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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Brooks
Read between
March 24 - March 28, 2025
“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. But when you are making a transformational choice, you are leaping into an unknown territory. You don’t know the patterns there. Intuition can’t tell you. It’s just guessing.
Logic is really good when the ends of a decision are clear, when you are playing a game with a defined set of rules.
“Your emotional commitment to what you are doing will be translated directly into your work.4 If you go at your work with half a heart, it will show in the lackluster results and in the laggard way in which you reach the end.”
It won’t work unless the boyish enthusiasm flows genuinely from your very heart. You can’t fake it.
“One’s mind has to be a searching mind,” Thomas Bernhard writes of the person looking for a calling.10 “A mind searching for mistakes, for the mistakes of humanity, a mind searching for failure.”
The best advice I’ve heard for people in search of a vocation is to say yes to everything. 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.
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.
“A man’s never out of work if he’s worth a damn,” the old man reflected. “It’s just sometimes he doesn’t get paid. I’ve gone unpaid my share and I’ve pulled my share of pay. But that’s got nothing to do with working. A man’s work is doing what he’s supposed to do, and that’s why he needs a catastrophe now and again to show him a bad turn isn’t the end, because a bad stroke never stops a good man’s work.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., once advised that 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 ideal and satisfy the soul’s yearning for righteousness.
The core flaw of hyper-individualism is that it leads to a degradation and a pulverization of the human person. It is a system built upon the egoistic drives within each of us. These are the self-interested drives—the desire to excel; to make a mark in the world; to rise in wealth, power, and status; to win victories and be better than others. Hyper-individualism does not emphasize and eventually does not even see the other drives—the deeper and more elusive motivations that seek connection, fusion, service, and care. These are not the desires of the ego, but the longings of the heart and
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The hyper-individualist sees society as a collection of individuals who contract with one another. The relationalist sees society as a web of connections that in many ways precedes choice. A hyper-individualist sees the individual as a self-sufficient unit; the relationalist says, a person is a node in a network, a personality is a movement toward others.
The best adult life is lived by making commitments and staying faithful to those commitments: commitments to a vocation, to a family, to a philosophy or faith, to a community. Adult life is about making promises to others, being faithful to those promises. The beautiful life is found in the mutual giving of unconditional gifts.
Society and culture are prior to and more important than politics or the market. The health of society depends on voluntary unselfishness.
