our own lives, we aren’t content to deal with things as they happen. We have to dive endlessly into what everything “means,” whether something is “fair” or not, what’s “behind” this or that, and what everyone else is doing. Then we wonder why we don’t have the energy to actually deal with our problems. Or we get ourselves so worked up and intimidated because of the overthinking, that if we’d just gotten to work we’d probably be done already. –loc 651

For all species other than us humans, things just are what they are. Our problem is that we’re always trying to figure out what things mean—why things are the way they are. –loc 662

It doesn’t matter whether this is the worst time to be alive or the best, whether you’re in a good job market or a bad one, or that the obstacle you face is intimidating or burdensome. What matters is that right now is right now. –loc 665

You’ll find the method that works best for you, but there are many things that can pull you into the present moment: Strenuous exercise. Unplugging. A walk in the park. Meditation. Getting a dog—they’re a constant reminder of how pleasant the present is. –loc 671

It’s not simply a matter of saying: Oh, I’ll live in the present. You have to work at it. Catch your mind when it wanders—don’t let it get away from you. Discard distracting thoughts. Leave things well enough alone—no matter how much you feel like doing otherwise. –loc 673

This is why we shouldn’t listen too closely to what other people say (or to what the voice in our head says, either). We’ll find ourselves erring on the side of accomplishing nothing. Be open. Question. –loc 700

Now, how do you and I usually deal with an impossible deadline handed down from someone above us? We complain. We get angry. We question. How could they? What’s the point? Who do they think I am? We look for a way out and feel sorry for ourselves. –loc 708

Jobs refused to tolerate people who didn’t believe in their own abilities to succeed. Even if his demands were unfair, uncomfortable, or ambitious. –loc 711

Jobs learned to reject the first judgments and the objections that spring out of them because those objections are almost always rooted in fear. –loc 716

This is radically different from how we’ve been taught to act. Be realistic, we’re told. Listen to feedback. Play well with others. Compromise. Well, what if the “other” party is wrong? What if conventional wisdom is too conservative? It’s this all-too-common impulse to complain, defer, and then give up that holds us back. –loc 720

An entrepreneur is someone with faith in their ability to make something where there was nothing before. –loc 722

It’s our preconceptions that are the problem. They tell us that things should or need to be a certain way, so when they’re not, we naturally assume that we are at a disadvantage or that we’d be wasting our time to pursue an alternate course. When really, it’s all fair game, and every situation is an opportunity for us to act. –loc 757

How about that business decision that turned out to be a mistake? Well, you had a hypothesis and it turned out to be wrong. Why should that upset you? It wouldn’t piss off a scientist, it would help him. –loc 775

When people are:
—rude or disrespectful: They underestimate us. A huge advantage.
—conniving: We won’t have to apologize when we make an example out of them.
—critical or question our abilities: Lower expectations are easier to exceed.
—lazy: Makes whatever we accomplish seem all the more admirable.
–loc 792

It’s a huge step forward to realize that the worst thing to happen is never the event, but the event and losing your head. Because then you’ll have two problems (one of them unnecessary and post hoc). –loc 809

Once you see the world as it is, for what it is, you must act. The proper perception—objective, rational, ambitious, clean—isolates the obstacle and exposes it for what it is. –loc 811

We’ve all done it. Said: “I am so [overwhelmed, tired, stressed, busy, blocked, outmatched].” And then what do we do about it? Go out and party. Or treat ourselves. Or sleep in. Or wait. –loc 869

We forget: In life, it doesn’t matter what happens to you or where you came from. It matters what you do with what happens and what you’ve been given. –loc 872

Consider this mind-set.
never in a hurry
never worried
never desperate
never stopping short
–loc 1003

Remember and remind yourself of a phrase favored by Epictetus: “persist and resist.” Persist in your efforts. Resist giving in to distraction, discouragement, or disorder. –loc 1006

What is defeat? Nothing but education; nothing but the first steps to something better. —WENDELL PHILLIPS –loc 1025

Great entrepreneurs are:
never wedded to a position
never afraid to lose a little of their investment
never bitter or embarrassed
never out of the game for long
They slip many times, but they don’t fall.
–loc 1051

The one way to guarantee we don’t benefit from failure—to ensure it is a bad thing—is to not learn from it. To continue to try the same thing over and over –loc 1068

“Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.” –loc 1086

The process is about finishing. Finishing games. Finishing workouts. Finishing film sessions. Finishing drives. Finishing reps. Finishing plays. Finishing blocks. Finishing the smallest task you have right in front of you and finishing it well. –loc 1094

Viktor Frankl, survivor of three concentration camps, found presumptuousness in the age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?” As though it is someone else’s responsibility to tell you. Instead, he said, the world is asking you that question. And it’s your job to answer with your actions. –loc 1188

A very Zen stance from our boy M. Aurelius:

The cucumber is bitter? Then throw it out. There are brambles in the path? Then go around. That’s all you need to know. —MARCUS AURELIUS –loc 1199

Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse. —HERACLITUS –loc 1254

Take a step back, then go around the problem. Find some leverage. Approach from what is called the “line of least expectation.” –loc 1282

You’re acting like a real strategist. You aren’t just throwing your weight around and hoping it works. You’re not wasting your energy in battles driven by ego and pride rather than tactical advantage. –loc 1316

Wise men are able to make a fitting use even of their enmities. —PLUTARCH –loc 1320

The great strategist Saul Alinsky believed that if you “push a negative hard enough and deep enough it will break through into its counterside.” Every positive has its negative. Every negative has its positive. The action is in the pushing through—all the way through to the other side. Making a negative into a positive. –loc 1369

The best men are not those who have waited for chances but who have taken them; besieged chance, conquered the chance, and made chance the servitor. —E. H. CHAPIN –loc 1420

Great commanders look for decision points. For it is bursts of energy directed at decisive points that break things wide open. They press and press and press and then, exactly when the situation seems hopeless—or, more likely, hopelessly deadlocked—they press once more. –loc 1464

In the meantime, cling tooth and nail to the following rule: not to give in to adversity, not to trust prosperity, and always take full note of fortune’s habit of behaving just as she pleases. —SENECA –loc 1473

Nothing can ever prevent us from trying. Ever. –loc 1479

It’s an infinitely elastic formula: In every situation, that which blocks our path actually presents a new path with a new part of us. If someone you love hurts you, there is a chance to practice forgiveness. If your business fails, now you can practice acceptance. If there is nothing else you can do for yourself, at least you can try to help others. –loc 1483

Will is our internal power, which can never be affected by the outside world. It is our final trump card. If action is what we do when we still have some agency over our situation, the will is what we depend on when agency has all but disappeared. –loc 1494

True will is quiet humility, resilience, and flexibility; the other kind of will is weakness disguised by bluster and ambition. –loc 1500

It’s much easier to control our perceptions and emotions than it is to give up our desire to control other people and events. –loc 1571

These lessons come harder but are, in the end, the most critical to wresting advantage from adversity. In every situation, we can Always prepare ourselves for more difficult times. Always accept what we’re unable to change. Always manage our expectations. Always persevere. Always learn to love our fate and what happens to us. Always protect our inner self, retreat into ourselves. Always submit to a greater, larger cause. Always remind ourselves of our own mortality. –loc 1574

Nobody is born with a steel backbone. We have to forge that ourselves. –loc 1605

We craft our spiritual strength through physical exercise, and our physical hardiness through mental practice (mens sana in corpore sano—sound mind in a strong body). –loc 1606

During the good times, we strengthen ourselves and our bodies so that during the difficult times, we can depend on it. We protect our inner fortress so it may protect us. –loc 1620

Offer a guarantee and disaster threatens. —ANCIENT INSCRIPTION AT THE ORACLE OF DELPHI –loc 1639

A premortem is different. In it, we look to envision what could go wrong, what will go wrong, in advance, before we start. Far too many ambitious undertakings fail for preventable reasons. Far too many people don’t have a backup plan because they refuse to consider that something might not go exactly as they wish. –loc 1649

Mike Tyson, who, reflecting on the collapse of his fortune and fame, told a reporter, “If you’re not humble, life will visit humbleness upon you.” –loc 1654

“Nothing happens to the wise man against his expectation,” he wrote to a friend. “…nor do all things turn out for him as he wished but as he reckoned—and above all he reckoned that something could block his plans.” –loc 1662

The only guarantee, ever, is that things will go wrong. The only thing we can use to mitigate this is anticipation. –loc 1677

About the worst thing that can happen is not something going wrong, but something going wrong and catching you by surprise. Why? Because unexpected failure is discouraging and being beaten back hurts. –loc 1693

When the cause of our problem lies outside of us, we are better for accepting it and moving on. For ceasing to kick and fight against it, and coming to terms with it. The Stoics have a beautiful name for this attitude. They call it the Art of Acquiescence. –loc 1731

It is far easier to talk of the way things should be. It takes toughness, humility, and will to accept them for what they actually are. It takes a real man or woman to face necessity. –loc 1734

We don’t get to choose what happens to us, but we can always choose how we feel about it. And why on earth would you choose to feel anything but good? We can choose to render a good account of ourselves. If the event must occur, Amor fati (a love of fate) is the response. –loc 1829

Determination, if you think about it, is invincible. Nothing other than death can prevent us from following Churchill’s old acronym: KBO. Keep Buggering On. –loc 1895

Pride can be broken. Toughness has its limits. But a desire to help? No harshness, no deprivation, no toil should interfere with our empathy toward others. Compassion is always an option. Camaraderie as well. That’s a power of the will that can never be taken away, only relinquished. –loc 1958

Help your fellow humans thrive and survive, contribute your little bit to the universe before it swallows you up, and be happy with that. Lend a hand to others. Be strong for them, and it will make you stronger. –loc 1970

When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. —DR. JOHNSON –loc 1973

Memento mori, the Romans would remind themselves. Remember you are mortal. –loc 1994

We forget how light our grip on life really is. Otherwise, we wouldn’t spend so much time obsessing over trivialities, or trying to become famous, make more money than we could ever spend in our lifetime, or make plans far off in the future. –loc 1998

The paths of glory, Thomas Gray wrote, lead but to the grave. –loc 2001

Reminding ourselves each day that we will die helps us treat our time as a gift. Someone on a deadline doesn’t indulge himself with attempts at the impossible, he doesn’t waste time complaining about how he’d like things to be. –loc 2013

See things for what they are. Do what we can. Endure and bear what we must. What blocked the path now is a path. What once impeded action advances action. The Obstacle is the Way. –loc 2114

The Latin translation for the title of Enchiridion—Epictetus’s famous work—means “close at hand,” or as some have said, “in your hands.” That’s what the philosophy was meant for: to be in your hands, to be an extension of you. Not something you read once and put up on a shelf. It was meant, as Marcus once wrote, to make us boxers instead of fencers—to wield our weaponry, we simply need to close our fists. –loc 2161

February 21, 2017

Dune

Author: Frank Herbert
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: November 2015, July 2018

Quick Summary: Dune is my favorite book. I have read this book at least ten times, and I think I might be lowballing myself.

Dune is a 1950s sci-fi epic set in the far future. Man has given up his reliance on thinking machines, and various specialized schools of humanity have developed. The story centers on Paul Atreides, a young noble whose family is given dominion over a desert planet whose primary resource (“the spice”) is used and coveted by the rest of the planets of man. Traps and plans laid for generations come to fruition as many groups fight for control over the spice, the planet, and Paul himself.

Frank Herbert weaves many political, religious, power, and ecological ideas into Dune. There is much wisdom found buried inside an excellent story.

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man.

