Habits – Page 10

Bertrand Russell’s 4 rules for avoiding persecution mania

For Bertrand Russell — mathematician, writer, philosopher — persecution mania is two things: a belief that everyone is out to GET you, or a belief that everything that happens is ABOUT you. At a cafe, the woman on the phone who glances your way is gossiping about your outfit; a truck that cuts you off in traffic doesn’t like your driving style; and on it goes…

He believes persecution mania is a cause of insanity and a barrier to happiness, and offers four rules for prevention and relief (hah, I sound like a pharmaceutical commercial):

Number 1: your motives are not as altruistic as you think

Number 2: don’t overestimate your own merits

Number 3: don’t expect others to be as interested in you as you are in yourself

Number 4: don’t assume people care enough about you to want to harm you

Wise words from a book with many more: The Conquest of Happiness. Btw, I’m rewriting it — with the occasional adjustment — in a more casual, simple voice…I’ll share when it’s done!

A must-read for Overachievers and their parents: David Brooks on parenting

Despite the lack of an overt tiger mom and family, I somehow adopted the Overachiever’s mindset at a young age. It took two decades and untold mistakes before I was able to step back and try to understand what happened with any honesty or empathy. And in this Katie Couric interview, David Brooks gave an incredible response to a question about overachievers and parents:

A lot of parents especially in our demographic love their children passionately, also desperately want their children to do really well in life, get into college, get great careers, and so these two forces collide to mean intense attention, intense effort, intense care and love for the child, but also intense anxiety about them not doing well, not getting into the right college, not getting the right job and intense love and relief when they do something well. So the kids are bombarded in a world in which when they do something well they get super bursts of love and when they don’t do something well there’s a little withdrawal and they begin to feel conditional love…I’ll love you as long as you’re on my balance beam but if you get off my balance beam you’re in trouble and we’ll cut you off, and I see this in my students, that the will for unconditional love terrifies them, it leads them to lack of internal criteria to make up their own decisions, it makes them in the most concrete sense have two majors, one for mom & dad and one for me, and they live under this inability to really lead their own lives, because the final act of parenting is letting go and I see some of the parents not come to convocation because they don’t like the job choice, and I’ve seen some very strange things in our culture, in our high-achieving high-pressure culture

This! Minute 54. Try to watch the whole thing. If you’re busy and pressed for time, you can listen to it at 1.25 or 1.5x to speed things up :)

David Brooks on the importance of character and the Greek versus Biblical moral codes

David Brooks is one of my favorite living nonfiction writers. His writing is a rare mix of humility, simplicity and breadth. He thinks deeply about what makes a good person and a good life, questions that are impossible to answer and invaluable to understand yet commonly ignored.

His op-ed The Service Patch is a particular favorite. To quote:

Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options. There’s crass but affluent investment banking. There’s the poor but noble nonprofit world. And then there is the world of high-tech start-ups, which magically provides money and coolness simultaneously. […] In whatever field you go into, you will face greed, frustration and failure. You may find your life challenged by depression, alcoholism, infidelity, your own stupidity and self-indulgence. So how should you structure your soul to prepare for this? Simply working at Amnesty International instead of McKinsey is not necessarily going to help you with these primal character tests. […] It’s worth noting that you can devote your life to community service and be a total schmuck. You can spend your life on Wall Street and be a hero. Understanding heroism and schmuckdom requires fewer Excel spreadsheets, more Dostoyevsky and the Book of Job.

It resonates with the deepest-felt dilemmas of my 20s, which themselves were the result of questions I ignored in my teens, in the pursuit of Ivy League acceptance letters and resume-varnishing job offers.

David Brooks gave the below talk on character at the Aspen Ideas Fest. I took extensive notes with a reminder to review them often. I wanted to share them with you.

Here is how I’d summarize the below

we are mostly good people who aren’t taught about character and its importance in our lives
the Greek character code is based on honor and strength and excellence
the Biblical code is based on humility and love and kindness
it’s the struggle with this duality that makes us who we are
to build character, focus on the right habits, surround yourself with the right people and be organized
religion plays an important role, giving us “awareness of something bigger than yourself”

And here are the full notes:

David Brooks — The Character Code @ Aspen Ideas Fest — REVIEW OFTEN

David grew up in Greenwich Village to liberal Jewish parents who hung out with hippies
he went to UChicago — “the school where fun goes to die”, a “Baptist school where atheist professors teach Jewish students St. Thomas Aquinas”
“world full of good people who don’t have a good vocabulary for character”
imagine a world where you have the neutron, gravity, neutrino, but no system to fit them together
study asked college students to name a moral dilemma, most couldn’t; when pushed, fell back on a “motive-ism” — what feels right for me is right for me, what feels right for you is right for you
existence of uber moms — weigh less than their children; kids raised in this atmosphere are trained in everything, but the most important — character — they’re on their own
there’s a character code from history, that we’ve forgotten
- (a lot of warfare history that I left out)
- what motivated Athenian decisions?
  - grew up with ideology, inspired by Homer (they quoted him like Christians quote Bible today)
  - an Honor Code based on how transitory/fleeting life is, how deeply insignificant an individual life can be
  - you should fight against that insignificance, behave courageously to achieve eternal fame and glory
- THE GREEK CODE — “Homeric man risks life to win honor”
  1. extremely competitive; if won Olympic medal, free meals for life
  2. asserts self, brags and shows off
  3. prowess, be excellent at something and display it to the world
  4. lack of self-doubt, very proud
- the Homeric code, inspired many: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, American founders; Alexander Hamilton called desire for glory “the ruling passion of the noblest minds”
- seen in sports heroism, all politicians, action movies — brave, strong, never self-doubt
there is another code — Moses and the Bible, Jesus
- Moses is meekest man on Earth
- bad public speaker, quiet shepherd
- when anointed by God, he said “you’ve got the wrong guy”
- Jesus, sermon on the Mount, turns every Greek virtue on its head
- loftiness of spirit by caring for downtrodden
- achieve greatness by demonstrating meekness
- power through dependence on God
- strength through vulnerability
- wisdom by accepting ignorance
GREEK versus BIBLICAL model
Western Civilization tries to fuse the two
- chivalry — Greek emphasis on honor with Christian emphasis on love
- Abraham Lincoln personifies — ambition with submission
- George H.W. Bush — ran for President, but raised not to talk about himself, when he did so in campaigning, his Mom would call him and say, “George, you’re talking about yourself”
Joseph Soleveitchik and the two Adams (for more, see Wikipedia), the majestic versus the covenantal; both willed by God, competitive versus cooperative
in merging these two strains, we’ve lost them both
- first, we don’t teach Western Civ anymore
- lost touch with Heroic code because it’s elitist
- lost touch with Biblical code because we’re uncomfortable with sin, assumption “that we have it baked into us”
“good people who are a little formless”
people living this duality
- Atul Gawande in a famously self-confident profession (surgery), but incredible motivation/modesty to see unpleasant facts; does something daring but starting from feeling of weakness
- Jim Collins — sort of a moral philosopher, “always celebrating a certain sort of hero”
  - celebrates the quiet unassuming CEO — boring, anal types
  - promotes a sort of moral code — diligent, prepared, Level 5 leaders “extreme personal humility with extreme personal will”
- Clayton Christensen — spent an hour each day asking, “what is my life about”
humility is: not thinking too highly OR too much about yourself, understanding your own weakness and that life is about struggle
how do we instill these qualities?
- “you can’t change your mind and then your behavior, if we did that, New Years resolutions would work”
- get the little habits right; when they asked Greg Maddux “how’d your day go”, he responded “67 of 73” (as in, 67 pitches left his hand how he wanted, had no control after that)
- being organized, neat
- being around exemplars; we are mimic machines — baby at 43 minutes old wagged her tongue in response to a wagging tongue
- we’re formed by institutions
religion has an important role to play
- grace, gratitude, awareness of something bigger than yourself
- St Augustine in Confessions said he spent 4 years beating himself up for stealing an apple when he was 14
- generally most impressive characters he knew were either deeply religious or grew up in religious atmosphere

Podcasts: new recommendations, favorite episodes, general thoughts

I wrote about my podcast habit more than a year ago. Since then, the podcasting world has grown and grown in variety and quality, and my subscription list has become so long that scrolling through has become tedious.

So, I took some time to create an updated list of recommended shows and favorite episodes, separated into the shows where I try my damndest to hear every episode (and fail), and shows where I dip in and out based on topic and guest.

And here are some overall favorite episodes:

Dan Carlin’s 5-part series on Ghenghis Khan and the Mongol Empire [link], still my all-time favorite
Phil Libin in Stanford’s ETL series [link], honest, thoughtful, unique opinions
TED Radio Hour’s To The Edge episode [link]
Tim Ferriss’s interview with Kevin Kelly [link], what an awesome thinker and writer
Jason Calacanis’s interview with Mark Suster, post-Maker Studios acquisition [link]
Freakonomics on why women are not men (more interesting than you’d think) [link]
Alec Baldwin talking to Rosie O’Donnell for Here’s The Thing [link]
The Fog of Disbelief on the Moth radio hour [link]
RadioLab’s The Black Box (you’ll want to hear the follow-up episode, too) [link]
RadioLab on why Kenyans dominate long-distance running [link]

Marc Maron with Robin Williams (and this very sincere, unplugged Marc Maron interview of Robin Williams)

Random podcast thoughts:

Like radio, its de facto predecessor, in podcasting current news and non-fiction dominate, but I’d like to see more fiction — short stories, plays, dialogues, excerpts of novels, etc. Maybe I haven’t searched thoroughly enough…

The go-to format is a host who interviews a new guest for each episode. Of my 13 favorites, 7 of them are of this interview Q&A variety, which has its limitations. I prefer the quirkier solo shows, like Dan Carlin’s and Nigel Warburton’s…but I’m sure podcasters will continue to experiment here

Podcasting is not a lucrative business. From what I understand of radio, national syndication is where you start to see big bucks. I’ve noticed more sponsorships and ads in professionally produced podcasts (eg, the BS Report, NPR Planet Money) but advertising needs massive viewership for massive dollars. Subscription and pay-per-episode models are uncommon and mostly voluntary. And the podcast patent infringement lawsuit against Adam Carolla revealed that most podcasters make so little money that it’s not worth a patent troll’s time lol

I would LOVE a podcasting app that allows you to press a button and instantly clip a 10-15 second chunk of a particular episode, for personal reference or to share. Also note-taking is cumbersome and involves switching between apps, but I assume that’s a niche problem…

Here’s the list of recommended shows. Thanks for reading y’all!

10 simple beautiful piano songs to play (with pdfs)

My childhood piano experience was a stressful one, but today playing piano has become for me a nice outlet, a relaxing escape from the computer screen, from answering emails and scheduling calendar appointments.

Here are 10 simple beautiful songs that I like to play, with printable PDFs. Note: the YouTube videos are not of me :)

Enjoy!

1. Trois Gymnopedies by Erik Satie — really, just the premiere…