Theodore Roosevelt’s Praise of Imperfect Heroes
Scott Barry Kaufman republishes Theodore Roosevelt's challenge to those whose sense of achievement is based only on sitting on the sidelines and taking potshots.
17 Life-Learnings to Celebrate the 17th Birthday of Maria Popova’s “The Marginalian”
This morning I received 17 wonderful gifts. Maria Popova’s website has been one of my places of respite for many years. In her most recent article, she celebrates her 17 years of online writing at “The Marginalian” by crystallizing 17 lessons she has learned along the way. Here is Maria’s introduction to her 17 lessons:
The Marginalian was born on October 23, 2006, under an outgrown name, to an outgrown self that feels to me now almost like a different species of consciousness. (It can only be so — if we don’t continually outgrow ourselves, if we don’t wince a little at our former ideas, ideals, and beliefs, we ossify and perish.)
What follows are merely the titles to Popova's 17 lessons. She discusses each of these more fully at her website. Everything she writes is, somehow, both analytically precise and poetic. I've printed this list and it has gone up on my wall so that I have daily reminders:
1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone
3. Be generous.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life.
5. You are the only custodian of your own integrity.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity.
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.”
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.
10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively.
11. Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test them against the raw input of reality.
12 There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again.
14. Choose joy.
16. Unself.
17.Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though not always in the form you imagined or hoped for.
No Matter What Time it is, it is a Good Time to Revisit Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot
Carl Sagan: "How fervent their hatreds . . . There is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves."
The Oldest Human Superstition
The oldest human superstition "is the evil eye: an almost universal fear that to attract envy is to attract disaster. The evil eye mindset is the reason that if someone comes into your house and says, “What a beautiful house,” You will usually say, “Yeah, but I’m sorry it’s so dirty,” or if they look at a baby and say, “Oh, it’s the perfect baby.” “Oh, but it just burped and it’s made a mess.”
One of our greatest fears and most universal anxieties as humans is that we may attract the jealousy of others, and that means an attack by others."
About Mentorship
This quote has guided me for much of my life:
" . . . [H]is disciple cried impetuously: 'But I believe in your cause and consider it so strong that I shall say everything, everything that I still have in my mind against it.'
The innovator laughed in his heart and wagged a finger at him. 'This kind of discipleship,' he said, 'is the best; but it is also the most dangerous, and not every kind of doctrine can endure it.'"
Friederich Nietzsche - The Gay Science (1882) Sec 106 "Music as an Advocate"
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