The forever optimist continues to gift his timely wisdom on his birthday. It’s a tradition that’s become a modern, once-a-year Tolstoy Calendar of Wisdom.
Here’s a few of our favorites from this year:
Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.
Your best job will be one that you were unqualified for because it stretches you. In fact only apply to jobs you are unqualified for.
For a great payoff be especially curious about the things you are not interested in.
That last one though. We’re typically told to follow our interests, our natural curiosities. How does one become curious about a subject they care little for?
One approach could be finding someone who is manically obsessed with the subject and have a conversation with them. Say you hate trigonometry. Maybe you approach the best trigonometry professor in your area and straight up ask them, Why is trigonometry so interesting?
One of the strengths of Zena Hitz’s book Lost in Thought is in the variety of intellectual examples she offers. Hitz doesn’t limit examples of the intellectual life to literature and philosophy. Instead she reminds us mathematics and science are vital intellectual disciplines.
Her two major examples include Albert Einstein and Andre Weil the French mathematician. Hitz uses their two career paths to explore how environments of failure – Einstein’s stint at a patent office, Weil’s time in prison, provided the ingredients for mathematical breakthroughs to flourish.
The ingredients being the absence of needing to comply with their profession’s expectations. Their environments of failure allowed them to pursue their ideas for the sake of curiosity.
On Einstein’s patent office stint:
But it is a cloister for Einstein, since in the office there were no hotshot professors to impress, no university administrators to placate, no students to whom he had to justify his existence. It is, then, chiefly a place where the love of learning is put to the test, where ambition is frustrated, where his work has to run on its own power without the grease of seeking out carrots and avoiding sticks. In the quiet of the patent office the beauty of the structures of nature can take hold of him and display itself with clarity.
One might think that the reasons Weil produced better mathematical work in prison are straightforward: more free time, fewer distractions of ordinary life. But Weil jokes about prison’s advantage for “pure and disinterested research” and, echoing Einstein, praises the beauty of his theorems. So he too suggests that his work was nurtured by separation from social or political agendas, competition, social hierarchy, objects of ambition, the expectations of others. The pursuit of beautiful theorems might elsewhere be crowded out by things that seemed more pressing but that ultimately mattered less.
I’ve been waiting months for this podcast episode. Tyler Cowen and Lydia Davis did not let me down.
For a writer of her stature, Lydia openly admits she finds very long books hard to approach:
COWEN: Do you think the late Thomas Pynchon became unreadable, that somehow it was just a pile of complexity and it lost all relation to the reader? Or are those, in fact, masterworks that we’re just not up to appreciating?
DAVIS: Since I hesitated to even open the books, I can’t answer you, because I do find — not all long books — but very long, very fat books a little hard to approach, and some of them, I try over and over. If I sense that it’s really a load of verbiage, I really don’t. I fault myself for not having the patience to get through at least one, say, late Pynchon, but I haven’t.
Don’t despair! Lydia Davis also struggled to read Ulysses. It took two cracks and a move to Ireland for her to finish:
I had a problem a long time ago trying to read Ulysses by Joyce, and started it twice, and finally read it when I lived in Ireland, which made it much easier because I had his context. That too — I suppose because it had different chapters, each of which approached the ongoing story in a very different way — I found that possible too.
I’m believing more and more, that what great books do, what the internet at it’s brightest light does, is make introductions.
Today’s introduction? The Catalan writer Josep Pla:
There’s a book by a Catalan writer called Josep Pla that’s called The Gray Notebook. That’s very fat, but I keep going back to it and delighting in it, but I’m not reading it all at once. I’m going back to it and just sort of nibbling away at it. It was an amazing project. He took an early, very brief diary of his when he was 21, I think, and it only covered a year and a half. He kept going back to it rather than publishing it. He kept going back to it and expanding it with more memories and more material, and I love that idea. Maybe that’s why I can read it.
Lydia admits the Harry Potter series didn’t captivate her. She preferred the writing in Philip Pullman’s The Dark Materials trilogy. But she understands, Harry Potter’s greatest value is hooking kids on reading:
COWEN: How would you articulate why you don’t like the Harry Potter novels?
