The first thing one has to ask is, What is a leader supposed to do? Any leader has a series of practical problems that obtrude and that circumstances generate, and that I would call the tactical level. Beyond that, he has the task of taking his society from where it is to where it has never been. That’s the challenge of leadership, to build arising circumstances into a vision of the future.
With respect to the first task, it depends partly on the domestic structure of the society and partly on a certain tactical skill.
With respect to the leadership part, the qualities most needed are character and courage. Character because the decisions that are really tough are 51-49. The obvious decisions get made in the course of bureaucratic consideration. But when you have a very close call, it means that you have decided to go on one road rather than another. So you need moral strength to make a decision on which, by definition, you can almost not have a majority because you’re dealing with unfamiliar terrain. And you need courage to walk alone part of the way. Now, of course you will say, “How about intelligence?” I would say you need a minimum of intelligence to understand the issues. You can always hire intelligent people, but you cannot hire character.
The public does not in the long run respect leaders who mirror its own insecurities or see only the symptoms of crises rather than the long-term trends. The role of the leader is to assume the burden of acting on the basis of a confidence in his own assessment of the direction of events and how they can be influenced. Failing that, crises will multiply, which is another way of saying that a leader has lost control over events. Napoleon turned out to be the precursor of a strange modern phenomenon - the political figure who desperately seeks to determine what the public wants, yet ends up rejected and perhaps even despised by it.
Bismarck did not lack the confidence to act on his own judgments. He brilliantly analyzed the underlying reality and Prussia’s opportunity. He built so well that the Germany he created survived defeat in two world wars, two foreign occupations, and two generations as a divided country. Where Bismarck failed was in having doomed his society to a style of policy which could only have been carried on had a great man emerged in every generation. This is rarely the case, and the institutions of imperial Germany militated against it. In this sense, Bismarck sowed the seeds not only of his country’s achievements, but of its 20th-century tragedies. “No one eats with impunity from the tree of immortality,” wrote Bismarck’s friend von Roon about him.
Whatever the utility of this approach in the realm of consumption, its effect on policymaking may prove transformative. The difficult choices in policymaking are always close. Where, in the world of ubiquitous social networks, does the individual find the space to develop the fortitude to make decisions that, by definition, cannot be based on a consensus? The adage that prophets are not recognized in their own time is true in that they operate beyond conventional conception - that is what made them prophets. In our era, the lead time for prophets might have disappeared altogether. The pursuit of transparency and connectivity in all aspects of existence, by destroying privacy, inhibits the development of personalities with the strength to take lonely decisions.
For all the great and indispensable achievements the Internet has brought to our era, its emphasis is on the actual more than the contingent, on the factual rather than the conceptual, on values shaped by consensus rather than by introspection. Knowledge and history and geography is not essential for those who can evoke their data with the touch of a button. The mindset for walking lonely political paths may not be self-evident to those who seek confirmation by hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook.
In 1981, for example, Adam Osborne released the first truly portable personal computer. It was not great but it worked well enough. As Osborne famously declared, “Adequacy is sufficient. All else is superfluous.” Jobs found that approach to be morally appalling, and he spent days making fun of Osborne. “This guy just doesn’t get it,” Jobs repeatedly railed as he wandered the Apple corridors. “He’s not making art, he’s making shit.”
One way to remember who you are is to remember who your heroes are.
Why do we assume that simple is good? Because with physical products, we have to feel we can dominate them. As you bring order to complexity, you find a way to make the product defer to you. Simplicity isn’t just a visual style. It’s not just minimalism or the absence of clutter. It involves digging through the depth of the complexity. To be truly simple, you have to go really deep.
We believe in saying no to thousands of projects, so that we can really focus on the few that are truly important and meaningful to us.
Then I remembered what they told me, that whenever you encounter anything scary, go toward it. So instead of being afraid of dying I got curious about what was going on. I was no longer trying to avoid dying. Instead of recoiling from the experience, I began to interrogate it. And with that, the whole situation dissolved into this pleasant floaty feeling, and I became the music for a while.
The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious. Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way; what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted conviction. And, more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love.
Statesmanship requires above all a sense of nuance and proportion, the ability to perceive the essential among a mass of apparent facts, and an intuition as to which of many equally plausible hypotheses about the future is likely to prove true. And authority is essential — the strength to take charge of a consequence of events and to impose some direction. Occasionally an outsider may provide perspective; almost never does he have enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves. Before I served as a consultant to Kennedy, I had believed, like most academicians, that the process of decision-making was largely intellectual and that all one had to do was to walk into the President’s office and convince him of the correctness of one’s views. This perspective I soon realized is as dangerously immature as it is widely held. To be sure, in our system the President has the authority to make final decisions; he has larger scope for discretion than the chief executive of any other large country — including probably even the Soviet Union. But a President’s schedule is so hectic that he has little time for abstract reflection. Almost all of his callers are supplicants or advocates, and most of their cases are extremely plausible — which is what got them into the Oval Office in the first place. As a result, one of the President’s most difficult tasks is to choose among endless arguments that sound equally convincing.
The complexity of modern government makes large bureaucracies essential; but the need for innovation also creates the imperative to define purposes that go beyond administrative norms. Ultimately there is no purely organizational answer; it is above all a problem of leadership. Organizational remedies cannot by themselves remove the bias for waiting for crises and for the avoidance of long-term planning. We set ourselves the task of making a conscious effort to shape the international environment according to a conception of American purposes rather than to wait for events to impose the need for decision.
He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? “No, thank you,” he will think. “Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy.”
An active life serves the purpose of giving man the opportunity to realize values in creative work, while a passive life of enjoyment affords him the opportunity to obtain fulfillment in experiencing beauty, art, or nature. But there is also purpose in that life which is almost barren of both creation and enjoyment and which admits of but one possibility of high moral behavior: namely, in man’s attitude to his existence, an existence restricted by external forces.
If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint. But I believed equally that no nation could face or even define its choices without a moral compass that set a course through the ambiguities of reality and thus made sacrifices meaningful. The willingness to walk this fine line marks the difference between the academic’s — or any outsider’s — perception of morality and that of the statesman. The outsider thinks in terms of absolutes; for him right and wrong are defined in their conception The political leader does not have this luxury. He rarely can reach his goal except in stages; any partial step is inherently morally imperfect and yet morality cannot be approximated without it. The philosopher’s test is the reasoning behind his maxims; the statesman’s test is not only the exaltation of his goals but the catastrophe he averts. Mankind will never know what it was spared because once thwarted the consequences can never be proved. The dialogue between the academic and the statesman is therefore always likely to be inconclusive. Without philosophy, policy will have no standards; but without the willingness to peer into darkness and risk some faltering steps without certainty, humanity would never know peace.
History knows no resting places and no plateaus. All societies of which history informs us went through periods of decline; most of them eventually collapsed. Yet there is a margin between necessity and accident, in which the statesman by perseverance and intuition must choose and thereby shape the destiny of his people. To ignore objective conditions is perilous; to hide behind historical inevitability is tantamount to moral abdication; it is to neglect the elements of strength and hope and inspiration which through the centuries have sustained mankind. The statesman’s responsibility is to struggle against transitoriness and not to insist that he be paid in the coin of eternity. He may know that history is the foe of permanence; but no leader is entitled to resignation. He owes it to his people to strive, to create, and to resist the decay that besets all human institutions.
I reached high office unexpectedly at a particularly complex period of our national life. In the life of nations, as of human beings, a point is often reached when the seemingly limitless possibilities of youth suddenly narrow and one must come to grips with the fact that not every option is open any longer. This insight can inspire a new creative impetus, less innocent perhaps than the naive exuberance of earlier years, but more complex and ultimately more permanent. The process of coming to grips with one’s limit is never easy. It can end in despair or in rebellion; it can produce a self-hatred that turns inevitable compromises into a sense of inadequacy.
Yet underlying our exploration of these many facets of negotiation will be a sobering truth: the techniques of reaching agreement, however creative, depend for the ultimate success on the accuracy of underlying assumptions about the world, judgments about the parties’ real interests, and in-depth knowledge of history, politics, economics, and culture. Process insights in the service of flawed objectives or divorced from an understanding of the true situation are unlikely to yield much of value.
I have always put great stress on getting my associates to analyze where they are, where they want to go, where our country should go, and then work back from that to practical solutions… When I came to Washington, I assembled a group of really young, able, dedicated people. I would meet with them several times a week, preferably daily, asking the question, what are we trying to do? What is our strategy in the world?
Credibility for state plays the role of character for a human being. It provides a guarantee that its assurance can be relied upon by friends and its threats taken seriously by adversaries.
One fundamental principle that I have learned in diplomacy is that you cannot separate diplomacy from the consequences of action. The idea that you can have a diplomacy that is conducted like a graduate seminar without the rewards and penalties that attach to actions, it’s a fantasy.
I made a considerable effort to leave no doubt about our fundamental approach. Only romantics think they can prevail in negotiation by trickery; only pedants believe in the advantage of obfuscation. In a society of sovereign states, an agreement will be maintained only if all parties consider it in their interest. They must have a sense of participation in the result. The art of diplomacy is not to outsmart the other side but to convince it either of common interests or of penalties if an impasse continues. The wise diplomat understands that he cannot afford to trick his opponent; in the long run a reputation for reliability and fairness is an important asset. The same negotiators meet over and over again; their ability to deal with one another is undermined if a diplomat acquires a reputation for evasion or duplicity.
At the base of the phenomenon of recognition are judgments about the intrinsic worth of other human beings, or about the norms, ideas, and rules that human beings create. Coerced recognition isn’t meaningful; the admiration of a free individual is far more satisfying than the obeisance of a slave. Political leadership emerges initially because members of a community admire a particular individual who demonstrate great physical prowess, courage, wisdom, or the ability to adjudicate disputes fairly. If politics is a struggle over leadership, it is also a story about followership and the willingness of the great mass of human beings to accord leaders higher status than themselves and subordinate themselves to them. In a cohesive and therefore successful community, this subordination is voluntary and based on belief in the leader’s right to rule.
As political systems develop, recognition is transferred from individuals to institutions - that is, to rules or patterns of behavior that persist over time, like the British monarchy or the US Constitution. But in either case, political order is based on legitimacy and the authority that arises from legitimate domination. Legitimacy means that the people who make up the society recognize the fundamental justice of the system as a whole and are willing to abide by its rules. In contemporary societies, we believe that legitimacy is conferred by democratic elections and respect for the rule of law. But democracy is hardly the only form of government that has been regarded as legitimate historically.
Political power is ultimately based on social cohesion. Cohesion may arise out of calculations of self-interest, but simple self-interest is frequently not enough to induce followers to sacrifice and die on behalf of their communities. Political power is the product not just of the resources and numbers of citizens that a society can command but also the degree to which the legitimacy of leaders and institutions is recognized.
Politics emerges as a mechanism for controlling violence, yet violence constantly remains as a background condition for certain types of political change. Societies can get stuck in a dysfunctional institutional equilibrium, in which existing stakeholders can veto necessary institutional change. Sometimes violence or the threat of violence is necessary to break out of the equilibrium.
Finally, the desire for recognition ensures that politics will never be reducible to simple economic self-interest. Human beings make constant judgments about the intrinsic value, worth, or dignity of other people or institutions, and they organize themselves into hierarchies based on those valuations. Political power ultimately rests upon recognition - the degree to which a leader or institution is regarded as legitimate and can command the respect of a group of followers. People may follow out of self-interest, but the most powerful political organization are those that legitimate themselves on the basis of a broader idea.
Biology gives us the building blocks of political development. Human nature is largely constants across different societies. The huge variance in political forms that we see both at the present time and over the course of history is in the first instance the product of variance in the physical environments that human beings came to inhabit. As societies ramify and fill different environmental niches across the globe, they develop distinctive norms and ideas in a process known as specific evolution. Groups of humans also interact with each other, and this interaction is as much a driver of change as is the physical environment.
A company’s culture is shaped by a lot of things, but this is one one the most important - you have to convey your priorities clearly and repeatedly. In my experience, it’s what separates great managers from the rest. If leaders don’t articulate their priorities clearly, then the people around them don’t know what their own priorities should be. Time and energy and capital get wasted. People in your organization suffer unnecessary anxiety because they don’t know what they should be focused on. Inefficiency sets in, frustration builds up, morale sinks.
You can do a lot for the morale of the people around you just by taking the guesswork out of the day-to-day life. A CEO must provide the company and its senior team with a road map. A lot of work is complex and require intense amounts of focus and energy, but this kind of messaging is fairly simple: This is where we want to be. This is how we’re going to get there. Once those things are laid out simply, so many decisions become easier to make, and the overall anxiety of an entire organization is lowered.
Pessimism leads to paranoia, which leads to defensiveness, which leads to risk aversion.
Optimism sets a different machine in motion. Especially in difficult moments, the people you lead need to feel confident in your ability to focus on what matters, and not to operate from a place of defensiveness and self-preservation. This isn’t about saying things are good when they’re not, and it’s not about conveying some innate faith that “things will work out.” It’s about believing you and the people around you can steer toward the best outcome, and not communicating the feeling that all is lost if things don’t break your way. The tone you set as a leader has an enormous effect on the people around you. No one wants to follow a pessimist.
His mantra was simple: “Do what you need to do to make it better.” Of all the things I learned from Roone, this is what shaped me the most. When I talk about this particular quality of leadership, I refer to it as “the relentless pursuit of perfection.” In practice that means a lot of things, and it’s hard to define. It’s a mindset, really, more than a specific set of rules. It’s not, at least as I have internalized it, about perfectionism at all cost. Instead, it’s about creating an environment in which you refuse to accept mediocrity. You instinctively push back against the urge to say: There’s not enough time, or I don’t have the energy, or This requires a difficult conversation I don’t want to have, or any of the many other ways we can convince ourselves that “good enough” is good enough.
The most important of these skills, and power’s crucial foundation, is the ability to master your emotions. An emotional response to a situation is the single greatest barrier to power, a mistake that will cost you a lot more than any temporary satisfaction you might gain by expressing your feelings. Emotions cloud reason, and if you cannot see the situation clearly, you cannot prepare and respond to it with any degree of control.
Anger is the most destructive of emotional responses, for it clouds your vision the most. It also has the ripple effect that invariably makes situations less controllable and heightens your enemy’s resolve.
Related to mastering your emotions is the ability to distance yourself from the present moment and think objectively about the past and future. Like Janus, the double-faced Romain deity, you must be able to look in both direction at once, the better to handle danger from wherever it comes.
Remember that often adversity is a blessing in disguise and certainly the greatest character builder.
One of my rules in consulting is simple: never solve the problem I am asked to solve. Why such a counterintuitive rule? Because, invariably, the problem I am asked to solve is not the real, fundamental, root problem. It is usually a symptom. In design, the secret to success is to understand what the real problem is.
The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, deep, sustained reasoning is difficult. Unaided memory, though, and reasoning are all limited in power. Human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities. How have we increased memory, thought and reasoning? By the invention of external aids: it is the things that make us smart. Some assistance comes through cooperative, social behavior: some arises through exploitation of the information present in the environment; and some comes through the development of tools of thought — cognitive artifacts — that complement abilities and strengthen mental powers.
Người ta có câu “anh hùng tương tích”, tức là anh hùng thì hiểu lòng nhau, quý mến nhau. Lưu Bị võ kém Quan Trương, mưu thua Gia Cát. Tống Giang võ kém Lâm Xung, mưu thua Ngô Dụng. Vậy tại sao những người giỏi võ, giỏi mưu hơn lại cam chịu ở dưới trướng họ? Bởi vì anh hùng không phải chỉ là biết võ biết mưu. Anh hùng là ở cốt cách, khí phách, ý chí. Những võ tướng tài giỏi, những hảo hán Lương Sơn đâu có đời nào lại chịu nghe một kẻ nhu nhược chỉ huy. Đừng nói là những tay hảo hán, mà ngay cả người bình thường, gặp kẻ nhu nhược đớn hèn chỉ huy, phỏng có ai chịu tuân theo mệnh lệnh.
Cốt cách anh hùng đấy, nói thì trừu tượng, nhưng nó cũng có những biểu hiện rất cụ thể mà cả ở Lưu Bị và Tống Giang đều thấy rõ, đó là không ngại khó, không ngại khổ, không sợ nguy hiểm; gặp nghịch cảnh vẫn hiên ngang, gặp cường địch vẫn bình thản. Đó là những tính cách mà tất cả đàn ông trên đời đều phải học tập.
In her view, the best code is like a good piece of writing. It needs a carefully realized structure; every word should do work. Programming this way requires empathy with readers. It also means seeing code not just as a means to an end but as an artifact in itself.
Of all the achievements of Nixon’s first term, I consider the preservation of the sinews of our military strength among the most significant. Without it all efforts at relaxing tensions would have failed. For moderation is a virtue only in those who are thought to have a choice.
Men become myths not by what they know, nor even by what they achieve, but by the tasks they set for themselves.
Any obstruction of the natural processes of development… or getting stuck on a level unsuited to one’s age, takes its revenge, if not immediately, then later at the onset of the second half of life, in the form of serious crises, nervous breakdowns, and all manner of physical and psychic sufferings. Mostly they are accompanied by vague feelings of guilt, by tormenting pangs of conscience, often not understood, in face of which the individual is helpless. He knows he is not guilty of any bad deed, he has not given way to an illicit impulse, and yet he is plagued by uncertainty, discontent, despair, and above all by anxiety - a constant, indefinable anxiety. And in truth he must usually be pronounced “guilty”. His guilt does not lie in the fact that he has a neurosis, but in the fact that, knowing he has one, he does nothing to set about curing it.
The most important relationship that you have in life is the one that you have with yourself. Voices of other people will come and go, but the voice in your head is never going away. If you have an unpleasant relationship with the voice in your head, you’re probably going to have unpleasant life.
The way you carry yourself will often determine how you are treated. In the long run, appearing vulgar or common will make people disrespect you. For a king respects himself and inspires the same sentiment in others. By acting regally and confident of your powers, you make yourself seem destined to wear a crown.
You have no idea how much it contributes to the general politeness and pleasantness of diplomacy when you have a little quiet armed force in the background.
You’re wrong. You notice only your shortcomings because you’ve resolved to not start liking yourself. In order to not like yourself, you don’t see your strong points and focus only on your shortcomings.
The greatest life-lie of all is not to live here and now. It is to look at the past and the future, cast a dim light on one’s entire life, and believe that one has been able to see something. Until now, you have turned away from the here and now and shone a light only on invented pasts and futures. You have told a great lie to your life, to these irreplaceable moments.
The man who has anticipated the coming of troubles takes away their power when they arrive.
Anticipating calamities is not about ruining the present moment, but optimizing it. We’ll be less afraid of things which might never happen. The Stoics think the best path to freedom is by imagining what we fear as it’s going to happen and examining it in our mind — until we can view it with detachment.
The common way to deal with fear is to hide from it and trying to think of something else. But this is probably the worst technique of all. Fear grows by not being looked at.
The proper way to deal with what we fear is thinking about it rationally, calmly, and often — until it becomes familiar. You’ll get bored with what you once feared, and your worries will disappear. By confronting your fears, whether in imagination or in reality, you reduce the stress caused by those fears.
One reason for this success is the firm’s self-confidence. McKinsey is all about confidence. The McKinsey sales pitch is a simple one: “Whatever your problem is, we’re the smart guys that can help you fix it.”
