Tag: alain de botton

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 It is both a historical document (who, what, when, where) and a doctrinal one (how you should live, and why).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?

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.

Alain de Botton on success

I always enjoy Alain de Botton’s work. He’s insightful, he’s prolific, and among the writers I follow, he cares the most about helping us become better people, to reach for our better angels.

Some people may call his work “pop philosophy”, but what’s wrong with that? Those very same people might benefit most from engaging with his questions and observations.

I recently watched his below TED talk on how to think about success, and wanted to share my notes with y’all. For more on Alain, here’s my initial post. In the timelines of our lives, mine would have an arrow pointing to early 2012 with the label “started reading Alain de Botton.”

Notes

  • snobbery is when you only know a little bit about someone but draw much larger conclusions about them
  • iconic question: “what do you do?”
  • if we could all be like our mothers, who don’t care if we’re successful and accept us unconditionally
  • we’re not by nature materialistic, we simply live in a society where emotional rewards are pegged to material goods; when you see a Ferrari driver, don’t criticize them for being greedy, because they’re actually communicating that they’re incredibly vulnerable and in need of love
  • we’ve done away with the caste system and we’re told that anyone can achieve anything, which generates envy
  • envy: when you can’t relate to them, you can’t envy them (which is why you don’t even the Queen of England, and why de Botton believes you should never go to a school reunion :)
  • any vision of success needs to admit what you’ll lose out on
  • why we love nature: in part, an escape from the human anthill
  • in the Middle Ages, the word for someone at the bottom of society was an “unfortunate”, which describes the lack of control in their life station
  • make sure your ideas of success are yours: “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”
  • think of your ideal dad – someone who’s tough but gentle – tough line to straddle

Why everyone should read some Alain de Botton

Alain de Botton @ TEDLet’s face it, we’re a pretty hypocritical country: we watch porn in record amounts but shun abortion; we drive Toyota Priuses but keep our lights on when we leave the house; we spend billions on diet books and fitness fads then stop by Wendy’s on the way home. It can overwhelm, at times.

I believe it’s partially driven by religion, or the lack thereof. Religious folk struggle to maintain their values in our sex-soaked, technology-obsessed culture; nonreligious folk (call them what you like: atheists, agnostics, the “spiritual but not religious”) struggle to find a sense of purpose, a greater good. We’re conflicted, caught between who we are and who we want to be (and believe). And hypocrisy – Greek for “acting of a theatrical part” – is the result.

That’s why I love reading Alain de Botton, and why I recommend his work. He’s chicken soup for the modern soul.

de Botton believes we’ve secularized, but have done so badly. In our abrupt, aggressive departure from religion, we’ve run away from home but are still wandering the streets without safety or shelter.

Instead of shunning religion, we should learn from it. We should, in the greatest sense of the word, steal pieces of it — for example, a belief in giving back, or love for neighbor and stranger — and make those pieces a part of our lives.

And the best part? It’s not just for nonbelievers: Christians can learn from Hindus, Buddhists can learn from Muslims, and so on.

His solution makes immediate, visceral sense. If humankind aspires to a true global village, this is the culture it must create.

de Botton is better-known in Europe than the States. They’re more secular, for one. His provocative titles, like “Religion for Atheists” or “Atheism 2.0”, would be dismissed forthwith here. Europe is also more removed, if by a small margin, from some of his critiques of what polisci students would call “American soft power.” Even his name is hard to pronounce (try saying “Botton” five times without hearing “bottom”).

But he’s prolific, he’s persuasive, and he’s profound. Start with his Twitter feed, a stream of seemingly simple self-help soundbites. Yes, he might be the intellectual man’s Tony Robbins, but there’s more substance, and nuance.

The bottom line: Alain de Botton has changed how I see the world and what I’d like to accomplish before I die.

The other author I’ve frequently praised on this blog is Haruki Murakami. There’s no obvious overlap with de Botton, not in style, format, or demographic, but they both peel back the layers of humankind, to place the emotional and logical pieces of our species into a broader tableau. Murakami’s tableau is a sensory, magical one; de Botton’s is an orderly, harmonious one.

Below, I’ve compiled a selection of my notes from his work, a sort of buffet-style entry to his arguments:

On status anxiety

  • It’s a problem today because 1) we don’t approve of people who receive their status by birth and 2) we believe status can be earned/achieved and therefore it is limitless
  • There are 2 types of self-help books: 1) the Tony Robbins kind, “become a billionaire by Sunday” and 2) how to deal with low self-esteem; they’re connected because if you’re not a billionaire by Saturday, you have self-esteem problems
  • Tocqueville, on his trip around the world, noted that envy would be the #1 emotion that Americans would suffer (as with most democratic, egalitarian societies)
  • In a “just” society like ours, the rich deserve their success, but the poor also deserve their failure (which makes it harder to tolerate our own mediocrity or lack of success)
  • Hundreds of years ago, if you saw a rich person, you would assume he/she was born into it or did something bad to get it; and in ancient Rome, your good fortune was due to the Gods, when something good happened to you, you’d thank God and bless him and sacrifice to him

On why pessimism is healthy

  • Problem with society is that, with the engines of science, technology, and commerce, mankind has taken such great strides that we forget pessimism’s usefulness in individuals, and in the day-to-day
  • The secular are least suited to cope because they believe we can achieve heaven on earth through things like Silicon Valley, Fortune 500s, university research
  • Religions provide angels – forever young and beautiful – to worship, and our lovers are instead meant to be tolerated (whereas secular people are always complaining, “why can’t you be more perfect?”)