DAVIS: That’s fairly easy, although I should have a page in front of me. It’s always better if you have the page, and you can say, “Look at this sentence, look at that sentence.” At a certain point, my son was reading Harry Potter as kids do and did. I think he was probably 11 or 10 or 11, 12, 9 — I don’t know. Also, the Philip Pullman trilogy, whose name I always forget. I thought it would be a lot of fun to read the Harry Potter books because I knew a lot of grownups were reading them and enjoying them. I thought, “This is great. There are a lot of them.”
But when I tried to read them, I didn’t like the style of writing, and I didn’t like the characters, and I didn’t like anything about them. Whereas, I opened the first Philip Pullman book and read the first page and said, “This is wonderful. The writing here is wonderful.” I really think there’s an ocean of difference. I wouldn’t put down the Harry Potter books because, as we know, they got a lot of kids reading and being enraptured with books. I think that matters more than anything, really — getting kids hooked on reading.
Brilliant and insightful. Do give it a listen or read the transcript in full here.
“By the 1950s I had found I was frightened when giving public talks to large audiences, this in spite of having taught classes in college for many years. On thinking this over very seriously, I came to the conclusion I could not afford to be crippled that way and still become a great scientist; the duty of a scientist is not only to find new things, but to communicate them successfully in at least three forms:
Writing papers and books
Prepared public talks
Impromptu talks
Lacking any one of these would be a serious drag on my career. How to learn to give public talks without being so afraid was my problem. The answer was obviously by practice, and while other things might help, practice was a necessary thing to do.” – Richard W. Hammingfrom the The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
The duty of a scientist is not only to research, but to communicate.
What’s our typical image of a scientist? Someone dressed in a white lab coat, hovering over a microscope. A lab assistant near, clipboard in hand (even in 2022). Hidden in the basement of some concrete government cube.
But think of the inspiring scientists of our time: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Bob Bakker, Oliver Sacks, the shark lady Eugenie Clark. They were and are scientists of the public. They shared their ideas on TV, in documentaries, podcasts, and lectures. These scientists were and are able to communicate successfully in at least the first two forms mentioned by Richard W. Hamming. Judging by interviews and their public personas I’m sure they were all capable of form #3 as well.
Mr. Richard W. Hamming’s mindset towards his fear is also worth noting. He could’ve dismissed his trepidation of speaking to large crowds as “something I’m just not wired for”. But he didn’t bury his head in the gravel. He decided practice was the necessary thing to do. Hamming would go on to give one of the preeminent talks on cultivating a scientific career titled – You and Your Research.
The most important thing to understand about Smiles is that he worked for his whole life. When he wasn’t in the office, he was pursuing his education or writing articles. This doesn’t mean he was succeeding. Often he was simply reading and learning for the sake of it. The successful books he published were the eventual result of decades of accreted labour. He studied because he wanted to. For a long time, the returns were zero.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part I, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader
That last sentence though, a pile driver – “For a long time, the returns were zero.” Writer Samuel Smiles was a model of persistence. He is what Henry Oliver calls an opsimath, or a late bloomer. (You know a word is good when the spellchecker redlines it). Smiles persisted with his dream project – a biography of the father of railroads George Stephenson. Smiles persevered with the book despite discouragement from Stephenson’s son, and day jobs sapping his writing time. The George Stephenson project began for Smiles in 1849. It was finally published in 1857.
Failure and rejection be damned. A side hustle is for life — and the sheer hell of it. He was a walking writer. And he began to benefit from his accumulated experiences. One trait of late bloomers is their ability to turn their experiences, however incoherent, however seemingly irrelevant, to their advantage as they persist in their interests.
Samuel Smiles: late bloomer with a side hustle. Part II, Henry Oliver. The Common Reader
Samuel Smiles’ determined path reminds me of Brooklyn Nets guard Seth Curry, who went undrafted and didn’t sign his first guaranteed contract until age twenty five. And the “exceptional case” Athletic Bilbao striker Aritz Aduriz. An athletic polymath who found success at the top level of Spanish football during the latter stages of his career. Scoring 66% percent of his career first division goals after age thirty and then retiring at thirty nine.