Marvin Bower told his proteges that the secret to success was to act successful. He wasn’t just talking about McKinsey. He was talking about a specific kind of American confidence that allowed the country to conquer the economic globe to a degree that is only now being called into question, some fifty years later. The country has that confidence — or it used to — and McKinsey expressed that as totally and fully as any company the world has ever seen. So it made mistakes. It could fix them. And it did.
A man should never be ashamed to own that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying, in other words, that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.
A very important principle in investing is that you don’t have to make it back the way you lost it. In fact, it’s usually a mistake to try to make it back the way you lost it.
Understanding reasons is an important factor in learning. To learn, remember, organize, and use ideas, we must understand the “why” and “how.” There’s no use memorizing what we don’t understand. If we don’t understand the meaning of an idea, we don’t use it. What we don’t use, we forget. We also need to be motivated to learn. And we can’t be motivated if we don’t understand why we need to learn something. We need to see its practical use.
Understanding is about the ability of seeing patterns — how ideas and things relate and hang together. Knowledge that can be used in a variety of situations.
Our brains favor the concrete and practical over the abstract and theoretical. We are special good at remembering images and spatial information. We therefore learn better if the use of ideas and patterns are illustrated through pictures and simple, clear and vivid real-life stories. Stories on what works and what doesn’t increase our ability to retain what we’ve learned.
It depends on what you think life is about. I mean, if I want to lead a happy personal life, then I would have remained a lawyer and a businessman and today I would be very much wealthier than I am. But I did not set out to do that. I saw a situation which I thought was wrong and I sought to put it right and I have the satisfaction of seeing better-fed people, better housing, everybody owning their own home, everybody having children who go to school, better health services, recreational facilities, all they could ask for in life. The problem is they now take it for granted and they believe that we can go on autopilot. I don’t think so. I think if the government falls into bad hands, bad leaders, it will gradually regress.
To be a leader, you must accept other people becoming rich because you are governing well. I once told that to the party secretary of Shenzhen. I said: “If you want to succeed as a leader, then don’t think of yourself. Create a system where the others can make money and become rich. And you will remain an honest official and relatively poor.” I don’t know whether he followed my advice.
He asked how I had stayed in power for so long, winning successive elections. Because, I replied, people knew I did not lie and was sincere in advancing their interests. Ordinary people could not follow the intricacies of an economic or a political problem so they learnt whom to trust. To win such trust, I never said anything which I did not believe in, and people slowly recognized that I was honest and sincere. This was my most powerful asset. It was also US President Reagan’s strength. He had good speechwriters. He worked on their drafts, using their ideas but putting them into his own words. He did not allow himself to be “voiced over” by his speechwriters, so when he delivered a speech, he came across as a man of sincerity and conviction.
The causes of war are psychological, biological, economic, and political — that is, they lie in the nature impulses of men, in the competitions of groups, in the material needs of societies, and in the fluctuations of national ambition and power.
The basic causes are in ourselves, for the state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history. The major instincts of mankind — acquisition, mating, fighting, action, and association — are the ultimate sources of war. For thousands, perhaps millions, of years men were uncertain of their food supply; not knowing yet the bounty of husbanded soil, the depended upon the fortunes of the hunt. Having captured prey they tore or cut it into pieces, often on the spot, and gorged themselves to their cubic capacity with the raw flesh and the warm gore; how could they tell when they might eat again? Greed is eating, or hoarding, for the future; wealth is originally a hedge against starvation; war is at first a raid for food. Perhaps all vices were once virtues, indispensable in the struggle for existence; they became vices only in the degree to which social order and increasing security rendered them unnecessary for survival. Once men had to chase, to kill, to grasp, to overeat, to hoard; a hundred millenniums of insecurity bred into the race those acquisitive and possessive impulses which no laws or morals or ideals, but only centuries of security, can mitigate or destroy.
Vague appeals to the conscience of mankind to put an end to war have had little effect throughout history, for there is no conscience of mankind. Morality is a habit of order generated by centuries of compulsion; international morality awaits international order; international order awaits international force; conscience follows the policeman. A wise people will love peace and keep its powder dry.
An effective approach to the problem of war will proceed, not by large and generous emotions, but by the specific study and patient adjustment of specific clauses and disputes. Peace must be planned and organized as realistically as war — with provision for every factor, and prevision for every detail. This cannot be done in an occasional moment stolen by statesmen from internal affairs; it requires the full-time attention of first-rate minds. The incentives to war are so numerous and powerful that each of them should be the major concern of an international commission specifically appointed for its consideration and adjustments.
We need more knowledge, and must submit to a heavy stress upon science in education and government, for we are subject to international challenges that force us to keep pace with every technological advance. But we need something more than knowledge; we need the wisdom and character to use our knowledge with foresight and caution, with both resolution and restraint. What is character? It is a rational harmony and hierarchy of desires in coordination with capacity. What is wisdom? It is an application of experience to the present problems, a view of the part in light of the whole, a perspective of the moment in the vista of years past and years to come.
But there is another way in which to view history; history as man’s rise from savagery to civilization — history as the record of the lasting contributions made to man’s knowledge, wisdom, arts, morals, manners, skills — history as a laboratory rich in a hundred thousand experiments in economics, religions, literature, science, and government — history as our roots and our illumination, as the road by which we came and the only light that can clarify the present and guide us into the future — that kind of history is not “bunk”; it is, as Napoleon said on St. Helena, “the only true philosophy and the only true psychology.” Other studies may tell us how we might behave, or how we should behave; history tells us how we have behaved for six thousand years. One who knows that record is in large measure protected in advance against the delusions and disillusionments of his times. He has learned the limitations of human nature, and bears with equanimity the faults of his neighbors and the imperfections of states. He shares hopefully in the reforming enterprises of his age and people; but his heart does not break, nor his faith in life fade out, when he perceives how modest are the results, and how persistently man remains what he has been for sixty centuries, perhaps for a thousand generations.
Man, to become civilized, must be subjected to a system of national law possessing superior force, just as states, to be civilized, must be subjected to a system of international law possessing superior force. So we must relinquish the childish dreams of unfettered liberty that inspired many of us in our youth, and that still enthrall some college students in America and abroad. And though we acknowledge that poverty is a spur to crime, we perceive that the root of crime, in all classes, nations, and ages, is the basically lawless nature of man, formed by a million years of hunting, fighting, killing, and greed.
The illustrious ancients, when they wished to make clear and propagate the highest virtues in the world, put their states in proper order. Before putting their states in proper order, they regulated their families. Before regulating their families, they cultivated their own selves. Before cultivating their own selves, they perfected their souls. Before perfecting their souls, they tried to be sincere in their thoughts. Before trying to be sincere in their thoughts, they extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such investigation of knowledge lay in the investigation of things, and seeing them as they really were. When things were thus investigated, knowledge became complete. When knowledge was complete, their thoughts became sincere. When their thoughts were sincere, their souls became perfect. When their souls were perfect, their own selves became cultivated. When their selves were cultivated, their families became regulated. When their families were regulated, their states came to be put into proper order. When their states were in proper order, then the whole world became peaceful and happy.
There was no little pathos in the emotions underlying each side’s arguments. Israel insisted on a “binding peace.” Only a country that had never known peace could have attached so much importance to that phrase. For what it is a binding peace among sovereign nations when one of the attributes of sovereignty is the right to change one’s mind? For three centuries France and Germany had fought wars in almost every generation; each one was ended by a formal “binding” peace treaty that did nothing to prevent the next war. Nor did “open frontiers” in 1914 prevent the outbreak of a word war which shook Europe to its foundations. Most wars in history have been fought between countries that started out at peace; it was the special lunacy of the Middle East that its wars broke out between countries that were technically already at war.
When a new Administration comes to office it is taken for granted that it will “tackle” the important world problems; new Presidents always chide their predecessors for leaving issues not yet conclusively “solved.” It is difficult for any American leader to accept the fact that in some conflicts opposing positions are simply irreconcilable. Indeed, when readiness to compromise does not exist, forcing the issue prematurely will magnify insecurity and instability; events that should be slowed down may be accelerated; pressures are generated that cannot be controlled. Every new Administration must learn — often the hard way — that on of the most difficult responsibilities of policymaking is the patience to pick the right moment for decisive action.
The things you think about determine the quality of your mind. Your soul takes on the color of your thoughts.
Every new Administration since 1960 has come into office convinced that its predecessor neglected Atlantic relations, proclaiming it would give high priority to remedying this shortcoming, and promising bold new programs. None brought about the dramatic improvement for which it aimed. Ironically, the greater the energy expended, the more the problems seemed to multiply.
This was no accident. There is a perpetual nostalgia about Atlantic relations that harks back to the Marshall Plan. Then, a bold American proposal elicited an enthusiastic and grateful European response; Atlantic and European institutions emerged in profusion to spell out a grand design. It was the secret dream of US foreign policy come true: American moral leadership evoking a spontaneous and authentic consensus; cooperation without a hint of coercion; the banishment of “outdated” concepts of national interest and power politics.
In the heady exaltation of the postwar years, it was overlooked that European attitudes were perhaps not as novel as they appeared; they were quite compatible with a hard sense of national interests. The practical consequence of the new approach was to enable a prostrate and ravaged continent to gain protection, economic assistance, and technology without any requirement of reciprocity. Yet for a whole generation of American leaders, that experiment represented the ideal pattern of international relations. They never reflected that while generosity makes hegemony bearable it does not render it acceptable. The test would come not in the formative years of the “new” Atlantic relationship, but when its proclaimed goals were being reached. Then, when Europe had regained its economic power and political self-confidence and the European countries were in a position to insist on their own views, when, in other words, real options existed for them, we would know whether we had participated in the birth of a new era or in the refurbishing of traditional patterns.
What if it was the case that the world revealed whatever goodness it contains in precise proportion to your desire for the best? What if the more your conception of the best has been elevated, expanded and rendered sophisticated the more possibility and benefit you could perceive? We only see what we aim at. The rest of the world (and that’s most of it) is hidden.
There is also a very special role for a leader in this process. When followers identify with a we, they almost invariably take on a notion of what we should or should not do. It is natural for followers, or potential followers, to define this notion of what they should or should not do in personal terms. For them, the leader serves as a role model — someone who sets the standards, who is the ideal, who is the focus of attention and the topic of gossip. Sometimes, the leader is even the protagonist in the creation myth of the group of we, as in the stories told in most firms about their founding.
People take stock in their groups’ leader; the leader’s actions symbolize for them what they should or should not do. The leader is the archetypal “one of us.”
But where do these constructions of boundaries, content, and prototypes come from? By now, we have already begun to answer that question. They come from the leaders themselves. Indeed, precisely because social category definitions constitute such a powerful social force, then anyone who is interested in shaping the world — political actors, social movement activists, and so on — needs to be interested in defining categories. Our third rule of effective leadership, then, is that leaders need to be skilled entrepreneurs of identity. Their craft lies in telling us who we are and in representing their ideas as the embodiment of who we are and what we want to be. If they succeed, our energy becomes their tool and our efforts constitute their power.
Vision is the key to understanding leadership, and real leaders have never lost the childlike ability to dream dreams… Vision is the blazing campfire around which people will gather. It provides light, energy, warmth and unity.
But on its own, vision is of little use. Many people have a clear and powerful sense of the future, but this alone does not make them leaders. After all, having visions can also be a sign of lunacy. People only become leaders, then, when their vision is accepted by others.
A person with no constituents is not a leader, and people will not follow until they accept a vision as their own. Leaders cannot command commitment only inspire it. Leaders have to enlist others in a common vision.
Indeed, there is a sense in which the heroic myth actually diminishes the achievement of great leaders. For if they are born with some “special stuff,” if it all comes naturally to them, then what merit is there in anything that they might achieve?
Our position is that leadership involves a highly complex set of skills. Our aim to demystify the process precisely so that we can analyze and appreciate all these skills. If anything, this can only increase our respect and even awe for great leaders, but equally, we want to show that these skills never come easily. They are the end result of a great deal of very hard work. And again, understanding the application and dedication that this involves adds to our respect. But such application does not set leaders apart from us. It brings them closer. For we too have the choice to apply ourselves. We too could acquire these skills. We are not condemned to servitude at birth.
Even though their success is likely to have come about through their willingness to learn about the group, and to represent it, the experience of success can change them. They begin to think that they are above the group, that they know more than the group, that they can simply tell group members what to do. In effect, although their experience gives the lie to the myth of heroic leadership, ultimately this myth — and the publicity that attends it — is something that they come to believe in. And as they do, they succumb to hubris and become distanced from the rank-and-file group members. For leaders, this is the kiss of death.
Lieutenant, you may be starving, but you must never show hunger; you always eat last. You may be freezing or near heat exhaustion, but you must never show that you are cold or hot. You may be terrified, but you must never show fear. You are the leader and the troops will reflect your emotions. They must believe that no matter how bad things look, you can make them better.
Roosevelt in his Autobiography tells of the first time he hunted dangerous game. He doesn’t recommend it for amateurs. He conceded that he was only a mediocre marksman because of poor eyesight and had several near misses with wild animals, including one charging elephant. The risk, he says, is the nerves of an inexperienced hunter when game first comes into view. “Any beginner is apt to have buck fever, and therefore no beginner should go at dangerous game,” Roosevelt writes. “Buck fever” is a state of intense nervous excitement “which may be entirely divorced from timidity.” Imagine the thrill and anxiety of doing something for the first time: your first trip to the zoo, first visit to the dentist, first time behind the wheel, your first kiss. Roosevelt mentions the first time speaking in front of a large audience and the first time in battle. That’s “buck fever,” and there is really only one cure, “habit.” “What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness. This he can get only by actual practice. He must, by custom and repeated exercise of self-mastery, get his nerves thoroughly under control.”
He who learns must suffer. Against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of enduring pain. Suffering can be virtuous, nothing worth doing well can be done without a bit of strife.
Above all he could make decisions — very tough decisions. Even when they hurt people — influential people — he made them.
As for our real competitors, I came to see that they were extremely important to our long-term success. They played a critical role in shaping our reputation in the industry — which was, and is, our most valuable asset — if only because their opinion carried more weight than that of any other group.
When they spoke well of us, everybody listened. So I made a habit of treating them with the respect I hoped they would show us as well, and I insisted that our salespeople do the same.
So what exactly do I mean by reputation? I’m talking about what people think of the way you do business, you they assess your character as a businessperson. Do you compete fairly? Do you run a nice, clean operation? Do you treat your employees well? Do you go around bad-mouthing other companies in the industry, or do you speak about them with respect? Those are all factors that help to shape your business reputation, which in turn affects your ability to hire people, attract customers, get financing, make deals, and do everything else that goes into building a successful company.
I’ve long believed that a good reputation is the most valuable asset you can have in business. What’s odd is the role your competitors play in creating one. Their opinion, I believe, counts more than the view of any other group — because of their credibility within the industry and with potential customers. Competitors have a unique perspective of you and your company. They face the same pressures and have to make the same choices that you do. If you have the respect of your competitors, you probably deserve it. If they think you’re a lowlife, you could be headed for trouble.
Whatever your company does, you need to believe in your gut that it’s the most interesting, exciting, worthwhile enterprise you could be engaged in at that moment, or you’re going to have a hard time convincing anyone else — employees, customers, investors, whoever — to make commitments to you. If I thought storing boxes on shelves was boring, I never would have been able to attract the great people I work with, and we wouldn’t have been able to accomplish what we’ve done.
That kind of enthusiasm is worth all the headaches and heartaches that go into building a company. If you don’t have it, you probably should find some other pursuit. Life is too short to waste your time — and everybody else’s — on things you don’t believe in. Then again, if you do have the passion, you’ll look at entrepreneurship the way I do: as a fantastic journey and a truly fabulous way to spend a life.
When thinking of the anima as the soul guide, we are apt to think of Beatrice leading Dante up to Paradise, but we would not forget that he experienced that only after he had gone through Hell. Normally, the anima does not take a man by the hand and lead him right up to Paradise; she puts him first into a hot cauldron where he is nicely roasted for a while.
Never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricane he will encounter. The statesman who yields to war fever must realize that, once the signal is given, he is no longer the master of policy but the slave of unforeseeable and uncontrollable events.
The divergence of the curves is not a paradox. Recall that the people who feel they lead meaningful lives are more susceptible to stress, struggle, and worry. Consider as well that anxiety has always been a perquisite of adulthood: it rises steeply from the school-age years to the early twenties as people take on adulthood responsibilities, and then falls steadily over the rest of the life course as they learn to cope with them. Perhaps that is emblematic of the challenges of modernity. Though people today are happier, they are not as happy as one might expect, perhaps because they have an adult’s appreciation of life, with all its worry and all its excitement. The original definition of Enlightenment, after all, was “humankind’s emergence from its self-incurred immaturity.”
Việt ngữ xưa kia còn nghèo lắm nên chỉ đủ dùng để diễn tả những thứ nhu cầu vật chất và tình cảm thôi. Đến việc biểu diễn những ý tưởng, những vật trừu tượng thì Việt ngữ không đủ dùng. Sau này dù có mượn thêm chữ Hán, những phẩm tử dùng để diễn tả ý trừu tượng cũng vẫn còn ít ỏi lắm vì chính chữ Hán là lối chữ tượng hình, tự nó cũng còn thiếu sót nhiều những chữ hoặc tiếng hoàn toàn chỉ dùng riêng về việc biểu diễn tư tưởng. Điểm thiếu sót ấy chính ở mực sinh hoạt vật chất của dân chúng trong xã hội nông nghiệp còn thấp kém. Mực sinh hoạt dân chúng mà được cao lên, tức nhu cầu vật chất đã tăng lên, thì ngôn ngữ đồng thời cũng giàu thêm bởi ngôn ngữ chỉ là tiếng “vang” của nhu cầu. Nhu cầu mới tạo ra những tiếng mới, mà mực sinh hoạt vật chất đã cao lên thì đồng thời cuộc sinh hoạt tinh thần cũng phức tạp hơn lên, và do đó, ngôn ngữ cũng theo nhịp tiến bộ vật chất mà phát triển. Cho nên sự giàu hay nghèo của ngôn ngữ vẫn biểu thị rất đúng mực sinh hoạt vật chất và tinh thần của một dân tộc trong mỗi giai đoạn tiến hoá lịch sử.
Frequently, trite ideas or unimaginative translation of those ideas is the result not of poor subject matter but of poor interpretation of a problem. In the absence of a fresh, visual solution, subject matter sometimes becomes the scapegoat. Such difficulties may arise if: a) the designer has interpreted a commonplace idea with a common place image; b) he has failed to resolve the problem of integrating form and content; or c) he has failed to interpret the problem as a two-dimensional organization in a given space. He has thus deprived his visual image of the potential to suggest, perhaps, more than the eye can see. And he has denied himself the opportunity of saying the commonplace in an uncommonplace way.
Collage and montage permit the showing of seemingly unrelated objects or ideas as a single picture; they enable the designer to indicate simultaneous events or scenes which by more conventional methods would result in a series of isolated pictures. Compactness of the complex message in a single picture more readily enables the spectator to focus his attention on the advertiser’s message.
Even if it is true that the average man seems most comfortable with the commonplace and familiar, it is equally true that catering to bad taste, which we so readily attribute to the average reader, merely perpetuates the mediocrity and denies the reader one of the most easily accessible means for esthetic development and eventual enjoyment.
