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A job is a way of making a living, but work is a particular way of being needed, of fulfilling the responsibility that life has placed before you.
your 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 id...
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A person who has found his vocation has been released from the anxiety of uncertainty,
But the brain is satisfied with good enough. If you want to achieve the level of mastery, you have to learn the skill so deliberately that when the knowledge is stored down below, it is perfect.
The more creative the activity is, the more structured the work routine should probably be.
this kind of structured discipline is necessary if you want to escape the tyranny of the scattered mind. “Self-discipline is a form of freedom,” he writes. “Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and the demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear—and doubt.”
If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should get off the mound.
The master has the ability to self-distance from what he is doing.
I separate all my relevant papers into piles on the carpet of my study or living room. Each pile is a paragraph in my column or my book.
Ryan Holiday
Vocation can be a cure for self-centeredness, because to do the work well you have to pay attention to the task itself.
happy enough if he can truly satisfy himself alone,
“Drudgery is the touchstone of character.”
You can be knowledgeable with other men’s knowledge, but you can’t be wise with other men’s wisdom.
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: a certain emotional reserve in one’s life becomes a source of great power in one’s work.”
Springsteen himself sang about escaping and running away to total freedom. But personally, he never fell for that false lure. He went back deeper into his roots, deeper into his unchosen responsibilities,
If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place, if you embody a distinct tradition, if your concerns are expressed through a specific imaginative landscape, you are going to have more depth and definition than you are if you grew up on the far-flung networks of eclecticism, surfing from one spot to the next, sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft commitments or none at all.
If yu stand for nothing, what wll you fall for?
One problem with the individualistic view, as always, is that it traps people in the small prison of the self. 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.
become lovely
Adam Smith
Marriage is the sort of thing where it’s safer to go all in, and it’s dangerous to go in half-hearted.
The opposite of love is not hate; it’s indifference.
the way the thoughts you have while exercising are always bold.
Politeness is at the core of morality.
“Those of us who wish to pride ourselves on autonomy, on the self-made life, on freedom of choice, are often humbled by the recognition that archaic patterns are playing through us. Who is in charge of our lives if we are not?”
What are the ways you are crazy? What parts of your life have been blocked by fear? How exactly do you self-destruct? In what ways have you not been loved?
Every relationship has a central disagreement, which will never go away and which both people are just going to have to live with.
“Suffering makes immature love grow into mature love,” Walter Trobisch writes. “Immature unlearned love is egotistic. It’s the kind of love children have, demanding and wanting—and wanting instantaneously.”
I’ve put a lot of emphasis on the heart and soul in this book, but in any commitment decision the rational brain is an equal partner.
We may marry or we may part, but this is my life. I am responsible for my choices. I’m perfectly capable of deciding well.
The Greeks distinguished between three types of love: philia (friendship), eros (passion), and agape (selfless giving).
In the end, people in an enduring marriage achieve metis. That’s the Greek word for a kind of practical wisdom, an intuitive awareness of how things are, how things go together, and how things will never go together.
Metis = Practical wisdom
Marriage, like all commitments, isn’t there to make you happy; it is there to make you grow.
The experts are aligned when it comes to how to recommit: Don’t expect some ultimate solution to the big disagreement in your marriage. Overwhelm the negative by increasing the positive. Swamp negative interactions with the five love languages: words of affirmation, acts of service, gifts, quality time, and personal touch.
Recommitment is the time for “Can we take a walk this afternoon?” and “You relax. I’ll vacuum.”
that the power of reason is inadequate to understand the complexity of the world, and that we should respect the “just prejudice” of our culture, the traditions that have stood the test of time.
Taleb
To put it more bluntly, the purpose of a school was to shape the students’ souls.
It did that by exposing students to excellence. “One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character,” the British educator Sir Richard Livingstone wrote. “More often it is due to an inadequate ideal.” So one job of a teacher was, in this educational model, to hold up exemplars. “I make honorable things pleasant to children,”
Moral development is tremendously important, everybody acknowledged, but it’s something you sort of do on your own.
The universities, like the rest of society, are information rich and meaning poor.
When I attended, the study of the Great Books occupied at least the first two years of study, and often beyond.
The mysteries of life and how to live well were there for the seizing for those who read well and thought deeply.
Western Civ took me outside the assumption of my time, outside the values of the modern meritocracy and America’s worship of success.
Western Civ inspired me to spend my life pursuing a philosophy—to spend decades trying to find a worldview that could handle the complexity of reality, but also offer a coherent vision that could frame my responses to events and guide me through the vicissitudes of life.
Seeing well is not natural. It is an act of humility. It means getting your own self—your own needs and wishes—out of the way, so that you can see the thing you’re looking at as itself, and not just as a mirror of your own interests.
Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”
We all get a little thrill when we come across a passage in a book that puts into words something we had vaguely intuited.
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
The people and institutions who leave a mark provide you with better things to love,
But ultimately joy is found not in satisfying your desires but in changing your desires so you have the best desires. The educated life is a journey toward higher and higher love.
the salvation of this human world lies nowhere else than in the human heart, in the human power to reflect, in human modesty, in human responsibility.
Frankl discovered that while the body grows according to what it consumes, the soul grows by the measure of love it pours out.