My Highlights

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct. –loc 88

“A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful,” Hawat had said. –loc 118

“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.” –loc 202

The old woman said: “You’ve heard of animals chewing off a leg to escape a trap? There’s an animal kind of trick. A human would remain in the trap, endure the pain, feigning death that he might kill the trapper and remove a threat to his kind.” –loc 210

“Hope clouds observation.” –loc 239

He understood terrible purposes. They drove against all odds. They were their own necessity. –loc 254

“Why do you test for humans?” he asked.
“To set you free.”
–loc 259

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” –loc 260

“Listen to my nephew,” the Baron said. “He aspires to rule my Barony, yet he cannot rule himself.” –loc 367

However, as someone once observed, given the right lever you can move a planet. –loc 418

“I see in the future what I’ve seen in the past. You well know the pattern of our affairs, Jessica. The race knows its own mortality and fears stagnation of its heredity. It’s in the bloodstream—the urge to mingle genetic strains without plan. –loc 483

In politics, the tripod is the most unstable of all structures. –loc 492

“Jessica, girl, I wish I could stand in your place and take your sufferings. But each of us must make her own path.” –loc 506

In a low voice, she said: “I’ve been so lonely.”
“It should be one of the tests,” the old woman said. “Humans are almost always lonely.”
–loc 512

“The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows—a wall against the wind. This is the willow’s purpose.” –loc 556

Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place. –loc 596

“Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things….” She held up four big-knuckled fingers. “…the learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing….” She closed her fingers into a fist. “…without a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!” –loc 625

“She asked me to tell her what it is to rule,” Paul said. “And I said that one commands. And she said I had some unlearning to do.” –loc 642

“She said a ruler must learn to persuade and not to compel. She said he must lay the best coffee hearth to attract the finest men.” –loc 644

the mystery of life isn’t a problem to solve, but a reality to experience. –loc 650

‘A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.’ –loc 651

“Mood?” Halleck’s voice betrayed his outrage even through the shield’s filtering. “What has mood to do with it? You fight when the necessity arises—no matter the mood! Mood’s a thing for cattle or making love or playing the baliset. It’s not for fighting.” –loc 714

“If wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets” –loc 766

Then, what deafness may we not all possess? What senses do we lack that we cannot see and cannot hear another world all around us? –loc 824

The truth could be worse than he imagines, but even dangerous facts are valuable if you’ve been trained to deal with them. –loc 868

“Knowing where the trap is—that’s the first step in evading it. –loc 886

“How could you win the loyalty of such men?” “There are proven ways: play on the certain knowledge of their superiority, the mystique of secret covenant, the esprit of shared suffering. It can be done. It has been done on many worlds in many times.” –loc 907

“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.” –loc 1064

There are worse things than dying, you know—even for an entire people. –loc 1085

“Can you remember your first taste of spice?”
“It tasted like cinnamon.”
“But never twice the same,” he said. “It’s like life—it presents a different face each time you take it.
–loc 1287

For the others, we can say that Muad’Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It is shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. –loc 1314

“Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere. Climb the mountain just a little bit to test that it’s a mountain. From the top of the mountain, you cannot see the mountain.” –loc 1380

Please permit the room to convey a lesson we learned from the same teachers: the proximity of a desirable thing tempts one to overindulgence. On that path lies danger. –loc 1435

Command must always look confident, he thought. All that faith riding on your shoulders while you sit in the critical seat and never show it. –loc 1619

There is probably no more terrible instant of enlightenment than the one in which you discover your father is a man—with human flesh. –loc 2013

“Nothing wins more loyalty for a leader than an air of bravura,” the Duke said. “I, therefore, cultivate an air of bravura.” –loc 2044

But the young body carried a sense of command, a poised assurance, as though he saw and knew things all around him that were not visible to others. –loc 2092

A gift is the blessing of the giver.’” –loc 2128

“What is money,” Kynes asked, “if it won’t buy the services you need?” –loc 2222

“When God hath ordained a creature to die in a particular place, He causeth that creature’s wants to direct him to that place.” –loc 2469

Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man. –loc 2475

A thing to note about any espionage and/or counter-espionage school is the similar basic reaction pattern of all its graduates. Any enclosed discipline sets its stamp, its pattern, upon its students. That pattern is susceptible to analysis and prediction. –loc 2654

“It’s a rule of ecology,” Kynes said, “that the young Master appears to understand quite well. The struggle between life elements is the struggle for the free energy of a system. Blood’s an efficient energy source.” –loc 2685

“Freely given, freely accepted,” –loc 2703

“Growth is limited by that necessity which is present in the least amount. And, naturally, the least favorable condition controls the growth rate.” –loc 2717

“When strangers meet, great allowance should be made for differences of custom and training.” –loc 2816

There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors. –loc 2862

“Humans live best when each has his own place, when each knows where he belongs in the scheme of things. Destroy the place and destroy the person. –loc 3002

“Anything outside yourself, this you can see and apply your logic to it,” she said. “But it’s a human trait that when we encounter personal problems, those things most deeply personal are the most difficult to bring out for our logic to scan. We tend to flounder around, blaming everything but the actual, deep-seated thing that’s really chewing on us.” –loc 3014

There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles. –loc 3169

Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife—chopping off what’s incomplete and saying: “Now, it’s complete because it’s ended here.” –loc 3361

The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back
–loc 3703

“A time to get and time to lose,” Jessica thought, quoting to herself from the O.C. Bible. “A time to keep and a time to cast away; a time for love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace.” –loc 3766

“They say: ‘Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.’” –loc 3875

“Fate is the same for everyone,” the Fremen said. “Your Duke, it is said, has met his fate. –loc 4067

Superstitions sometimes have strange roots and stranger branchings.” –loc 4284

“Blackmail?”
“One of the tools of statecraft, as you’ve said yourself,” Paul said
–loc 4292

What do you despise? By this are you truly known. —FROM “MANUAL OF MUAD’DIB” –loc 4420

We came from Caladan—a paradise world for our form of life. There existed no need on Caladan to build a physical paradise or a paradise of the mind—we could see the actuality all around us. And the price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life—we went soft, we lost our edge. –loc 4892

Whether a thought is spoken or not it is a real thing and it has power –loc 4938

“You think that day will come?”
“I have little to do with how you’ll meet tomorrow, Gurney Halleck. I can only help you meet today.”
–loc 4944

“Fortune passes everywhere,” –loc 4986

Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all. –loc 5018

Paul spoke without turning: “I find myself enjoying the quiet here.” How the mind gears itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: “The mind can go either direction under stress—toward positive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training.” –loc 5030

Science is made up of so many things that appear obvious after they are explained. –loc 5253

Then, as his planet killed him, it occurred to Kynes that his father and all the other scientists were wrong, that the most persistent principles of the universe were accident and error. –loc 5301

“To save one from a mistake is a gift of paradise,” –loc 5471

She knew what it was—she had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death—the drive to seek immortality through progeny. The fertility drive of the species had overpowered them. –loc 5588

A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.” –loc 5601

The young reed dies so easily. Beginnings are times of such great peril. –loc 5616

“Keep the mind on the knife and not on the hand that holds it,” Gurney Halleck had told him time and again. “The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand.” –loc 5835

“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.” –loc 5950

“From water does all life begin.” –loc 5956

The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future. –loc 6148

“It’s easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.” –loc 6401

‘Do not count a human dead until you’ve seen his body. And even then you can make a mistake.’” –loc 6497

“To accept a little death is worse than death itself,” –loc 6763

“Usul, you’re crying,” Chani murmured. “Usul, my strength, do you give moisture to the dead? To whose dead?”
“To ones not yet dead,” he said.
“Then let them have their time of life,” she said.
–loc 6919

Else why bargain? One bargains with equals or near equals! –loc 7022

“Hawat’s a dangerous toy,” Feyd-Rautha said.
“Toy! Don’t be stupid. I know what I have in Hawat and how to control it. Hawat has deep emotions, Feyd. The man without emotions is the one to fear. But deep emotions… ah, now, those can be bent to your needs.” –loc 7050

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic. –loc 7084

Yet, it is possible to see peril in the finding of ultimate perfection. It is clear that the ultimate pattern contains its own fixity. In such perfection, all things move toward death. –loc 7224

She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.” –loc 7270

“Give as few orders as possible,” his father had told him once long ago. “Once you’ve given orders on a subject, you must always give orders on that subject.” –loc 7371

“Control the coinage and the courts—let the rabble have the rest.” Thus the Padishah Emperor advised you. And he tells you: “If you want profits, you must rule.” There is truth in these words, but I ask myself: “Who are the rabble and who are the ruled?” –loc 7445

“All men beneath your position covet your station,” –loc 8094

“Prophets have a way of dying by violence.” –loc 8096

“My father had an instinct for his friends,” Paul said. “He gave his love sparingly, but with never an error. His weakness lay in misunderstanding hatred. –loc 8246

“One of the most terrible moments in a boy’s life,” Paul said, “is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It’s a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can’t evade it. I heard my father when he spoke of my mother.
–loc 8251

“There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and an ancient force that gives. A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it’s almost impossible for him to see into the giving force without changing into something other than man. For a woman, the situation is reversed.” –loc 8471

There should be a word-tension directly opposite to adab, the demanding memory, she thought. There should be a word for memories that deny themselves. –loc 8953

“How would you like to live billions upon billions of lives?” Paul asked. “There’s a fabric of legends for you! Think of all those experiences, the wisdom they’d bring. But wisdom tempers love, doesn’t it? And it puts a new shape on hate. How can you tell what’s ruthless unless you’ve plumbed the depths of both cruelty and kindness?
–loc 8962

The Guild navigators, gifted with limited prescience, had made the fatal decision: they’d chosen always the clear, safe course that leads ever downward into stagnation. –loc 8996

“Was that their plan?” Jessica said.
“Isn’t it obvious?” Paul asked.
“I see the signs!” Jessica snapped. “My question was meant to remind you that you should not try to teach me those matters in which I instructed you.”
–loc 9132

“Expect only what happens in the fight. That way you’ll never be surprised.”

February 9, 2017

Steppenwolf

Author: Herman Hesse
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: October 2016

Quick Summary:

I started this book three times, but always failed to get past the same spot every time (Magic theater – entrance not for everybody). However, finally I managed to make it past that section to the treatise on the Steppenwolf, and holy shit. What a book.

In short summary, the book is simply about this:

There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. The cause of this apparently was that at the bottom of his heart he knew all the time (or thought he knew) that he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the Steppes.

This man is trapped between two ideals for what life entails. But he learns that perhaps there are more aspects than the ones he understands.

Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands.

I hate to think that this is the book that makes me say, “Here I am! Here are the things I learned! Steppenwolf is about me!” I even only just learned to love dancing! What does that say? That I am just one of the many who belongs in the counterculture movement? Perhaps my friends would not be so surprised, but I am!

For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity.

No prospect was more hateful and distasteful to him than that he should have to go to an office and conform to daily and yearly routine and obey others.

My Highlights

A wild longing for strong emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless, flat, normal and sterile life. –loc 37

For what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of mediocrity. –loc 40

At every other step were placards and posters with their various attractions, Ladies’ Orchestra, Variété, Cinema, Ball. But none of these was for me. They were for “everybody,” for those normal persons whom I saw crowding every entrance. –loc 130

It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and munches another’s words in his mouth, and gives them out again undigested, to enter into me through my eyes. I absorbed a whole column of it. And then I devoured a large piece cut from the liver of a slaughtered calf. Odd indeed! –loc 146

Who read by night above the Rhine the cloudscript of the drifting mists? It was the Steppenwolf. And who over the ruins of his life pursued its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its seeming meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God’s presence? –loc 173

How foolish to wear oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold stillness of space in which the stars revolve. –loc 192

There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf. He went on two legs, wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a wolf of the Steppes. He had learned a good deal of all that people of a good intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learned, however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. The cause of this apparently was that at the bottom of his heart he knew all the time (or thought he knew) that he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the Steppes. –loc 257

But it was exactly the same when Harry felt and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred and enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate manners and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and watched the wolf, called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered for him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being. –loc 283

Thus it was then with the Steppenwolf, and one may well imagine that Harry did not have an exactly pleasant and happy life of it. This does not mean, however, that he was unhappy in any extraordinary degree (although it may have seemed so to himself all the same, inasmuch as every man takes the sufferings that fall to his share as the greatest). –loc 286

even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments and its little flowers of happiness between sand and stone. –loc 289

There are a good many people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches others too with its enchantment. –loc 310

All these men, whatever their deeds and works may be, have really no life; that is to say, their lives are not their own and have no form. They are not heroes, artists or thinkers in the same way that other men are judges, doctors, shoemakers, or schoolmasters. Their life consists of a perpetual tide, unhappy and torn with pain, terrible and meaningless, unless one is ready to see its meaning in just those rare experiences, acts, thoughts and works that shine out above the chaos of such a life. To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastrophe of nature. To them, too, however, the other thought has come that man is perhaps not merely a half-rational animal but a child of the gods and destined to immortality. –loc 317

No prospect was more hateful and distasteful to him than that he should have to go to an office and conform to daily and yearly routine and obey others. –loc 332

In the beginning his dream and his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate. The man of power is ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He was ever more independent. He took orders from no man and ordered his ways to suit no man. –loc 337

“I am curious to see all the same just how much a man can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open the door to escape.” There are a great many suicides to whom this thought imparts an uncommon strength. –loc 378

Now what we call “bourgeois,” when regarded as an element always to be found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that arise in human conduct. –loc 419

Now it is between the two, in the middle of the road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr or agree to his own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain his own identity. –loc 425

In short, his aim is to make a home for himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. –loc 428

A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self. –loc 430

The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force, and the polling booth for responsibility. –loc 433

Neither the great numbers of the herd, nor virtue, nor common sense, nor organization could avail to save it from destruction. No medicine in the world can keep a pulse beating that from the outset was so weak. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie prospers. Why? –loc 438

There is always a large number of strong and wild natures who share the life of the fold. –loc 443

And so all through the mass of the real bourgeoisie are interposed numerous layers of humanity, many thousands of lives and minds, every one of whom, it is true, would have outgrown it and have obeyed the call to unconditioned life, were they not fastened to it by sentiments of their childhood and infected for the most part with its less intense life; and so they are kept lingering, obedient and bound by obligation and service. –loc 446

Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of the bourgeois earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign themselves or make compromises. Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they have to share their beliefs in order to live. –loc 454

Humor alone, that magnificent discovery of those who are cut short in their calling to highest endeavor, those who falling short of tragedy are yet as rich in gifts as in affliction, humor alone (perhaps the most inborn and brilliant achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism. To live in the world as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to stand above it, to have possessions as though “one possessed nothing,” to renounce as though it were no renunciation, all these favorite and often formulated propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in the power of humor alone to make efficacious. –loc 467

So too, to come to the point, is the Steppenwolf a fiction. When Harry feels himself to be a were-wolf, and chooses to consist of two hostile and opposed beings, he is merely availing himself of a mythological simplification. –loc 500

Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner, but between thousand and thousands. –loc 515

Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications–and most of all himself. –loc 519

For it appears to be an inborn and imperative need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. –loc 520