While a good story must give me a role, and must extend beyond my horizons, it need not be true. A story can be pure fiction, and yet provide me with an identity and make me feel that my life has meaning. Indeed, to the best of our scientific understanding, none of the thousands of stories that different cultures, religions and tribes have invented throughout history is true. They are all just human inventions. If you ask for the true meaning of life and get a story in reply, know that this is the wrong answer. The exact details don’t really matter. Any story is wrong, simply for being a story. The universe just does not work like a story.
So why do people believe in these fictions? One reason is that their personal identity is built on the story. People are taught to believe in the story form early childhood. They hear it from their parents, their teachers, their neighbors and the general culture long before they develop the intellectual and emotional independence necessary to question and verify such stories. By the time their intellect matures, they are so heavily invested in the story, that they are far more likely to use their intellect to rationalize the story than to doubt it.
Even in romance, any aspiring Romeo knows that without sacrifice, there is no true love. The sacrifice is not just a way to convince your lover that you are serious - it is also a way to convince yourself that you are really in love. Why do you think women ask their lovers to bring them diamond rings? Once the lover makes such a huge financial sacrifice, he must convince himself that it was for a worthy cause.
Most generals were promoted because they performed well in operations. They now had to shift their perspective to the strategic level and embrace skills that had played little or no role in their promotion to flag rank. I wanted to convey, in personal, concrete terms, the complexity of dealing with civilian policymakers and how their current skill set was incomplete for what lay ahead.
Above all, I cautioned them that their natural inclination to be team players could not compromise their independence of character. They had to be capable of articulating necessary options or consequences, even when unpopular. They must give their military advice straight up, not moderating it. Avoid what George Kennan called “the treacherous curtain of deference.” Don’t be political. They had to understand that their advice might not be accepted. Then they must carry out a policy, to the best of their ability, even when they might disagree. Recognize, too, that ultimately any President gets the advice he desires and deserves, but in the dawn’s early light you need to be able to look in the shaving mirror without looking away. As Secretary Shultz had said before Congress, to do our jobs well, we should not want our job too much.
The leader must learn to cut to the heart of a situation, recognize its decisive elements and base his course of action on these. The ability to do this is not God-given, nor can it be acquired overnight; it is a process of years. He must realize that training in solving problems of all types - long practices in making clear unequivocal decisions, the habit of concentrating on the question at hand, and an elasticity of mind - are indispensable requisites for the successful practice of the art of war… It is essential that all leaders - from subaltern to commanding general - familiarize themselves with the art of clear, logical thinking.
PowerPoint is the scourge of critical thinking. It encourages fragmented logic by the briefer and passivity in the listener. Only a verbal narrative that logically connects a succinct problem statement using rational thinking can develop sound solutions. PowerPoint is excellent when displaying data; but it makes us stupid when applied to critical thinking.
“As officers,” he wrote, “you will neither eat, nor drink, nor sleep, nor smoke, nor even sit down until you have personally seen that your men have done those things. If you do this for them, they will follow you to the end of the world. And, if you do not, I will break you.”
Leadership means reaching the souls of your troops, instilling a sense of commitment and purpose in the face of challenges so severe that they cannot be put into words.
In the process we had to learn the painful lesson that events can be dominated only by those with a clear set of goals. A nation gets no awards for confusion masquerading as moderation. For the adversary may mistake goodwill for acquiescence and confuse restraint with weakness. They may be genuinely surprised — indeed, feel tricked — when after much travail we finally and grudgingly turn to the defense of our interests. The result is a crisis.
All experience teaches that Soviet military moves, which usually begin as tentative, must be resisted early, unequivocally, and in a fashion that gives Soviet leaders a justification for withdrawal. If this moment is permitted to pass, the commitment grows to too large to be dismantled short of a major crisis. But a strong response when the challenge is still ambiguous is peculiarly difficult to organize. The evidence, by definition, is not likely to be conclusive. Intelligence agencies — contrary to the mythological perception of them as reckless adventurers — tend to play it safe; they generally flock to a cautious hypothesis. In my experience in almost every crisis there has been an initial dispute about whether we faced a challenge at all — a debate that quickly spreads from the Executive Branch to the Congress. Those opposed to a firm response claim that the Administration is “overreacting.” And if the Administration acts in time and averts the danger, they will feel they were proved right. What they fail to consider is that the real choice is between seemingly overreacting (and containing the challenge) or letting events take over. By the time the true dimensions of the threat become unambiguous — when everyone agrees about its overwhelming nature — it is often too late to do anything. And somewhere along the line the question of what causes a Soviet move becomes irrelevant; American policy must deal with its consequences, not with its causes.
The Soviets respect power and strength. They understand military strength best of all. This does not mean, of course, that they are eager to fight, or that they believe in the indiscriminate use of force. But they do not understand restraint; it confuses them, and in the end leads them to conclude that there is room for their own forward movement.
If the US does not support Israel demonstratively with military assistance, the Soviets will ponder why we refuse to do so. Ultimately, they will conclude that we are deterred because of either domestic, political and economic concerns or because the consequences of military escalation.
When soldiers put their lives on the line, they need to know that the commander in chief who sent them in harm’s way believes in their mission. They need him to talk often to them and to the country, not just to express gratitude for their service and sacrifice but also to explain and affirm why that sacrifice is necessary, why their fight is noble, why their cause is just, and why they must prevail.
As I looked out on all the new appointees at the White House in mid-2009, I was struck by how diverse they — like their predecessors — were in the motives for joining the government. Some were acolytes who idolized the new president, had worked unbelievably hard for his election, and were totally devoted to him on a personal level. They were prepared to sacrifice years of their lives to try to make him successful. Others were “cause” people, individuals who had worked for him and were willing to serve under hm now because of one or another specific issue — or the entire agenda — and saw him and their service as a way to advance policies they believed in. Still others had been successful in their careers and saw an opportunity to give back to the country by working for a man they supported, or simply to do something different for a while. Still another group were just political “junkies” — they loved the political life, and working in the executive branch after 8 years on the Hill or “in the wilderness” (outside government) was like a fresh tank of oxygen. And then there were a small number whose arms had to be twisted personally by the president to get them to abandon the comfort of private life in exchange for grueling hours and the opportunity to be all too often flayed personally and politically on the Hill and in the media.
Venice would be less beautiful without the great buildings that grace the waterfronts. But these buildings are set among modest neighbours, which neither compete with nor spoil them — neighbours whose principal virtue resides precisely in their neighbourliness, their refusal to draw attention to themselves or to claim the exalted status of high art. Ravishing beauties are less important in the aesthetics of architecture than things that fit appropriately together, creating a soothing and harmonious context, a continuous narrative as in a street or a square, where nothing stands out in particular, and good manners prevail.
Much that is said about beauty and its importance in our lives ignores the minimal beauty of an unpretentious street, a nice pair of shoes or a tasteful piece of wrapping paper, as though these things belonged to a different order of value from a church by Bramante or a Shakespeare sonnet. Yet these minimal beauties are far more important to our daily lives, and far more intricately involved in our own rational decisions, than the great works which (if we are lucky) occupy our leisure hours. They are part of the context in which we live our lives, and our desire for harmony, fittingness and civility is both expressed and confirmed in them.
Without the conscious pursuit of beauty we risk falling into a world of addictive pleasures and routine desecration, a world in which the worthwhileness of human life is no longer clearly perceivable.
The paradox, however, is that the relentless pursuit of artistic innovation leads to a cult of nihilism. The attempt to defend beauty from pre-modernist kitsch has exposed it to postmodernist desecration. We seem to be caught in between two forms of sacrilege, the one dealing in sugary dreams, the other in savage fantasies.
Both are forms of falsehood, ways of reducing and demeaning our humanity. Both involve a retreat from the higher life, and a rejection of its principal sign, which is beauty. But both point to the real difficulty, in modern conditions, of leading a life in which beauty has a central place.
Kitsch deprives feeling of its cost, and therefore its reality; desecration augments the cost of feeling, and so frightens us away from it. The remedy for both states of mind is suggested by the thing that they each deny, which is sacrifice. Love and affection between people is real only to the extent that it prepares the way for sacrifice. Sacrifice is the core of virtue, the origin of meaning and the true theme of high art.
Sacrifice can be avoided, and kitsch is the great lie that we can both avoid it and retains its comforts. Sacrifice can also be made meaningless by desecration. But, when sacrifice is present and respected, life redeems itself; it becomes and object of contemplation, something that “bears looking at”, and which attracts our admiration and our love. This connection between sacrifice and love is presented in the rituals and stories of religion.
A good sitter is someone you trust. A great sitter is someone who loves you and you trust. A superlative sitter is someone who doesn’t have any agenda of their own. They don’t want you to see a certain thing. They don’t want you to be a certain way. They don’t want you to discover a certain thing. With or without psychedelics, sounds like good criteria for close friends, too.
There’s a saying in the psychedelic world: “If you get the answer, you should hang up the phone.” In other words, when you get the message you need, you shouldn’t keep asking (i.e., having more experiences), at least until you’ve done some homework assignments, or used the clarity gained to make meaningful changes. It’s easy to use the medicine as a crutch and avoid doing your own work, as the compounds themselves help in the short term as antidepressants.
There’s no point in going to a motivational seminar if you’re not going to take any next steps.
You’re not wound up about this at all?
How would I be wound up? I’m either ready or I’m not. Worrying about it right now ain’t gonna change a damn thing. Right? Whatever’s gonna happen is gonna happen. I’ve either done everything I can to be ready for this, or I haven’t.
Governments deal with the US because it is in their interest, not because they like us or trust us or because of our ability to keep secrets. Some respect us, some fear us, many need us. We have by far the largest economy and the most powerful military. As has been said, in global affairs, we are the indispensable nation. So, other countries will continue to deal with us. Is this embarrassing? Yes. Awkward? Somewhat. But the long-term impact? Very modest.
If your message is one of despair, then you should not be a leader. You must give people hope, hope of improving their conditions. There are of course moments when you feel very down, either because you’re physically down or emotionally down. I think when you’re in that condition, the first thing you do is to get a good night’s sleep, then get a swim or chase a ball.
A messy room equals a messy mind.
Visible mess helps distract us from the true source of the disorder. The act of cluttering is really an instinctive reflex that draws our attention away from the heart of an issue.
When your room is clean and uncluttered, you have no choice but to examine your inner state. You can see any issues you have been avoiding and are forced to deal with them. From the moment you start tidying, you will be compelled to reset your life.
Tidying is just a tool, not the final destination. The true goal should be establish the lifestyle you want most once your house has been put in order.
It’s not the actual violence that scares us. It is the uncertainty and possibility for disaster that emotionally drives us absolutely bonkers.
The need for a stable and predictable environment is a core human need. What frightens us or gives us anxiety is not when bad things happen - it’s when we’re not sure whether a bad thing will happen or not. When something goes wrong, at least we have the power to fix it. We’re still in control. But when life becomes unpredictable - when the house is dark and there’s a mysterious sound upstairs - we feel as though we’ve lost control.
Love yourself. That should be the foundational commandment. Love yourself. All else will follow, but this is the foundation.
When something is very frightening remember that this is the time not to go anywhere, this is the time to be here. When something frightening is happening, then something is happening. The moment is very pregnant and you have to be here, and you have to go into it.
If you don’t love yourself, and you are nearest to you, how can you love anybody else? Nobody loves himself yet he is trying to love others. Then your love is nothing but hatred masked, hidden.
I tell you to love yourself first, because if love happens within you, only then can it spread to others.
Love yourself, and then suddenly you will find yourself reflected everywhere.
You are a human being and all other human beings are just like you. Just forms differ, names differ, but the reality is the same. Go on moving, farther and farther; then animals are also like you - the form differs a little more. But the being? Then the trees are also like you. Go farther and farther, the ripples spread; then even rocks, because they exist like you. Existence is the same, similar.
And of course the taste of pain is bitter, but once you have learned it, it gives such sharpness and brilliance to you. It shakes all dust, all stupor and sleepiness from you. It makes you fully mindful in a way that nothing else can. In pain you can be more meditative than in pleasure. Pleasure is more distracting. Pleasure engulfs you; in pleasure you abandon consciousness. Pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is a remembrance; you cannot forget pain. Pain can become a very creative energy; it can become meditation, it can become awareness.
When pain is there, use it as awareness, as meditation, as a sharpening of the soul. And when pleasure is there, then use it as a drowning, as a forgetfulness.
Time is a problem because you have not been living rightly - it is symbolic, it is symptomatic. If you live rightly the problem of time disappears, the fear of time disappears.
The fear is not of death, the fear is of time, and if you look deeply into it then you find that the fear is of unlived life - you have not been able to live life. If you live, then there is no fear. If life comes to a fulfillment, there is no fear. If you have enjoyed, attained to the peaks that life can give, if your life has been an orgasmic experience, a deep poetry vibrating within you, a song, a festival, a ceremony, and you lived each moment of it to its totality; then there is no fear of time, then the fear disappears.
I saw firsthand the age-old reality that the qualities important for military leadership and success in war are not the same as those required in peacetime. In war, boldness, adaptability, creativity, sometimes ignoring the rules, risk taking, and ruthlessness are essential for success. These are not characteristics that will get an officer very far in peacetime.
Wars are a lot easier to get into than out of, a point I hope I have made clear. Those who ask about exit strategies or what happens if assumptions prove wrong are rarely welcome at the conference table when the fire-breathers argue we must act militarily. The argument against military action is almost never about capabilities but whether it is wise. As Petraeus said early on in Iraq, “Tell me how this ends.” Too often the question is not even asked, much less answered.
Every attempt to make war easy and safe will result in humiliation and disaster.
No matter how a war starts, it ends in mud. It has to be slugged out — there are no trick solutions or cheap shortcuts.
During WW2, General George Marshall once told his wife, “I cannot afford the luxury of sentiment, mine must be cold logic. Sentiment is for others.”
Fortified by his uncommon mix of gloom and glee, Kissinger never wavered. The gloom led him as a conservative, to privilege order over justice. The glee led him to think he might, by the force of his will and intellect, forestall the tragic and claim, if only for a fleeting moment, freedom. “Those statesmen who have achieved final greatness did not do so through resignation, however well founded. It was given to them not only to maintain the perfection of order but to have the strength to contemplate chaos, there to find material for fresh creation.”
Four years earlier, Kissinger had elaborated on the importance of political imagination in his discussion of JFK’s response to the Cuban missile crisis. The “essence” of good foreign policy, Kissinger wrote, “is its contingency; its success depends on the correctness of an estimate which is in part conjectural.” The problem, though, is that successful nation-states rationalize their foreign policy. They create a foreign service, with protocols, guidelines, clear procedures, and grades for promotion, administered by functionaries who depend on experts deeply versed in the particularities of their particular region. The whole system is set up to strive for “safety” and “predictability,” to work for the maintenance and reproduction of the status quo. “The attempt to conduct policy bureaucratically leads to a quest for calculability which tends to become a prisoner of events.” Routinization leads to caution, caution to inaction, inaction to atrophy. Success is measured by “mistakes avoided rather than by goals achieved.”
In contrast, great statesmen, the ones who will truly make a difference, never let themselves become paralyzed by a “pre-vision of catastrophes.” They are agile, thriving on “perpetual creation, on a constant redefinition of goals.”
What Reagan and his followers did, then, was to keep Kissingerism by splitting it in two. They claimed as their own the half that emphasized that the human condition was radical freedom, that decline was not inevitable, that the course of history could be swayed by the will of purposeful men. Rodgers writes that “by the time Reagan entered the White House, freedom’s nemesis had migrated into the psyche. Freedom’s deepest enemy was pessimism: the mental undertow of doubt, the paralyzing specter of limits, the ‘cynic who’s trying to tell us we’re not going to get any better.’” Into Regan’s speeches slipped an “enchanted, disembedded, psychically involute sense of freedom” celebrating the “limitless possibilities of self and change.”
“America’s not just a word,” Reagan said in his 1984 address, “it is a hope, a torch shedding light to all the hopeless of the world… You know, throughout the world, the persecuted hear the word ‘America,’ and in that sound they hear the sunrise, hear the rivers push, hear the cold, swift air at the top of the peak. Yes, you can hear freedom.”
Kissinger has said, over and over again, that one of the worst conditions that can befall a political leader is to become “prisoner of the past,” to be overly worried about repeating mistakes. Statesmen must refuse, as Kissinger has refused, to accept the proposition that the consequences of any previous action, no matter how horrific, should restrict their room to maneuver in the future.
- What are America’s perpetual, eternal interests?
- I would begin by saying that we have to have faith in ourselves. That is an absolute requirement. We can’t reduce policy to a series of purely tactical decisions or self-recriminations. The fundamental strategic question is: What is it that we will not permit, no matter how it happens, no matter how legitimate it looks?
Clarity: when the mind is free from fear and ego.
Clarity is not found through intellect but experienced in stillness.
The day you plant the seed is not the day you eat the fruit.
Three conclusions emerge from Richelieu’s career. First, the indispensable element of a successful foreign policy is a long-term strategic concept based on a careful analysis of all relevant factors. Second, the statesman must distill that vision by analyzing and shaping an array of ambiguous, often conflicting pressures into a coherent and purposeful direction. He must know where this strategy is leading and why. And, third, he must act at the outer edge of the possible, bridging the gap between his society’s experiences and its aspirations. Because repetition of the familiar leads to stagnation, no little daring is required.
Individuals became civilized when they were made secure by membership in an effectively protective communal groups; states will become civilized when they are made secure by loyal membership in an effectively protective federated group.
How did civilization grow despite the inherent hunting nature of the male? It did not aim to stifle that nature; it recognized that no economic system can long maintain itself without appealing to acquisitive instincts and eliciting superior abilities by offering superior rewards. It knew that no individual or state can long survive without willingness to fight for self-preservation. It saw that no society or race or religion will last if it does not breed. But it realized that if acquisitiveness were not checked it would lead to retail theft, wholesale robbery, political corruption, and to such concentration of wealth as would invite revolution.
If pugnacity were not checked, it would lead to brawls at every corner, to domination of every neighborhood by its heaviest thug, to the division of every city by rival gangs. If sex were not controlled, it would leave every girl at the mercy of every seducer, every wife at the mercy of her husband’s secret itching for the charms of variety and youth, and would make not only every park, but every street, unsafe for any woman. Those powerful instincts had to be controlled, or social order and communal life would have been impossible, and men would have remained savages.
The hunting-stage instincts were controlled partly by law and police, partly by a precarious general agreement called morality. The acquisitive impulses were checked by outlawing robbery and condemning greed and the disruptive concentration of wealth. The spirit of pugnacity was restrained by inflicting punishing injury to persons or property. The sexual impulses — only slightly less powerful than hunger — were disciplined to manageable order by banning their public excitation and by trying to channel them at an early age into responsible marriage.
Everything we did - everything associated with our name - needed to be good. Thinking this way was not just about morale; it was a signal to everyone at Pixar that they were part owners of the company’s greatest asset - its quality.
Around this time, John coined a new phrase: “Quality is the best business plan.” What he meant was that quality is not a consequence of following some set of behavior. Rather, it is a prerequisite and a mindset you must have before you decide what you are setting out to do. Everyone says quality is important, but they must do more than say it. They must live, think, and breathe it. When our people asserted that they only wanted to make films of the highest quality and when we pushed ourselves to the limit in order to prove our commitment to that ideal, Pixar’s identity was cemented. We would be a company that would never settle. That didn’t mean that we wouldn’t make mistakes. Mistakes are part of creativity. But when we did, we would strive to face them without defensiveness and with a willingness to change.