Read Henry Oliver’s full profiles on Samuel Smiles here: pt.1, pt.2.
And do subscribe to The Common Reader. It’s one of the brightest lights on the internet.
Sometimes I read straight on without going back, but often, when I learn one word, it explains the meaning of other words that came just before it, so I look back, and, one by one, each newly acquired word gives me the clue to the next one. Knowing Tom had gotten onto his knees before climbing into bed gave me the answer to another word: rezar = pray. And another, later: arrodillarse had to mean “kneel.” Reading a sentence several times over is often enough to teach me most of the mysterious words.
Lydia Davis, Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer, pg 93, Essays Two
The essay Reading Las Aventuras de Tom Sawyer makes owning Essays Two entirely worth it. Lydia Davis’ passion for translation and foreign language led her to read a Spanish translation of Tom Sawyer by Sara Gomez. In the essay, Davis describes the little games she devised to bolster her understanding of Spanish. One game was, she decided to not look up any word in the dictionary while reading through the book. The idea being, to learn words from context only.
Lydia again reminds us of the power rereading a sentence. Here though, it’s to reveal the meaning of “mysterious” Spanish words. My guess is, not only did the rereading reveal the meaning, but it would likely have embedded the meaning into her memory.
Along the way I learned a number of lessons. Life is neither linear nor predictable. A career is not something that you put on like a coat. It is something that grows organically around you, step-by-step, choice-by-choice, and experience-by-experience. Everything adds up. No work is beneath you. Nothing is a waste of time unless you make it so. An elderly cab driver in Bogota may well have as much to teach you as a wandering sadhu in India or a mystic saint in the Sahara. There were tens of thousands of teachers out there that I did not even know I had.
Wade Davis – Explorers’ Sketchbooks The Art of Discovery & Adventure
Anthropologist Wade Davis (a real life Indian Jones?) reminds us of the unpredictability of life and career.
Work hard, pursue an education, but be open to the surprising teachers along the way.
I find that simply reading a sentence carefully a second time can yield significantly more understanding. I’m not sure exactly what happens in the brain between the first and second readings.
Lydia Davis, Before my morning coffee, pg 374, Essays Two
Here Lydia Davis is referring to re-reading a passage while translating an A.L. Snijders’ story from Dutch to English. But practicing a careful second reading could be applied to many other readings too. Emails and poems come to mind.
Quickly I had learned that in the high Antarctic where I worked, besides the books, a knife to sharpen my pencil was indispensable, any ink in a pen usually freezing. And any sort of electronic device just would not work, and would be unreliable. I also learned, from some anxious experiences, that a field book had to become ‘un-losable’. Starting out, I once mislaid a book when trying to capture a skua with a net; it was often an athletic endeavor, with a bird diving one way, and my book flying out of my parka pocket in the other. Only after painstakingly retracing my steps was I able to recover it, its brown cover camouflaged among the endless boulders and frozen guano of the penguin colony. It was a huge relief – you can’t imagine how happy I was. Thereafter I would plaster the journals with bright yellow tape in fat stripes. Eventually I found field books bound in vivid orange covers. In the polar snows, these were just perfect.
Pete Doctor is Pixar’s chief creative officer. Recently he sat down for an interview with economist Steven Levitt. On his People I (Mostly) Admire podcast, Steve asked Pete one of my favorite, but ridiculous interview questions. What live advice would you give the 20 year old Pete Doctor, knowing what you know now?
Pete’s response:
I’d probably tell myself draw more. Just get outside and draw, cause your draftsmanship skills are always handy. But more importantly I think, drawing for me, really connects me to stuff. It forces me to see things. I can walk past a house everyday, but then if I stop and draw it I suddenly notice details and things about it that I’d never payed attention to before. So I feel like drawing is a way to slow me down and really connect me to the world that I’m inhabiting that I’m not always fully paying attention to.
An excellent interview for all you drawers out there. Listen in full here.
Floodlights and Goalposts 