On atheism and religion:

  • There’s much to admire about organized religion – the music, architecture, texts, rules, communities
  • Education has two goals – to learn important/technical skills, and to make better human beings
  • We are immensely forgetful beings, which is why religions on average remind people of things five times per day (whereas secular education rarely if ever reviews important lessons)
  • Secular world has religious equivalents, like museums, but they lack power and purpose
  • In 2011, the Catholic Church made $97B. Why is it so successful? Because it’s involved directly in many aspects of peoples’ lives, whereas the academic/intellectual world is more distant, preferring instead to publish books and lecture from afar
  • Religions are like good hosts at a party – bring people together, facilitate intros, help people make things happen

Some videos:

Some tweets:

Some quotes from Religion for Atheists (see here for a longer list):

We can then recognize that we invented religions to serve two central needs which continue to this day and which secular society has not been able to solve with any particular skill: first, the need to live together in communities in harmony, despite our deeply rooted selfish and violent impulses. And second, the need to cope with terrifying degrees of pain which arise from our vulnerability to professional failure, to troubled relationships, to the death of loved ones and to our decay and demise.

I recognized that my continuing resistance to theories of an afterlife or of heavenly residents was no justification for giving up on the music, buildings, prayers, rituals, feasts, shrines, pilgrimages, communal meals and illuminated manuscripts of the faiths.

In a restaurant no less than in a home, when the meal itself – the texture of the escalopes or the moistness of the courgettes – has become the main attraction, we can be sure that something has gone awry.

Religions teach us to be polite, to honour one another, to be faithful and sober, but they also know that if they do not allow us to be or do otherwise every once in a while, they will break our spirit.

The one generalization we might venture to draw from the Judaeo-Christian approach to good behaviour is that we would be advised to focus our attention on relatively small-scale, undramatic kinds of misconduct. Pride, a superficially unobtrusive attitude of mind, was deemed worthy of notice by Christianity, just as Judaism saw nothing frivolous in making recommendations about how often married couples should have sex.

Why, then, does the notion of replacing religion with culture, of living according to the lessons of literature and art as believers will according to the lessons of faith, continue to sound so peculiar to us? Why are atheists not able to draw on culture with the same spontaneity and rigour which the religious apply to their holy texts?

The difference between Christian and secular education reveals itself with particular clarity in their respective characteristic modes of instruction: secular education delivers lectures, Christianity sermons. Expressed in terms of intent, we might say that one is concerned with imparting information, the other with changing our lives.

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.

The benefits of a philosophy of neo-religious pessimism are nowhere more apparent than in relation to marriage, one of modern society’s most grief-stricken arrangements, which has been rendered unnecessarily hellish by the astonishing secular supposition that it should be entered into principally for the sake of happiness.

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.

Thanks everyone. That was a long post but hope you found it useful. I’d love to hear what authors and thinkers inspire you. Also here is a much longer list of stuff I’m reading and highlighting if you’re into that sort of thing.

April Quotes: “If you actually want results, make a 5-year commitment…a lesser commitment is largely pointless” (Steve Pavlina)

For a full list of my favorite quotes, see here. Send me yours, I’m always looking for more.

Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things. – Peter F. Drucker

/** Both are crucial to a mission’s long-term success, but from my Hyperink experience I’ve learned that – as a young(ish) entrepreneur – it’s more important to do the right things than to “do things right” which is often conflated with “work really really really hard” **/

To make sure this goal was achieved, I created eight laws of learning, namely, explanation, demonstration, imitation, repetition, repetition, repetition, and repetition. – John Wooden

/** Wooden is the man. If you want to learn more about the greatest athletic coach of all-time, read this. **/

A Polish Jew in an Episcopal graveyard in a largely Dominican neighborhood. What could be more New York? – Bloomberg’s eulogy at Ed Koch’s funeral

/** Yet another reason I love New York. The ethnic and cultural diversity is unparalleled. No other city comes close, no matter what its citizens would like to believe. **/

If you actually want results, make a 5-year commitment to a particular path, like building an online business, developing your social skills, becoming a world traveler, etc. A lesser commitment is largely pointless. – Steve Pavlina

/** I love reading Steve’s blog. It can sometimes get weird (for example, polyamory, polyphasic sleep), but that’s just a reflection of his always-pushing-the-limits mentality. It stretches your conception of what is possible in life, which is what people who make a difference do. **/

Life is so filled with disappointments that we are likely to assume that they are built into the human condition. On examination, however, there proves to be something disappointments share in common. Each thwarts an expectation of the individual ego. if the ego were to have no expectations, there would be nothing to disappoint. – Huston Smith

/** We are the expectations generation. **/

Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. – Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers

/** Cribbed from Jason’s blog. **/

Anyone who isn’t embarrassed of who they were last year probably isn’t learning enough. – Alain de Botton

/** Have I told you to follow Alain de Botton’s Twitter feed? Well, follow his feed. Please. **/

We should keep a careful diary of our moments of envy – they are our covert guides to what we should try to do next. – Alain de Botton

/** Have you followed his feed yet? **/

What I want out of each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. – Deputy Marshall Gerard in The Fugitive

/** Was reminded of this excellent movie by the one, the only Bill Simmons. And immediately remembered my favorite quote, from Deputy Marshall Gerard :) **/

You know what material this is?

[wait for it…]

…Boyfriend material

/** Super silly but thanks Jasmine! **/

It is exactly of the same nature as the Hindu’s view, that the world rested upon an elephant and the elephant rested upon a tortoise; and when they said, “How about the tortoise?” the Indian said, “Suppose we change the subject.”

/** Hah. Such wisdom. **/

And how could I wrap up this quote without leaving you guys with a little 孔子 wisdom?

If you study, you know. If you know, you’re wise. If you’re wise, you’re fair. If you’re fair, you grow. If you grow, you can manage your family well. If you can manage your family well, you can service the country. If you can serve the country, you can improve the world.

Did I say Alain de Botton had a great Twitter feed? I bet Confucius would put him to shame.