Freedom is a luxury of security.
The stem cell debate was an introduction to a phenomenon I witnessed throughout my presidency: highly personal criticism. Partisan opponents and commentators questioned my legitimacy, my intelligence, and my sincerity. They mocked my appearance, my accent, and my religious beliefs. I was labeled a Nazi, a war criminal, and Satan himself. One lawmaker called me both a loser and a liar. He became majority leader of the US Senate.
In some ways, I wasn’t surprised. I had endured plenty of rough politics in Texas. I had seen Dad and Bill Clinton derided by their opponents and the media. Abraham Lincoln was compared to a baboon. Even George Washington became so unpopular that political cartoons showed the hero of the American Revolution being marched to a guillotine.
Yet the death spiral of decency during my time in office, exacerbated by the advent of 24-hour cable news and hyper-partisan political blogs, was deeply disappointing. The toxic atmosphere in American politics discourages good people from running for office.
Over time, the petty insults and name-calling hardened into conventional wisdom. Some have said I should have pushed back harder against the caricatures. But I felt it would debase the presidency to stoop to the critics’ level. I had run on a promise to change the tone in Washington. I took that vow seriously and tried to do my part, but I rarely succeeded.
The shrill debate never affected my decisions. I read a lot of history, and I was struck by how many presidents had endured harsh criticism. The measure of their character, and often their success, was how they responded. Those who based their decisions on principle, not some snapshot of public opinion, were often vindicated over time.
George Washington once wrote that leading by conviction gave him “a consolation within that no earthly efforts can deprive me of.” He continued: “The arrows of malevolence, however barbed and well pointed, never can reach the most vulnerable part of me.”
I read those words in Presidential Courage, written by historian Michael Beschloss in 2007. As I told Laura, if they’re still assessing George Washington’s legacy more than two centuries after he left office, this George W. doesn’t have to worry about today’s headlines.
From the beginning, I knew the public reaction to my decision would be colored by whether there was another attack. If none happened, whatever I did would probably look like an overreaction. If we were attacked again, people would demand to know why I hadn’t done more.
That is the nature of the presidency. Perceptions are shaped by the clarity of hindsight. In the moment of decision, you don’t have that advantage.
A fourth concern that applies to both discretionary and automatic countercyclical policy is that these measures can be a little like taking aspirin when you’ve got a bad case of flu: it numbs the pain so that you feel better, but it doesn’t directly address the underlying infection. Macroeconomic fiscal policy doesn’t address questions such as how to make the US economy less susceptible to oil price shocks, or how to address price bubbles in technology stocks or housing, or how to design a financial system that is less susceptible to crisis. Fiscal policy can ease the pain of a recession, at least somewhat, but the underlying causes of recession still need to be addressed and worked through by both private market and the public sector.
I made a conscious decision to show resolve, not doubt, in public. I wanted the American people to understand that I believed wholeheartedly in our cause. The last thing they needed to hear was the commander in chief whining about how conflicted he felt. IfI had concerns about the direction of the war, I needed to make changes in the policy, not wallow in public.
I reflected on everything we were facing. Over the past few weeks we had seen the failure of America’s two largest mortgage entities, the bankruptcy of a major investment banks, the sale of another, the nationalization of the world’s largest insurance company, and now the most drastic intervention in the free market since the presidency of FDR. At the same time, Russia had invaded and occupied Georgia, Hurricane Ike had hit Texas, and America was fighting a two-front war in Iraq and Afghanistan. This was one ugly way to end the presidency.
I didn’t feel sorry for myself. I knew there would be tough days. Self-pity is a pathetic quality in a leader. It sends such demoralizing signals to the team and the country. As well, I was comforted by my conviction that the Good Lord wouldn’t give a believer a burden he couldn’t handle.
After the meeting, I walked around the Roosevelt Room and thanked everyone. I told them how grateful I was for their hard work, and how fortunate America was that they had chosen to serve. In the presidency, as in life, you have to play the hand you’re dealt. This wasn’t the hand any of us had hoped for, but we were damn sure going to play it as best we could.
Fighting against non-European peoples, du Picq had witnessed the power of military organization at first hand. Had not Napoleon said that, whereas one Mamluk was the equal of three Frenchman, a hundred Frenchmen could confidently take on five times their number in Mamluk? Individual men were often cowards; however, having trained together and standing together in formation, they were transformed. A new social force, known as cohesion, made its appearance as comrade sustained comrade and mutual shame prevented each other from running away.
But often they lack the ability to communicate in a constructive way, which is generally what makes them come across as disrespectful. It’s not what is being said, it’s how they are saying it.
The English-educated were terrified, but Ong’s antics delighted the Chinese-speaking. All their lives they had felt excluded from power; now they had a Hokkien speaking their own language and giving vent to their frustrations. He was like a man possessed, intoxicated with power and mass adulation. He wanted to create newspaper headline every day. He went on raising expectations with dramatic gestures, as if there were no tomorrow when the bills would have to be paid.
Nếu võ công ngang nhau mới có thể kết bái thì ta phải kết bái với bọn Hoàng lão tà, Lão Độc vật à?
A true strategic thinker is really a statesman, then, someone who is mindful of what is proverbially called the big picture that breaks through the ultimately artificial barrier between “foreign” and “domestic.”
A genuine strategic thinker needs to know what is going on at the Fed and the Treasury Department as much as he needs to know what is going on at the State and Defense Departments. More than that, a strategic thinker needs to appreciate changing social and cultural variables below the line of everyday political sight. It is not enough to know chronicle; one must know history in the true sense of the term: we are interested not only in what happened when but in what events tell us about human nature, and especially about human nature as it applies to politics and social conflict within and among peoples.
The trick here, of course, which few ever master, is to hone one’s intuition for how the various causal threads come together to form the whole cloth of reality. There is no formula to follow here, no foolproof equations or shortcuts that can be known. Mastery comes from an open orientation to the subject matter, in particular the ability to learn from one’s mistakes (or excessive enthusiasms) and to avoid the laziness inherent in too-quick-to-close analogical thinking.
But it’s probably worse than that. At a critical juncture he failed to show that he had steel in his back, he failed to follow through. He spoke on the record and very sensibly about the settlements, but when a confrontation developed between him and Netanyahu, Obama caved in. That has contributed significantly to the general mess we now have in the Middle East.
I’m sympathetic to his dilemma; he didn’t want to jeopardize his reelection. Yet I also think that when really great issues are at stake, sometimes you have to take a chance and do what you think is right. We could be sliding to a really bad explosion, the consequences of which would be detrimental to our interests.
For since men for the most part follow in the footsteps and imitate the actions of others, and yet are unable to adhere exactly to those paths which others have taken, or attain to the virtues of those whom they would resemble, the wise man should always follow the roads that have been trodden by the great, and imitate those who have most excelled, so that if he cannot reach their perfection, he may at least acquire something of its savour.
They who from a private station become Prince by mere good fortune, do so with little trouble, but have much trouble to maintain themselves. They meet with no hindrance on their way, being carried as it was on wings to their destination, but all their difficulties overtake them when they alight. Such Princes are wholly dependent on the favour and fortunes of those who have made them great, than which supports none could be less stable or secure; and they lack both the knowledge and the power that would enable them to maintain their position. They lack the knowledge, because unless they have great parts and force of character, it is not to be expected that having always lived in a private station they should have learned how to command. They lack the power, since they cannot look for support from attached and faithful troops. Moreover, States suddenly acquired, like all else that is produced and grows up rapidly, can never have such root or hold as that the first storm which strikes them shall not overthrow them; unless, indeed, as I have said already, they who thus suddenly become Princes have a capacity for learning quickly how to defend what Fortune has placed in their lap, and can lay those foundations after they rise which by others are laid before.
He who is made Prince by the favour of the nobles, has greater difficulty to maintain himself than he who comes to the Princedom by the aid of the people, since he finds many about him who think themselves as good as he, and whom, on that account, he cannot guide or govern as he would. But he who reaches the Princedom by the popular support, finds himself alone, with none, or but a very few about him who are not ready to obey. Moreover, the demands of the nobles cannot be satisfied with credit to the Prince, nor without injury to others, while those of the people well may, the aim of the people being more honourable than that of the nobles, the latter seeking to oppress, the former not to be oppressed. Add to this, that a Prince can never secure himself against a disaffected people, their number being too great, while he may against a disaffected nobility, since their number is small. The worst that a Prince need fear from a disaffected people is, that they may desert him, whereas when the nobles are his enemies he has to fear not only that they may desert him, but also that they may turn against him; because, as they have greater craft and foresight, they always choose their time to suit their safety, and seek favour with the side they think will win. Again, a Prince must always live with the same people, but need not always live with the same nobles, being able to make and unmake these from day to day, and give and take away their authority at his pleasure.
As to the mental training of which we have spoken, a Prince should read histories, and in these should note the actions of great men, observe how they conducted themselves in their wars, and examine the causes of their victories and defeats, so as to avoid the latter and imitate them in the former. And above all, he should, as many great men of past ages have done, assume for his models those before his time have been renowned and celebrated, whose deeds and achievements he should constantly keep in mind, as it is related that Alexander the Great sought to resemble Achilles, Caesar Alexander, and Scipio Cyrus.
A wise Prince, therefore, should pursue such methods as these, never resting idle in times of peace, but strenuously seeking to turn them to account, so that he may derive strength from them in the hour of danger, and find himself ready should Fortune turn against him, to resist her blows.
A Prince, as I have said before, sooner becomes hated by being rapacious and by interfering with the property and with the women of his subjects, than in any other way. From these, therefore, he should abstain. For so long as neither their property nor their honour is touched, the mass of mankind live contentedly, and the Prince has only to cope with the ambition of a few, which can in many ways and easily be kept within bounds.
I don’t know if I’m scarred emotionally I would say it. But I would say this, that if you are in high office you have an obligation to the public and to your subordinates not to exhibit whatever doubts you have. Because the most important quality you can impart is confidence that the problem is solvable. If the man who is in charge shows uncertainty then all of his subordinates and all of those whose future depends on them will also panic or withdraw into a shell.
Please bear in mind much time is required to build up an air force. It cannot be done overnight — 18 months are required to reach quantity production in planes — note I said reach — 2 years are needed to train personnel to make them competent to handle our complicated aircraft. Delay in beginning will make for undue haste to catch up and frenzied haste makes for waste and extravagance.
Each letter had to state clearly whether assistance was needed from Rickover or from his staff. “Share good news with your spouse. All I care about are the problems.” Rickover knew that the requirement to write weekly letters pressured people to think constantly about their jobs and to investigate and resolve problems. Without this impetus, even good subordinates, when isolated from headquarters, often settled into comfortable routines and succumbed to overly friendly relations with those they were supposed to monitor. Rickover knew from practical experience that even in well-run operations, problems abounded. Those who reported no problems, he believed, were either lazy or oblivious of reality.
What battles have in common is human: the behavior of men struggling to reconcile their instinct for self-preservation, their sense of honor and the achievement of some aim over which other men are ready to kill them. The study of battle is therefore always a study of fear and usually of courage; always of leadership, usually of obedience; always of compulsion, sometimes of insubordination; always of anxiety, sometimes of elation or catharsis; always of uncertainty and doubt, misinformation and misapprehension, usually of faith and sometimes of vision; always of violence, sometimes also of cruelty, self-sacrifice, compassion; above all, it is always a study of solidarity and usually also of disintegration — for it is toward the disintegration of human groups that battle is directed.
Clausewitz’s third quality of military genius, determination, derives from, “first, an intellect that, even in the darkest hour, retains some glimmerings of the inner light which leads to truth; and second, the courage to follow this faint light wherever it might lead.” This combination of intellect and courage gives great commanders the coup d’oeil that allows “the quick recognition of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss or would perceive only after long study and reflection.” This ability to assess rapidly and accurately a given situation is the essence of adaptability.
Moore was able to sense the appropriate course of action because he recognized the “truth” of a situation; “he knew the nature of a fight.” Moore knew that, no matter how long he took to contemplate decisions, he would never have all the information or time to remove uncertainty and risk from command in battle. He considered the initial plan for an operation as merely a “springboard into action,” after which interaction with the enemy and unanticipated conditions would demand quick decision making and flexibility to seize and retain the initiative. Moore would later advise commanders to “trust your instincts. In a critical, fast-moving battlefield situation, instincts and intuition amount to an instant estimate of the situation. Your instincts are the product of your education, training, reading, personality, and experience.”
For Moore, an adaptive commander must:
exhibit his determination to prevail no matter what the odds or how desperate the situation… and display the will to win by his actions, his words, his tone of voice on the radio and face to face, his appearance, his demeanor, his countenance, the look in his eyes. He must remain calm and cool. No fear. He must ignore the noise, dust, smoke, explosions, screams of the wounded, the yells, the dead lying around him. That is all normal!
He must never give off any hint or evidence that he is uncertain about a positive outcome, even in the most desperate of situations.
Again, the principle which must be driven into you own head an the heads of your men is: Three strikes and you’re not out!
There is always one more thing you can do to influence any situation in your favor.
Fear is the greatest obstacle to learning. But fear is your best friend. Fear is like fire. If you learn to control it, you let it work for you. If you don’t learn to control it, it’ll destroy you and everything around you. Like a snowball on a hill, you can pick it up and throw it or do anything you want with it before it starts rolling down, but once it rolls down and gets so big, it’ll crush you to death. So one must never allow fear to develop and build up without having control over it, because if you won’t be able to achieve your objective or save your life.
Cus was a strong believer that in your mind you had to be the entity that you wanted to be. If you wanted to be heavyweight champion of the world, you had to start living the life of a heavyweight champion. I was only 14, but I was a true believer in Cus’s philosophy. Always training, thinking like a Roman gladiator, being in a perpetual state of war in your mind, yet on the outside seeming calm and relaxed.
So he had me saying, “The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me. The best fighter in the world. Nobody can beat me” over and over again all day. I love doing that, I loved hearing myself talk about myself.
The goal of all these technique was to build confidence in the fighter. Confidence was everything. But in order to possess that confidence, you had to test yourself and put yourself on the line. It doesn’t come from osmosis, out of the air. It comes from consistently going over the visualization in your mind to help you develop the confidence that you want to possess.
No matter what any one says, no matter what the excuse or explanation, whatever a person does in the end is what he intended to do all along.
A lot of you guys might think that physical setup doesn’t matter much, but that’s because you haven’t found the perfect setup for your body yet. This is connect to the Attention theory. There are some days when you play well, and others when you play badly. I won’t deny that form changes from day to day, but it’s not that important. The important thing is who you play against. When I play against gold or platinum players, I don’t need to obsessively fix my setup. Even if I only use 30 percent of my attention, and leave the other 70 alone, I can still win easily. But when I match up against opponents like Showmaker, I need all the attention I can muster. And if my mouse feels slightly off, that takes away some of my attention, which I need to play the game. However, if my setup is perfect, I can focus on the game. The stronger the opponent, the more attention I need, and that makes every last bit of it matter. That’s why I’m so obsessive over my setup.
Look at the champions you’ve read about in all these books. At some time early in their careers a number of them suffered knockout losses. But they never gave up. They endured. That’s why you’re reading about them. The ones who lost and quit, well their demons will follow them to their grave because they had a chance to face them and they didn’t. You have to face your demons, Mike, or they will follow you to eternity. Remember to always be careful how you fight your fights because the way that you fight your fights will be the way that you live your life.
That was the day that I turned into Iron Mike; I became that guy 100 percent. Even though I had been winning almost every one of my fights in an exciting fashion, I wasn’t completely emotionally invested in being the savage that Cus wanted me to be. After that talk about me being too small, I became that savage. I even began to fantasize that if I actually killed someone inside the thing, it would certainly intimidate everyone. Cus wanted an antisocial champion, so I drew on the bad guys from the movies, guys like Jack Palance and Richard Widmark. I immersed myself in the role of the arrogant sociopath.
When I see those columns, I think of what happened to Greece and Rome. They lost their will to live. They became subject to the decadence that destroys civilization. The US is reaching that period.
I didn’t look good that fight even though the knockout was resounding. Cus would have been angry with me. But I didn’t have that anymore. I didn’t have to worry about somebody ripping my fucking ass out in the dressing room if he didn’t like what I was doing. I didn’t have to listen to anybody. You know how easy it is to relax when you don’t have to give a fuck?
He was out on his back. I really didn’t want to hurt Henry. I wanted to get it over with real quick. I liked him a lot and I was just glad he got a nice payday. Tillman was one of those fighters who was really great but just didn’t have confidence in himself. If he had believed in himself, he would have been a legendary fighter; he would have been in the Hall of Fame.
I knew Holyfield would win. Douglas went in a way overweight and Holyfield was the better fighter. Douglas just quit. He got hit a little and laid down. He was a whore for his $17M. He didn’t go into the fight with any dignity or pride to defend his belt. He made his payday but lost his honor. You can’t win honor, you can only lose it. Guys like him who only fight for money can never become legends. I can tell that it still affects Buster to this day. Years later, I ran into him again at an autograph session we both attended. No one wanted his autograph. This was the guy who made history for beating me but now his legacy had ben reduced to nothing.
It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty. Perhaps that should even be your default assumption, when faced with such a situation. That’s too harsh, you think. You might be right. Maybe that’s a step too far. But consider this: failure is easy to understand. No explanation for its existence is required. In the same manner, fear, hatred, addiction, promiscuity, betrayal and deception require no explanation. It’s not existence of vice, or the indulgence in it, that requires explanation. Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today’s cheap pleasures. As the infamous father of the Simpson clan puts it, immediately prior to downing a jar or mayonnaise and vodka, “That’s a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy!”
Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity. Watch and observer while you move forward. Articulate your experience as clearly and carefully to yourself and others as you possibly can. In this manner, you will learn to proceed more effectively and efficiently towards your goal. And, while you are doing this, do not lie. Especially to yourself.
If you shirk the responsibility of confronting the unexpected, even when it appears in manageable doses, reality itself will become unsustainably disorganized and chaotic. Then it will grow bigger and swallow all order, all sense, and all predictability. Ignored reality transform itself (reverts back) into the great Goddess of Chaos. If the gap between pretence and reality goes unmentioned, it will widen, you will fall into it, and the consequences will not be good. Ignored reality manifests itself in an abyss of confusion and suffering.
Be careful with what you tell yourself and others about what you have done, what you are doing, and where you are going. Search for the correct words. Organize those words into the correct sentences, and those sentences into the correct paragraphs. The past can be redeemed, when reduced by precise language to its essence. The presence can flow by without robbing the future if its realities are spoken out clearly. With careful thought and language, the singular, stellar destiny that justifies existence can be extracted from the multitude or murky and unpleasant futures that are far more likely to manifest themselves of their own accord. This is how the Eye and the Word make habitable order.
Don’t hide the baby monsters under the carpet. They will flourish. They will grow large in the dark. Then, when you least expect it, they will jump out and devour you. You will descend into an indeterminate, confusing hell, instead of ascending into the heaven of virtue and clarity. Courageous and truthful words will render your reality simple, pristine, well-defined and habitable.
This question sounds easy because it’s straightforward. Actually, it’s very hard to answer. It’s intellectually difficult because the knowledge that everyone is taught in school is by definition agreed upon. And it’s psychologically difficult because anyone trying to answer must say something she knows to be unpopular. Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.
Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it.
In middle school, we’re encouraged to start hoarding “extracurricular activities.” In high school, ambitious students compete even harder to appear omnicompetent. By the time a student gets to college, he’s spent a decade curating a bewildering diverse resume to prepare for a completely unknowable future. Come what may, he’s ready — for nothing in particular.
A definite view, by contrast, favors firm convictions. Instead of pursuing many-sided mediocrity and calling it “well-roundedness,” a definite person determines the one best thing to do and then does it. Instead of working tirelessly to make herself indistinguishable, she strives to be great at something substantive — to be a monopoly of one. This is not what young people do today, because everyone around them has long since lost faith in definite world. No one gets into Stanford by excelling at just one thing, unless that thing happens to involve throwing or catching a leather ball.
To an indefinite optimist, the future will be better, but he doesn’t know how exactly, so he won’t make any specific plans. He expects to profit from the future but sees no reason to design it concretely.
Instead of working for years to build a new product, indefinite optimists rearrange already-invented ones. Bankers make money by rearranging the capital structures of already existing companies. Lawyers resolve disputes over old things or help other people structure their affairs. And private equity investors and management consultants don’t start new businesses; they squeeze extra efficiency from old ones with incessant procedural optimizations. It’s no surprise that these fields all attract disproportionate numbers of high-achieving Ivy League optionality chasers; what could be a more appropriate reward for two decades of resume-building than a seemingly elite, process-oriented career that promises to “keep options open”?
People who lead happy but not necessarily meaningful lives have all their needs satisfied: they are healthy, have enough money, and feel good a lot of the time. People who lead a meaningful lives may enjoy none of these boons. Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors. Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness. Time spent with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more meaningful. Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life unhappier but more meaningful. It’s not that the people with meaningful lives masochistically go looking for trouble but that they pursue ambitious goals: “Man plans and God laughs.” Finally, meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self: it is enhanced by activities that define the person and build a reputation.
Making the decision to meet a crisis is far more difficult than the test itself. One of the most trying experience an individual can go through is the period of doubt, of soul-searching, to determine whether to fight the battle or to fly from it. It is in such a period that almost unbearable tensions build up, tensions that can be relieved only by taking action, one way or another. And significantly, it is this period of crisis conduct that separates the leaders from the followers. A leader is one who has the emotional, mental, and physical strength to withstand the pressures and tensions, created by necessary doubts and then, at the critical moment, to make a choice and to act decisively. The men who fail are those who are so overcome by doubts that they either crack under the strain or flee to avoid meeting the problem at all.
On the other hand, if one is to act and to lead responsibly he must necessarily go through this period of soul-searching and testing of alternative courses of action. Otherwise he shoots from the hip, misses the target, and loses the battle through sheer recklessness.
Even in a struggle as clear-cut as that between Communism and freedom, there are gray areas. But there are intrinsic principles which must be adhered to. Anyone who shirks this inner debate in waging this struggle acts irresponsibly. It is this soul-searching and testing which ultimately gives a man the confidence, calmness, and toughness with which to act decisively.
If you’re coasting, you’re going downhill.
Our preference was to counter threats whenever possible with friends and allies at our side, but we were clear that America must lead. Only a nation that is strong enough to act decisively can provide the leadership needed to encourage others to resist aggression.
If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life.
Pragmatism is an admission of ignorance, and the confidence that comes with an ideology is much more satisfying.
After all manner of gnashing of teeth, we told our sales force to notify our memory customers. This was one of the great bugaboos: How would our customer react? Would they stop doing business with us altogether now that we were letting them down? In fact, the reaction was, for all practical purposes, a big yawn. Our customers knew that we were not a very large factor in the market and they had half figured that we would get out; most of them had already made arrangements with other suppliers.
In fact, when we informed them of the decision, some of them reacted with the comment, “It sure took you a long time.” People who have no emotional stake in a decision can see what needs to be done sooner.
It was through the memory business crisis — and how we dealt with it — that I learned the meaning of a strategic inflection point. It’s a very personal experience. I learned how small and helpless you feel when facing a force that’s “10X” larger than what you are accustomed to. I experienced the confusion that engulfs you when something fundamental changes in the business, and I felt the frustration that comes when the things that worked for you in the past no longer do any good. I learned how desperately you want to run from dealing with even describing a new reality to close associates. And I experienced the exhilaration that comes from a set-jawed commitment to a new direction, unsure as that may be. Painful as it has all been, it turned me into a better manager. I learned some basic principles, too.
I learned that the word “point” in strategic inflection point is something of a misnomer. It’s not a point; it’s a long, torturous struggle.
Taking an organization through a strategic inflection point is a march through unknown territory. The rules of business are unfamiliar or have not yet been formed. Consequently, you and your associates lack a mental map of the new environment, and even the shape of your desired goal is not completely clear.
Things are tense. Often in the course of traversing a strategic inflection point your people lose confidence in you and in each other, and what’s worse, you lose confidence in yourself.
To make it through the valley of death successfully, your first task is to form a mental image of what the company should look like when you get to the other side. The image not only needs to be clear enough for you to visualize but it also has to be crisp enough so you can communicate it simply to the tired, demoralized and confused staff.
I can’t help but wonder why leaders are so often hesitant to lead. I guess it takes a lot of conviction and trusting your gut to get ahead of your peers, your staff and your employees while they are still squabbling about which path to take, and set unhesitating, unequivocal course whose rightness or wrongness will not be known for years. Such a decision really test the mettle of the leader. By contrast, it doesn’t take much self-confidence to downsize a company — after all, how can you go wrong by shuttering factories and laying people off if the benefits of such actions are going to show up in tomorrow’s bottom line and will be applauded by the financial community?
While you’re going through the valley of death, you may think you see the other side, but you can’t be sure whether it’s truly the other side or just a mirage. Yet you have to commit yourself to a certain course and a certain pace, otherwise you will run out of water and energy before long.
If you’re wrong, you will die. But most companies don’t die because they are wrong; most die because they don’t commit themselves. They fritter away their momentum and their valuable resources while attempting to make a decision. The greatest danger is in standing still.
Warren Buffett gives us some introductory remarks on why even smart people get bad results:
It’s ego. It’s greed. It’s envy. It’s fear. It’s mindless imitation of other people. I mean, there are a variety of factors that cause that horsepower of the mind to get diminished dramatically before the output turns out. And I would say if Charlie and I have any advantage it’s not because we’re so smart, it is because we’re rational and we very seldom let extraneous factors interfere with our thoughts. We don’t let other people’s opinion interfere with it… we try to get fearful when others are greedy. We try to get greedy when others are fearful. We try to avoid any kind of imitation of other people’s behavior. And those are the factors that cause smart people to get bad results.
The power of a nation-state by no means consists only in its armed forces, but also in its economic and technological resources; in the dexterity, foresight and resolution with which its foreign policy is conducted; in the efficiency of its social and political organization. It consists most of all in the nation itself, the people; their skills, energy, ambition, discipline, initiative; their beliefs, myths and illusions. And it consists, further, in the way all these factors are related to one another. Moreover national power has to be considered not only in itself, in its absolute extent, but relative to the state’s foreign or imperial obligations; it has to be considered relative to the power of other states.
Germany was to go empty-handed. When Bulow, in his famous “hammer or anvil” speech of 1899, angrily declared, “We cannot allow any foreign power, any foreign Jupiter to tell us: ‘What can be done? The world is already partitioned,’” he was expressing a widely held resentment. Little wonder that German publicists called for a redivision of the globe.
To be sure, all rising powers call for changes in an international order which has been fixed to the advantage of the older, established powers. From a Realpolitik viewpoint, the question was whether this particular challenger could secure changes without provoking too much opposition. And while geography played an important role here, diplomacy was also important; because Germany did not enjoy, say, Japan’s geopolitical position, its statecraft had to be of an extraordinarily high order. Realizing the unease and jealousy which the Second Reich’s sudden emergence had caused, Bismarck strove after 1871 to convince the other Great Powers that Germany had no further territorial ambitions. Wilhelm and his advisers, eager to show their mettle, were much less careful. Not only did they convey their dissatisfaction with the existing order, but — and this was the greatest failure of all — the decision-making process in Berlin concealed, behind a facade of high imperial purpose, a chaos and instability which amazed all who witnessed it in close action.
Kissinger’s approach to world affairs was historicist and relativistic: events had to be seen in their larger context, and related to each other; Great Powers should be judged on what they did, not on their domestic ideology; and absolutist search for security was Utopian, since that would make everyone else absolutely insecure — all that one could hope to achieve was relative security, based upon a reasonable balance of forces in world affairs, a mature recognition that the world scene would never be completely harmonious, and a willingness to bargain. Like the statesmen he had written about (Metternich, Castlereagh, Bismarck), Kissinger felt that “the beginning of wisdom in human as well as in international affairs was knowing when to stop.”
Finally, Kissinger recognized the limitations upon American power, not only in the sense that the US could not afford to fight a protracted war in the jungles of Southeast Asia and to maintain its other, more vital interests, but also because both he and Nixon could perceive that the world’s balances were altering, and new forces were undermining the hitherto unchallenged domination of the two superpowers. A concert of large powers, balancing each other off and with no one dominating another, would be “a safer world and a better world” than a bipolar situation in which “a gain for one side appears as an absolute loss for the other.” Confident in his own abilities to defend American interests in such a pluralistic world, Kissinger was urging a fundamental reshaping of American diplomacy in the largest sense of that word.
That this was the first war in which the US had unequivocally lost, that it confounded the victorious experiences of WW2 and destroyed a whole array of reputations, from those of 4-star generals to those of “brightest and best” intellectuals; that it coincided with, and in no small measure helped to cause, the fissuring of a consensus in American society about the nation’s goals and priorities, was attended by inflation, unprecedented student protests and inner city disturbances, and was followed in turn by the Watergate crisis, which discredited the presidency itself for a time; that it seemed to many to stand in bitter and ironic contradiction to everything which the Founding Fathers had taught, and made the US unpopular across most of the globe; and finally that the shamefaced and uncaring treatment of the GIs who came back from Vietnam would produce its own reaction a decade later and thus ensure that the memory of this conflict would continue to prey upon the public consciousness, in war memorials, books, television documentaries, and personal tragedies — all of this meant that the Vietnam War, although far smaller in terms of casualties, impacted upon the American people somewhat as had WW1 upon Europeans. The effects were seen, overwhelmingly, at the personal and psychological levels; more broadly, they were interpreted as a crisis in American civilization and in its constitutional arrangements.
When the leader succeeds, it will be because he has learned two basic lessons: Men are complex, and men are different. Human beings respond not only to the traditional carrot and stick used by the driver of a donkey but also to ambition, patriotism, love of the good and the beautiful, boredom, self-doubt, and many more dimensions and patterns of thought and feeling that make them men. But the strength and importance of these interests are not the same for every worker, nor is the degree to which they can be satisfied in his job.
To me there is not only right or wrong but many shades in between. The real tragedies in life are not in choices between right and wrong. Only the most callous of persons choose what they know to be wrong. Real tragedy comes from a dilemma of evaluating what is right. Real dilemmas are difficulties of the soul, provoking agonies, which you in your world of black and white can’t even begin to comprehend.
Yet after withdrawing from three wars in two generations — each begun with idealistic aspirations and widespread public support but ending in national trauma — America struggles to define the relationship between its power (still vast) and its principles.
Kissinger recalled that “the deepest impact” of his early life in Germany and his immigration to the US was that “all the things that had seemed secure and stable collapsed and many of the people that one had considered the steady examples suddenly were thrown into enormous turmoil themselves and into fantastic insecurities. So in this case it was a rather unsettling experience.”
“Helmut is a man. He has seen more than most people in a life time.” Kissinger went on to explain that the camps were “testing grounds,” where men “fought for survival” under the worst possible circumstances. “The intellectuals, the idealists, the men of high morals had no chance.” Survival required “a singleness of purpose inconceivable to you sheltered people in the States. Such singleness of purpose broached no stopping in front of accepted sets of values, it had to disregard ordinary standards of morality. One could only survive through lies, tricks and somehow acquiring enough food to fill one’s belly.” Kissinger closed the letter with a telling statement: “They have seen man from the most evil side, who can blame them for being suspicious?”
It is not difficult to detect in these letters aspects of Kissinger’s later approach to international affairs, particularly his belief that the statesman could not be held to “ordinary standards of morality” in the struggle between nations.
Although Nixon also stressed that a rapid American withdrawal would have “disastrous” effects in Asia, the president tended to emphasize the domestic effects: “The most serious effect would be in the US. When a great power fails, it deeply affects the will of the people. While the public would welcome peace initially, they would soon be asking why we pulled out and this would in turn lead to an attack on the leadership and establishment and the US role in the war.” Nixon believed that a rapid withdrawal, with a likely collapse of Saigon and victory for the North Vietnamese, would cause an intense political crisis within the US. Critics would rightly ask, What was the sacrifice in American blood and treasure for? Why did my father or son or brother have to die? Who was responsible for this failure? Nixon believed this would destroy his capacity to govern. He shared the sentiment that Kissinger’s mentor, Fritz Kraemer, penned in a memo Kissinger forwarded to the president: “The ‘people’ are not very just, they forgive the victor, but always make scapegoats for their own leaders who are not victorious.”
In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. In other words, when you can do a great job, you get promoted. And that process repeats itself until finally you end up in a job you can’t handle.
I’d like to paraphrase it as “in every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear.”
The essence of leadership is being aware of your fear (and seeing it in the people you wish to lead). No, it won’t go away, but awareness is they key to making progress.
Kissinger, with a mixture of self-pity and blackmail, told Dinitz, “Our whole foreign policy position depends on our not being represented as having screwed up a crisis, and with all affection for Israel, if it turns out that we are going to be under attack for mismanagement in a crisis, we will have to turn on you.” Continued success and the perception of highly skilled diplomacy were central to Kissinger’s elevated public image, and he feared they could be undermined by any suggestion that the Nixon administration — or he personally — had “screwed up” on the Middle East. It was the epitome of the personalization of foreign policy that Kissinger had come to promote.
Kissinger approached this combination of crises and dilemmas with extraordinary energy, intelligence, and guile. David Bruce, one of America’s patrician diplomats from the early Cold War and still an active ambassador, captured an essential aspect of Kissinger’s approach when he wrote in his diary that Kissinger’s “physical and intellectual vigor amaze even those they discomfit … the spectacle of a 50-year old German-born Jew, exercising the authority he does in coping with with the end of an era complications of universal import elicits my sympathy, dazzles my imagination.” Kissinger devised a strategy, sensing how the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of world politics could be arranged to promote his vision of America’s national interest. He also recognized how his personal prestige could be harnessed to address these issues, and knew that success would further enhance his own personal power. Within days of the cease-fire, the TV networks were referring to Kissinger as the new “go-between” in dealing with Israel and the Arab world. Planning a trip to the Arab states in the region, Kissinger told Golda Meir, “One thing the Arabs have achieved in this war — regardless of what they lost — is that they’ve globalized the problem. They have created the conviction that something must be done, which we’ve arrested only by my prestige, by my trip, by maneuvers.”
“Painful experience should have taught us that we ought not exaggerate our capacity to foresee, let alone to shape, social and political change in other societies.” He concluded by restating the way he thought America should approach foreign policy: “The question is not whether our values should affect our foreign policy but how. The issue is whether we have the courage to face complexity and the inner conviction to deal with ambiguity; whether we will look behind easy slogans and recognize that our great goals can only be reached by patience, and in imperfect stages.”
Today we find that — like most other nations in history — we can neither escape from the world nor dominate it. Today we must conduct diplomacy with subtlety, flexibility, maneuver, and imagination in the pursuit of our interests. We must be thoughtful in defining our interests. We must prepare against the worst contingency and not only plan for the best. We must pursue limited objectives and many objectives simultaneously.
The brain can be developed just the same way as the muscles can be developed, if one will only take the pains to train the mind to think.
And why not? Memorable experiences are the ultimate scarcity.
What Simon was observing was a manifestation of one of the oldest rules in economics: “Every abundance creates a new scarcity.” We tend to value most what we don’t already have in plentitude. For example, an abundance of free coffee at work awakens a need for much better coffee, for which we are willing to pay a lot. And so, too, for any premium good that arises from a sea of inexpensive commodity products, from artisanal food to designer water.
What become scarce is reputation. When all physical needs are met, the most important commodity becomes social capital.
In some of these books, the end of labor scarcity liberates the mind, ends war over resources, and creates a civilization of spiritual, philosophical beings. In others, the end of scarcity makes us lazy, decadent, stupid, and mean. You don’t have to spend much time online to find examples of both.
Free is not a magic bullet. Giving away what you do will not make you rich by itself. You have to think creatively about how to convert the reputation and attention you can get from free into cash. Every person and every project will require a different answer to that challenge, and sometimes it won’t work at all. This is just like everything else in life — the only mystery is why people blame free for their own poverty of imagination and intolerance for possible failure.
She calls it a “growth mindset.” If you believe that the qualities defining you are carved in stone, you will be stuck trying to prove them over and over again, regardless of the circumstances. But if you have a growth mindset, you believe the qualities that define you can be modified and cultivated through effort. You can change yourself; you can adapt; in fact, you are more comfortable and do better when you are forced to do so.
Dweck’s experiments show that your mindset can set in motion a whole chain of thoughts and behaviors: If you think your abilities are fixed, you’ll set for yourself what she calls “performance goals” to maintain that self-image. But if you have a growth mindset, you’ll set “learning goals” — goals that’ll drive you to take risks without worrying so much about how, for example, a dumb question or a wrong answer will make you look. You won’t care because you’re a learning animal, and in the long run you’ll learn more and scale greater heights.
The clan puts the substance of a problem above all else; the state is concerned with process — to ensure that all are treated equally and fairly, even if it means that some wrongdoer may go unpunished because of a procedural flaw with the case. The state focuses on the public good; the clan cares most for its own private cause. The state is committed to administer justice; the clan is sensitive to its honor. State recognizes and forces contracts; the clan may deal in something akin to contract, but hierarchy or status counts for more. Sir Henry Maine, the Victorian legal historian, summed up the course of all civilization in these terms: “From status to contract.” Today in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, the state’s essentials — process, the public good, justice, and contract — have lost ground or been abandoned.
Problems don’t age well; denying or hiding them guarantees that they will get worse.
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
I have always believed that the secret of negotiations is meticulous preparation. The negotiator should know not only the technical side of the subject but its nuances. He must above all have a clear conception of his objectives and the routes to reach them. He must study the psychology and purposes of his opposite number and determine whether and how to reconcile them with his own. He must have all this at his fingertips because the impression of indecisiveness invites hesitation or intransigence; the need for frequent consultation at the negotiating table undermines authority. This is why my associates and I repaired to Key Biscayne over the weekend of June 19-20 to review the briefing papers, which had already been rewritten many times — and were to be rewritten again several times more before we set off.
If anything, evolution teaches that humans are creatures of passion and that reason itself is primarily aimed at social victory and political persuasion rather than philosophical or scientific truth. To insist that persistent rationality is the best means and hope for victory over enduring irrationality — that logical harnessing of facts could someday do away with the sacred and so end conflict — defies all that science teaches about our passion-driven nature. Throughout the history of our species, as for the most intractable conflicts and greatest collective expressions of joy today, utilitarian logic is a pale prospect to replace the sacred.
