Big Idea#1 Talking to the Dead
Big Idea#2 Be curious
Big Idea#3 Learn to Listen
Big Idea#4 Find your class room
Big Idea#5 Hit the Road
Big Idea#1 Talking to the Dead
He had come from Phoenicia. It had been a long journey, traveling from port to port across the Mediterranean, trading in purple dye, the color of the cloaks worn by the wealthiest Greeks.
But today, young Zeno was not traveling on business.
As he wound along the Sacred Way, toward the Temple of Apollo, home of the Oracle at Delphi, he began the sacred rituals, washing his hands in the holy spring. He lit a stick of incense. The flickering light of torches lined his path to the inner sanctum, where the priestess waited for his question.
What is the secret to a good life?
“You will become wise,” the priestess told Zeno, “when you begin to have conversations with the dead.”
It took many years and a terrible accident from him to understand what she meant. At thirty, Zeno found himself in Athens, shipwrecked and penniless. He passed a bookseller in the agora and listened to a story from the life of Socrates. Suddenly, the meaning of the priestess’s words revealed itself.
Socrates had been in the grave for many years. Yet Zeno was listening to him as though he lived. Conversations with the dead. That’s what books are!
Because reading is a conversation, great readers are not passive. They put books through the wringer, they put the author on trial. They ask questions. They talk back. And they don’t just read occasionally, but constantly, devouring fiction and nonfiction alike, philosophy and history, memoir and biography, poetry and prose.
That’s what books allow us to do – to gain cheaply knowledge that someone else gained through pain and suffering.
When you begin to have conversation with the dead. Don’t trust your memory or leave it to chance.
This reminds me of Zig Ziglar See You At The Top. He would create a note book called the Trigger Page.
While listening to a speaker, reading a book, or listening to a recording, you have heard or read something that really “triggered” your imagination. On those occasions you probably thought, “that reminds me,” or “that gives me an idea.” Try as you might at a later time, you often cannot recall the thought or idea that had been so clear in your mind a short time earlier. Since this is a characteristic of most people, I’m going to urge you to get a “Trigger Page” notebook. I suggest the standard stenographic pad because it is approximately the same size as this book and will be easy to carry. Divide the pages
I suggest you get both a red and black felt-tip pen to record your thoughts and ideas. Start by using the red pen at the bottom of the Trigger Page in Section 1 the first time you read the book. Use the black pen and move up to Section 2 of the Trigger page the second and subsequent times you read it. Let’s also urge you to underline and mark the portions of the book that are meaningful to you. These markings, combined with the thoughts and ideas you record, will personalize the book and make it “your” book. It will be so personalized that you will keep it and use it as a constant source of reference.
Big Idea#2 Be curious
They were just two curious kids, that’s how it began. Their father had brought home a little toy from one of his trips. A stick with some rubber bands and two propellers, but it flew. How?
Orville and Wilbur watched in wonder, playing for ours with his flying machine, their curiosity whetted in a way they’d be chasing for the rest of their lives.
“It isn’t true to say we have no special advantages,” Orville would say after he and his brother had changed the world and taken man into the air. “The greatest thing in our favor was growing up in a family where there was always much encouragement to intellectual curiosity.”
The Wright house was filled with books. Thucydides. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Milton. Plutarch’s Lives. Darwin. Dickens.. Twain. The shelves burst with classics and cutting-edge science for the time. Everyone in the family was expected to be a reader.
Doing well in school? It mattered, but their parents always understood if the boys had a project they’d rather do instead. What was most important was following one’s curiosity to its natural end. Even if that was inconvenient or even if it made a mess. “She would never destroy one thing the boys were trying to make,” Their sister, Katharine Wright, said of their mother. “Any little thing they left around in the way she picked up and put on a shelf in the kitchen.”
How did the Wright brothers, with less than one thousand dollars of their own money – and no college education – manage to solve the problem of manned flight before governments? How did their plane beat a US project that cost some seventy thousand dollars
It wasn’t money that motivated them, although ultimately their inventions would make them quite rich. “If my father had not been the kind who encouraged his children to pursue intellectual interests without any thought of profit,” Orville explained, “our early curiosity about flying would have been nipped too early to bear fruit.”
At the beginning, most ventures, especially risky or experimental ones, are horribly unprofitable. The odds are stacked against you, All sorts of drudgery and dead ends loom ahead. A genuine fascination, a desire to know, is the only force powerful enough to drive someone to real discovery.
