10 Learnings from 10 Years of
Brain Pickings
Fluid
reflections on keeping a solid center.
I
remember my first awareness of mortality as a child in Bulgaria. I was nine and
my father was relaying an anecdote from his youth. I asked him when it had
taken place. With unconcerned casualness, he replied: “About a decade
ago.” I was astonished that people could segment their lives into
blocks this big — my own life hadn’t yet lasted a decade. In realizing that “a
decade ago” I hadn’t existed — the self I now so vividly experienced daily was
then a nonentity — I also realized that in several more of those ten-year
blocks, my dad, and eventually I, will cease to exist.
After one such time-block, I left Bulgaria
for America, lured by the liberal arts education promise of being taught how to
live. As the reality fell short of that promise, I began keeping my own record
of what I was reading and learning outside the classroom in mapping this
academically unaddressed terra incognita of being.
All
the while, I was working numerous jobs to pay my way through school. What I was
learning at night and on weekends, at the library and on the internet — from
Plato to pop art — felt too uncontainably interesting to keep to myself, so I
decided to begin sharing these private adventures with my colleagues at one of
my jobs. On October 23, 2006, Brain Pickings was born as a
plain-text email to seven friends. Halfway through my senior year of college,
juggling my various jobs and academic course load, I took a night class to
learn coding and turned the short weekly email into a sparse website, which I
updated manually every Friday, then, eventually, every weekday.
The site grew as I grew — an unfolding record
of my intellectual, creative, and spiritual development. At the time, I had no
idea that this small labor of love and learning would animate me with a sense
of purpose and become both my life and my living, nor that its seven original
readers would swell into several million. I had no idea that this eccentric
personal record, which I began keeping in the city where Benjamin Franklin
founded the first subscription library in America, would one day be included in
the Library of Congress archive of “materials of historical importance.”
And now, somehow, a decade has elapsed.
Because I believe that our becoming, like the
synthesis of meaning itself, is an ongoing and dynamic process, I’ve been
reluctant to stultify it and flatten its ongoing expansiveness in static
opinions and fixed personal tenets of living. But I do find myself continually
discovering, then returning to, certain core values. While they may be refined
and enriched in the act of living, their elemental substance remains a center
of gravity for what I experience as myself.
I
first set down some of these core beliefs, written largely as notes to myself
that may or may not be useful to others, when Brain Pickings turned seven (which kindred spirits later adapted into a beautiful poster inspired by the aesthetic of vintage children’s
books and a cinematic short
film). I expanded upon them to mark year
nine. Today, as I round the first decade of Brain
Pickings, I feel half-compelled, half-obliged to add a tenth learning, a sort
of crowning credo drawn from a constellation of life-earned beliefs I distilled
in a commencement
address I delivered in the spring of 2016.
Here are all ten, in the order that they were
written.
From year seven:
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 of unconscious
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 Angelou famously 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, in discussing
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.
bY MARIA POPOVA
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