You can’t “quake-proof” your sense of self. Grappling with identity issues is what life and growth are all about, and no amount of love or accomplishment or skill can insulate you from these challenges.
The biggest factor that contributes to a vulnerable identity is “all-or-nothing” thinking: I’m either competent or incompetent, good or evil, worthy of love or not.
The primary peril of all-or-nothing thinking is that it leaves our identity extremely unstable, making us hypersensitive to feedback. When faced with negative information about ourselves, all-or-nothing thinking gives us only two choices for how to manage that information, both of which cause serious problems. Either we try to deny the information that is consistent with our self-image, or we do the opposite: we take in the information in a way that exaggerates its importance to a crippling degree.
One reason people are reluctant to admit mistakes is that they fear being seen as weak or incompetent. Yet often, generally competent people who take the possibility of mistakes in stride are seen as confident, secure, and “big enough” not to have to be perfect, whereas those who resist acknowledging even the possibility of a mistake are seen as insecure and lacking confidence. No one is fooled.
All things being equal, you root for your own sex, your own culture, your own locality… and what you want to prove is that you are better than the other person. Whomever you root for represents you; and when he wins, you win.
When viewed in this light, the passion of the sports fan begins to make sense. The game is no light diversion to be enjoyed for its inherent form and artistry. The self is at stake. That is why hometown crowds are so adoring and, more tellingly, so grateful toward those regularly responsible for home-team victories.
LKY does not see how it is possible to rule very wisely if one does not rule very firmly. Strong leaders make hard decisions that stick. Weak leaders make bad situations worse by deciding poorly or not deciding at all.
Politics is getting your own way. Nothing more.
What, however, makes culture and ideology attractive? They become attractive when they are seen as rooted in material success and influence. Soft power is power only when it rests on a foundation of hard power. Increases in hard economic and military power produce enhanced self-confidence, arrogance, and belief in the superiority of one’s own culture or soft power compared to those of other peoples and greatly increase its attractiveness to other peoples. Decreases in economic and military power lead to self-doubt, crises of identity, and efforts to find in other cultures the keys to economic, military, and political success. As non-Western societies enhance their economic, military, and political capacity, they increasingly trumpet the virtues of their own values, institutions, and culture.
We want our lives to form a pattern that can be easily followed. Many call this guiding principle “meaning.” If our story advances evenly over the years, we refer to it as “identity.” We try on stories as we try on clothes.
We do the same with world history, shaping the details into a consistent story. Suddenly we “understand” certain things; for example, why the Treaty of Versailles led to WW2, or why Alan Greenspan’s loose monetary policy created the collapse of Lehman Brothers. We comprehend why the Iron Curtain had to fall or why Harry Potter became a best-seller.
The good news is, the moment of suffering — when you’re in pain — is a moment of truth. It is a moment where you’re forced to embrace reality the way it actually is. Then, you can make meaningful change and progress. You can only make progress when you’re starting with the truth.
The hard thing is seeing the truth. To see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn’t want to face the truth. The smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want, the easier it will be to see reality.
As a romantic I can shed a tear for the fate of Henry V (the Bourbon pretender); as a diplomat I would be his servant if I were French, but as things stand, France, irrespective of the accident who leads it, is for me an unavoidable pawn on the chessboard of diplomacy, where I have no other duty than to serve my king and my country. I cannot reconcile personal sympathies and antipathies toward foreign powers with my sense of duty in foreign affairs; indeed I see in them the embryo of disloyalty toward the Sovereign and the country I serve.
Nobody grows old by merely living a number of years. People grow old only by deserting their ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up interest wrinkles the soul. Worry, doubt, self-distrust, fear and despair; these are the long, long years that bow the head and turn the growing spirit back to dust. Whatever your years, there is in every being’s heart the love of wonder, the undaunted challenge of events, the unfailing childlike appetite for what next, and the joy and the game of life.
The computer makes available a range of data inconceivable in the age of books. It packages it effectively; style is no longer needed to make it accessible, thus destroying one element of aesthetics. In dealing with a single decision separated from its context, the computer supplies tools unimaginable even a decade ago.
But it also shrinks perspective. Because knowledge is so accessible and communication so instantaneous, there is a lack of training in its significance. Policymakers are forever tempted to wait for a case to arise before dealing with it; manipulation replaces reflection as the principal policy tool. But the dilemmas of foreign policy are not only — or perhaps even primarily — the by-product of contemporary events; rather they are the end product of the historical process that shaped them. Modern decision-making is overwhelmed not only by contemporary facts but by the immediate echo which overwhelms perspective. Instant punditry and the egalitarian conception that any view is as valid as any other combine with a cascade of immediate symptoms to crush a sense of perspective.
However different the great statesmen of history, they had in common as sense of the past and a vision of the future. The contemporary statesman is constantly seduced by tactics. The irony is that mastery of facts may lead to loss of understanding of the subject matter and, indeed, control over it. Foreign policy is in danger of turning into a subdivision of domestic politics instead of an adventure in shaping the future.
The problem of most of previous periods was that purposes outran knowledge. The challenge of our period is the opposite: knowledge is far outrunning purposes. The task for the US therefore is not only to reconcile its power and its morality but to temper its faith with wisdom.
American idealism, the underlying cause of the national debate on both sides of the argument, is, of course, a symptom of America’s strength — an expression of faith that our society is eternally able to renew itself, transcend history, and reshape reality. But we must take care that rebellion against the very concept of limits does not become the permanent feature of the American response to international politics. For the recognition of some constraints is an attribute, perhaps the price, of maturing in societies as well as in people. The test of a society is not the denial but the proper understanding of its constraints. Mediocre societies and statesmen limit themselves to the easily attainable. Great societies and statesmen strive at the outer reaches of their possibilities. But the denial of any limits leads to exhaustion or disaster.
On one level, being in a good mood seems to make people less rational by leading them to have higher expectations of success than the objective facts justify. On another level, however, being overconfident can be more rational than being realistic, since some prizes only go to the bold. It seems that emotions can sometimes exhibit a kind of super-rationality that saves pure reason from itself.
As a group, one thing is remarkably constant. I’ve repeatedly been struck by how liberating it is for them not to have to worry about whether there is someplace else they need to be, or someone else they need to be talking to. They take their time, make eye contact, relax, and are really there with whomever they’re talking to. They don’t have to worry if there is someone more important they should be talking to at that moment because their staff — their external attentional filters — have already determined for them that this is the best way they should be using their time. And there is a great amount of infrastructure in place ensuring that they will get to their next appointment on time, so they can let go of that nagging concern as well.
It’s usually obvious when you’re talking to somebody a level above you, because they see lots of things instantly when those things take considerable work for you to figure out. These are good people to learn from, because they remember what it’s like to struggle in the place where you’re struggling, but the things they do still make sense from your perspective (you just couldn’t do them yourself).
Talking to somebody two or more levels above you is a different story. They’re barely speaking the same language, and it’s almost impossible to imagine that you could ever know what they know. You can still learn from the, if you don’t get discouraged, but the things they want to teach you seem really philosophical, and you don’t think they’ll help you — but for some reason, they do.
Somebody three levels above is actually speaking a different language. They probably seem less impressive to you than the person two levels above, because most of what they’re thinking about is completely invisible to you. From where you are, it is not possible to imagine what they think about, or why. You might think you can, but this is only because they know how to tell entertaining stories. Any one of these stories probably contains enough wisdom to get you halfway to your next level if you put in enough time thinking about it.
Statesmen prize steadiness and reliability in a partner, not a restless quest for ever-new magic formulas.
Constrained by his representative function, the politician is further circumscribed by the responsibilities of his office. The raw brutalities of power are largely converted into the suavities of authority, and it is important to distinguish these two phenomena. The outsider is often impressed by the power of those who hold important positions in the state, but power, while attractive as a kind of melodrama, is mostly exaggerated. The office of a PM or president is constitutionally limited, and idealists quickly find that their capacity to improve the world requires whole streams of concessions they would prefer not to make. As Harry Truman remarked: “About the biggest power the President has is the power to persuade people to do what they ought to do without having to be persuaded.” The power of an office is merely the skill by which a ruler can use his authority to get the right things done. Otherwise, when people talk of “power” they merely mean the pleasure an office-holder may get from a purely personal exercise of will, which is basically a trivial thing. Most trivial of all is the pleasure in being the constant focus of attention in public places, and the capacity to please — but also to frustrate — the ambitious people by whom the politician is surrounded.
Risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.
“Nothing is more provoking, when we are arguing with a man with reasons and explanations, and taking all pains to convince him, than to discover at last that he will understand, that we have to do with his will.” Hence the uselessness of logic: no one ever convinced anybody by logic; and even logicians use logic only as a source of income. To convince a man, you must appeal to his self-interest, his desires, his will. Observe how long we remember our victories, and how soon we forget our defeats; memory is the menial of will.
Men are only apparently drawn from in front; in reality they are pushed from behind; they think they are led on by what they see, when in truth they are driven on by what they feel, — by instincts of whose operation they are half the time unconscious. Intellect is merely the minister of foreign affairs; nature has produced it for the service of the individual will. Therefore it is only designed to know things so far as they afford motives for the will, but not to fathom them or to comprehend their true being. The will is the only permanent and unchangeable element in the mind; it is the will which, through continuity of purpose, gives unity to consciousness and holds together all its ideas and thoughts, accompanying them like a continuous harmony.
Character lies in the will, and not in the intellect; character too is continuity of purpose and attitude: and these are will. Popular language is correct when it prefers the “heart” to the “head”; it knows (because it has not reasoned about it) that a “good will” is profounder and more reliable than a clear mind; and when it calls a man “shrewd,” “knowing,” or “cunning” it implies its suspicion and dislike. Brilliant qualities of mind win admiration, but never affection; and all religions promise a reward for excellences of the will or heart, but none for the excellence of the head or understanding.
Lack of endurance sounds all right, but you will find that it comes from cowardice.
For a warrior to take pride in being dependable is correct according to the chivalric code. Nevertheless, if you make a show of dependability for no good reason, showing up where you have no business, taking on burdens you shouldn’t trouble yourself with, then you are called a meddler, a busybody; this is not good at all. Even if it is some matter you think you might take some interest in, if you are not asked it is best not to get involved.
Perhaps the most difficult lesson for a national leader to learn is that with respect to the use of military force, his basic choice is to act or to refrain from acting. He will not be able to take away the moral curse of using force by employing it halfheartedly or incompetently. There are no rewards for exhibiting one’s doubts in vacillation; statesmen get no prizes for failing with restraint. Once committed they must prevail. If they are not prepared to prevail, they should not commit their nation’s power. Neither the successive administrations nor the critics ever fully understood this during the Vietnam war. And therein lay the seeds of many of its tragedy.
The use of pronouns by a counterpart can also help give you a feel for their actual importance in the decision and implementation chains on the other side of the table. The more in love they are with “I,” “me,” and “my” the less important they are.
Is it true that “he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow,” and that it is the most highly organized beings that suffer most? Yes; but but it is also true that the growth of knowledge increases joy as well as sorrow, and that the subtlest delights, as well as the keenest pains, are reserved for the developed soul. Voltaire rightly preferred the Brahmin’s “unhappy” wisdom to the blissful ignorance of the peasant woman; we wish to experience life keenly and deeply, even at the cost of pain; we wish to venture into its innermost secrets, even at the cost of disillusionment. Virgil, who had tasted every pleasure, and knew the luxuries of imperial favor, at last “tired of everything except the joy of understanding.” When the senses cease to satisfy, it is something to have won access, however arduously, to comradeship with those artists, poets and philosophers whom only the mature mind can comprehend. Wisdom is a bitter-sweet delight, deepened by the very discords that enter into its harmony.
Men prepare themselves with life-long study before becoming authorities in physics or chemistry or biology; but in the field of social and political affairs every grocer’s boy is an expert, knows the solution, and demands to be heard.
Huxley argued that biology could not be taken as an ethical guide; that “nature red in tooth and claw” exalted brutality and cunning rather than justice and love; but Spencer felt that a moral code which could not meet the tests of natural selection and the struggle for existence, was from the beginning doomed to lipservice and futility. Conduct, like anything else, should be called good or bad as it is well adapted, or maladapted, to the ends of life; “the highest conduct is that which conduces to the greatest length, breadth, and completeness of life.” Or, in terms of the evolution formula, conduct is moral according as it makes the individual or the group more integrated and coherent in the midst of a heterogeneity of ends. Morality, like art, is the achievement of unity in diversity; the highest type of man is he who effectively unites in himself the widest variety, complexity, and completeness of life.
Behind all this “morality” is a secret will to power. Love itself is only a desire for possession; courtship is combat and mating is mastery. People imagine that they are unselfish in love because they seek the advantage of another being, often in opposition to their own. But for so doing they want to possess the other being. Even in the love of truth is the desire to possess it, perhaps to be its first possessor, to find it virginal. Humility is the protective coloration of the will to power.
Against this passion for power, reason and morality are helpless; they are but weapons in its hands, dupes of its game. Philosophical systems are shining mirages; what we see is not the long-sought truth, but the reflection of our own desires. The philosophers all pose as though their real opinions had been discovered through the self-evolving of a cold, pure, divinely indifferent dialectic; whereas in fact a prejudicial proposition, idea or “suggestion,” which is generally their heart’s desire abstracted and refined, is defended by them with arguments sought out after the event.
The greater part of our intellectual activity goes on unconsciously, and unfelt by us; conscious thinking is the weakest. Because instinct is the direct operation of the will to power, undisturbed by consciousness, instinct is the most intelligent of all kinds of intelligence which have hitherto been discovered. Indeed, the role of consciousness has been senselessly overestimated; consciousness may be regarded as secondary, almost as indifferent and superfluous, probably destined to disappear and to be superseded by perfect automatism.
In strong men there is very little attempt to conceal desire under the cover of reason; their simple argument is, “I will.”
When one hears of disastrous schedule slippage in a project, he imagines that a series of major calamities must have befallen it. Usually, however, the disaster is due to termites, not tornadoes; and the schedule has slipped imperceptibly but inexorably. In deed, major calamities are easier to handle; one responds with major force, radical reorganization, the invention of new approaches. The whole team rises to the occasion.
But the day-to-day slippage is harder to recognize, harder to prevent, harder to make up. Yesterday a key man was sick, and a meeting couldn’t be held. Today the machines are all down, because lightning struck the building’s power transformer. Tomorrow the disk routines won’t start testing, because the first disk is a week late from the factory. Snow, jury duty, family problems, emergency meetings with customers, executive audits - the list goes on and on. Each on only postpones some activity by a half-day or a day. And the schedule slips, one day at a time.
Providing the students with such a broad range of knowledge is not, however, the ultimate goal of the course. Rather, it is to transform them into mission-oriented leaders and problem solvers.
This is achieved by handing them mission after mission, with minimal guidance. Some assignments are as mundane as organizing a conference for their fellow cadets, which requires coordinating the speakers, facilities, transportation, and food. Others are as complicated as penetrating a telecommunications network of a live terrorist cell.
The essence of tactical skill is to be able to move rapidly from one to the other, from width to depth, and to disperse or concentrate as appropriate.
Ta phải biết rằng phàm những việc nước nọ giao thiệp với nước kia thì thường là người ta mượn tiếng “vị nghĩa” mà làm những việc “vị lợi” mà thôi.
Conflict has been, is and probably always will be an integral element of human society. It is vitally important to maintain the search for peace, but peace must be understood as a condition relating to conflict: not in the sense of the absence of conflict but as one in which that option is not chosen.
For it is not just the military that is still caught up in the paradigm of industrial war, since it is the political leadership that sends out forces in search of a solution to a problem, assuming it can be definitively solved by the deployment of force. It is also the political leaders who allocate the funds to the military and are responsible for creating and maintaining the political will for military operations, and also the sustainment of each nation’s standing forces. Equally, it is the political leaders who create coalitions and alliances, and multinational military missions with the inevitable convoluted chains of command. Finally, it is the political leadership that, in seeking to use the forces available to it, endeavors to do so without risk to its asset — the force itself — and without ensuring that the military actions are coherent with the actions of its other levers of power. In other words, it seeks to use force like a tool out of a box, without a blueprint for the item under construction.
Remember always that threats are expensive when they fail and bribes are expensive when they succeed.
Clutter is anything that keeps you from living the life you want to live.
The entire economic system is based on trust. It’s not based on a particular investment model, price-earnings ratio, income statement, or balance sheet. It’s not based on any of these rational concepts. It’s based on whether people believe in the numbers and in the people who are supplying them. If people don’t trust those who handle their money, their livelihoods, and their lives, they’ll just refuse to participate.
It was a lesson I never forgot. Preparedness is the key to success and victory.
It is not the content of the exchange that is central but the experience of being taken in and heard, which not only affirms the legitimacy of one’s way of looking at the world but then allows one to begin letting go of some defensiveness because the experience of affirmation increases one’s capacity to affirm others.
I don’t do the middle or a little.
In the early 1970s America needed above all a complex understanding of new realities; instead it was offered simple categories of black and white. It had to improve its sense of history; instead it was told by its critics that all frustrations in the world reflected the evil intent of America’s own leaders. The Vietnam debate short-circuited a process of maturing. It represented a flight into nostalgia; it fostered the illusion that what ailed America was a loss of its moral purity and that our difficulties could be set right by a return to simple principles. Whatever our mistakes, our destiny was not that facile. A self-indulgent America opened the floodgates of chaos and exacerbated its internal divisions.
The difference in any effort you have ever known as between greatness and mediocrity is a nuance. You can’t describe it. And it took us two years when no one understood what we were doing to get it. One success created the necessity of the other. When it unravels it will go the same way. For two years you won’t see anything, and then you start pulling the threads out. I can go to the Hill and say, gentlemen, here are the dangers. You will have a Mideast war if this keeps up.
Pompidou had indeed asked the basic question that Americans above all are reluctant to address: Do we, as the strongest free nation in the world, resist the fact of change or the method of change? Do we seek to prevent only that Soviet expansion brought about by illegitimate means (however “illegitimate” is defined), or do we have a stake in defending the geopolitical equilibrium whatever the method by which it is challenged — even if, as Pompidou put it, the assault on it is disguised as a “progressive tide”?
A tradition of faith in international law and an historical reluctance to think in terms of balance of power incline Americans to the view that we resist only the method and not the fact of change. And of course we cannot, and should not, be wedded to a blind defense of every status quo. Justice as well as stability must be a goal of American foreign policy, and indeed they are linked. Yet there are changes in the international balance that can threaten our nation’s security and have to be resisted however they come about. For a century England went to war rather than permit the port of Antwerp to be acquired by a major power, by any methods. Control of the seas, the prerequisite to Britain’s survival, was considered incompatible with the existence of a secure naval base so close to Britain’s lifeline.
Compassion means “to suffer together.”
In any administration events occur that are not foreseen by intelligence; indeed, they are probably unforeseeable because they also surprise the victim who had the greatest interest in preventing them. The disturbance of the equilibrium may begin as a relatively minor event; its ever-widening ripples turn it into a crisis that either rages out of control or issues into that sudden calm indicating that a new equilibrium has been achieved. During the period of crisis the elements from which policy is shaped suddenly become fluid. In the resulting upheaval the statesman must act under constant pressure. Paradoxically, this confers an unusual capacity for creative action; everything suddenly depends on the ability to dominate and impose coherence on confused and seemingly random occurrences. Ideally this should occur without the use of force; however, sometimes one can avoid the use of force only by threatening it.