There wasn’t any profit in the early days of the Wright’s experiments at Kitty Hawk and back in Ohio. Quite the opposite: The Wright brothers would do a short season of flying and then return home and work very hard at their bicycle factory to put together the funds to support another round of flights. “Instead of thinking about getting money out of the airplane,” Orville said,”our chief concern was always to get money to put into it. We were at it for the sport. It was something to spend money on, because it interested us, just as a man spends money on golf if that interests him, with no thought of making it pay.”
As a very young child Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) knew that he experienced the world differently than others. He was born with extreme nearsightedness. Everything around him was a blur, and so his other senses developed to compensate for this – particularly touch and smell. Even after he was prescribed glasses at the age of five, he continued to perceive the world around him with more than just his eyes. He had a tactile form of intelligence.
Fuller was an extremely resourceful child. He once invented a new kind of oar to help propel him across the lakes in Maine where he spent his summers delivering amil. Its design was modeled after the motion of jellyfish, which he had observed and studied. He could envision the dynamics of their movement with more than his eyes – he felt the movement. He reproduced this motion in his new fangled oar and it functioned beautifully. During such summers he would dream of other interesting inventions – these would be his life’s work, his destiny.
Being different, however, had its painful side. He had no patience for the usual forms of education. Although he was very bright and had been admitted to Harvard University, he could not adapt to its strict style of learning. He skipped classes, began to drink, and led a rather bohemian lifestyle. The officials at Harvard expelled him twice – the second time for good.
After that he bounced from job to job. He worked at a meat packing plant and then, during World War 1, he secured a good position in the navy. He had an incredible feel for machines and how their parts worked in concert. But he was restless, and could not stay too long in one place. After the war he had a wife and child to support, and despairing of ever being able to care for them properly, he decided to take a high-paying position as a sales manager. He worked hard, did a decent job, but after three months the company folded. He had found the work extremely unsatisfying, but it seemed that such jobs were all he could expect from life.
Finally, a few months later, a chance appeared out of nowhere. His father-in-law had invested in a way of producing materials for houses that would end up making them more durable and better insulated, and at a much lower cost. But the father could not find investors or anyone willing to help him set up a business. Fuller thought his idea brilliant. He had always been interested in housing and architecture, and so he offered to take charge of implementing this technology.
He put everything he could into the effort and was even able to improve on the materials to be used. Fuller’s father-in-law supported his work, and together they formed the Stockade Building System. Money from investors, mostly family members, allowed them to open factories. The company struggled – the technology was too new and radical, and Fuller was too much of a purist to compromise his desire to revolutionize the construction industry. After five years the company was sold and Fuller was fired as president.
Now the situation looked bleaker than ever. The family had been living well in Chicago on his salary, beyond its means. In those five years he had not managed to save anything. Winter was approaching and his prospects for work seemed very slim – his reputation was in tatters. One evening he walked along Lake Michigan and thought of his life up until then. He had disappointed his wife, and he had lost money for his father-in-law and his friends who had invested in the enterprise. He was useless at business and a burden to everyone. Finally he decided upon suicide as the best option. He would drown himself in the lake. He had a good insurance policy, and his wife’s family would take better care of her than he had been able to. As he walked toward the water, he mentally prepared himself for death.
Suddenly something stopped him in his tracks – what he would describe later as a voice, coming from nearby or perhaps from within him. It said, “From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thoughts. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to the Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.” Never having heard voices before, Fuller could only imagine it as something real. Stunned by these words, he turned away from the water and headed home.
On the way there he began to ponder the words and to reassess his life, now in a different light. Perhaps what he had perceived moments earlier as his mistakes were not mistakes at all. He had tried to fit into a world (business) in which he did not belong. The world was telling him this if he only listened. The Stockade experience was not all a waste – he had learned some invaluable lessons about human nature. He should have no regrets. The truth was that he was different. In his mind he imagined all kinds of inventions – new kinds of cars, houses, building structures that reflected his unusual perceptual skills. It struck him, as he looked around at row after row of apartment housing on his way back, that people suffered more from sameness, from the inability to think of doing things differently, than from nonconformity.
He swore that from that moment on he would listen to nothing except his own experience, his own voice. He would create an alternative way of making things that would open people’s eyes to new possibilities. The money would eventually come. Whenever he thought of money first, disaster followed. He would take care of his family, but they would have to live frugally for the moment.
Over the years, Fuller kept to this promise. The pursuit of his peculiar ideas led to the design of inexpensive and energy-efficient forms of transportation and shelter (the Dymaxion car and Dymaxion house), and to the invention of the geodesic dome – a new form of architectural structure. Fame and money soon followed.
