10 Learnings from 10 Years of Brain Pickings
1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable
luxury of changing your mind. Cultivate that capacity for “negative capability.”We live in a culture where one of the
greatest social disgraces is not having an opinion, so we often form our
“opinions” based on superficial impressions or the borrowed ideas of others,
without investing the time and thought that cultivating true conviction
necessitates. We then go around asserting these donned opinions and clinging to
them as anchors to our own reality. It’s enormously disorienting to simply say,
“I don’t know.” But it’s infinitely more rewarding to understand than to be
right — even if that means changing your mind about a topic, an ideology, or,
above all, yourself.
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or
money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet
that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on
what you like, but what you’d like to like.” Those extrinsic motivators are
fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make
it thrilling to get up in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night —
and, in fact, they can often distract and detract from the things that do offer
those deeper rewards.
3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your
resources and with giving credit and, especially, with your words. It’s so much
easier to be a critic than a celebrator. Always remember there is a human being
on the other end of every exchange and behind every cultural artifact being
critiqued. To understand and be understood, those are among life’s greatest
gifts, and every interaction is an opportunity to exchange them.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your
life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going
nowhere in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. The best ideas come to us when we stop actively trying
to coax the muse into manifesting and let the fragments of experience float
around our unconscious mind in order to click into new combinations. Without
this essential stage ofunconscious processing, the entire flow of the creative process is broken.
Most important, sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking moment,dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and disciplined about
your sleep as you are about your work. We tend to wear our ability to get by on
little sleep as some sort of badge of honor that validates our work ethic. But
what it really is is a profound failure of self-respect and of priorities. What
could possibly be more important than your health and your sanity, from which
all else springs?
5. When people tell you who they are, Maya Angeloufamously advised, believe them. Just as important,
however, when
people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own
integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and
what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about
you.
6. Presence is far more intricate and
rewarding an art than productivity. Ours is a culture that measures our
worth as human beings by our efficiency, our earnings, our ability to perform
this or that. The cult of productivity has its place, but worshipping at its
altar daily robs us of the very capacity for joy and wonder that makes life
worth living — for, as Annie Dillard memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course,
how we spend our lives.”
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take
a long time.”This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so
fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth
of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our
present definition of success needs serious retuning. As I’ve reflected elsewhere, the flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one
spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the
blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the
making of one’s character and destiny.
From year nine:
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Patti Smith, indiscussing William Blake and her creative influences, talks about writers and artists who
magnified her spirit — it’s a beautiful phrase and a beautiful notion. Who are
the people, ideas, and books that magnify your spirit? Find them, hold on to
them, and visit them often. Use them not only as a remedy once spiritual
malaise has already infected your vitality but as a vaccine administered while
you are healthy to protect your radiance.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist. There is much to be said for our
responsibility as creators and consumers of that constant dynamic interaction
we call culture — which side of the fault line between catering and creating
are we to stand on? The commercial enterprise is conditioning us to believe
that the road to success is paved with catering to existing demands — give the
people cat GIFs, the narrative goes, because cat GIFs are what the people want.
But E.B. White, one of our last great idealists, was eternally right when he asserted half a century ago that the role of the
writer is “to lift people up, not lower them down” — a role each of us is
called to with increasing urgency, whatever cog we may be in the machinery of
society. Supply creates its own demand. Only by consistently supplying it can
we hope to increase the demand for the substantive over the superficial — in
our individual lives and in the collective dream called culture.
And as I round the decade:
10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight
it actively. Fight it in yourself, for this ungainly
beast lays dormant in each of us, and counter it in those you love and engage
with, by modeling its opposite. Cynicism often masquerades as nobler faculties
and dispositions, but is categorically inferior. Unlike that great Rilkean life-expanding doubt, it is a
contracting force. Unlike critical thinking, that pillar of reason and necessary counterpart to hope, it is inherently uncreative,
unconstructive, and spiritually corrosive. Life, like the universe itself,
tolerates no stasis — in the absence of growth, decay usurps the order. Like
all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely easier and lazier than
construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our
society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted,
constructive, rational faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and
betterment. This remains the most potent antidote to cynicism. Today,
especially, it is an act of courage and resistance.
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