Category: Media

Your Personal Bible: making a handbook of your most treasured text

Since publishing the below post I’ve finished and shared mine publicly. You can read about and download the file here

Your Personal Bible

I’ve come to really value the process of reading the same content over and over and over, until I feel that I know it inside and out like a favorite song or an old sweatshirt. It’s a habit I’ve grown to enjoy and I think it has many uses. Today I want to take the concept a step further and share the idea of building your own Personal Bible.

The Judeo-Christian Bible, from my perspective, is a set of stories and lessons that have not only survived but thrived for millenia. It is both a historical document (who, what, when, where) and a doctrinal one (how you should live, and why). Believers read the Bible weekly if not daily, both silently and out loud, in private and within groups. For many centuries, the Bible was a growing, changing document to which its authors added and removed, edited and curated.

A few weeks ago I began to build my own such “bible”, by collecting my favorite texts from blog posts, books, poems, notes, and the like. (I mean no offense to Christians or anyone who may be put off by a perceived misuse of the word)

My goal for this Personal Bible is to have a handbook of the most inspiring, powerful, and interesting content I’ve experienced. Something I can read every day or as often as possible, a resource I can turn to when facing important decisions or tough emotional times. Together, they represent the ideas and beliefs and insights that I want to remember forever, concepts that I want to become a concrete part of my daily life.

Here are some examples of content that I’ve included in mine:

  • Richard Hamming: You and Your Research [link]
  • Paul Graham: How to do what you love [link]
  • David Brooks: The Heart Grows Smarter [link]
  • Paul Buchheit: Applied Philosophy, a.k.a. “Hacking” [link]
  • Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power [Kindle]
  • Steve Pavlina: Broadcast Your Desires [link]
  • 38 insights from Alain de Botton [link]
  • The Scott Adams happiness formula [link]
  • Jiro and Rene Redzepi have a cup of tea [link]
  • Derek Sivers: Hell Yeah or No [link]
  • Patrick McKenzie: Don’t End The Week With Nothing [link]
  • George Saunders advice to graduates [link]
  • Jure Robic and “That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger” [link]
  • The BVP Anti-Portfolio [link]

When I struggle to commit to a project or path, I read about Jure Robic and how he pushes his mind to near insanity. When I want to be more effective with my time and efforts, I read Richard Hamming’s advice on how to do great work. And so on.

(please note: for most of the above content, I do not include the full text in my bible, but rather my notes and select quotes and excerpts that I pull from the pieces)

And within this document I also include a few of my favorite poems, such as:

The Man Watching by Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time, and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined to fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Alain de Botton said something like, we are already far better read than the great Greek philosophers of old, yet we are still think we’re not well-read enough. We hunger for the new. Instead, why not spend our limited time to really understand and know deep within our soul the great stuff we’ve already enjoyed?

“It’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free” – a collection of insights from David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks)

David Brooks is another of my favorite writers / thinkers. Like this post on Alain de Botton, here’s a collection of notes that I’ve taken from David Brooks’s writings and talks. There will be a part 2 at some point. There was too much for just one post.

“In the realm of emotion they have a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect, they have a set, permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action, they have commitments to projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality, they have a certain consistency and rigor that’s almost perfect.” – David Brooks (from The Atlantic)

The Moral Bucket List [NYT]

  • “The résumé virtues are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that are talked about at your funeral”
  • “You lack a moral vocabulary. It is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity.”
  • “But all the people I’ve ever deeply admired are profoundly honest about their own weaknesses. They have identified their core sin”
  • “But people on the road to inner light do not find their vocations by asking, what do I want from life? They ask, what is life asking of me? How can I match my intrinsic talent with one of the world’s deep needs?”
  • “The people on this road see the moments of suffering as pieces of a larger narrative. […] They see life as a moral drama and feel fulfilled only when they are enmeshed in a struggle on behalf of some ideal.”

The 4 Types of Commitments [YouTube]

  • failure advice sucks, don’t fail
  • happiness peaks in 20s, then declines until bottoming out at 47, then climbs again
  • “you need an agency moment, when you’re deciding your own criteria for judging success”
  • making commitments is key, there are 4 types:
    1. to spouse and family
    2. to career and vocation (“a vocation summons you”)
    3. to faith or philosophy
    4. to community and village
  • morality has an inverse logic: give to receive, failure leads to success, find yourself by losing yourself
  • society today values skills over character
  • “it’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free”

The Heart Grows Smarter [NYT]

  • “It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.”
  • “In case after case, the magic formula is capacity for intimacy combined with persistence, discipline, order and dependability.”