No good can ever come from deviating from the path that you were destined to follow. You will be assailed by varieties of hidden pain. Most often you deviate because of the lure of money, of more immediate prospects of prosperity. Because this does not comply with something deep within you, your interest will lag and eventually the money will not come easily. You will search for other easy sources of money, moving further and further away from your path.Not seeing clearly ahead of you, you will end up in a dead-end career. Even if your material needs are met, you will feel an emptiness inside that you will need to fill with any kind of belief system, drugs, or diversions. There is no compromise here,
The way back requires a sacrifice. You cannot have everything in the present. The road to mastery requires patience. You will have to keep your focus on five or ten years down the road, when you will reap the rewards of your efforts. The process of getting there, however, is full of challenges and pleasures. In the end, the money and success that truly last come not to those who focus on such things as goals, but rather to those who focus on Mastery and fulfilling their Life’s Task.
Big Idea#3 Learn to Listen
Zeno talked with the dead. He studied under Crates. And then, eventually, he set up his own school in the center of the Athenian agora, on a little porch where he and his pupils would sit and talk.
There, on the stoa poikile, he taught two very different students.
Aristo was a brilliant and brash student, a once-in-a-generation talent. He was a true believer in Stoicism, but what he loved more than anything was to argue. He argued with his fellow students. He argued with his teacher. He was often right and he often won, but even more than winning, what Aristo loved was talking, period. He was known for long discourses and endless tangents. Almost naturally at odds with Zeno’s dictum that each of us is given two ears and only one mouth for a reason, Aristo talked far more than he ever cared to listen.
Meanwhile, Zeno had another student who often seemed less promising. Cleanthes came to philosophy later in life. He was not a brilliant kid, but a manual laborer who carried water to the gardens of wealthy Athenians. He didn’t make much of a presence on the stoa, and he certainly didn’t interrupt with obnoxious disagreements. What Cleathes did was sit and listen… for twenty years.
He took it all in, over thoughts of lectures, thousands of long walks, thousands of interactions. We sometimes call a great listener like this a “sponge,”but Zeno had a more precise analogy. Cleathes, he once said, was like a hard waxen tablet hard to write on, but once imprinted, the writing was there for a good.
After two decades of study and learning, because it was Cleanthes, not Aristo, whom Zeno entrusted with the future of Stoicism.
What’s the point of going to school or finding a mentor if you’re not going to listen? When you’re talking, what you’re doing is not hearing. When we open our mouths, we shut our ears.
Really, what we’re doing is closing doors. We could have learned something. We could have gotten someone else’s perspective. We could have heard their experience. We could have gotten their advice.
I’d like to tell you about The Strangest Secret in the World. The late Nobel prize-winning Dr. Albert Schweitzer was once asked, “Doctor, what is wrong with men today?” The great doctor was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Men simply do not think!” It is about this that I want to talk with you.
We live today in a golden age. This is an era that humanity has looked forward to, dreamed of, and worked toward for thousands of years. But since it is here we pretty well take it for granted. We are fortunate to live in the richest era that ever existed on the face of the earth. A land of abundant opportunity for everyone. But do you know what happens?
Let’s take 100 individuals who start even at the age of 25. Do you have any idea what will happen to those men and women by the time they are 65?
These 100 people, who all start even at the age of 25, all believe they’re going to be successful. If you ask any one of them if they want to be a success they would tell you they did. You would notice that they are eager toward life, there is a certain sparkle in their eye, an erectness to their carriage. Life seems like a pretty interesting adventure to them.
But by the time they are 65, only one will be rich, four will be financially independent, 41 will still be working, and 54 will be broke – depending on others for life’s necessities.
Now think a moment: out of the 100, only five make the grade!
Big Idea#4 Find your class room
Claude Monet wanted to be an artist. From an early age, his caricatures brought him attention and no small amount of pocket money. A talented painter took the young boy aside and told him he was obviously gifted. “I hope you are not going to stop there,” he said to Monet. “Study, learn to see and to paint, draw, make landscapes.”
But the boy had always been rebellious, and with his natural talent, he was not taken with the idea of study, especially in the way that so many of the great painters of the past had learned, under the direction of a strict master. His parents, to their credit, offered to send their son to train at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, the most prestigious art school in the world, but the thought filled Monet with dread and boredom. From his earliest days, he had liked nothing more than to be outside in the open air, running along the cliff tops of Normandy and paddling in the water. School and studio to him are like prisons.
The course of his life was decided when, at age twenty, Monet was drafted for a seven-year term in the French army. His wealthy parents, who worried their son was frittering away his life, saw their chance to intervene. Give up this silly, bohemian fantasy, they said, and we’ll pay to get you out of the service. Get serious. Go to real school.