Some may visualize crisis management as a frenzied affair in which key policymakers converge on the White House in their limousines, when harassed officials are bombarded by nervous aides rushing in and out with the latest flash cables. Oddly enough, I have found this not to be accurate; periods of crisis, to be sure, involve great tension but they are also characterized by a strange tranquility. All the petty day-to-day details are stripped away; they are either ignored, postponed, or handled by subordinates. Personality clashes are reduced; too much is usually at stake for normal jealousies to operate. In a crisis only the strongest strive for responsibility; the rest are intimidated by the knowledge that failure will demand a scapegoat. Many hide behind a consensus that they will be reluctant to shape; others concentrating on registering objections that will provide alibis after the event. The few prepared to grapple with circumstances are usually undisturbed in the eye of a hurricane. All around them there is commotion; they themselves operate in solitude and a great stillness that yields, as the resolution nears, to exhaustion, exhilaration, or despair.
Our age must learn the lessons of WW2, brought about when the democracies failed to understand the designs of a totalitarian aggressor, sought foolishly to appease him, and permitted him to achieve a military superiority. This must never happen again, whatever the burdens of an adequate defense. But we must remember as well the lesson of WW1, when Europe, despite the existence of a military balance, drifted into a war no one wanted and a catastrophe that no one could have imagined. Military planning drove decisions; bluster and posturing drove diplomacy. Leaders committed the cardinal sin of statecraft: They lost control over events.
An American President thus has a dual responsibility: He must resist Soviet expansionism. And he must be conscious of the profound risks of global confrontation. His policy must embrace both deterrence and coexistence, both containment and an effort to relax tensions. If the desire for peace turns into an avoidance of conflicts at all costs, if the just disparage power and seek refuge in their moral purity, the world’s fear of war becomes a weapon of blackmail by the strong; peaceful nations, large and small, will be at the mercy of the most ruthless. Yet if we pursue the ideological conflict divorced from strategy, if confrontation turns into an end in itself, we will lose the cohesion of our alliances and ultimately the confidence of our people. That was what the Nixon Administration understood by detente.
The Nixon Administration sought a foreign policy that eschewed both moralistic crusading and escapist isolationism, submerging them in a careful analysis of the national interest. America’s aim was to maintain the balance of power and seek to build upon it a more constructive future. We were entering a period when America’s responsibility was to provide a consistent, mature leadership in much more complex conditions than we had ever before faced and over a much longer period of time than we ever had had to calculate.
He showed me that it was better to stay in the cheapest room in the best hotel than to stay in the best room in the cheapest hotel. He insisted that I eat in good restaurant and learn to appreciate the differences between food and service.
An essential insight for mastering any challenging skill is that every brief, but thrilling, spurt forward will be followed by a much longer plateau slightly higher than the previous one. True masters learn to “love the plateau,” continuing to practice enthusiastically even was they seem, on the surface, to be stagnating.
It is fortunate for posterity that Bismarck was in the relatively subordinate position of ambassador for 10 years. His principal means of influencing public policy was through reports to his superiors. The result was a flood of memoranda passion, brilliantly written, remarkably consistent — the outline of Bismarck’s later policy. Increasingly Bismarck urged that foreign policy had to be based not on sentiment but on an assessment of strength. Prussia had to abandon the self-restraint that had characterized its policy since 1815:
We live in a wondrous time in which the strong is weak because of his moral scruples and the weak grows strong because of his audacity. A sentimental policy knows no reciprocity. It is an exclusively Prussian peculiarity. Every other government seeks the criteria for its actions solely in its interests, however it may cloak them with legal deductions. For heaven’s sake no sentimental alliances in which the consciousness of having performed a good deed furnishes the sole reward for our sacrifice. The only healthy basis of good policy for a great power is egotism and not romanticism. Gratitude and confidence will not bring a single man into the field on our side; only fear will do that, if we use it cautiously and skillfully. Policy is the art of the possible, the science of the relative.
Policy depended on calculation, not emotion. The interests of states provided objective imperatives transcending individual preferences. “Not even the King has the right to subordinate the interests of the state to his personal sympathies or antipathies.”
The charge of opportunism, however, begs the key issue of statesmanship. Anyone wishing to affect events must be opportunist to some extent. The real distinction is between those who adapt their purposes to reality and those who seek to mold reality in the light of their purposes.
Like many men of limited vision, Metternich’s successors confused maneuver with conception and sought to hide their timidity by restless activity. As a result, Austria abandoned the anonymity that was one of the tactics which enabled Metternich to deflect major crises from his rickety state. Henceforth, Austria found itself increasingly at the center of European disputes. Its vacillations made the Crimean War inevitable. Its confusion caused Russia to see it as a principal obstacle to St. Petersburg’s design in the Balkans. During the Crimean War and after, Austrian policy suffered from the inability to define priorities. Its measures took so long to conceive that they were irrelevant by the time they were executed; the Imperial Cabinet was so afraid of recklessness that it left itself no room for maneuver, save in sudden fits of panic which had the same effect as recklessness. As its position grew more desperate, its measure became more fitful. The Austrian government sought to compensate for each lost opportunity by redoubling its energies when it finally brought itself to act — which was usually at the wrong moment.
Gerlach had no better plan. What was at issue between him and Bismarck was not a policy, but a philosophy. To Gerlach an alliance with Napoleon was contrary to the maxims of morality and the lessons of Prussian history; to Bismarck it depended entirely on political unity unencumbered by moral scruples. Gerlach tested policy by an absolute moral standard; Bismarck considered success the only acceptable criterion. Gerlach sought fulfillment in commitment; Bismarck sought it in dexterity. Because he was of a generation which had known disaster, Gerlach was obsessed by the risks of a power in the center of a continent. Because disaster indicated to Bismarck only a false assessment of forces, he saw primarily the opportunities of the central position.
In this manner it became apparent that the requirements of the national interest were highly ambiguous after all. Bismarck could base self-restraint on a philosophy of self-interest. In the hands of others lacking his subtle touch, his methods led to the collapse of the 19th-century state system. The nemesis of power is that, except in the hands of a master, reliance on it is more likely to produce a contest at arms than self-restraint.
Domestically, too, the very qualities that had made Bismarck a solitary figure in his lifetime caused his compatriots to misunderstand him when he had become a myth. They remembered the three wars that had achieved their unity. They forgot the patient preparation that had made them possible and the moderation that had secured their fruits.
The law of substitution states that “your conscious mind can only hold one thought at a time, positive or negative.” Whatever thought is held continuously in your conscious mind will eventually be accepted by your subconscious mind as an instruction or command.
You subconscious mind, in harmony with these other mental laws, will go to work 24 hours per day to bring your dominant thought or idea into reality. Your subconscious mind is inordinately powerful. It is the repository of all your emotions, beliefs, values, attitudes and feelings.
There are many other features closely related to this. The increasing veneration fo the state, the admiration of power, and of bigness for bigness’ sake, the enthusiasm for “organization” of everything (we now call it “planning”), and that “inability to leave anything to the simple power of organic growth.”
Not in some cosmic, karma kind of way, but I believe deep down we all know who we are. You cannot hide anything from yourself. Your own failures are written within your psyche, and they’re obvious to you. If you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself. The worst outcome in this world is not having self-esteem. If you don’t love yourself, who will?
I think you just have to be very careful about doing things you are fundamentally not going to be proud of, because they will damage you. The first time someone acts this way, I will warn them. By the way, nobody changes. Then I just distance myself from them. I cut them out of my life. I just have this saying inside my head: “The closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.”
As I said before, I think it’s best to think of insight as drips of water filling a bucket, rather than any great thunderbolt that might transform your life instantaneously.
- Good: What did I do well today?
- Better: How could I improve?
- Best: What do I need to do if I want to be the best version of myself?
It is likely that the significance attributed to the attachment to the spatial location of the home also has a behavioral component. The boundaries or spatial limits of the home provide the enclosed structure that is seemingly necessary for familiarity to develop. Humans seek the familiar because what is familiar is also habitual; and, as such, the structured familiarity of the home provides comfort as it limits the anxiety-provoking multitude of possibilities of action that present themselves for consideration to human beings.
Ultimately, America’s long-term success in self-renewal may require a fundamental change of focus in America’s social culture: how Americans define their personal aspirations and the ethical content of their national “dream.” Is the acquisition of material possessions way beyond the requirements of convenience, comfort, and self-gratification the ultimate definition of the good life? Could patiently and persistently pursued domestic reforms turn America into an example of an intelligent society in which a productive, energetic, and innovative economy serves as the basis for shaping a society that is culturally, intellectually, and spiritually more gratifying? Unfortunately, such a far-reaching reevaluation of the meaning of a good life might occur only after the American public has been shocked into a painful understanding that America itself will be in jeopardy if it continues on a course that leads from the pursuit of domestic cornucopia to a plunge into international bankruptcy.
States, like individuals, are driven by inherited propensities — their traditional geopolitical inclinations and their sense of history — and they differ in their ability to discriminate between patient ambition and imprudent self-delusion. In reflecting on the possible consequences of a change in the global hierarchy of power in the first half of the 21st century, it may be useful therefore to remind oneself that in the 20th century two extreme examples of impatient self-delusion resulted in national calamities.
The most obvious was provided by Hitler’s imprudent megalomania, which not only vastly overestimated Germany’s global capacity for leadership but also prompted two personal strategic decisions that deprived him of any chance of retaining control even of continental Europe. The first, when already having conquered Europe but still at war with Great Britain, was to attack the Soviet Union; and the second was to declare war on the US while still engaged in a mortal struggle with both the Soviet Union and Great Britain.
The second case was less dramatic but the stake was also global power. In the early 1960s the Soviet leadership proclaimed officially that it expected to surpass the US during the decade of 1980s in economic power and in technological capability (dramatized by its Sputnik success). Vastly overestimating its economic capabilities, by the late 1970s the USSR was pursuing an active arms race with the US in which its technological capacity for innovation was central to the outcome, but in which its GNP limited the practical scope of its global political as well as military outreach. On both scores, the Soviet Union overreached disastrously. It then compounded the consequences of its miscalculation with the calamitous decision to invade Afghanistan in 1979. A decade later the exhausted Soviet Union ceased to exist and the Soviet bloc fragmented.
Just 35 years ago, the US benefited from strong relationships with the four most important countries in the Middle East: Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Turkey. As a result, American interests in the region were secure. Today, American influence with each of these four states is largely reduced. America and Iran are locked in a hostile relationship; Saudi Arabica is critical of America’s evolving regional policy; Turkey is disappointed by the lack of American standing for its regional ambitions; and Egypt’s rising skepticism regarding its relationship with Israel is setting it at odds with America’s priorities. In brief, the US position in the Middle East is manifestly deteriorating. An American decline would end it.
The first point to make here is that models come and go. All 3 countries have at one time or another been considered by at least some people as the leading capitalist economy which others should emulate. Indeed, it was thought that their success would make it inevitable that others would have to follow the same path. Yet each national set of institutions generated its own problems and each economy ended up in crisis. Most recently, the free market and shareholder capitalism of the US seemed to be all-conquering but it was this capitalism that led to scandals galore and the long crisis that started in 2007.
True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity.
The punch line is clear: people who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. Too many people try to change their habits without these basic details figured out. We tell ourselves, “I’m going to eat healthier” or “I’m going to write more,” but we never say when and where these habits are going to happen. We leave it up to chance and hope that we will just “remember to do it” or feel motivated at the right time.
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action.
It’s easy to be in motion and convince yourself that you’re still making progress. Motion makes you feel like you’re getting things done. But really, you’re just preparing to get something done. When preparation becomes a form of procrastination, you need to change something. You don’t want to merely be planning. You want to be practicing.
The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.
My boy’s business is to put big, strong, scary men in their place.
I couldn’t deal with all that pressure. Before the finals, Cus pulled me aside.
“Mike, this is the real world. You see all these people,” and he pointed to all the ring officials and the reporters and the boxing officials in the arena. “When you lose, they don’t like you anymore. If you’re not spectacular, they don’t like you anymore. Everybody used to like me. Believe me, when I was in my fifties, young, beautiful women would chase me all over the place. Now that I’m an old man, no one comes around anymore.”
He who cannot change the very fabric of his thought will never be able to change reality.
If you get the objectives right, a lieutenant can write the strategy.
Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.
Many people have the ability to review something and make it better. Few are able to identify what is missing.
The use of force is the ultimate sanction of diplomacy. Diplomacy and power are not discrete activities. They are linked, though not in the sense that each time negotiations stall, you resort to force. It simply means that the opposite number in a negotiation needs to know there is a breaking point at which you will attempt to impose your will. Otherwise, there will be a deadlock or a diplomatic defeat. That point is dependent on three components: the possession of adequate and relevant power, tactical willingness to deploy it, and a strategic doctrine that disciplines a society’s power with its values.
The worst possible meeting is when the person you are meets the person you could have been.
Knowledge is the beginning of practice; doing is the completion of knowing.
Religion is any all-encompassing story that confers superhuman legitimacy on human laws, norms and values.
When I realized that I would never talk to someone they way I talk to myself, it was a little lightbulb moment.
To solve this problem, the mind creates maps of reality in order to understand it, because the only way we can process the complexity is through abstraction. But frequently, we don’t understand our maps or their limits. In fact, we are so reliant on abstraction that we will frequently use an incorrect model simply because we feel any model is preferable to no model.
You do not understand a model, map, or reduction unless you understand and respect its limitations.
Abundant time can make us procrastinate. Deadline pressure makes us more efficient. What scarcity does is make you focus. When there’s no scarcity, you relax, you take it easy, and then you wonder, what happened to the day? You’re treating time the way the rich treat money.
Surround yourself and only date people that make you a better version of yourself, that bring out your best parts, love and accept you.
But risks must be taken because the greatest hazard in life is to risk nothing. The person who risks nothing, does nothing, has nothing, is nothing.
He may avoid suffering and sorrow, but he cannot learn, feel, change, grow or love. Chained by his certitudes, he is a slave. He has forfeited his freedom.
Only a person who dares to risk is free
Steve was the most remarkably focused person I’ve ever met in my life. And the thing with focus is, it’s not this thing you aspire to, or you decide on Monday, “You know, I’m going to be focused.” It’s a every minute, “Why are we talking about this? This is what we’re working on.” You can achieve so much when you truly focus.
What focus means is saying no to something that with every bone in your body think is a phenomenal idea, and you wake up thinking about it, but you end up saying no to it because you’re focusing on something else.
Super rich people get even richer, while making talented poor people rich, by paying the talented people to fight in arenas and selling tickets to poor people.
Personal knowledge is the key to making discoveries. As we study a particular field, we absorb increasing amounts of specific knowledge, including rules, facts, terminology and relationships. At some point, we know these details well enough that we can begin to focus on the whole. We can then begin to see patterns, the meaning of things, and sense when something is wrong, even though we may not always be able to articulate our understanding. This improves our ability to perceive problems and opportunities when doing research, interviewing a candidate or screening acquisitions.
The process of discovery begins when we observe, often vaguely, a gap between what is and what could be. Our intuition tells us something better is just beyond the range of our mind’s eye. To build a culture of discovery, we must encourage, not discourage, the passionate pursuit of our own and others’ hunches. Next, we need to strive to clearly articulate our hypotheses, which, when made concrete and specific, can be challenged and tested. Hypotheses that pass this hurdle can then be put to the broader test of working in practice. The genesis of this entire process is the development of personal knowledge that is passionately applied to solve a problem.
Laws control the lesser man. Right conduct controls the greater one.
The stench. The filth. The total confusion. The sense of despair and hopelessness. What did it? Human rights? Are they bankable?
Half the difficulty of learning anything comes in grasping the principles upon which it is based. Knowing a specialized trick — like the coin construction for heads — will not get you very far. But when you master a principle, you take a stride in seven-league boots. I have attempted to explain the principles of practical drawing in this book. However, you will not really master them until you can apply them to your own problems.
No carelessness in your actions. No confusion in your words. No imprecision in your thoughts. No retreating into your own soul, or trying to escape it. No overactivity.
Some managers try to be popular with the players and become one of the boys. It never works. As a leader, you don’t need to be loved, though it is useful, on occasion, to be feared. But, most of all, you need to be respected. There are just some natural boundaries, and when those get crossed it makes life harder.
But injustice, arrogance, displayed in the hour of triumph will never be forgotten or forgiven.
Growth in philosophical understanding, or just plain wisdom, is always a matter of being able to distinguish between levels of truth and frame of reference, at the same time being able to see one’s own life in its intimate relation to these differing and ever more universal levels. Above all, there is the level beyond levels, the boundless frame of universal nature, which, however impossible to describe, is the self-determining and spontaneous ground of our being and our freedom. The degree of freedom and self-determination varies with the level which we realize to be our self — the source from which we act. As our sense of self is narrow, the more we feel our existence as restraint. For when we stand with our nature, seeing that there is nowhere to stand against it, we are at last able to move unmoved.
The production of so much research often adds simply another burden to already overworked officials. It tends to divert attention from the act of judgment on which policy ultimately depends to the assembly of facts which is relatively the easiest step in policy formation. Few if any of the recent crises of US policy have been caused by the unavailability of data. Our policy makers do not lack advice; they are in many respects overwhelmed by it. They do lack criteria on which to base judgments. In the absence of commonly understood and meaningful standards, all advice tends to become equivalent and every problem turns into a special case.
Competence in one specialty is frequently achieved by reducing the attention given to everything else. It is not surprising that the graduates of such a process regard national policy as something tangential to their primary interests, as a duty to be performed in one’s spare time or as a career to cap an eminence achieved elsewhere. High government service is desired by many of our eminent people precisely because it is different from their previous activities and because it offers a new challenge. But a new challenge taken up late in life is bound to produce uncertainty. It means that the official cannot draw strength from his familiar mode of operation or contribute in an original fashion to his new environment.
Most essential — and most difficult — is a new estimation of reflection itself. It is time that we realize that committees of experts are not the most likely vehicle for profound thought. There is no substitute for the painful task of creation.
Without great solitude, no serious work is possible.
Within the private sector of our society an extraordinary and increasing premium is placed on administrative skill. Though administrative ability is very useful in high office, it does not touch the central problem of policy making in a revolutionary period. The essence of good administration is coordination among the specialized functions of a bureaucracy. The task of statesmanship is to impose purpose on routine. A good administrator possesses judgment; a great statesman is distinguished by vision. Administration is concerned with execution; policy making must also address itself to developing a sense of direction.
The best-dressed salespeople are always the ones making the most money in their fields. Whenever a well-dressed salesperson talks to me, it is immediately evident from his confident attitude that he is making excellent money in his field.
Countless salespeople have no idea that they are sabotaging themselves and their sales each morning when they leave the house dressed poorly.
Remember, in dress, as well as in all other aspects of selling, everything counts! It is either helping you or hurting you. It either adds or detracts. Your dress either moves you toward the sale, or moves you away. Dress is one of the most powerful of all suggestive influences in selling.
Aiming at simplicity and lucidity is a moral duty of all intellectuals, lack of clarity is a sin, and pretentiousness is a crime.
Anh hùng trong thiên hạ bây giờ chỉ có sứ quân và Tháo này mà thôi.