The Service Patch [NYT]

  • “But I was struck by the unspoken assumptions. Many of these students seem to have a blinkered view of their options.”
  • “Many people today find it easy to use the vocabulary of entrepreneurialism, whether they are in business or social entrepreneurs. This is a utilitarian vocabulary. How can I serve the greatest number? How can I most productively apply my talents to the problems of the world? It’s about resource allocation.”
  • “Around what ultimate purpose should your life revolve? Are you capable of heroic self-sacrifice or is life just a series of achievement hoops? These, too, are not analytic questions about what to do. They require literary distinctions and moral evaluations.”

The Thought Leader [NYT]

  • “The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited.”
  • “By his late 20s, he has taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre.”
  • “The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity.”

The Haimish Line [NYT]

  • “We live in a highly individualistic culture. When we’re shopping for a vacation we’re primarily thinking about Where. The travel companies offer brochures showing private beaches and phenomenal sights. But when you come back from vacation, you primarily treasure the memories of Who — the people you met from faraway places, and the lives you came in contact with.”

38 powerful insights from Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton)

Alain de Botton is one of my favorite thinkers/writers/intellectuals. I’ve written about his work in the past, such as his TED talk on success and his book Religion for Atheists.

By now I’ve read and watched a lot of the content he’s put online, so I wanted to share some of my favorite insights across his work with you. So in no particular order…

(most of the below is paraphrase, with direct quotes in italics)

Alain de Botton on how to think more about sex

1. There’s nothing that is considered sexy that isn’t, with the wrong person, disgusting

2. The magic of oral sex is that it takes the dirtiest part of us and makes it clean. That part is accepted by another person

3. What turns us on? It’s often what’s missing…from our childhoods, our moms

4. Why do we have too little sex? It’s because the person we have sex with is someone we do too much other stuff with (in past, people had more specific gender and vocational roles but now, we do everything together)

Alain de Botton on success
on YouTube

5. Snobbery is when you know only a little bit about someone but draw much larger conclusions about them

6. We’re not materialistic, we live in a society where emotional rewards are pegged to material goods. So when you see a Ferrari driver, don’t criticize them for being greedy, instead, see them as somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love

7. We’ve done away with the caste system. We’re told anyone can achieve anything, which generates envy (envy is our dominant modern emotion)

8. What is envy? Envy is relatability. When you can’t relate to them, you can’t envy them

9. It’s bad enough to not get what you want. It’s even worse to get what you want, after all this hard work, only to realize it may not be what you wanted all along

Alain de Botton on status anxiety

10. Low-paying jobs are frowned upon not just because of the pay…but because of their perceived status. Vice-versa for high-paying jobs

11. In a “just” society like ours, we believe the rich deserve their success, but we also assume the poor deserve their failure (which makes it harder to tolerate our own mediocrity or lack of success)

12. Jesus and Socrates as great exemplars for being sacrificial and sticking to their beliefs

13. We want the respect of people who we don’t even respect

Alain de Botton on why pessimism is healthy

14. The problem with society is that, with the engines of science, technology, and commerce, we’ve taken such great strides as mankind that we forget pessimism’s usefulness in individuals, and in the day-to-day.

15. Ironically, the secular are least suited to cope because they believe we can achieve heaven on earth through Silicon Valley, Fortune 500s, university research, etc

16. Religions provide angels – forever young and beautiful – to worship, and our lovers instead to tolerate (whereas secular people are always complaining, “why can’t you be more perfect?”).

Alain de Botton’s talk at Google
on YouTube

17. We’ve offloaded making up our minds to things like social media and the news

18. News drives us insane with envy; envy is good, but we don’t extract its lessons

19. We need MORE bias in the news: GOOD bias, not false fairness

Alain de Botton on Socrates and self confidence
on YouTube

20. There are 5 steps to have a good thought:

Step 1. look for “plain common sense” statements
Step 2. try to find exceptions
Step 3. if an exception is found, that must mean statement is false or imprecise
Step 4. try to incorporate the exception into the original statement
Step 5. continue this process, keep finding exceptions, until it’s impossible to disprove

21. Socrates believed we can have an interesting philosophical conversation anywhere, on a street corner or at home or in a foreign place

22. Socrates had reservations about democracy (lived in Athenian democracy). He argued that just because the majority of people believe something doesn’t make it right. What matters is whether the argument is logical and reasonable, not whether the majority says so

Alain de Botton on La Rochefoucauld
Philosophers Mail

23. There are some people who would never have fallen in love, if they had not heard there was such a thing.

Alain de Botton on Epicurus on happiness
on YouTube

24. Happiness is important: it comes from friends (as permanent companions), freedom (Epicurus left city life to start a commune), and an analyzed life (to find the time and space for quiet thinking about our lives)

