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by
David Brooks
Read between
August 23 - September 12, 2019
My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality.
“But what our human emotions seem to require,” he wrote, “is the sight of struggle going on. The moment the fruits are being merely eaten, things become ignoble. Sweat and effort, human nature strained to its uttermost and on the rack, yet getting through it alive, and then turning its back on its success to pursue another [challenge] more rare and arduous still—this
“The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing, the marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s pains.”
It’s really hard to know your current self, but it’s pretty well impossible to know what your future transformed self will be like. You can’t rationally think through this problem, because you have no data about the desires of the transformed you.
Every choice is a renunciation, or an infinity of renunciations.
For many, the big choices in life often aren’t really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing.
“The big choices we make are practically random.”
intuitions are unstable. Feelings are usually fleeting and
loss aversion, priming effects, the halo effect, the optimism bias, and so forth.
“Intuition” is a fancy word for pattern recognition. It can be trusted only in domains in which you have a lot of experience, in which the mind has time to master the various patterns.
By approaching the decision rationally, scientifically, you can break the decision-making down into clear stages. Decision-making experts fill books with clear decision stages: preparation (identify the problem; determine your objectives), search (assemble a list of the possible jobs or people that will help you meet your objectives), evaluation (make a chart and rate the options on a ten-point scale according to various features), confrontation (ask disconfirming questions; create constructive disagreement to challenge existing premises), selection (tally up the scores; build a consequences
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How will this decision feel in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years? That will help you put the short-term emotional pain of any decision in the context of long-term consequences.
it, too, is insufficient. The first problem is the one described at the start of this chapter. You can have no data on what your transformed self will want,
When making a commitment decision, defining the purpose of your life is the biggest part of the problem. That’s a matter of the ultimate horizon. The question What is my ultimate good? is a different kind of question than How can I win at Monopoly?
But if you are trying to discern your vocation, the right question is not What am I good at? It’s the harder questions: What am I motivated to do? What activity do I love so much that I’m going to keep getting better at it for the next many decades? What do I desire so much that it captures me at the depth of my being?
Interest multiplies talent and is in most cases more important than talent. The crucial terrain to be explored in any vocation search is the terrain of your heart and soul, your long-term motivation. Knowledge is plentiful; motivation is scarce.
That means you are looking into the unconscious regions of heart and soul that reason cannot penetrate.
There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable.
The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.
There are some activities that cover over the heart and soul—the ones that are too analytic, economic, prudently professional, and comfortably bourgeois. There are some that awaken the heart and engage the soul—music, drama, art, friendship, being around children, being around beauty, and, paradoxically, being around injustice.
They decide they’d rather be line workers than managers, teachers rather than principals, writers rather than editors. The thing other people call “impact,” or working “at scale,” is overrated. But in most of the cases I’ve been around, people take the promotion.
they realize they are most fulfilled when they are instruments for serving an institution that helps address a problem. They have found their vocation.
Say yes to every opportunity that comes along, because you never know what will lead to what. Have a bias toward action. Think of yourself as a fish that is hoping to get caught. Go out there among the fishhooks.
“usually caused by a sense of outrage about some injustice, wrong-doing or unfairness we see in society.” But he goes on to argue that “you should ignore 99% of these moments of obligation,” no matter how guilty it makes you feel. The world is full of problems, but very few are the problems you are meant to address.
If you were born lucky, you should solve big problems. Second, “Am I uniquely positioned…to make this happen?”
“Am I truly passionate?”
something he was uniquely prepared to do.
What problems are around me? What has my life given me as preparation? How can the two go together?
A vocation decision is not about finding the biggest or most glamorous problem in the world. Instead, it’s about finding a match between a delicious activity and a social need. It’s the same inward journey we’ve seen before: the plunge inward and then the expansion outward. Find that place in the self that is driven to connect with others, that spot where, as the novelist Frederick Buechner famously put it, your deep gladness meets the world’s deep hunger.
work should have length—something you get better at over a lifetime. It should have breadth—it should touch many other people. And it should have height—it should put you in service to some ideal and satisfy the soul’s yearning for righteousness.
“In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself,” Emerson wrote, “add observation to observation, patient of neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, happy enough if he can truly satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly.”
Just as all writing is really rewriting, all commitment is really recommitment. It’s saying yes to the thing you’ve already said yes to.
brain peaks early in life, in the twenties. After that, brain cells die, memory deteriorates. But the lessons of experience compensate. We get much better at recognizing patterns and can make decisions with much less effort.
What I have lost with age in my capacity for hard mental work, I seem to have gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost unfairly easy insight.”
they don’t want to appear earnest about their high and powerful idealism—the need to express some emotion in themselves, to explore some experience.
“Drudgery is the touchstone of character.”
There are (at least) two kinds of failure. In the first kind you are good, but other people can’t grasp how good you are.
In the second kind, you fail because you’re not as good as you thought you were, and other people see it. We all want to imagine that our failures are of the first kind, but one suspects that something like 95 percent of failures are of the second kind. One of the character tests on the road to mastery involves recognizing that fact.
Mastery takes too much discipline and usually involves some form of asceticism.
It’s precisely the lack of social and emotional flow that can propel creativity. As the poet Christian Wiman puts it, “An artist is conscious of always standing apart from life, and one of the results of this can be that you begin to feel most intensely what you have failed to feel:
It is an act of raw moral courage to reject the voices all around and to choose what you have chosen before. It looks like you are throwing away your chance at stardom, but you are actually staying in touch with what got you there.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
considered marriage as the most interesting event of one’s life, the foundation of happiness or misery.”
Romantic view for a tragic (and at points comedic) awareness that every human will frustrate, anger, annoy, madden and disappoint us….There can be no end to our sense of emptiness and incompleteness.”
Americans now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem, and personal growth.” A spouse becomes, in the famed psychologist Carl Rogers’s words, “my companion in our separate but intertwined pathways of growth.”
She read the American magazines and found they celebrated “the savvy, sovereign chooser who is well aware of his needs and acts on the basis of self-interest.” Perhaps the greatest problem with this
If you go into marriage seeking self-actualization, you will always feel frustrated because marriage, and especially parenting, will constantly be dragging you away from the goals of self.
marriage is a moral microcosm of life, in which each person freely chooses to take on responsibility for others, and become dependent on others in order to do something larger.
The maximal marriage is something you hurl yourself into, burning the boats behind you.
“If two spouses each say, ‘I’m going to treat my self-centeredness as the main problem in the marriage,’ you have the prospect of a truly great marriage.”