A man, therefore, who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is already almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. –loc 528

In reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us shares the delusion. –loc 530

But things are not so simple in life as in our thoughts, nor so rough and ready as in our poor idiotic language –loc 561

That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that the way towards it has only been covered for a very short distance and with terrible agonies and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold today and the monument tomorrow–all –loc 576

Even the wolf has two, and more than two, souls in his wolf’s breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the same forgetfulness as the man who sings: “If I could be a child once more!” He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable of all suffering. –loc 599

Instead of narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will have to absorb more and more of the world and at last take all of it up in your painfully expanded soul, if you are ever to find peace. –loc 608

We are not dealing here with man as he is known to economics and statistics, as he is seen thronging the streets by the million, and of whom no more account can be made than of the sand of the sea or the spray of its waves. We are not concerned with the few millions less or more. They are a stock-in-trade, nothing else. No, we are speaking of man in the highest sense, of the end of the long road to true manhood, of kingly men, of the immortals. Genius is not so rare as we sometimes think; nor, certainly, so frequent as may appear from history books or, indeed, from the newspapers. –loc 614

A man who can understand Buddha and has an intuition of the heaven and hell of humanity ought not to live in a world ruled by “common sense” and democracy and bourgeois standards. –loc 621

It is true that every time my life was shattered in this way I had in the end gained something, some increase in liberty and in spiritual growth and depth, but with it went an increased loneliness, an increasing chill of severance and estrangement. –loc 693

so it is with the majority of men day by day and hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. Without really wanting to at all, they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics of their own lives and recognizing the stupidity and shallowness, the hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity grinning over it all. –loc 837

Obeying is like eating and drinking. There’s nothing like it if you’ve been without it too long. Isn’t it so, you’re glad to do as I tell you?” –loc 985

How can you say that you’ve taken any trouble to live when you won’t even dance? –loc 1006

“Fine views of life, you have. You have always done the difficult and complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learned. No time, of course. More amusing things to do. Well, thank God, I’m not your mother. But to do as you do and then say you’ve tested life to the bottom and found nothing in it is going a bit too far.” –loc 1024

Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere moment, just long enough for a joke.” –loc 1189

To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence of time. You can’t be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odéon Bar and all that.” –loc 1252

But it’s a poor fellow who can’t take his pleasure without asking other people’s permission. –loc 1457

Any one could comprehend it and reach the same conclusion after a moment’s reflection. But nobody wants to. Nobody wants to avoid the next war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the next holocaust if this be the cost. To reflect for one moment, to examine himself for a while and ask what share he has in the world’s confusion and wickedness–look you, nobody wants to do that. And so there’s no stopping it, and the next war is being pushed on with enthusiasm by thousands upon thousands day by day. –loc 1557

There are always a few such people who demand the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and crudeness.” –loc 1707

“In your case, for example, the spiritual part is very highly developed, and so you are very backward in all the little arts of living. Harry, the thinker, is a hundred years old, but Harry, the dancer, is scarcely half a day old. It’s he we want to bring on, and all his little brothers who are just as little and stupid and stunted as he is.” –loc 1723

“You’re a child. You were too lazy to learn to dance till it was nearly too late, and in the same way you were too lazy to learn to love. As for ideal and tragic love, that, I don’t doubt, you can do marvellously–and all honor to you. –loc 1749

“Well,” he said with equanimity, “you see, in my opinion there is no point at all in talking about music. I never talk about music. What reply, then, was I to make to your very able and just remarks? You were perfectly right in all you said. But, you see, I am a musician, not a professor, and I don’t believe that, as regards music, there is the least point in being right. Music does not depend on being right, on having good taste and education and all that.” –loc 1818

Then what does it depend on?”
“On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable. That is the point, Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and Haydn in my head and could say the cleverest things about them, not a soul would be the better for it. But when I take hold of my mouthpiece and play a lively shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure. It gets into their legs and into their blood. That’s the point and that alone. Look at the faces in a dance hall at the moment when the music strikes up after a longish pause, how eyes sparkle, legs twitch and faces begin to laugh. That is why one makes music.” –loc 1823

None of us intellectuals is at home in reality. We are strange to it and hostile. That is why the part played by intellect even in our own German reality, in our history and politics and public opinion, has been so lamentable a one. –loc 1878

The unhappiness that I need and long for is different. It is of the kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and lust after death. That is the unhappiness, or happiness, that I am waiting for.” –loc 2104

But sometimes when happiness leaves a moment’s leisure to look about me and long for things, the longing I have is not to keep this happiness forever, but to suffer once again, only more beautifully and less meanly than before. I long for the sufferings that make me ready and willing to die.” –loc 2114

You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought you back to yourself, the greater has your need been and the deeper the sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up to your neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. –loc 2122

“You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever, and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking, coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has got it in him–the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great poets or for the saints–is a fool and a Don Quixote. –loc 2129

And I knew that my dreams had been right a thousand times over, just as yours had been. It was life and reality that were wrong. –loc 2139

You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily contented world of today. –loc 2146

You have a dimension too many. Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours–” –loc 2148

Time and the world, money and power belong to the small people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing. Nothing but death.” –loc 2167

“It is a pleasure to me, my dear Harry, to have the privilege of being your host in a small way on this occasion. You have often been sorely weary of your life. You were striving, were you not, for escape? You have a longing to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate to a reality more native to you, to a world beyond time. You know, of course, where this other world lies hidden. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no picture gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the impulse, the key. I can help you to make your own world visible. That is all.” –loc 2570

true humor begins when a man ceases to take himself seriously. –loc 2618

“Yes, there are indeed too many men in the world. In earlier days it wasn’t so noticeable. But now that everyone wants air to breathe, and a car to drive as well, one does notice it. –loc 2827

It is not a good thing when man overstrains his reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it again.” –loc 2832

“This is the art of life,” he said dreamily. “You may yourself as an artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the beginning of all art and all fantasy. –loc 2946

Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty. You must have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not know that.” –loc 3173

All life is so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not asses, laugh at it. It little becomes people like you to be critics of radio or of life either. Better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest. Or is it that you have done better yourself, more nobly and fitly and with better taste? Oh, no, Mr. Harry, you have not. You have made a frightful history of disease out of your life, and a misfortune of your gifts. And you have, as I see, found no better use for so pretty, so enchanting a young lady than to stick a knife into her body and destroy her. Was that right, do you think?” –loc 3290

February 4, 2017

Man’s Search for Meaning

Author: Viktor E. Frankl
Rating: 9/10
Last Read: May 2014

Quick Summary: Viktor Frankl was sent to a concentration camp during WWII. He discusses his own experiences and those of fellow prisoners, and tries to find the reason that some were able to survive the harsh concentration camps, while others simply gave up and died. This book is an excellent read and will shift your perspective on the value of having a purpose and a good mental attitude.

Terrible as it was, his experience in Auschwitz reinforced what was already one of his key ideas: Life is not primarily a quest for pleasure, as Freud believed, or a quest for power, as Alfred Adler taught, but a quest for meaning.

One thing to note: I remember reading this in China while riding on the bus to Foxconn. It’s incredibly hard to do work after reading Frankl’s descriptions of being in concentration camps and differentiating those who survived and those who didn’t. Be aware of the material, and perhaps find a suitable time to read. This is not bedtime reading material.

There is value is looking into the dark parts of the human condition. In those parts one can truly find the appreciation for the positive aspects of life, the strength of the will, and the generosity of those whose spirit will not be bent and broken by the dark aspects of the world.

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

My Highlights

The forward echoes my own sentiments on the value of a good book:

Typically, if a book has one passage, one idea with the power to change a person’s life, that alone justifies reading it, rereading it, and finding room for it on one’s shelves. –loc 16

Nietzsche: “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.” –loc 21

Frankl saw three possible sources for meaning: in work (doing something significant), in love (caring for another person), and in courage during difficult times. –loc 29

Suffering in and of itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. –loc 30

Forces beyond your control can take away everything you possess except one thing, your freedom to choose how you will respond to the situation. You cannot control what happens to you in life, but you can always control what you will feel and do about what happens to you. –loc 35

Frankl would have argued that we are never left with nothing as long as we retain the freedom to choose how we will respond. –loc 41

We have come to know Man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
HAROLD S. KUSHNER
–loc 55

And now, to Frankl’s own words…

Whereupon I react by reporting that in the first place I do not at all see in the bestseller status of my book an achievement and accomplishment on my part but rather an expression of the misery of our time: if hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails. –loc 65

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.” –loc 81

it will try to answer this question: How was everyday life in a concentration camp reflected in the mind of the average prisoner? –loc 104

It is easy for the outsider to get the wrong conception of camp life, a conception mingled with sentiment and pity. Little does he know of the hard fight for existence which raged among the prisoners. This was an unrelenting struggle for daily bread and for life itself, for one’s own sake or for that of a good friend. –loc 114

Every man was controlled by one thought only: to keep himself alive for the family waiting for him at home, and to save his friends. With no hesitation, therefore, he would arrange for another prisoner, another “number,” to take his place in the transport. –loc 127

These former prisoners often say, “We dislike talking about our experiences. No explanations are needed for those who have been inside, and the others will understand neither how we felt then nor how we feel now.” –loc 139

In psychiatry there is a certain condition known as “delusion of reprieve.” The condemned man, immediately before his execution, gets the illusion that he might be reprieved at the very last minute. –loc 187

At that moment I saw the plain truth and did what marked the culminating point of the first phase of my psychological reaction: I struck out my whole former life. –loc 240

Apart from that strange kind of humor, another sensation seized us: curiosity. I have experienced this kind of curiosity before, as a fundamental reaction toward certain strange circumstances. When my life was once endangered by a climbing accident, I felt only one sensation at the critical moment: curiosity, curiosity as to whether I should come out of it alive or with a fractured skull or some other injuries. –loc 264

The prisoner of Auschwitz, in the first phase of shock, did not fear death. Even the gas chambers lost their horrors for him after the first few days—after all, they spared him the act of committing suicide. –loc 292

I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. I understood how a man who has nothing left in this world still may know bliss, be it only for a brief moment, in the contemplation of his beloved. In a position of utter desolation, when man cannot express himself in positive action, when his only achievement may consist in enduring his sufferings in the right way —an honorable way—in such a position man can, through loving contemplation of the image he carries of his beloved, achieve fulfillment. –loc 528

I knew only one thing—which I have learned well by now: Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance. –loc 541

The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. –loc 610

To draw an analogy: a man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of gas. If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the “size” of human suffering is absolutely relative. –loc 611

(The consciousness of one’s inner value is anchored in higher, more spiritual things, and cannot be shaken by camp life. But how many free men, let alone prisoners, possess it?) –loc 839

Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress. –loc 874

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way. –loc 875

Dostoevski said once, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.” –loc 886

It can be said that they were worthy of their sufferings; the way they bore their suffering was a genuine inner achievement. It is this spiritual freedom—which cannot be taken away—that makes life meaningful and purposeful. –loc 888

An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces. A creative life and a life of enjoyment are banned to him. But not only creativeness and enjoyment are meaningful. If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete. –loc 889

Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering. –loc 902

Take the fate of the sick—especially those who are incurable. I once read a letter written by a young invalid, in which he told a friend that he had just found out he would not live for long, that even an operation would be of no help. He wrote further that he remembered a film he had seen in which a man was portrayed who waited for death in a courageous and dignified way. The boy had thought it a great accomplishment to meet death so well. Now—he wrote—fate was offering him a similar chance. –loc 903

This young woman knew that she would die in the next few days. But when I talked to her she was cheerful in spite of this knowledge. “I am grateful that fate has hit me so hard,” she told me. “In my former life I was spoiled and did not take spiritual accomplishments seriously.” Pointing through the window of the hut, she said, “This tree here is the only friend I have in my loneliness.” Through that window she could see just one branch of a chestnut tree, and on the branch were two blossoms. “I often talk to this tree,” she said to me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to take her words. Was she delirious? Did she have occasional hallucinations? Anxiously I asked her if the tree replied. “Yes.” What did it say to her? She answered, “It said to me, ‘I am here—I am here—I am life, eternal life.’” –loc 916

The unemployed worker, for example, is in a similar position. His existence has become provisional and in a certain sense he cannot live for the future or aim at a goal. –loc 936

Instead of taking the camp’s difficulties as a test of their inner strength, they did not take their life seriously and despised it as something of no consequence. They preferred to close their eyes and to live in the past. Life for such people became meaningless. –loc 955

What does Spinoza say in his Ethics? —“Affectus, qui passio est, desinit esse passio simulatque eius claram et distinctam formamus ideam.” Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it. –loc 978

Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual. –loc 1018

When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden. –loc 1026

Long ago we had passed the stage of asking what was the meaning of life, a naïve query which understands life as the attaining of some aim through the active creation of something of value. For us, the meaning of life embraced the wider cycles of life and death, of suffering and of dying. –loc 1031

“Was Du erlebst, kann keine Macht der Welt Dir rauben.” (What you have experienced, no power on earth can take from –loc 1086

The body has fewer inhibitions than the mind. –loc 1156

Logotherapy focuses rather on the future, that is to say, on the meanings to be fulfilled by the patient in his future. (Logotherapy, indeed, is a meaning-centered psychotherapy.) –loc 1236

According to logotherapy, this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man. –loc 1244

Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a “secondary rationalization” of instinctual drives. This meaning is unique and specific in that it must and can be fulfilled by him alone; only then does it achieve a significance which will satisfy his own will to meaning. –loc 1248

The term “existential” may be used in three ways: to refer to (1) existence itself, i.e., the specifically human mode of being; (2) the meaning of existence; and (3) the striving to find a concrete meaning in personal existence, that is to say, the will to meaning. –loc 1268

A man’s concern, even his despair, over the worthwhileness of life is an existential distress but by no means a mental disease. –loc 1292

Thus it can be seen that mental health is based on a certain degree of tension, the tension between what one has already achieved and what one still ought to accomplish, or the gap between what one is and what one should become. –loc 1315

No instinct tells him what he has to do, and no tradition tells him what he ought to do; sometimes he does not even know what he wishes to do. Instead, he either wishes to do what other people do (conformism) or he does what other people wish him to do (totalitarianism). –loc 1335

The existential vacuum manifests itself mainly in a state of boredom. Now we can understand Schopenhauer when he said that mankind was apparently doomed to vacillate eternally between the two extremes of distress and boredom. –loc 1339

Let us consider, for instance, “Sunday neurosis,” that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest. –loc 1343

This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” –loc 1371

Such a precept confronts him with life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself. –loc 1374

By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it were a closed system. –loc 1385

It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other than oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. –loc 1387

The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. –loc 1388

Thus far we have shown that the meaning of life always changes, but that it never ceases to be. According to logotherapy, we can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering. –loc 1391

The second way of finding a meaning in life is by experiencing something—such as goodness, truth and beauty—by experiencing nature and culture or, last but not least, by experiencing another human being in his very uniqueness—by loving him. –loc 1394

Thus love is not understood as a mere side-effect of sex; rather, sex is a way of expressing the experience of that ultimate togetherness which is called love. –loc 1404

For what then matters is to bear witness to the uniquely human potential at its best, which is to transform a personal tragedy into a triumph, to turn one’s predicament into a human achievement. –loc 1408

When we are no longer able to change a situation—just think of an incurable disease such as inoperable cancer—we are challenged to change ourselves. –loc 1409

suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds a meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice. –loc 1416

“our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.” –loc 1425

I observed that procreation is not the only meaning of life, for then life in itself would become meaningless, and something which in itself is meaningless cannot be rendered meaningful merely by its perpetuation. –loc 1491

Logotherapy bases its technique called “paradoxical intention” on the twofold fact that fear brings about that which one is afraid of, and that hyper-intention makes impossible what one wishes. –loc 1544

Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips. –loc 1664

To the European, it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to “be happy.” –loc 1714

One must have a reason to “be happy.” Once the reason is found, however, one becomes happy automatically. –loc 1716

Once an individual’s search for a meaning is successful, it not only renders him happy but also gives him the capability to cope with suffering. –loc 1725

Live as if you were living for the second time and had acted as wrongly the first time as you are about to act now. –loc 1857

From this one may see that there is no reason to pity old people. Instead, young people should envy them. It is true that the old have no opportunities, no possibilities in the future. But they have more than that. Instead of possibilities in the future, they have realities in the past—the potentialities they have actualized, the meanings they have fulfilled, the values they have realized—and nothing and nobody can ever remove these assets from the past. –loc 1864

Frankl was once asked to express in one sentence the meaning of his own life. He wrote the response on paper and asked his students to guess what he had written. After some moments of quiet reflection, a student surprised Frankl by saying, “The meaning of your life is to help others find the meaning of theirs.”
“That was it, exactly,” Frankl said. “Those are the very words I had written.” –loc 2057

November 8, 2016

Conversations with Kafka

Author: Gustav Janouch
Rating: 8/10
Last Read: August 2016

Quick Summary:

Conversations with Kafka has been recommended to me numerous times. The Kafka presented here is thoughtful, troubled, and philosophical. The young narrator has many wide-ranging conversations with Kafka, covering topics such as religion, politics, communism, photography, and Chinese philosophy. There are many beautiful phrases and chunks of wisdom to be found in this book.

As the forward says:

Rereading Janouch, I thought: If Kafka didn’t say all these things, he said some of them and should have said the rest.

Favorite Quotes:

Life is as infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one’s personal existence. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.

One cannot break one’s chains when there are no chains to be seen. One’s imprisonment is therefore organized as a perfectly ordinary, not over-comfortable form of daily life. Everything looks as if it were made of solid, lasting stuff. But on the contrary it is a life in which one is falling towards an abyss. It isn’t visible. But if one closes one’s eyes, one can hear its rush and roar.’

Joy is food to the human soul. Without it, life is only a form of dying.

My Highlights

“Art like prayer is a hand outstretched in the darkness, seeking for some touch of grace which will transform it into a hand that bestows gifts. Prayer means casting oneself into the miraculous rainbow that stretches between becoming and dying, to be utterly consumed in it, in order to bring its infinite radiance to bed in the frail little cradle of one’s own existence.” –loc 45

Rereading Janouch, I thought: If Kafka didn’t say all these things, he said some of them and should have said the rest. –loc 70

There is nothing more beautiful than some straightforward, concrete, generally useful trade. –loc 151

Apart from carpentry, I have also worked at farming and gardening. It was all much better and worth more than forced labour in the office. There one appears to be something superior, better; but it is only appearance. In reality one is only lonelier and therefore unhappier. That is all. Intellectual labour tears a man out of human society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him towards men. What a pity I can no longer work in the workshop or in the garden.’ –loc 152

‘You would leave everything here behind?’
‘Everything, if I could make a life that had meaning, stability, and beauty.’ –loc 157

His entire figure seemed to say, ‘I am, forgive me, quite unimportant. You do me a great pleasure, if you overlook me.’ –loc 186

He gave me the book and said: ‘Every man lives behind bars, which he carries within him. That is why people write so much about animals now. It’s an expression of longing for a free natural life. But for human beings the natural life is a human life. But men don’t always realize that. They refuse to realize it. Human existence is a burden to them, so they dispose of it in fantasies.’ –loc 273

It’s like the narrowly confined life of the office. There are no longer any marvels, only regulations, prescriptions, directives. Men are afraid of freedom and responsibility. So they prefer to hide behind the prison bars which they build around themselves. –loc 279

Fundamentally, it is only a special situation. Wealth implies dependence on things which one possesses and which have to be safeguarded from dwindling away by new possessions and a further dependence. It is merely materialized insecurity. –loc 295

Love often wears the face of violence. –loc 301

‘So you too are a lunatic about books, with a head that wags from too much reading?’
‘That’s right. I don’t think I could exist without books. To me, they’re the whole world.’
Kafka’s eyebrows narrowed. ‘That’s a mistake. A book cannot take the place of the world. –loc 308

That is impossible. In life, everything has its own meaning and its own purpose, for which there cannot be any permanent substitute. A man can’t, for instance, master his own experience through the medium of another personality. That is how the world is in relation to books. One tries to imprison life in a book, like a songbird in a cage, but It’s no good. On the contrary! Out of the abstractions one finds in books, one can only construct systems that are cages for oneself. Philosophers are only brightly clad Papagenos with their own different cages.’ –loc 311

‘Work is a release from the longings of our dreams, which often only blind us and flatter us to death.’ –loc 385

‘Youth is full of sunshine and love. Youth is happy, because it has the ability to see beauty. When this ability is lost, wretched old age begins, decay, unhappiness.’
‘So age excludes the possibility of happiness?’
‘No, happiness excludes age.’ Smiling, he bent his head forward, as if to hide it between his hunched shoulders. ‘Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.’ –loc 390

One reads in order to ask questions. –loc 414

‘From life one can extract comparatively so many books, but from books so little, so very little, life.’
‘So literature is a bad preservative?’
He laughed and nodded.
–loc 435

‘The false illusion of a freedom achieved by external means is an error, a confusion, a desert in which nothing flourishes except the two herbs of fear and despair. That is inevitable, because anything which has a real and lasting value is always a gift from within. Man doesn’t grow from below upwards but from within outwards. That is the fundamental condition of all freedom in life. It is not an artificially constructed social environment but an attitude to oneself and to the world which it is a perpetual struggle to maintain. It’s the condition of man’s freedom.’ –loc 485

‘What is the matter? Your face is quite grey.’
‘That will soon be over,’ I managed to say, and tried to smile. ‘People think I’m something that I’m not.’
‘That’s not unusual,’ declared Kafka, with a slightly contemptuous curl of the lip. ‘It’s an old failing of human communication. The only thing that’s always new about it is the pain it causes.’ –loc 510

‘Don’t say that! You don’t realize how much strength there is in silence. Aggression is usually only a disguise which conceals one’s weakness from oneself and from the world. Genuine and lasting strength consists in bearing things. Only weaklings react quickly and brutally. And in doing so, they sacrifice their manhood.’ –loc 528

‘the road from appearance to reality is often very hard and long, and many people make only very poor travellers. We must forgive them when they stagger against us as if against a brick wall.’ –loc 546

The majority of modern books are merely wavering reflections of the present. They disappear very quickly. You should read more old books. The classics. Goethe. What is old reveals its deepest value – lastingness. What is merely new is the most transitory of all things. It is beautiful today, and tomorrow merely ludicrous. That is the way of literature.’ –loc 564

‘To be disturbed by an unexpected visit is a weakness, an avoidance of the unexpected. One huddles into one’s so-called private life, because one lacks the strength to master the world. One flies from the miraculous into one’s own limited self. That is a withdrawal. Being is most of all a being-with-things, a dialogue. One mustn’t shrink from that. You can always call on me as and when you please.’ –loc 574

The suicide only kills himself out of impotence. Because he cannot do anything else. So he takes the last course left open to him. For this, he does not require any strength. All that’s required is despair, the abandonment of all hope. No risk is involved. To dare is to endure, to give oneself to life, to carry on as if untroubled from one day to another.’ –loc 637

But – these are only words. Art is always a matter of the entire personality. For that reason it is fundamentally tragic.’ –loc 651

‘It is literature,’ said Kafka smiling. ‘Flight from reality.’
‘So poetry is lies?’
‘No. Poetry is a condensate, an essence. Literature, on the other hand, is a relaxation, a means of pleasure which alleviates the unconscious life, a narcotic.’
‘And poetry?’
‘Poetry is exactly the opposite. Poetry is an awakening.’
‘So poetry tends towards religion.’
‘I would not say that. But certainly to prayer.’ –loc 675

One cannot break one’s chains when there are no chains to be seen. One’s imprisonment is therefore organized as a perfectly ordinary, not over-comfortable form of daily life. Everything looks as if it were made of solid, lasting stuff. But on the contrary it is a life in which one is falling towards an abyss. It isn’t visible. But if one closes one’s eyes, one can hear its rush and roar.’ –loc 777

Literature strives to present things in pleasing, attractive light. But the poet is forced to elevate things into the realm of truth, clarity, and permanence. Literature aims at comfort. But the poet is a seeker after happiness, and that is everything rather than comfortable.’ –loc 794

‘It’s a betrayal,’ I burst out. ‘These people pretend to be something that they’re not.’
‘And so? What’s unusual in that?’ – His face had a fascinating look of pity, patience and forgiveness. – ‘How often is injustice committed in the name of justice? How often does damnation fly the flag of enlightenment? How often does a fall disguise itself as a rise? We can see it all now quite properly. The war didn’t only burn and tear the world, but also lit it up. We can see that it is a labyrinth built by men themselves, an icy machine world, whose comforts and apparent purposefulness increasingly emasculate and dishonour us. –loc 814

Yet this particularly is the most striking expression of the hunger for truth. Men only discover themselves in the dark mirror of tragedy. But by then It’s already over.’ –loc 834

‘How could that be? Dying is an exclusively human affair. For that reason, all men die. But the monkey continues to live on in the whole human race. The “I” is nothing else except a cage from the past, its bars entwined with perpetual dreams of the future.’ –loc 836

‘What impertinence!’ I said angrily.
‘He’s not impertinent,’ Kafka said gently, and looked at me with dark, sad eyes. ‘He’s only afraid. So he’s unjust. Fear for one’s daily bread destroys one’s character. That’s what life is like.’ –loc 883

‘Most men indeed don’t really live at all,’ said Kafka, in a strangely soft voice. ‘They cling to life like little polyps to a coral reef. But in doing so men are far worse off than those primitive organisms. For them, there’s no firm barrier reef to ward off the breakers. They haven’t even a shell of their own to live in. All they can do is to emit an acid stream of bile, which leaves them even weaker and more helpless, because it divides them from their fellows. But what can they do about it?’ –loc 886

‘By the rubbish of worn-out words and ideas. They’re stronger than thick armour plate. Men hide behind them from Time’s whirligigs. For that reason, words are evil’s strongest buttress. They are the most reliable preservatives of every passion and every stupidity.’ –loc 922

A young man who doesn’t believe in tomorrow morning is a traitor to himself. If one wishes to live, one must believe.’
‘In what?’
‘In the significant interrelation of all things and all moments, in the external existence of life as a single whole, in what is nearest and what is farthest.’
–loc 1001

‘For me you are a young man,’ said Franz Kafka. ‘You have future possibilities which others have already lost. People mean so much to you that you have to watch yourself very closely, in order not to lose yourself. Certainly I am more friendly to you than to Klaus. After all, I speak to my own past when I speak to you. One cannot help being friendly. And then; you are younger than Klaus, and so you need more understanding and love.’ –loc 1229

you know him well?’ ‘Well?’ said Kafka, and shrugged his shoulders in denial. ‘One never knows the living. The present is change and transformation. Albert Ehrenstein is one of today’s generation. He is a child lost and crying in the night.’ –loc 1255

