Category: Media

Jim Carrey: “So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.”

Who doesn’t love themselves a good graduation speech? Like an inspiring sermon, sans the sometimes awkwardness of religion, plus more ceremony and uplift. You get to hear a thoughtful person tell you the best stories and lessons of their life, in the most punchy and succinct way they can manage.

Among my favorites are David Brooks’s at Dartmouth on the importance of commitments, George Saunders’s at Syracuse on the failures of kindness, and I can’t leave out David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College: “This is water. This is water.”

To that list I’ve now added Jim Carrey at Maharishi. The speech is like a medley of his greatest acting hits: profound, personal, peculiar, and very funny.

Here are some of my favorite bits:

I learned many great lessons from my father, not the least of which was that you can fail at what you don’t want, so you might as well take a chance on doing what you love.

You can spend your whole life imagining ghosts, worrying about your pathway to the future, but all there will ever be is what’s happening here, and the decisions we make in this moment, which are based in either love or fear.

So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality.

My father used to brag that I wasn’t a ham — I was the whole pig. And he treated my talent as if it was his second chance. When I was about 28, after a decade as a professional comedian, I realized one night in LA that the purpose of my life had always been to free people from concern, like my dad. When I realized this, I dubbed my new devotion, “The Church of Freedom From Concern” — “The Church of FFC”— and I dedicated myself to that ministry.

You can join the game, fight the wars, play with form all you want, but to find real peace, you have to let the armor fall. Your need for acceptance can make you invisible in this world.

I’ve often said that I wished people could realize all their dreams of wealth and fame so they could see that it’s not where you’ll find your sense of completion.

No matter what you gain, ego will not let you rest. It will tell you that you cannot stop until you’ve left an indelible mark on the earth, until you’ve achieved immortality. How tricky is the ego that it would tempt us with the promise of something we already possess.

Why life is a JUGGLING act not a balancing act

“I think it’s about juggling. The juggling metaphor is a lot more apt. One of the things about juggling is that you’ve got to keep your eye on all the balls. A second thing about juggling is each time you touch something you have to give it energy. You’ve got to throw it up in the air so that it takes care of itself while you’re working on the others. You’ve also got to throw the balls thoughtfully and carefully. That requires a lot of practice. The third thing about juggling, though, is you’ve got to catch the falling ball. The most important ball is the one that’s about to hit the ground.” – Howard Stevenson

From a meeting between Harvard’s divinity school and business school:

Notes from Sam Harris’s interview of Will MacAskill

Here’s the episode, it’s fantastic and dense and requires a more attentive listen than your average podcast:

I wanted to share a few particularly powerful comments:

  • Obligation versus Opportunity paradox: an obligation is when you have the moral imperative to help a person or cause because your life is better, which doesn’t seem to convince either Sam or Will. An opportunity is when you help because you’ll feel better and improve your reputation as a result, and this is more convincing to both. Will’s Effective Altruism movement is based on this
  • 90/10 problem: 90% of r&d funds are spent on 10% of humanity’s problems. For example, Will mentions male pattern baldness as an example of a problem that attracts a lot of research dollars but it mostly affects a small, well-off minority, while new antiobiotics aren’t being invented because the profit motive isn’t there
  • Will describes patents as “two wrongs trying to make a right”. Very interesting. The first wrong is that companies can’t capture the full market value of their r&d, and the second wrong is to grant a legitimate monopoly in the form of patents and hope the two failures cancel each other out

A Personal Bible: how to collect and review life’s most valuable lessons

April 2020: Here’s the latest PDF version

I read a lot, but I forget even more. Frustrated with the forgetting, I began to save my favorite readings into Evernote: Blog posts. Book excerpts. Forum threads. Poems. But once inside Evernote, all this wisdom was lost in the crowd, rarely to be discovered again. I didn’t have a reliable way to remind myself of what to review and when. Didn’t allow for serendipity or habit.

So I created a Personal Bible.

It’s a Microsoft Word document of my favorite text from over the years. Passages and sentences and excerpts that I want to read and re-read and absorb and marinate in. Whenever I have an aha! moment with text, I add it to my collection. From David Brooks columns to Malcolm Gladwell passages, from bucket lists to the Beatitudes, from writing advice to religious anecdotes. I try to read from it every day. Sometimes just a few sentences.

If we use the computer as an analogy, this document helps me keep life’s important lessons loaded onto my mind’s RAM. Lying just beneath conscious thought, available for quick and ready access.

Here’s the latest version you can download. Feel free to read it, edit it, use it as a template for your own.

I load the Word doc onto my Kindle and update it monthly. You may find some gems that you like. Better yet, I hope you’re inspired to create your own. If you do, please share it with me. I’d love to see what you curate for yourself.

“I have come to realize that I had everything that was important before I left”

“I was the ambitious one, the one that strayed far from home, chasing the dream, getting caught up in the consumerism. I’m glad that by the age of 38 I have come to realize that I had everything that was important before I left. The remainder was a constant cycle of churn, want more, want bigger, want better, want newer, want more convenient. Except it’s hard when it’s being fed to you every day by every billboard, every sign, every menu, every advert, every press release, every news story, every TV show to differentiate between want and need. When you stop to analyze what you actually need – I mean really need: clean air, clean water, shelter, nutrition, sanitation, family, community, companionship; how much of what you’re being sold every day is truly ‘needed’ and how much of it is a want to fulfill some notion that has been sold to you by the media?”

…from Hacker News.