Alain de Botton on Schopenhauer and his views on love
on YouTube

25. Being hurt by rejection is to not fully understand the requirements of acceptance

26. Love has nothing to do with happiness, it’s all about procreation, the “Will to life” (like Nietzsche’s “Will to power”)

Alain de Botton on Nietzsche and hardship
on YouTube

27. One of the few philosophers who wrote about pain and hardship, he believed they were necessary evil for enjoyment and success

Alain de Botton on Montaigne on self-esteem

28. Animals often surpass us in wisdom. They are much more natural about their bodies

29. Every society has customs which create narrow minds. To counter it, travel widely

30. How can you test for wisdom? Ask questions such as:

What should one do when anxious?
What is a good parent?
How can you tell if one is in love or infatuated?

31. “even on the highest throne, we are seated, still, on our asses”

From Religion for Atheists

32. As John Stuart Mill, another Victorian defender of the aims of education, put it: ‘The object of universities is not to make skillful lawyers, physicians or engineers. It is to make capable and cultivated human beings.’

33. We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

34. The single danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings – much to their detriment – are at risk of taking psychological centre stage

35. The modern world is not, of course, devoid of institutions. It is filled with commercial corporations of unparalleled size which have an intriguing number of organizational traits in common with religions. But these corporations focus only on our outer, physical needs, on selling us cars and shoes, pizzas and telephones. Religion’s great distinction is that while it has a collective power comparable to that of modern corporations pushing the sale of soap and mashed potatoes, it addresses precisely those inner needs which the secular world leaves to disorganized and vulnerable individuals.

36. Religions do not, as modern universities will, limit their teaching to a fixed period of time (a few years of youth), a particular space (a campus) or a single format (the lecture).

37. Comte…was convinced that humanity was still at the beginning of its history and that all kinds of innovation – however bold and far- fetched they might initially sound – were possible in the religious field, just as in the scientific one. […] The age he lived in, he asserted, afforded him a historic opportunity to edit out the absurdities of the past and to create a new version of religion which could be embraced because it was appealing and useful… He drew most heavily from Catholicism […] and also essayed occasional forays into the theology of Judaism, Buddhism and Islam.

38. Images of tranquillity and security haunt it: a particular job, social conquest or material acquisition always seems to hold out the promise of an end to craving. In reality, however, each worry will soon enough be replaced by another, and one desire by the next, generating a relentless cycle of what Buddhists call ‘grasping’, or upādāna in Sanskrit.

World famous chefs Rene Redzepi and Jiro Ono on habits: “The people who are truly at the top won’t say they want to retire after they are 70 or 80. They just fasten their belts after that.”

Jiro and Rene run Michelin-starred restaurants and are among the most respected chefs in the world. For twelve minutes they drink tea and talk about mastery. I wanted to share parts of their conversation. You can tell both chefs have built great habits of hard work and good attitude and pushing, always pushing.

Jiro: If you start saying “I don’t like this” or “this isn’t the job for me” you won’t become an expert in anything

Rene: When did you feel like you were finally a master?
Jiro: 50.

Rene: Did [you] ever want to stop?
Jiro: No. Never. I never considered that question. The only question was, “how can I get better?”

Rene: What makes you happiest?
Jiro: I can work. That’s the first and most important thing. I can work. After that, it’s especially great if you enjoy what you do.

Jiro: If you don’t learn to love your work and remind your brain to make new steps every day, there can be no progress.

Jiro: [on Rene] You are stubborn, right? If you aren’t a strong willed person, you can’t get to this. And you are sensitive, too. Both have to be there to become like this.

Jiro: The people who are truly at the top won’t say they want to retire after they are 70 or 80. They just fasten their belts after that.

Two masters discussing what they do best. A highly recommended video. 12 minutes long. Simply filmed, well executed.

Richard Hamming on the habits of great research

richard-hamming-habits
I probably review this talk by mathematician Richard Hamming once a month if not more often. Here are my favorite excerpts:

Given two people with exactly the same ability, the one person who manages day in and day out to get in one more hour of thinking will be tremendously more productive over a lifetime.

If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work. Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them.

…there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder. Somehow they seem to work on slightly the wrong thing – not much, but enough that they miss fame.

I strongly prefer to work on my own and without noise or bother from outside. But it’s a valuable reminder: socializing (both yourself and your work) can lead to greater career success. As with all things, the difficulty probably lies in balancing between the two poles.

But if you want to be a great scientist you’re going to have to put up with stress. You can lead a nice life; you can be a nice guy or you can be a great scientist.

The habits that emerge: Allow time for deep thinking. Know the important problems in your field. Keep the door open. Adapt to stress.