“Reason holds the helm, but passions are the gales.”
– John Adams
John Adams was enlightened to the human heart.
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 421
Tag: break glass in case of an emergency
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That one had to keep a “good heart,” come what may, was Abigail’s lifelong creed. “A merry heart doeth good like medicine,” she loved to say, quoting Proverbs. “I hate to complain,” she now wrote. “No one is without difficulties, whether in high or low life, and every person knows best where their own shoe pinches.
With all of the Richmond Hill house sick, Abigail Adam’s “good heart” endured.
The most formidable first lady of all time?
McCullough, David. John Adams. United Kingdom, Simon & Schuster, 2001. pg 423
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‘Close your eyes. Sit very quietly for a minute. Imagine that you were just given five million dollars. Now think what you would do if you had that five million dollars.’ After a pause, she would say, ‘I want you to open your eyes and think what is stopping you from doing those same things without the five million.’
Go ahead. Close your eyes.
What would you do? What fear is holding you back?
The Audrey Sutherland: live immediately chapter inspires.
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg 223 of the Kindle Edition
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Johnson learned wherever he went. On a visit to an army camp in 1778, when he was nearly sixty, he enquired about many aspects of military practice, including the weight of musket balls, and the range at which they could be effective. He displayed a good knowledge of gunpowder, talked on a range of military topics, and sat up late watching a court martial. The inventor Richard Arkwright said Johnson was the only person who, on first view, ‘understood the principal and powers of his most complicated piece of machinery’. He had been advised by his cousin Cornelius Ford, with whom he spent some formative months as a young man, ‘to obtain some general principles of every science’.
– Henry Oliver
Similar to Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Johnson was a man interested in everything.
Second time through on the Samuel Johnson chapter…
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024. pg181, Kindle edition.
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Go! Change your days. Burn with a hard gem-like flame.
– Henry Oliver
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024.
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Take Samuel Johnson’s advice. Resolve, work, fail and resolve again. We should do this not just for ambition, for ‘hope of a better fortune’, but because ‘the time comes at last, in which life has no more to promise’ and all we can do then is remember our lives; and ‘virtue will be ll that we can recollect with pleasure’.
– Henry Oliver
It’s Monday.
Resolve. Work. Fail. Resolve again.
The Samuel Johnson chapter continues to inspires.
Oliver, Henry. Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life. United Kingdom, John Murray Press, 2024.
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“The hell with passion. Find something you can do. That would be great.”
“Find fascination. Fascination is way better than passion. It’s not so sweaty.”
– Jerry Seinfeld
And three keys to life:
Bust your ass.
Pay attention.
Fall in love.
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There I think the attitude of Epictetus helps guide one to the right reaction. He thought every mischance in life, however bad, created an opportunity to learn something useful, and one’s duty was not to become immersed in self-pity but to utilize each terrible blow in a constructive fashion.
– Charlie MungerMunger, Charles T.. Poor Charlie’s Almanack: The Essential Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger. N.p., Stripe Matter Incorporated. pp279
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This is Bruce fuckin’ Springsteen saying that he was not a natural genius and he would have to work hard. And let me tell you something right here: no one is a natural genius. We have talents to a lesser or greater degree, but it is a waste unless we work hard at the small things.
When Virat Kohli first started batting in the nets, well before he had started shaving, he had to focus on the small things to get better. Sure, he probably got there with great hand-eye coordination, but now he had to cultivate all the good habits that have to be reflexive in a great batsman. He had to work on his footwork, the angle of the elbow while moving into a drive, the movement of the shoulder into the line, the balance of the body, the stillness of the head. And only after hours and days and weeks and months and years of consicious practice could some of those become internalised to the point that an onlooker could say, ‘Genius!’
Genius?
Maybe not for all of us. But excellence, certainly, is achievable by working hard on the small things.
More encouraging words from Amit Varma’s India Uncut Newsletter.
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The patron saint of overworked teachers, Alice Kober, taught five classes at a time at Brooklyn College in the 1940s. At any rate, she taught during the day. At night, she set about deciphering an ancient language, Linear B, that had been uncovered on clay tablets at the turn of the century and that stood as a Mount Everest for linguists, a seemingly impossible puzzle. A middle aged spinster, the daughter of working class immigrants, she collected the statistics for each sign of the dead language onto two hundred thousand paper slips. Because of paper shortages during and after the war these slips had to be repurposed from any spare paper she could find. The slips in turn were collected into old cigarette cartons. Her work was cut off by an untimely illness, but she laid the foundation for the dramatic decipherement that took place only a few years after her death.
One never knows when their work will bear fruit. Keep going.
Hitz, Zena. Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life. United States, Princeton University Press, 2021. (pp 41)
Floodlights and Goalposts 