‘On the contrary I’ Kafka gave a painful smile. ‘Nothing sticks so fast in the mind as a groundless sense of guilt, because – since it has no real foundation – one cannot eliminate it by any form of repentance or redemption. –loc 1359

‘So you are disappointed in Döblin?’
‘As a matter of fact, I am only disappointed in myself. I expected from him something different from what he perhaps wished to give. But the stubbornness of my expectation blinded me so that I skipped pages and sentences and finally the whole book.
–loc 1404

‘Most men are not wicked,’ said Franz Kafka, talking of Leonhard Frank’s book Man is Good. ‘Men become bad and guilty because they speak and act without foreseeing the results of their words and their deeds. They are sleepwalkers, not evildoers.’ –loc 1486

Kafka interrupted me. ‘The factories are merely organizations for increasing financial profit. In such a matter, we all have a merely subordinate function. Man is today only an old-fashioned instrument of economic growth, a hangover from history, whose economically inadequate skills will soon be displaced by frictionless thinking machines.’
I sighed disdainfully: ‘Oh yes, that’s a favourite Utopia of H. G. Wells.’
‘No,’ said Kafka in a hard voice, ‘that’s no Utopia, but only the future which already looms before us.’
–loc 1581

To impose an armistice on the enemy is the greatest victory one can achieve. But the final destruction of evil? One can’t expect that. That’s a lunatic dream by which evil is not weakened but – quite the contrary – is strengthened and its effect accelerated, because one overlooks its real nature and distorts reality into an illusion founded on one’s own misleading wishes.’ –loc 1623

he studied the picture of the seated Moses. ‘That is not a leader,’ he said. ‘He is a judge, a stern judge. In the end men can only lead by means of harsh, inexorable judgement.’ –loc 1674

‘You are undisciplined,’ he said reproachfully after we had exchanged greetings. ‘Your illness was a warning. You must take better care of yourself. Good health is not a personal possession, to do what one likes with. It is property on loan, a grace. Most people do not realize this. So they have no hygienic economy.’ –loc 1678

‘As a flood spreads wider and wider, the water becomes shallower and dirtier. The Revolution evaporates, and leaves behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. The chains of tormented mankind are made out of red tape.’ –loc 1847

Lying is an act and – like every other act – demands all a man’s skill. One must give up everything to it, one must first believe in the lie oneself, because only then can one convince other people. Lying demands the heat of passion. For that reason, it reveals more than it conceals. I am not capable of that. So for me there is only one hiding-place – the truth.’ –loc 1860

I no longer know how I stammered my way out of my shameful confusion, I only know that from then on I took greater care of what I was saying. Not only in conversation with Kafka, but in my contacts with everyone. That heightened my powers of perception. I learned to observe and to listen better. Thereby my life became deeper and more complicated but without becoming more cold and detached. On the contrary; the almost infinite complexity of things and people, which never failed to astonish me, made my existence richer and more meaningful. I was carried through time on a wave of feeling that was bliss. I was no longer a bureaucrat’s small, insignificant son, but one who struggled to take the measure of the world and of himself, a little champion of God and man. And all this I owed to Kafka. –loc 1866

‘Joy is food to the human soul. Without it, life is only a form of dying.’ –loc 1889

Happiness does not depend on possessions. Happiness is a matter of attitude. That is to say: a happy man does not see the dark side of reality. His sense of life suppresses the gnawing woodworm of the consciousness of death. One forgets that instead of walking, one is falling. It’s as if one were drugged. So It’s a direct offence to be asked after one’s health. It’s as if one apple asked another apple: “How are the worms which the insect bites gave you?” Or as if one blade of grass asked another: “How are you withering? How goes your esteemed decomposition?” What would you think of that?’ –loc 1919

Anyone who grasps life completely has no fear of dying. The fear of death is merely the result of an unfulfilled life. It is a symptom of betrayal. –loc 1975

‘Truth, which is one of the few really great and precious things in life, cannot be bought. Man receives it as a gift, like love or beauty. But a newspaper is a commodity, which is bought and sold.’ –loc 1981

‘In the end the problem is quite simple. The only really difficult and insoluble problems are those which we cannot formulate, because they have the difficulties of life itself as their content.’ –loc 2020

History is made out of the failures and heroism of each insignificant moment. If one throws a stone into a river, it produces a succession of ripples. But most men live without being conscious of a responsibility which extends beyond themselves. And that – I think – is at the root of our misery.’ –loc 2025

the luxury of the rich is paid for by the misery of the poor.’ –loc 2034

How can one find outside oneself something which ought to come from within?’ –loc 2143

Kafka said, ‘that is perfectly reasonable. Poets try to give men a different vision, in order to change reality. For that reason they are politically dangerous elements, because they want to make a change. For the state, and all its devoted servants, want only one thing, to persist.’ –loc 2181

Deceivers always try to solve difficult problems on the cheap. –loc 2201

Goethe’s view is the right one. One must, with quiet respect for the unknowable, accept the order of everything that is knowable. The smallest thing, like the greatest, must be close and precious to one.’ –loc 2203

‘All my friends have wonderful eyes,’ he said. ‘The light of their eyes is the only illumination of the dark dungeon in which I live. And even that is only artificial light.’ –loc 2220

‘Perhaps my insomnia only conceals a great fear of death. Perhaps I am afraid that the soul – which in sleep leaves me – will never return. Perhaps insomnia is only an all too vivid sense of sin, which is afraid of the possibility of a sudden judgement. Perhaps insomnia is itself a sin. Perhaps it is a rejection of the natural.’ –loc 2224

‘Photography concentrates one’s eye on the superficial. For that reason it obscures the hidden life which glimmers through the outlines of things like a play of light and shade. One can’t catch that even with the sharpest lens. One has to grope for it by feeling. Or do you think that one can successfully apprehend the profound depths of this ever-returning reality, before which, through all former ages, whole legions of poets, artists, scientists and other miracle workers have stood in trembling longing and hope, by pressing the knob of a cheap machine? – I doubt it. This automatic camera doesn’t multiply men’s eyes but only gives a fantastically simplified fly’s eye view.’ –loc 2237

For instance: Death is not brought to life by life; Life is not killed by dying. Life and death are conditioned; they are contained within a great coherence. This is, I think, the fundamental and central problem of all religions and of wisdom about life. It’s a question of grasping the coherence of things and time, of deciphering oneself, and of penetrating one’s own becoming and dying. –loc 2398

There’s only one thing certain. That is one’s own inadequacy. One must start from that.’ –loc 2436

Truth is what every man needs in order to live, but can obtain or purchase from no one. Each man must reproduce it for himself from within, otherwise he must perish. Life without truth is not possible. Truth is perhaps life itself.’ –loc 2608

Yet Walt Whitman’s significance lies elsewhere. He combined the contemplation of nature and of civilization, which are apparently entirely contradictory, into a single intoxicating vision of life, because he always had sight of the transitoriness of all phenomena. –loc 2617

‘A lie is often an expression of the fear that one may be crushed by the truth. It is a projection of one’s own littleness, of the sin of which one is afraid.’ –loc 2633

The masses hurry, run, march in thunder through our era. Where to? Where have they come from? No one knows. The more they march, the less they achieve their goal. They use their strength to no purpose. They think they are on the move. And thus, marking time, they fall into the void. That is all. Mankind has lost its home.’ –loc 2710

‘One cannot escape oneself. That is fate. The only possibility is to look on and forget that a game is being played with us.’ –loc 2738

But Kafka gives, really gives, in such a way that It’s a pleasure. For instance, a bunch of grapes which he has not eaten that morning. They are left-overs. You know what they usually look like – with most people. But Kafka never leaves them looking like a tasteless lump. He leaves the grapes or the fruit nicely arranged on the plate. –loc 2744

Wherever one goes, one only travels towards one’s own misunderstood nature. –loc 2763

‘That is precisely what is irritating and difficult. Life has so many possibilities, and each one only mirrors the inescapable impossibility of one’s own existence.’ His voice broke into a dry convulsive cough, which he quickly mastered. We smiled at each other. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘everything will soon be all right.’ ‘It is already all right,’ Franz Kafka said slowly. ‘I have said yes to everything. In that way suffering becomes an enchantment, and death – it is only an ingredient in the sweetness of life.’ –loc 2771

But so called reasonable people are usually those who have been disabled by life. And they are the dominant majority, and do not tolerate examples which reflect unfavourably on themselves.’ –loc 2866

‘Do not excite yourself. Be calm. Quietness is indeed a sign of strength. But quietness may also help one to achieve strength. That is the law of opposites. So be quiet. Calmness and quietness make one free – even on the scaffold.’ –loc 2869

‘Life is as infinitely great and profound as the immensity of the stars above us. One can only look at it through the narrow keyhole of one’s own personal existence. But through it one perceives more than one can see. So above all one must keep the keyhole clean.’ –loc 2985

November 1, 2016

Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

Author: Jocko Willink, Leif Babin
Rating: 9/10
Last Read: September 2016

Quick Summary: This book is absolutely packed with actionable advice for leading teams and improving yourself. While the book does include war stories to illustrate the authors’ points, the principles are timeless and worth reading even for those who aren’t interested in military subject matters.

The core of the book: take ownership of yourself and the success of your team. Detach, kill your ego, and don’t blame others for failure. Instead, look at how you can improve the situation, communicate better, and clearly prioritize goals so your team members up and down the chain of command fully understand the situation.

This book made me take a hard look at myself and identified ways that I need to improve, especially in communicating up the chain to make sure my leaders understand the situation on the ground. I will be revisiting this book again and again.

Also, I highly recommend checking out the Jocko Podcast, as well as the Tim Ferris Interview with Jocko.

Extreme Ownership. Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame.

My Highlights

Who are we to write such a book? It may seem that anyone who believes they can write a book on leadership must think themselves the epitome of what every leader should aspire to be. But we are far from perfect. We continue to learn and grow as leaders every day, just as any leaders who are truly honest with themselves must. We were simply fortunate enough to experience an array of leadership challenges that taught us valuable lessons. This book is our best effort to pass those lessons on, not from a pedestal or a position of superiority, but from a humble place, where the scars of our failings still show. –loc 73

We learned that leadership requires belief in the mission and unyielding perseverance to achieve victory, particularly when doubters question whether victory is even possible. –loc 81

“Relax. Look around. Make a call.” –loc 164

Cover and Move, Simple, Prioritize and Execute, and Decentralized Command. –loc 166

The only meaningful measure for a leader is whether the team succeeds or fails. For all the definitions, descriptions, and characterizations of leaders, there are only two that matter: effective and ineffective. Effective leaders lead successful teams that accomplish their mission and win. Ineffective leaders do not. –loc 213

The best leaders are not driven by ego or personal agendas. They are simply focused on the mission and how best to accomplish it. –loc 220

The greatest of these was the recognition that leadership is the most important factor on the battlefield, the single greatest reason behind the success of any team. –loc 256

We encourage leaders to do the things they know they probably should be doing but aren’t. By not doing those things, they are failing as leaders and failing their teams. –loc 288

Extreme Ownership. Leaders must own everything in their world. There is no one else to blame. –loc 298

These weaker commanders would get a solid explanation about the burden of command and the deep meaning of responsibility: the leader is truly and ultimately responsible for everything. –loc 496

On any team, in any organization, all responsibility for success and failure rests with the leader. The leader must own everything in his or her world. There is no one else to blame. The leader must acknowledge mistakes and admit failures, take ownership of them, and develop a plan to win. –loc 499

When subordinates aren’t doing what they should, leaders that exercise Extreme Ownership cannot blame the subordinates. They must first look in the mirror at themselves. The leader bears full responsibility for explaining the strategic mission, developing the tactics, and securing the training and resources to enable the team to properly and successfully execute. –loc 505

If an individual on the team is not performing at the level required for the team to succeed, the leader must train and mentor that underperformer. But if the underperformer continually fails to meet standards, then a leader who exercises Extreme Ownership must be loyal to the team and the mission above any individual. If underperformers cannot improve, the leader must make the tough call to terminate them and hire others who can get the job done. It is all on the leader. –loc 508

Total responsibility for failure is a difficult thing to accept, and taking ownership when things go wrong requires extraordinary humility and courage. But doing just that is an absolute necessity to learning, growing as a leader, and improving a team’s performance. –loc 513

“So, you’re here to help me, right?” the VP inquired. Knowing that, due to ego, some people bristle at the idea of criticism and coaching no matter how constructive, I chose to take a more indirect approach. “Maybe not so much here to help you, but here to help the situation,” –loc 533

When a bad SEAL leader walked into a debrief and blamed everyone else, that attitude was picked up by subordinates and team members, who then followed suit. They all blamed everyone else, and inevitably the team was ineffective and unable to properly execute a plan. –loc 610

The answer: leadership is the single greatest factor in any team’s performance. Whether a team succeeds or fails is all up to the leader. The leader’s attitude sets the tone for the entire team. The leader drives performance—or doesn’t. And this applies not just to the most senior leader of an overall team, but to the junior leaders of teams within the team. –loc 758

