What I’ve Learned So Far

“In the long run men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high.”

—Thoreau

“I count him braver who overcomes his desires than him who conquers his enemies; for the hardest victory is the victory over self.”

—Aristotle

Working hard on this end, folks — thus the lack of original content lately.

I’ll also be traveling this weekend, so I may choose to break my consecutive-days streak on this blog. Even when it’s just a little something, I’ve posted every day since . . . the beginning of October, I think it is.

Anyway, enough about me, what’s up with you?

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

–Dale Carnegie

With most objects of desire, physical nature restricts our choice to but one of many represented goods, and even so it is here. I am often confronted by the necessity of standing by one of my empirical selves and relinquishing the rest. Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million a year, be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire’s work would run counter to the saint’s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. Such different characters may conceivably at the outset of life be alike possible to a man. But to make any one of them actual, the rest must more or less be suppressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation. All other selves thereupon become unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with them. This is as strong an example as there is of that selective industry of the mind on which I insisted some pages back (p. 284 ff.). Our thought, incessantly deciding, among many things of a kind, which ones for it shall be realities, here chooses one of many possible selves or characters, and forthwith reckons it no shame to fail in any of those not adopted expressly as its own.

I, who for the time have staked my all on being a psychologist, am mortified if others know much more psychology than I. But I am contented to wallow in the grossest ignorance of Greek. My deficiencies there give me no sense of personal humiliation at all. Had I ‘pretensions’ to be a linguist, it would have been just the reverse. So we have the paradox of a man shamed to death because he is only the second pugilist or the second oarsman in the world. That he is able to beat the whole population of the globe minus one is nothing; he has ‘pitted’ himself to beat that one; and as long as he doesn’t do that nothing else counts. He is to his own regard as if he were not, indeed he is not.

Yonder puny fellow, however, whom every one can beat, suffers no chagrin about it, for he has long ago abandoned the attempt to ‘carry that line,’ as the merchants say, of self at all. With no attempt there can be no failure; with no failure no humiliation. So our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do. It is determined by the ratio of our actualities to our supposed potentialities; a fraction of which our pretensions are the denominator and the numerator our success: thus, Self-esteem = Success / Pretensions. Such a fraction may be increased as well by diminishing the denominator as by increasing the numerator. To give up pretensions is as blessed a relief as to get them gratified; and where disappointment is incessant and the struggle unending, this is what men will always do. The history of evangelical theology, with its conviction of sin, its self-despair, and its abandonment of salvation by works, is the deepest of possible examples, but we meet others in every walk of life. There is the strangest lightness about the heart when one’s nothingness in a particular line is once accepted in good faith. All is not bitterness in the lot of the lover sent away by the final inexorable ‘No.’ Many Bostonians, crede experto (and inhabitants of other cities, too, I fear), would be happier women and men to-day, if they could once for all abandon the notion of keeping up a Musical Self, and without shame let people hear them call a symphony a nuisance. How pleasant is the day when we give up striving to be young, - or slender! Thank God! we say, those illusions are gone. Everything added to the Self is a burden as well as a pride. A certain man who lost every penny during our civil war went and actually rolled in the dust, saying he had not felt so free and happy since he was born.

Once more, then, our self-feeling is in our power. As Carlyle says: “Make thy claim of wages a zero, then hast thou the world under thy feet. Well did the wisest of our time write, it is only with renunciation that life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.”

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Negative emotions like sadness, fear, anxiety, or boredom produce “psychic entropy” in the mind, that is, a state in which we cannot use attention effectively to deal with external tasks, because we need it to restore an inner subjective order. Positive emotions like happiness, strength, or alertness are states of “psychic negentropy” because we don’t need attention to ruminate and feel sorry for ourselves, and psychic energy can flow freely into whatever thought or task we choose to invest it in.

When we choose to invest attention in a given task, we say that we have formed an intention, or set a goal for ourselves. How long and how intensely we stick by our goals is a function of motivation. Therefore intentions, goals, and motivations are also manifestations of psychic negentropy. They focus psychic energy, establish priorities, and thus create order in consciousness. Without them mental processes become random, and feelings tend to deteriorate rapidly.

–Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, Finding Flow.

A good day of research — confirming that you will, indeed, be able to deliver what you’ve promised to deliver when your next conference rolls around — interspersed with enjoying the Return of Sunshine to our fair city, followed by a dinner party with friends + many kids.

At least, I’m feeling satisfied with same.

You?

This is what we in the biz call a “Day Of Knocking Things Off My To-Do List One by Freaking One”.

So far, so good.  No matter how many times I do it, I never get stale on the little thrill that comes from starting with a big list of nagging to-do’s and then killing them, one after the other.

How’s by you?

And here’s what I discover: In 2008 I’m slated to visit, in coincidentally alphabetical order, Boise, Denver, Philadelphia, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

First stop: next week’s trip to Miami.

Plus many engagements here in Austin, ranging from a lecture at the McCombs School to my son’s first encounter with the Pinewood Derby.

My thubnail verdict, upon looking over this schedule: Whew!

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

–Shunryu Suzuki.