If he didn’t, came the ultimatum, they would disinherit him. But to Money, the army was the classroom he wanted to be in. “A friend who was in the
Chasseurs d’Afrique’ and who adored military life had communicated his enthusiasm and inspired me with his love for adventure,” he recounted in his memoirs. “Nothing seemed more attractive to me than the endless treks under a great sun, the raids, the crackling of gun power, saber-rattling, nights in the desert under canvas.
He dismissed his parent’s threat and requested to be drafted into an African regiment, precisely the kind of dangerous posting everyone else was trying to avoid.
“In Algeria,” he explained, “I spent two really charming years. I incessantly saw something new; in my moments of leisure I attempted to render what I saw. You cannot imagine to what an extent I increased my knowledge, and how much my vision gained thereby.” Even though his intuition had drawn him to Africa, he could not have predicted the education he would get. “The impressions of light and color that I received there were not to classify themselves until later, “ he said; “they contained the germ of my future research.”
This is the key to life: finding the classroom that works for you, that allows you to take over your own education.
Because an education is not something you “get,” it’s something you take. It’s something you make.
Each person is unique and special. We have to find our path, what works for them may not work for me.
The greater the Resistance we find ourselves experiencing, the bigger the dream percolating inside us.
Resistance operates like Newton’s Third Law of Motion. For every action (our dream), there is an equal and opposite Reaction (Resistance).
Big Resistance = Big Dream
Big Idea#5 Hit the Road
Herodotus did not become the world’s first great historian by sitting at home with his books. No, he hit the road.
From Persia to Athens to Italy, Libya, Babylonia, Byzantium, and the Black Sea, he traveled thousands of miles over the course of his life. He traveled the Nile by boat. He visited Phoenicia, the birthplace of Zeno, a century before the philosopher was born.
The Greeks had always been travelers, as Herodotus noted. Some traveled for trade, some for way, and others, he said, speaking almost certainly of himself, “out of mere curiosity, to see what they could see.” Then, and now , travel was a source of wisdom, a means to discover new places and understand yourself.
He inspected temples. He ate the food. He made conversation. He visited big cities and little ones. He saw the flora and the fauna – from crocodiles to camels. He walked dusty roads and along beautiful beaches. He crossed deserts and entered bustling ports. He watched their ceremonies. He loved monuments and public works. “I have myself seen it,” he was of a great labyrinth in Egypt at which he gazed for hours, “and indeed no words can tell of it’s wonders.”
Before Herodotus, there was no “history” as a subject, so he wasn’t able to just read it. If he wanted to learn about the Far East or even the culture in a neighboring country, the Persian wars or the deeds of the great Spartans, who gave everything at Thermopylae, he had to see the places and the people for himself.
Herodotus wanted to get the aitie – the root cause of things. He was fascinated by the nomos, the people’s customs, and the way they differed from his own. He wanted to hear their stories. He wanted to know why they did things the way they did.
His famous book, the Histories, is full of delightful asides. Here’s how the Persians collected taxes. Here’s how the Babylonians irrigated their crops. Here’s how the Scythians fought on horseback.
Delighted, he watched the river trade on the Euphrates, observing circular boats made of watertight skins. Herodotus notes where the boats were made (Armenia), what goods they carried (mostly wine), their tonnage (up to 130) and besides the brew, the special passengers who rode aboard (live donkeys). When boats arrived, they were broken down and sold for parts, and then the donkeys carried money and goods back how to start the process over again. “This, “ he said, “I find the greatest wonder of all things there, except for Babylon itself.”
How many questions did he ask to learn all this? How curious he must have been!
Herodotus’ purpose was to be a historian.
One of the ways to discover your purpose.
Each day in the morning take a pen, paper, and spend 10-15min. Ask yourself the question. What do I truly love to do even if I don’t get paid would I still do it?
Steven Pressfield, was thirty-one. I had saved up $2,700 and moved from New York to a little town in Northern California. I rented a house behind another house for $105 a month. I had my old Chevy van, my Smith- Corona typewriter, and my cat Mo.
I didn’t talk to anybody during my year of turning pro. I didn’t hang out. I just worked. I had a book in mind and I had decided I would finish it or kill myself. I could not run away again, or let people down again, or let myself down again. This was it, do or die.
I did finish the book. I didn’t kill myself. But I couldn’t find a buyer for it, or for the one after it. It would be another twenty-one years before a real-life publisher accepted something I had written and brought it out as a finished book.
In the end, the wait didn’t matter. That year gave me, for the first time in my life, and uninterrupted stretch of month after month that was mine alone, when I was truly productive, truly facing my demons, and truly working my shit. That year has stuck with me.