When leaders who epitomize Extreme Ownership drive their teams to achieve a higher standard of performance, they must recognize that when it comes to standards, as a leader, it’s not what you preach, it’s what you tolerate. –loc 833

Leaders should never be satisfied. They must always strive to improve, and they must build that mind-set into the team. –loc 847

If I expressed doubts or openly questioned the wisdom of this plan in front of the troops, their derision toward the mission would increase exponentially. They would never believe in it. As a result, they would never commit to it, and it would fail. But once I understood and believed, I then passed that understanding and belief on, clearly and succinctly, to my troops so that they believed in it themselves. When they understood why, they would commit to the mission, persevere through the inevitable challenges in store, and accomplish the task set before us. –loc 1096

In order to convince and inspire others to follow and accomplish a mission, a leader must be a true believer in the mission. Even when others doubt and question the amount of risk, asking, “Is it worth it?” the leader must believe in the greater cause. If a leader does not believe, he or she will not take the risks required to overcome the inevitable challenges necessary to win. –loc 1127

Leaders must always operate with the understanding that they are part of something greater than themselves and their own personal interests. –loc 1131

Every leader must be able to detach from the immediate tactical mission and understand how it fits into strategic goals. –loc 1138

When leaders receive an order that they themselves question and do not understand, they must ask the question: why? Why are we being asked to do this? Those leaders must take a step back, deconstruct the situation, analyze the strategic picture, and then come to a conclusion. If they cannot determine a satisfactory answer themselves, they must ask questions up the chain of command until they understand why. –loc 1138

In business just as in the military, no senior executive team would knowingly choose a course of action or issue an order that would purposely result in failure. But a subordinate may not understand a certain strategy and thus not believe in it. Junior leaders must ask questions and also provide feedback up the chain so that senior leaders can fully understand the ramifications of how strategic plans affect execution on the ground. –loc 1147

A common misperception among military leaders or corporate senior executives, this was an example of a boss who didn’t fully comprehend the weight of her position. In her mind, she was fairly laid back, open to questions, comments, and suggestions from people. She talked about maintaining an “open-door policy.” But in the minds of her sales managers, she was still The Boss: experienced, smart, and most important, powerful. That position demanded a high level of reverence—so high, in fact, that for an employee to question her ideas seemed disrespectful. None of them were comfortable questioning her, even though none of the midlevel managers actually worried about losing their jobs because they asked a question. But they were certainly worried about looking bad in front of The Boss. –loc 1193

Often, my subordinate leadership would pick up the slack for me. And they wouldn’t hold it against me, nor did I think they were infringing on my ‘leadership turf.’ On the contrary, I would thank them for covering for me. Leadership isn’t one person leading a team. It is a group of leaders working together, up and down the chain of command, to lead. If you are on your own, I don’t care how good you are, you won’t be able to handle it.” –loc 1253

Ego clouds and disrupts everything: the planning process, the ability to take good advice, and the ability to accept constructive criticism. It can even stifle someone’s sense of self-preservation. Often, the most difficult ego to deal with is your own. –loc 1453

“If you approached it as he did something wrong, and he needs to fix something, and he is at fault, it becomes a clash of egos and you two will be at odds. That’s human nature. But, if you put your own ego in check, meaning you take the blame, that will allow him to actually see the problem without his vision clouded by ego. Then you both can make sure that your team’s standard operating procedures—when to communicate, what is and isn’t within his decision-making authority—are clearly understood. –loc 1520

We utilized the principle of Cover and Move on every operation: all teams working together in support of one another. –loc 1716

“The enemy is out there,” I said, pointing out the window to the world beyond. “The enemy is all the other competing companies in your industry that are vying for your customers. The enemy is not in here, inside the walls of this corporation. The departments within and the subsidiary companies that all fall under the same leadership structure—you are all on the same team. You have to overcome the ‘us versus them’ mentality and work together, mutually supporting one another. –loc 1761

Simplifying as much as possible is crucial to success. When plans and orders are too complicated, people may not understand them. And when things go wrong, and they inevitably do go wrong, complexity compounds issues that can spiral out of control into total disaster. Plans and orders must be communicated in a manner that is simple, clear, and concise. Everyone that is part of the mission must know and understand his or her role in the mission and what to do in the event of likely contingencies. As a leader, it doesn’t matter how well you feel you have presented the information or communicated an order, plan, tactic, or strategy. If your team doesn’t get it, you have not kept things simple and you have failed. You must brief to ensure the lowest common denominator on the team understands. –loc 1951

the enemy gets a vote.–loc 2033

“The enemy gets a vote?” the plant manager repeated, questioning what that meant. “Yes. Regardless of how you think an operation is going to unfold,” I answered, “the enemy gets their say as well—and they are going to do something to disrupt it. When something goes wrong—and it eventually does—complex plans add to confusion, which can compound into disaster. Almost no mission ever goes according to plan. There are simply too many variables to deal with. This is where simplicity is key. If the plan is simple enough, everyone understands it, which means each person can rapidly adjust and modify what he or she is doing. If the plan is too complex, the team can’t make rapid adjustments to it, because there is no baseline understanding of it.” –loc 2034

Prioritize and Execute. Even the greatest of battlefield leaders could not handle an array of challenges simultaneously without being overwhelmed. That risked failing at them all. I had to remain calm, step back from my immediate emotional reaction, and determine the greatest priority for the team. Then, rapidly direct the team to attack that priority. Once the wheels were in motion and the full resources of the team were engaged in that highest priority effort, I could then determine the next priority, focus the team’s effort there, and then move on to the next priority. I could not allow myself to be overwhelmed. I had to relax, look around, and make a call. –loc 2197

Even the most competent of leaders can be overwhelmed if they try to tackle multiple problems or a number of tasks simultaneously. The team will likely fail at each of those tasks. Instead, leaders must determine the highest priority task and execute. When overwhelmed, fall back upon this principle: Prioritize and Execute. –loc 2240

Just as in combat, priorities can rapidly shift and change. When this happens, communication of that shift to the rest of the team, both up and down the chain of command, is critical. Teams must be careful to avoid target fixation on a single issue. They cannot fail to recognize when the highest priority task shifts to something else. The team must maintain the ability to quickly reprioritize efforts and rapidly adapt to a constantly changing battlefield. –loc 2258

To implement Prioritize and Execute in any business, team, or organization, a leader must:
• evaluate the highest priority problem.
• lay out in simple, clear, and concise terms the highest priority effort for your team.
• develop and determine a solution, seek input from key leaders and from the team where possible.
• direct the execution of that solution, focusing all efforts and resources toward this priority task.
• move on to the next highest priority problem. Repeat.
• when priorities shift within the team, pass situational awareness both up and down the chain.
• don’t let the focus on one priority cause target fixation. Maintain the ability to see other problems developing and rapidly shift as needed. –loc 2261

Human beings are generally not capable of managing more than six to ten people, particularly when things go sideways and inevitable contingencies arise. No one senior leader can be expected to manage dozens of individuals, much less hundreds. –loc 2529

Decentralized Command does not mean junior leaders or team members operate on their own program; that results in chaos. Instead, junior leaders must fully understand what is within their decision-making authority—the “left and right limits” of their responsibility. Additionally, they must communicate with senior leaders to recommend decisions outside their authority and pass critical information up the chain so the senior leadership can make informed strategic decisions. –loc 2536

Junior leaders must be proactive rather than reactive. –loc 2540

Tactical leaders must be confident that they clearly understand the strategic mission and Commander’s Intent. They must have implicit trust that their senior leaders will back their decisions. Without this trust, junior leaders cannot confidently execute, which means they cannot exercise effective Decentralized Command. To ensure this is the case, senior leaders must constantly communicate and push information—what we call in the military “situational awareness”—to their subordinate leaders. Likewise, junior leaders must push situational awareness up the chain to their senior leaders to keep them informed, particularly of crucial information that affects strategic decision making. –loc 2542

Contrary to a common misconception, leaders are not stuck in any particular position. Leaders must be free to move to where they are most needed, which changes throughout the course of an operation. Understanding proper positioning as a leader is a key component of effective Decentralized Command, not just on the battlefield. –loc 2564

“Junior leaders must know that the boss will back them up even if they make a decision that may not result in the best outcome, as long as the decision was made in an effort to achieve the strategic objective” –loc 2645

The mission must explain the overall purpose and desired result, or “end state,” of the operation. The frontline troops tasked with executing the mission must understand the deeper purpose behind the mission. –loc 2784

Leaders must delegate the planning process down the chain as much as possible to key subordinate leaders. Team leaders within the greater team and frontline, tactical-level leaders must have ownership of their tasks within the overall plan and mission. Team participation—even from the most junior personnel—is critical in developing bold, innovative solutions to problem sets. –loc 2791

The test for a successful brief is simple: Do the team and the supporting elements understand it? –loc 2807

The plan must mitigate identified risks where possible. SEALs are known for taking significant risk, but in reality SEALs calculate risk very carefully. A good plan must enable the highest chance of mission success while mitigating as much risk as possible. –loc 2808

The best teams employ constant analysis of their tactics and measure their effectiveness so that they can adapt their methods and implement lessons learned for future missions. Often business teams claim there isn’t time for such analysis. But one must make time. –loc 2815

A post-operational debrief examines all phases of an operation from planning through execution, in a concise format. It addresses the following for the combat mission just completed: What went right? What went wrong? How can we adapt our tactics to make us even more effective and increase our advantage over the enemy? –loc 2818

If your boss isn’t making a decision in a timely manner or providing necessary support for you and your team, don’t blame the boss. First, blame yourself. Examine what you can do to better convey the critical information for decisions to be made and support allocated. –loc 3226

Leading up the chain takes much more savvy and skill than leading down the chain. Leading up, the leader cannot fall back on his or her positional authority. Instead, the subordinate leader must use influence, experience, knowledge, communication, and maintain the highest professionalism. –loc 3230

While pushing to make your superior understand what you need, you must also realize that your boss must allocate limited assets and make decisions with the bigger picture in mind. You and your team may not represent the priority effort at that particular time. Or perhaps the senior leadership has chosen a different direction. Have the humility to understand and accept this. –loc 3233

A public display of discontent or disagreement with the chain of command undermines the authority of leaders at all levels. This is catastrophic to the performance of any organization. –loc 3237

But at the end of the day, once the debate on a particular course of action is over and the boss has made a decision—even if that decision is one you argued against—you must execute the plan as if it were your own. –loc 3240

The major factors to be aware of when leading up and down the chain of command are these:
• Take responsibility for leading everyone in your world, subordinates and superiors alike.
• If someone isn’t doing what you want or need them to do, look in the mirror first and determine what you can do to better enable this.
• Don’t ask your leader what you should do, tell them what you are going to do.
–loc 3244

They just don’t get what we are dealing with, and their questions and second-guessing prevents me and my team from getting the job done.” The infamous they. –loc 3251

Intelligence gathering and research are important, but they must be employed with realistic expectations and must not impede swift decision making that is often the difference between victory and defeat. Waiting for the 100 percent right and certain solution leads to delay, indecision, and an inability to execute. Leaders must be prepared to make an educated guess based on previous experience, knowledge of how the enemy operates, likely outcomes, and whatever intelligence is available in the immediate moment. –loc 3452

In the SEAL Teams, we taught our leaders to act decisively amid chaos. Jocko had taught me that, as a leader, my default setting should be aggressive—proactive rather than reactive. This was critical to the success of any team. Instead of letting the situation dictate our decisions, we must dictate the situation. But for many leaders, this mind-set was not intuitive. Many operated with a “wait and see” approach. But experience had taught me that the picture could never be complete. There was always some element of risk. There was no 100-percent right solution. –loc 3506

The moment the alarm goes off is the first test; it sets the tone for the rest of the day. The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win—you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail. Though it seems small, that weakness translates to more significant decisions. But if you exercise discipline, that too translates to more substantial elements of your life. –loc 3648

The temptation to take the easy road is always there. It is as easy as staying in bed in the morning and sleeping in. But discipline is paramount to ultimate success and victory for any leader and any team. –loc 3668

Although discipline demands control and asceticism, it actually results in freedom. When you have the discipline to get up early, you are rewarded with more free time. When you have the discipline to keep your helmet and body armor on in the field, you become accustomed to it and can move freely in it. The more discipline you have to work out, train your body physically and become stronger, the lighter your gear feels and the easier you can move around in it. –loc 3669

A leader must be calm but not robotic. It is normal—and necessary—to show emotion. The team must understand that their leader cares about them and their well-being. But, a leader must control his or her emotions. If not, how can they expect to control anything else? Leaders who lose their temper also lose respect. But, at the same time, to never show any sense of anger, sadness, or frustration would make that leader appear void of any emotion at all—a robot. People do not follow robots. –loc 3714

a leader must be confident but never cocky. Confidence is contagious, a great attribute for a leader and a team. But when it goes too far, overconfidence causes complacency and arrogance, which ultimately set the team up for failure. –loc 3716

A leader must be brave but not foolhardy. He or she must be willing to accept risk and act courageously, but must never be reckless. It is a leader’s job to always mitigate as much as possible those risks that can be controlled to accomplish the mission without sacrificing the team or excessively expending critical resources. –loc 3718

Leaders must have a competitive spirit but also be gracious losers. They must drive competition and push themselves and their teams to perform at the highest level. But they must never put their own drive for personal success ahead of overall mission success for the greater team. Leaders must act with professionalism and recognize others for their contributions. –loc 3720

A leader must be attentive to details but not obsessed by them. A good leader does not get bogged down in the minutia of a tactical problem at the expense of strategic success. He or she must monitor and check the team’s progress in the most critical tasks. But that leader cannot get sucked into the details and lose track of the bigger picture. –loc 3723

A leader must be strong but likewise have endurance, not only physically but mentally. He or she must maintain the ability to perform at the highest level and sustain that level for the long term. Leaders must recognize limitations and know to pace themselves and their teams so that they can maintain a solid performance indefinitely. –loc 3725

Leaders must be humble but not passive; quiet but not silent. They must possess humility and the ability to control their ego and listen to others. They must admit mistakes and failures, take ownership of them, and figure out a way to prevent them from happening again. But a leader must be able to speak up when it matters. They must be able to stand up for the team and respectfully push back against a decision, order, or direction that could negatively impact overall mission success. –loc 3728

A leader must be close with subordinates but not too close. The best leaders understand the motivations of their team members and know their people—their lives and their families. But a leader must never grow so close to subordinates that one member of the team becomes more important than another, or more important than the mission itself. Leaders must never get so close that the team forgets who is in charge. –loc 3731

A good leader does not gloat or revel in his or her position. To take charge of minute details just to demonstrate and reinforce to the team a leader’s authority is the mark of poor, inexperienced leadership lacking in confidence. –loc 3737

Generally, when a leader struggles, the root cause behind the problem is that the leader has leaned too far in one direction and steered off course. Awareness of the dichotomies in leadership allows this discovery, and thereby enables the correction. –loc 3743

October 25, 2016

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

Author: John le Carré
Rating: 7/10
Last Read: September 2016

Quick Summary: I’m not normally one for spy or mystery novels. The spy I read about and liked was Jason Bourne. I shared this and received a recommendation to read Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, claiming it would get me hooked.

