The whole essay’s great and you should just read it but I wanted to share some incredible and unforgettable examples that he cites:
Shared verbatim, all credit Visakan: “Seriousness is love and curiosity expressed earnestly.”
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Justo Gallego Martínez was serious. At about 36 years old, he got stricken with tuberculosis, got better, promised God that he would build a cathedral, and spent the remaining 60 years of his life building it. “When I started building, word on the street was that I was crazy. They didn’t believe I would be so dedicated… I’m proving them wrong.”
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Dashrath “Mountain Man” Manjhi was serious. In 1959, Dashrath Manjhi’s wife died from her injuries after a fall, being unable to get medical attention in time. He spent the next 22 years using a hammer and chisel to carve a 360ft path through a mountain, reducing the distance between his village and the nearest doctor from 55-70km to 1km. “When I started hammering the hill, people called me a lunatic but that steeled my resolve.”
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Hokusai was serious. Here’s him talking about his paintings after ~70 years of working on them: “From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.”