I can safely say after finishing the book that I didn’t really feel the pull. The book was slow-paced and sometimes the writing left me confused as to what had transpired (mostly in the beginning). There was so much slow buildup, and the book just ended in a quick manner without much fuss.

I do think that George Smiley is a very interesting character, so I can see how one would want to read more about him. However, I won’t be continuing on.

My Highlights

Well, you can’t blame him, can you? You can’t blame a man for wanting a drop of peace in the evening of his life. I can’t.” –loc 425

“Living off the wits of his subordinates—well, maybe that’s leadership these days.” –loc 443

And now it was pouring with rain, Smiley was soaked to the skin, and God as a punishment had removed all taxis from the face of London. –loc 468

But Smiley had a second reason, which was fear, the secret fear that follows every professional to his grave. Namely, that one day, out of a past so complex that he himself could not remember all the enemies he might have made, one of them would find him and demand the reckoning. –loc 495

‘To possess another language is to possess another soul.’ –loc 927

That a man’s wealth should be counted by the number of his names! –loc 961

After a lifetime of living by his wits and his considerable memory, he had given himself full time to the profession of forgetting. –loc 1202

Patiently Smiley waited for the speck of gold, for Connie was of an age where the only thing a man could give her was time. –loc 1574

“An artist is a bloke who can hold two fundamentally opposing views and still function: who dreamed that one up?” –loc 2290

Sitting is an eloquent business; any actor will tell you that. We sit according to our natures. We sprawl and straddle, we rest like boxers between rounds, we fidget, perch, cross and uncross our legs, lose patience, lose endurance. Gerstmann did none of those things. His posture was finite and irreducible, his little jagged body was like a promontory of rock; he could have sat that way all day, without stirring a muscle. –loc 3068

“I often thought that. I even put it to Control: we should take the opposition’s cover stories more seriously, I said. The more identities a man has, the more they express the person they conceal.” The fifty-year-old who knocks five years off his age. The married man who calls himself a bachelor; the fatherless man who gives himself two children . . . Or the interrogator who projects himself into the life of a man who does not speak. Few men can resist expressing their appetites when they are making a fantasy about themselves.” –loc 3089

Survival, as Jim Prideaux liked to recall, is an infinite capacity for suspicion. –loc 4812

he wondered whether there was any love between human beings that did not rest upon some sort of self-delusion –loc 4985

He thought about treason and wondered whether there was mindless treason in the same way, supposedly, as there was mindless violence. –loc 4988

As an artist he had said all he had to say at the age of seventeen, and one had to do something with one’s later years. –loc 5319

October 18, 2016

The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday machine

Author: Michael Lewis
Rating: 9/10
Last Read: September 2016

Quick Summary: I was inspired to read this book after seeing the movie and I wasn’t disappointed. The movie provides a concise summary of the events in the book, so if you’re just looking for the cliff notes version you can safely stop there. However, the book is worth reading as much for the basic financial background as for the insights into human nature. There are many examples of how ego and greed prevented people from recognizing the danger of the situation they were creating.

Lewis provides for the layman much needed insight into the market crash of 2007-2008. The short summary is: greed, shortsightedness, and trust in the ratings agencies lead everyone to believe that they were making boatloads of money on mortgage-backed securities. In reality, everyone was giving out shitty loans that were bound to default, nobody was doing their due diligence, and only a few people recognized and capitalized on the situation.

They actually spent time wondering how people who had been so sensationally right (i.e., they themselves) could preserve the capacity for diffidence and doubt and uncertainty that had enabled them to be right. The more sure you were of yourself and your judgment, the harder it was to find opportunities premised on the notion that you were, in the end, probably wrong.

One of the most illuminating quotes from this book refers to a talk given by Charlie Munger on incentives:

Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn’t get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked—until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones—until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. “Well, you can say, ‘Everybody knows that,’” said Munger. “I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.”

My Highlights

A thought crossed his mind: How do you make poor people feel wealthy when wages are stagnant? You give them cheap loans. –loc 328

“Someone asked him if he believed in the free checking model,” recalls Eisman. “And he said, ‘Turn off your tape recorders.’ Everyone turned off their tape recorders. And he explained that they avoided free checking because it was really a tax on poor people—in the form of fines for overdrawing their checking accounts. And that banks that used it were really just banking on being able to rip off poor people even more than they could if they charged them for their checks.”
Eisman asked, “Are any regulators interested in this?”
“No,” said Sandler.
“That’s when I decided the system was really, ‘Fuck the poor.’” –loc 405

When a Wall Street firm helped him to get into a trade that seemed perfect in every way, he asked the salesman, “I appreciate this, but I just want to know one thing: How are you going to fuck me?” –loc 445

They measured risk by volatility: how much a stock or bond happened to have jumped around in the past few years. Real risk was not volatility; real risk was stupid investment decisions. –loc 721

Back in 1995, Munger had given a talk at Harvard Business School called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” If you wanted to predict how people would behave, Munger said, you only had to look at their incentives. FedEx couldn’t get its night shift to finish on time; they tried everything to speed it up but nothing worked—until they stopped paying night shift workers by the hour and started to pay them by the shift. Xerox created a new, better machine only to have it sell less well than the inferior older ones—until they figured out the salesmen got a bigger commission for selling the older one. “Well, you can say, ‘Everybody knows that,’” said Munger. “I think I’ve been in the top five percent of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I’ve underestimated it. And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther.” –loc 742

He didn’t know exactly why all these banks were suddenly so keen to buy insurance on subprime mortgage bonds, but there was one obvious reason: The loans suddenly were going bad at an alarming rate. Back in May, Mike Burry was betting on his theory of human behavior: The loans were structured to go bad. Now, in November, they were actually going bad. –loc 975

Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly. –loc 1399

He was surprised that Charlie and Jamie, both now so alive to the possibility of dramatic change in the financial markets, were less alert and responsive to the possibilities outside those markets. “I’m trying to prepare myself and my children for an environment that is unpredictable,” Ben said. –loc 1814

“I realized, I have to sell my house. Right now.” His house was worth a million dollars and maybe more yet would rent for no more than $2,500 a month. “It was trading more than thirty times gross rental,” said Ben. “The rule of thumb is that you buy at ten and sell at twenty.” In October 2005 he moved his family into a rental unit, away from the fault. –loc 1823

They actually spent time wondering how people who had been so sensationally right (i.e., they themselves) could preserve the capacity for diffidence and doubt and uncertainty that had enabled them to be right. The more sure you were of yourself and your judgment, the harder it was to find opportunities premised on the notion that you were, in the end, probably wrong. –loc 3512

“I think there is something fundamentally scary about our democracy,” said Charlie. “Because I think people have a sense that the system is rigged, and it’s hard to argue that it isn’t.” –loc 3516

The main effect of turning a partnership into a corporation was to transfer the financial risk to the shareholders. –loc 3808

October 11, 2016

The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements

Author: Eric Hoffer
Rating: 10/10
Last Read: August 2015

Quick Summary: Wow. This 1951 book on the psychology of mass movements is just stunning and terrifying. Even reviewing the notes brings me a sense of awe and a tinge of fear as you make associations with the world we live in today.

Hoffer explains what kind of people and attitudes give rise to mass movements and analyses the life cycle from start to end. His gaze shifts from the factors that motivate individuals to join mass movements to the societal forces that support and resist this force of change. He also compares mass movements to each other, including religious, political, or radical movements that we are familiar with throughout our history.

This is an excellent book that I will revisit again and again.

I recommend reading this book along with Why Don’t We Learn From History?

J. B. S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400 A.D. It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of resurrection.

My Highlights

All mass movements generate in their adherents a readiness to die and a proclivity for united action; all of them, irrespective of the doctrine they preach and the program they project, breed fanaticism, enthusiasm, fervent hope, hatred and intolerance; all of them are capable of releasing a powerful flow of activity in certain departments of life; all of them demand blind faith and singlehearted allegiance. –loc 77

Though there are obvious differences between the fanatical Christian, the fanatical Mohammedan, the fanatical nationalist, the fanatical Communist and the fanatical Nazi, it is yet true that the fanaticism which animates them may be viewed and treated as one. –loc 82

Starting out from the fact that the frustrated predominate among the early adherents of all mass movements and that they usually join of their own accord, it is assumed: 1) that frustration of itself, without any proselytizing prompting from the outside, can generate most of the peculiar characteristics of the true believer; 2) that an effective technique of conversion consists basically in the inculcation and fixation of proclivities and responses indigenous to the frustrated mind. –loc 91

Montaigne: “All I say is by way of discourse, and nothing by way of advice. I should not speak so boldly if it were my due to be believed.” –loc 109

Some kind of widespread enthusiasm or excitement is apparently needed for the realization of vast and rapid change, and it does not seem to matter whether the exhilaration is derived from an expectation of untold riches or is generated by an active mass movement. –loc 117

Success and failure are unavoidably related in our minds with the state of things around us. –loc 160

Hence it is that people with a sense of fulfillment think it a good world and would like to conserve it as it is, while the frustrated favor radical change. –loc 161

that the successful, too, however much they pride themselves on their foresight, fortitude, thrift and other “sterling qualities,” are at bottom convinced that their success is the result of a fortuitous combination of circumstances. The self-confidence of even the consistently successful is never absolute. –loc 166

The powerful can be as timid as the weak. What seems to count more than possession of instruments of power is faith in the future. –loc 194

Where power is not joined with faith in the future, it is used mainly to ward off the new and preserve the status quo. On the other hand, extravagant hope, even when not backed by actual power, is likely to generate a most reckless daring. For the hopeful can draw strength from the most ridiculous sources of power—a slogan, a word, a button. –loc 195

Those who would transform a nation or the world cannot do so by breeding and captaining discontent or by demonstrating the reasonableness and desirability of the intended changes or by coercing people into a new way of life. They must know how to kindle and fan an extravagant hope. –loc 200

Hence men of outstanding achievement and those who live full, happy lives usually set their faces against drastic innovation. The conservatism of invalids and people past middle age stems, too, from fear of the future. –loc 208

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse. –loc 224

For men to plunge headlong into an undertaking of vast change, they must be intensely discontented yet not destitute, and they must have the feeling that by the possession of some potent doctrine, infallible leader or some new technique they have access to a source of irresistible power. They must also have an extravagant conception of the prospects and potentialities of the future. Finally, they must be wholly ignorant of the difficulties involved in their vast undertaking. Experience is a handicap. –loc 227

When a mass movement begins to attract people who are interested in their individual careers, it is a sign that it has passed its vigorous stage; that it is no longer engaged in molding a new world but in possessing and preserving the present. –loc 253

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves. –loc 261

The less justified a man is in claiming excellence for his own self, the more ready is he to claim all excellence for his nation, his religion, his race or his holy cause. –loc 262

A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business. –loc 264

The burning conviction that we have a holy duty toward others is often a way of attaching our drowning selves to a passing raft. What looks like giving a hand is often a holding on for dear life. Take away our holy duties and you leave our lives puny and meaningless. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. –loc 269

In a modern society people can live without hope only when kept dazed and out of breath by incessant hustling. –loc 277

Yet to the frustrated the present is irremediably spoiled. Comforts and pleasures cannot make it whole. No real content or comfort can ever arise in their minds but from hope. –loc 281

Every mass movement is in a sense a migration—a movement toward a promised land; and, when feasible and expedient, an actual migration takes place. –loc 351

Migration, in the mass, strengthens the spirit and unity of a movement; and whether in the form of foreign conquest, crusade, pilgrimage or settlement of new land it is practiced by most active mass movements. –loc 353

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. –loc 365

The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy. –loc 366

Though the disaffected are found in all walks of life, they are most frequent in the following categories: (a) the poor, (b) misfits, (c) outcasts, (d) minorities, (e) adolescent youth, (f) the ambitious (whether facing insurmountable obstacles or unlimited opportunities), (g) those in the grip of some vice or obsession, (h) the impotent (in body or mind), (i) the inordinately selfish, (j) the bored, (k) the sinners. –loc 376

The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility. The goals are concrete and immediate. –loc 404

Where people toil from sunrise to sunset for a bare living, they nurse no grievances and dream no dreams. –loc 412

One of the reasons for the unrebelliousness of the masses in China is the inordinate effort required there to scrape together the means of the scantiest subsistence. –loc 412

Discontent is likely to be highest when misery is bearable; when conditions have so improved that an ideal state seems almost within reach. –loc 417

A grievance is most poignant when almost redressed. –loc 418

It is not actual suffering but the taste of better things which excites people to revolt. –loc 424

The intensity of discontent seems to be in inverse proportion to the distance from the object fervently desired. –loc 429

Our frustration is greater when we have much and want more than when we have nothing and want some. We are less dissatisfied when we lack many things than when we seem to lack but one thing. –loc 433

We dare more when striving for superfluities than for necessities. Often when we renounce superfluities we end up lacking in necessities. –loc 435

Every established mass movement has its distant hope, its brand of dope to dull the impatience of the masses and reconcile them with their lot in life. Stalinism is as much an opium of the people as are the established religions. –loc 445

Where freedom is real, equality is the passion of the masses. Where equality is real, freedom is the passion of a small minority. –loc 487

Equality without freedom creates a more stable social pattern than freedom without equality. –loc 489

Unlimited opportunities can be as potent a cause of frustration as a paucity or lack of opportunities. –loc 700

The attitude is: “All that I am doing or possibly can do is chicken feed compared with what is left undone.” Such is the frustration which broods over gold camps and haunts taut minds in boom times. –loc 701

Patriotism, racial solidarity, and even the preaching of revolution find a more ready response among people who see limitless opportunities spread out before them than among those who move within the fixed limits of a familiar, orderly and predictable pattern of existence. –loc 704

When people are bored, it is primarily with their own selves that they are bored. –loc 729

The consciousness of a barren, meaningless existence is the main fountainhead of boredom. –loc 730

The differentiated individual is free of boredom only when he is engaged either in creative work or some absorbing occupation or when he is wholly engrossed in the struggle for existence. –loc 731

With few exceptions, any group or organization which tries, for one reason or another, to create and maintain compact unity and a constant readiness for self-sacrifice usually manifests the peculiarities—both noble and base—of a mass movement. –loc 778

“To illustrate a principle,” says Bagehot, “you must exaggerate much and you must omit much.” –loc 805

The fully assimilated individual does not see himself and others as human beings. –loc 826

Dying and killing seem easy when they are part of a ritual, ceremonial, dramatic performance or game. –loc 884

There is need for some kind of make-believe in order to face death unflinchingly. To our real, naked selves there is not a thing on earth or in heaven worth dying for. –loc 884

It is only when we see ourselves as actors in a staged (and therefore unreal) performance that death loses its frightfulness and finality and becomes an act of make-believe and a theatrical gesture. –loc 886

It is one of the main tasks of a real leader to mask the grim reality of dying and killing by evoking in his followers the illusion that they are participating in a grandiose spectacle, a solemn or light-hearted dramatic performance. –loc 887

The indispensability of play-acting in the grim business of dying and killing is particularly evident in the case of armies. Their uniforms, flags, emblems, parades, music, and elaborate etiquette and ritual are designed to separate the soldier from his flesh-and-blood self and mask the overwhelming reality of life and death. –loc 898

Glory is largely a theatrical concept. There is no striving for glory without a vivid awareness of an audience—the knowledge that our mighty deeds will come to the ears of our contemporaries or “of those who are to be.” We are ready to sacrifice our true, transitory self for the imaginary eternal self we are building up, by our heroic deeds, in the opinion and imagination of others. –loc 903

To lose one’s life is but to lose the present; and, clearly, to lose a defiled, worthless present is not to lose much. –loc 921

When today is all there is, we grab all we can and hold on. We are afloat in an ocean of nothingness and we hang on to any miserable piece of wreckage as if it were the tree of life. On the other hand, when everything is ahead and yet to come, we find it easy to share all we have and to forego advantages within our grasp. –loc 944

Common suffering by itself, when not joined with hope, does not unite nor does it evoke mutual generosity. –loc 948

We cling to what we call our common sense, our practical point of view. Actually, these are but names for an all-absorbing familiarity with things as they are. The tangibility of a pleasant and secure existence is such that it makes other realities, however imminent, seem vague and visionary. Thus it happens that when the times become unhinged, it is the practical people who are caught unaware and are made to look like visionaries who cling to things that do not exist. –loc 972

“for a living dog is better than a dead lion. For the living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing … neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun.” –loc 992

Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself. –loc 1030

All active mass movements strive, therefore, to interpose a fact-proof screen between the faithful and the realities of the world. They do this by claiming that the ultimate and absolute truth is already embodied in their doctrine and that there is no truth nor certitude outside –loc 1063

It is the true believer’s ability to “shut his eyes and stop his ears” to facts that do not deserve to be either seen or heard which is the source of his unequaled fortitude and constancy. He cannot be frightened by danger nor disheartened by obstacles nor baffled by contradictions because he denies their existence. Strength of faith, as Bergson pointed out, manifests itself not in moving mountains but in not seeing mountains to move. And it is the certitude of his infallible doctrine that renders the true believer impervious to the uncertainties, surprises and the unpleasant realities of the world around him. –loc 1072

The devout are always urged to seek the absolute truth with their hearts and not their minds. “It is the heart which is conscious of God, not the reason.” –loc 1090

Being an instrument of the present, an army deals mainly with the possible. Its leaders do not rely on miracles. Even when animated by fervent faith, they are open to compromise. They reckon with the possibility of defeat and know how to surrender. On the other hand, the leader of a mass movement has an overwhelming contempt for the present—for all its stubborn facts and perplexities, even those of geography and the weather. He relies on miracles. His hatred of the present (his nihilism) comes to the fore when the situation becomes desperate. He destroys his country and his people rather than surrender. –loc 1205

Sarpedon spoke to Glaucus as they stormed the Grecian wall: “O my friend, if we, leaving this war, could escape from age and death, I should not here be fighting in the van; but now, since many are the modes of death impending over us which no man can hope to shun, let us press on and give renown to other men, or win it for ourselves.” –loc 1213

The face of the mass is as “the face of the deep” out of which, like God on the day of creation, he will bring forth a new world. –loc 1224

Heine suggests that what Christian love cannot do is effected by a common hatred. –loc 1230

F. A. Voigt tells of a Japanese mission that arrived in Berlin in 1932 to study the National Socialist movement. Voigt asked a member of the mission what he thought of the movement. He replied: “It is magnificent. I wish we could have something like it in Japan, only we can’t, because we haven’t got any Jews.” –loc 1235

We do not usually look for allies when we love. Indeed, we often look on those who love with us as rivals and trespassers. But we always look for allies when we hate. –loc 1267

There is a guilty conscience behind every brazen word and act and behind every manifestation of self-righteousness. –loc 1292

It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life. –loc 1306

It seems that when we are oppressed by the knowledge of our worthlessness we do not see ourselves as lower than some and higher than others, but as lower than the lowest of mankind. We hate then the whole world, and we would pour our wrath upon the whole of creation. –loc 1325

The act of self-denial seems to confer on us the right to be harsh and merciless toward others. The impression somehow prevails that the true believer, particularly the religious individual, is a humble person. The truth is that the surrendering and humbling of the self breed pride and arrogance. The true believer is apt to see himself as one of the chosen, the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a prince disguised in meekness, who is destined to inherit this earth and the kingdom of heaven, too.18 He who is not of his faith is evil; he who will not listen shall perish. –loc 1349

The deindividualization which is a prerequisite for thorough integration and selfless dedication is also, to a considerable extent, a process of dehumanization. The torture chamber is a corporate institution. –loc 1369

Imitation is often a shortcut to a solution. We copy when we lack the inclination, the ability or the time to work out an independent solution. People in a hurry will imitate more readily than people at leisure. Hustling thus tends to produce uniformity. And in the deliberate fusing of individuals into a compact group, incessant action will play a considerable role.22 –loc 1399

Proselytizing is more a passionate search for something not yet found than a desire to bestow upon the world something we already have. It is a search for a final and irrefutable demonstration that our absolute truth is indeed the one and only truth. –loc 1512

There is a period of waiting in the wings—often a very long period—for all the great leaders whose entrance on the scene seems to us a most crucial point in the course of a mass movement. Accidents and the activities of other men have to set the stage for them before they can enter and start their performance. “The commanding man in a momentous day seems only to be the last accident in a series.” –loc 1539

People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. –loc 1616

To the frustrated, freedom from responsibility is more attractive than freedom from restraint. They are eager to barter their independence for relief from the burdens of willing, deciding and being responsible for inevitable failure. –loc 1618

Action is a unifier. There is less individual distinctness in the genuine man of action—the builder, soldier, sportsman and even the scientist—than in the thinker or in one whose creativeness flows from communion with the self. –loc 1641

The true believer is eternally incomplete, eternally insecure. –loc 1748

What de Rémusat said of Thiers is perhaps true of most men of words: “he has much more vanity than ambition; and he prefers consideration to obedience, and the appearance of power to power itself. Consult him constantly, and then do just as you please. He will take more notice of your deference to him than of your actions.” –loc 1799

Luther, who, when first defying the established church, spoke feelingly of “the poor, simple, common folk,”7 proclaimed later, when allied with the German princelings, that “God would prefer to suffer the government to exist no matter how evil, rather than to allow the rabble to riot, no matter how justified they are in doing so.”8 A –loc 1817

Jesus was not a Christian, nor was Marx a Marxist. –loc 1909

However, the freedom the masses crave is not freedom of self-expression and self-realization, but freedom from the intolerable burden of an autonomous existence. They want freedom from “the fearful burden of free choice,”19 freedom from the arduous responsibility of realizing their ineffectual selves and shouldering the blame for the blemished product. –loc 1930

They believe in the possibility of individual happiness and the validity of individual opinion and initiative. But once a movement gets rolling, power falls into the hands of those who have neither faith in, nor respect for, the individual. And the reason they prevail is not so much that their disregard of the individual gives them a capacity for ruthlessness, but that their attitude is in full accord with the ruling passion of the masses. –loc 1940

The most significant division between men of words is between those who can find fulfillment in creative work and those who cannot. –loc 1960

Said Oliver Cromwell: “A man never goes so far as when he does not know whither he is going.” –loc 2138

But in a traditionally free country the individual who pits himself against coercion does not feel an isolated human atom but one of a mighty race—his rebellious ancestors. –loc 2180

J. B. S. Haldane counts fanaticism among the only four really important inventions made between 3000 B.C. and 1400 A.D. It was a Judaic-Christian invention. And it is strange to think that in receiving this malady of the soul the world also received a miraculous instrument for raising societies and nations from the dead—an instrument of resurrection. –loc 2284

October 6, 2016

Walking

Author: Henry David Thoreau
Rating: 8/10
Last Read: August 2016

Quick Summary: Thoreau’s essay on the joys and virtues of the walking man is an enjoyable read if you like to walk (as I do). Your head will become inflated and you will feel better than all those around you who are in their cars or at their homes sitting idly. The real crown jewel of the essay, however, is his departure into discussion of the wild. It is true, still in this day, that the wild calls to us.

I did not expect to find a timeless piece like this one calling through the ages. Take Thoreau’s advice. Go outside. Turn off your phone. Be in the world with body and spirit. Find something wild.

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap.

My Highlights

For this is the secret of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense, is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. –loc 11

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers, nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our steps. –loc 15

No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and independence which are the capital in this profession. –loc 25

Ambulator nascitur, non fit. –loc 27

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend four hours a day at least—and it is commonly more than that—sauntering through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from all worldly engagements. –loc 33

When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them—as if the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon—I think that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long ago. –loc 35

When a traveler asked Wordsworth’s servant to show him her master’s study, she answered, “Here is his library, but his study is out of doors.” –loc 57

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a certain roughness of character—will cause a thicker cuticle to grow over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their delicacy of touch. –loc 58

I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. –loc 70

In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning occupations and my obligations to Society. But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run in my head and I am not where my body is—I am out of my senses. In my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? –loc 71

Nowadays almost all man’s improvements, so called, as the building of houses and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees, simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. –loc 79

To enjoy a thing exclusively is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come. –loc 129

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. –loc 162

Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of the Wild. The cities import it at any price. Men plow and sail for it. From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source. –loc 220

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. –loc 242

In literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dullness is but another name for tameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking in Hamlet and the Iliad, in all the scriptures and mythologies, not learned in the schools, that delights us. –loc 290

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the human voice—take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for instance—which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet. –loc 325

By long years of patient industry and reading of the newspapers—for what are the libraries of science but files of newspapers—a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. –loc 382

My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence. –loc 390

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience, but a successful life knows no law. –loc 395

It is an unfortunate discovery certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before that we were bound. –loc 396

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past. –loc 452