Your life becomes meaningful in precise proportion to the depths of the responsibility you are willing to shoulder. That is because you are now genuinely involved in making things better. You are minimizing the unnecessary suffering. You are encouraging those around you, by example and word. Your are constraining the malevolence in your own heart and the hearts of others. A bricklayer may question the utility of laying his bricks, monotonously, one after another. But perhaps he is not merely laying bricks. Maybe he is building a wall, a building, a cathedral — the glorification of the Highest Good.
Steve was preoccupied with the nature and quality of his own thinking. He expected so much of himself and worked hard to think with a rare vitality, elegance and discipline. His rigor and tenacity set a dizzyingly high bar. When he could not think satisfactorily he would complain in the same way I would complain about my knees.
As thoughts grew into ideas, however tentative, however fragile, he recognized that this was hallowed ground. He had such a deep understanding and reverence for the creative process. He understood creating should be afforded rare respect—not only when the ideas were good or the circumstances convenient.
Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely.
People who lead happy but not necessarily meaningful lives have all their needs satisfied: they are healthy, have enough money, and feel good a lot of the time. People who lead a meaningful lives may enjoy none of these boons. Happy people live in the present; those with meaningful lives have a narrative about their past and a plan for the future. Those with happy but meaningless lives are takers and beneficiaries; those with meaningful but unhappy lives are givers and benefactors. Parents get meaning from their children, but not necessarily happiness. Time spent with friends makes a life happier; time spent with loved ones makes it more meaningful. Stress, worry, arguments, challenges, and struggles make a life unhappier but more meaningful. It’s not that the people with meaningful lives masochistically go looking for trouble but that they pursue ambitious goals: “Man plans and God laughs.” Finally, meaning is about expressing rather than satisfying the self: it is enhanced by activities that define the person and build a reputation.
Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation) there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would not otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favour all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance which no man would have dreamed would come his way. I have learned a deep respect for one of Goethe’s couplets: “Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.”
Dù bạn giỏi giang, tài trí, giàu sang tới cỡ nào, cũng xin hãy cư xử khiêm tốn và nương nhẹ với tổ tiên, với non nước quê nhà, thành phố quê hương.
It’s about showing up and getting started, and then something amazing happens or it doesn’t happen, all that matters is that you enable the chance for something to happen and for that you have to sit at your desk and you have to draw and do and make decisions and hope for the best.
I don’t need a source of strength. Quitting is not in my nature. And I don’t care about optimism or pessimism. Fuck that we’re gonna get it done.
The conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time. As a result, your brain is always working to preserve your conscious attention for whatever task is most essential. Whenever possible, the conscious mind likes to pawn off tasks to the nonconscious mind to do automatically.
Write down the words you want inscribed on your soul. I wrote that down. That seemed pretty good - a little on the romantic side, granted - but that was in keeping with the game. Then I upped the ante. I decided to ask myself the hardest questions I could think up, and await their answers.
In the absence of criteria of success, self-delusion took the place of analysis.
The individual seeks confirmation, on the part of his fellows, of the evaluation he puts upon himself. It is only in the tribute which others pay to his goodness, intelligence, and power that he becomes fully aware of, and can fully enjoy, what he deems to be his superior quality. It is only through his reputation for excellence that he can gain the measure of security, wealth, and power which he regards to be his due. Thus, in the struggle for existence and power, which is, as it were, the raw material of the social world, what others think about us is as important as what we actually are. The image in the mirror of our fellows’s minds, that is, our prestige, rather than the original, of which the image in the mirror may be but the distorted reflection, determines what we are as members of society.
The only nation which in modern times could maintain a continuous position of preponderance owed that position to a rare combination of potential superior power, a reputation for superior power, and the infrequent use of that superior power. Thus Great Britain was able, on the one hand, to overcome all serious challenges to its superiority because its self-restraint gained powerful allies and, hence, made it actually superior. On the other hand, it could minimize the incentive to challenge it because its superiority did not threaten the existence of other nations. When Great Britain stood at the threshold of its greatest power, it heeded the warning of its greatest political thinker — a warning as timely today as when first uttered in 1793:
Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take one precaution against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded. It is ridiculous to say we are not men, and that, as men, we shall never with to aggrandize ourselves in some way grandized? We are already in possession of almost all the commerce of the world. Our empire in India is an awful thing. If we should come to be in a condition not only to have all this ascendant in commerce, but to be absolutely able, without the least control, to hold the commerce of all other nations totally dependent upon our good pleasure, we may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard-of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin.
In political terms such clashes between the existing legal order and the demand for its change are but another manifestation of the antagonism between the status quo and imperialism. Any particular distribution of power, once it has reached some degree of stability, is hardened into a legal order. This legal order not only provides the new status quo with ideological disguises and moral justifications. It also surrounds the new status quo with a bulwark of legal safeguards, the violation of which will put into motion the enforcement mechanism of the law. The function of the courts is to put the enforcement action into motion by determining whether the concrete case under consideration justifies such action according the existing rules of law. Thus any system of existing law is of necessity an ally of the status quo, and the courts cannot fail to be its custodians. This is so in the international sphere no less than on the domestic scene.
As Castlereagh wisely put it: It is difficult enough in international affairs to hold the balance “between conflicting nations,” it is still more difficult to hold the balance “between conflicting principles.”
The importance of diplomacy for the preservation of international peace is but a particular aspect of the general function which diplomacy fulfills as an element of national power. For a diplomacy which ends in war has failed in its primary objective: the promotion of the national interests by peaceful means.
Taken in its widest meaning, comprising the whole range of foreign policy, the task of diplomacy is fourfold. (1) Diplomacy must determine its objectives in the light of the power actually and potentially available for the pursuit of these objectives. (2) Diplomacy must assess the objectives of other nations and the power actually and potentially available for the pursuit of these objectives. (3) Diplomacy must determine to what extent these different objectives are compatible with each other. (4) Diplomacy must employ the means suited to the pursuit of its objectives. Failure in any one of these tasks may jeopardize the success of a foreign policy and with it the peace of the world.
A nation can only take a rational view of its national interests after it has parted company with the crusading spirit of a political creed. A nation is able to consider the national interests of the other side with objectivity only after it has become secure in what it considers its own national interests. Compromise on any issue, however minor, is impossible so long as both sides are not secure in their national interests.
Don’t become angry over little things; there are enough big ones.
Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
Man, even the most “practical” one who is most contemptuous of enterprises such as the one undertaken by this book, cannot live without a philosophy which gives meaning to his existence, by explaining it in terms of causality, rationalizing it in terms of philosophy proper, and justifying it in terms of ethics. A philosophy as a system of intellectual assumptions is static; life is in constant flux. Life is always in a “period of transition,” by which standard phrase the age reveals its embarrassment at its intellectual inability to cope with the experience of modern life. In the face of this contradiction between philosophy and experience, it is the easiest thing in the world to stick to one’s philosophic guns and, pointing to the intellectual and moral excellence of one’s philosophy, to substitute for all the creative revisions and revolutions of true philosophy the sterile incantations of a self-sufficient dogmatism.
Intellectual victories, however, are not won that way. The dominance of a philosophy over its age and its fecundity for the future are not determined by the standards of a seminar in logic or metaphysics but by its relation to the life experiences of the common man. That philosophy wins out in the competition of the marketplace, which, with greater faithfulness than any other, makes explicit and meaningful what the man in the street but dimly perceives yet strongly feels.
Man may continue to live for a while with a philosophy which falls short of this standard. He may still believe in its assumptions, listen to its exhortations, and wonder in confusion what is true and false, good and evil, right and wrong in this conflict between the known dogmas of the old philosophy and the felt experiences of the new life. Yet man will not forever accept a philosophy which is patently at odds with his experience. He will not forever listen to “appeals to reason” when he experiences the power of irrational forces over his own life and the lives of his fellow men.
The ability of an age to perform such a task of rejuvenation, which is also a task of destruction, is the measure of its intellectual vitality.
While many value Lee’s views on the changing world, in fact his geopolitical ideology is very simple. He filters everything through the lens of what is best for Singapore. Every fact, every nuance, every meeting, every new information, he acquires during his numerous meetings with world leaders, is stored away in his capacious brain and processed through the lens of how it would affect the Republic.
Freedom was no end in itself because in its present form it had become an excuse for unrestrained license, divorced from any concept of virtue and social responsibility. Instructed by modern liberal ideas about the rights of man, people thought themselves entitled to pursue their greediest, ugliest, most base, and most perverse desires without no acknowledgment of limit or conscience. It was what Strauss called “the victory of the gutter.” Weimar Germany was a model of this kind of freedom. But “not everything is permitted,” Strauss said, and “restraint is as natural to man as is freedom.” The ancient had a firmer and more nuanced understanding of freedom because they didn’t think only of rights: “Premodern thought put the emphasis on duty, and rights, as far as they were mentioned at all, were understood only as derivative from duties.” Western civilization was as much about limits and responsibilities as it was about liberty.
As with freedom, so with tolerance. The intolerance of the Nazis — which defined their movement and led to industrialized mass murder — was heinous. And yet leaping to the opposite position of tolerance for its own sake was hardly and adequate response to death camps. It was impossible, Strauss insisted, to be tolerance of everything and everyone. Even the most liberal of persons ran up against limits to their goodwill. Our actions are always guided by some notion of good and bad, or at least better and worse. Judgment was built into our humanity, and the necessity for choice could not be evaded by a soothing rubric of “tolerance.” An ecumenical tolerance eradicated personal responsibility and denied individual will.
The one clear implication of all my research, and all my experience, both personal and professional, is that success, impact, and life satisfaction are not the result of how much power you can accumulate, or even how powerful others think you are; they are the result of what you are able to do for others with the power you already have.
Firms need to plan ahead. By getting involved in the budgeting process, managers are forced to do this. Without the budgeting process, managers might just carry on with their routine tasks, and then engage in crisis management. By getting managers to think ahead, they foresee problems and are in a better position to prevent them from arising.
Lincoln seemed to know, perhaps more than any other American president in history, when to hold his tongue and when silence was a graver mistake than speaking up. At the core of this skill was an understanding of one of the most fundamental truths of human nature. We are self-preserving creatures who are instinctively compelled to defend, deflect, and deny all threats to our well-being, not the least of which are threats to our pride.
It’s often said that to be successful you must surround yourself with successful people. While there is truth to the statement, few see that there are 2 ways to approach this positioning. Either you can seek friendships with those who are already successful, or you can seek success for those who are already friends. Whichever way you choose, one thing is certain: your success is always commensurate with the number of people who want to see you successful. But one way provides better numbers.
In the long run, no one but the originator remember things such as whose idea it was, who spoke first, or who took the first risk. What people remember is magnanimity. It is an interesting paradox that the more you surrender the credit for something you’ve done, the more memorable you become, and the more you actually end up receiving credit.
Ronald Reagan was once quoted as saying, “What I would really like to do is to go down in history as the president who made Americans believe in themselves again.” From this quote alone we can establish a fairly accurate character analysis of the man. He was in the game so that others could win. His political goals centered on the uplifting and success of those he served in the office of the president.
Perhaps what best typifies Reagan is the quote on the plaque that sat above his Oval Office desk. It read: “There is no limit to what a man can do, or where he can go, if he doesn’t mind who gets the credit.”
Relationships matter because the people you spend time with shape who you are and who you become. Behavior and beliefs are contagious: you easily “catch” the emotional state of your friends, imitate their actions, and absorb their values as your own. If your friends are the types of people who get stuff done, chances are you’ll be that way, too. The fastest way to change yourself is to hang out with people who are already the way you want to be.
One day, for instance, I was in the car stopped at a light, and a scooter pulled up alongside me that was ridden by a young man wearing a denim jacket covered in badges. I liked it; I could see that this was a new, genuine, trendy. I called my design chief from the car and told him what I was looking at. In 2 weeks, the jackets were in the shops and selling like hot cakes. That sort of thing happens to me a lot.
There are many tiny threads, some invisible, all surprisingly strong, that bind modern Gullivers. As the US embarked on its new role as the world’s most powerful nation in the days after WW2, it could hardly imagine that within a few years, for all its power, it would be constrained in ways that precluded victory in 2 small corners of Asia, or hamstrung in the UN that it created, or that the flip side of containment was being bogged down worldwide in small struggles that sapped our strength, tested our will, and made us winder about the future of American power. In the same way, as the 3 presidents who presided over the new world that Truman had helped ushering into being discovered, being the “leader of the free world” did not exactly mean that they possessed unlimited power. Even at home, they found that everything from political realities to their own foibles to the groupthink and intrigues among their advisors would frustrate them just as did the tiny restraints on the comparatively giant Gulliver.
Although their views are not universally positive on every aspect of Nixon-era policy, the degree to which there is unanimity about the quality of the process and of Kissinger’s genius for keeping the big picture in mind (and for having thought that big picture through) is remarkable.
The good policy paper laid out the issue and then provided a lot of good detailed background and technical background and political background and then it stated assumptions and stated goals so that if people quibbled about those assumptions or goals you could have a debate. But at least you knew where the rest of the paper was coming from — it was coming from a certain set of assumptions. There was always a good intelligence tab or appendix that provided all the data that the intelligence community knew. And then there were options, and under each of the options there was either a pro-con list or a list of evaluative criteria to evaluate each of the options on the same set of criteria: how would the allies react, how would the Congress react, would the Russians agree to it, how would it get us to our goals, and how close it would get us to our goals. And it was all very transparent. You could see the flow of thought.
A person usually has 2 reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one.
An entrepreneurial perspective can be defined as opportunity-seeking behavior, while a strategic perspective is an advantage-seeking behavior that involves creating and sustaining one ore more competitive advantages as the path through which opportunities are exploited.
But once war is forced upon us, there is no other alternative than to apply every available means to bring it to a swift end.
War’s very object is victory, not prolonged indecision.
In war there is no substitute for victory.
But let us also remember that even the best consultative machinery cannot substitute for common vision and shared goals; it cannot replace the whole network of intangible connections that have been the real sinews of the transatlantic and especially the Anglo-American relationship. We must take care lest in defining European unity in too legalistic a manner we lose what has made our alliance unique: that in the deepest sense Europe and America do not think of each other as foreign entities conducting traditional diplomacy, but as members of a larger community engaged, sometimes painfully but ultimately always cooperatively, in a common enterprise.
As we look into the future we can perceive challenges compared to which our recent disputes are trivial. A new international system is replacing the structure of the immediate postwar years. The external policies of China and the Soviet Union are in periods of transition. Western Europe is unifying. New nations seek identity and an appropriate role. Even now, economic relationships are changing more rapidly than the structures which nurtured them. We — Europe, Canada, and America — have only 2 choices: creativity together or irrelevant apart.
All too frequently a problem evaded is a crisis invited. The future must be shaped or it will impose itself as catastrophe. That remains the key test of democratic statesmanship.
Tocqueville expressed his concerns for the American “depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to want to bring the strong down to their level and which reduces men to preferring equality in servitude to inequality in freedom.”
Diplomats should be able to be very tough if necessary in order to achieve their goals. It is not all about being nice and polite. This is what I used to tell my younger diplomats. Your job is to advance Singapore’s national interests. Preferably by being nice and polite but if required, by using whatever means necessary, even if it means being nasty. But the point is to advance your goals.
Thị phi thành bại theo dòng nước
Sừng sững cơ đồ bỗng tay không
Một vò rượu nếp vui gặp gỡ
Chuyện đời tan trong chén rượu nồng
The thing is that evolution, as a process, is not smart — but it is at least dumb in a very persistent way. All that matters to evolution is that you survive the thousand possible horrible deaths that lurk at every turn for just long enough to ensure that your genes make it through to the next generation. If you manage that, job done. If not, tough luck. This means that evolution doesn’t really do foresight. If a trait gives you an advantage right now, it’ll be selected for the next generation, regardless of whether or not it’s going to end up lumbering your great-great-grandchildren with something that’s woefully outdated. Equally, it doesn’t give points for prescience — saying, “Oh, this trait is kind of a hindrance now, but it’ll come in really useful for my descendants in a million years’ time, trust me” cut absolutely no ice. Evolution gets results not by planning ahead, but rather by simply hurling a ridiculously large number of hungry, horny organisms at a dangerous and unforgiving world and seeing who fails least.
This means that our brains aren’t the result of a meticulous design process aimed at creating the best possible thinking machines; instead, they’re a loose collection of hacks and bodges and shortcuts that made our distant ancestors 2% better at finding food, or 3% better at communicating the concept “Oh shit, watch out, it’s a lion.”
Those mental shortcuts (they’re called “heuristics”) are absolutely necessary for surviving, for interacting with others and for learning from experience: you can’t sit down and work out everything you need to do from first principles.
We believe that the quality of our surroundings has a direct influence on the quality of our lives.
Your calendar never lies. Time is your only true resource. And the way you divvy time up — visible to one and all — is the only true statement of what really matters to you.
But what’s all this neural power for? Evolutionary theory tells us our purpose is to survive and reproduce. These are complex aims, not least reproduction, which, for humans, means manipulating what potential mates think of us. Convincing a member of the opposite sex that we’re a desirable mate is a challenge that requires a deep understanding of social concepts such as attraction, status, reputation and rituals of courting. Ultimately, then, we could say the mission of the brain is this: control. Brains have to perceive the physical environment and the people that surround it in order to control them. It’s by learning how to control the world that they get what they want.
Control is why brain are on constant alert for the unexpected. Unexpected change is a portal through which danger arrives to swipe at our throats. Paradoxically, however, change is also an opportunity. It’s the crack in the universe through which the future arrives. Change is hope. Change is promise. It’s our winding path to a more successful tomorrow. When unexpected change strikes we want to know, what does it mean? Is this change for the good or the bad? Unexpected change makes us curious, and curious is how we should feel in the opening movements of an effective story.
Since birth, it’s been in a state of heightened plasticity that has enabled it to build its models. But now it becomes less plastic and harder to change. Most of the peculiarities and mistakes that make us who we are have become incorporated into its models. Our flaws and peculiarities have become who we are. Our minds have been made up.
From being model-builders we become model defenders. Now that the flawed self with its flawed model of the world has been constructed, the brain starts to protect it. When we encounter evidence that it might be wrong, because other people aren’t perceiving the world as we do, we can find it deeply disturbing.
In the meantime, the Chinese leader underscored to American visitors that normalization of relations with the PRC “would do more for American security than any number of arms control treaties signed with Moscow.”
The reason most people fail instead of succeed is they trade what they want most for what they want at the moment.
The will to win is the paramount factor in any battle: without the political will and leadership to create and sustain the force and direct it to achieving its objective come what may, no military force can triumph in the face of a more determined opponent. On the battlefield we call this will morale, the spirit that triumphs in the face of adversity — and it is crucial. At the political and strategic levels the reward is defined in terms of the political purpose and the strategic objective: the grand prizes. However, as one enters the arena of the tactical battle, these objectives appear all the more distant and relative. In battle men fight to kill before they are killed, and for objectives they think are worth losing their lives for. These tend in the extreme to be emotional and abstract objectives such as race, creed, honor, regiment or group.
Competition is not only the life of trade, it is the trade of life — peaceful when food abounds, violent when the mouths outrun the food. Animals eat one another without qualm; civilized men consumed one another by due process of law. Co-operation is real, and increases with social development, but mostly because it is a tool and form of competition; we co-operate in our group — our family, community, club, church, party, “race,” or nation — in order to strengthen our group in its competition with other groups.
Since we have admitted no substantial change in man’s nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends — the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other, the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars.
The wisest policy of the powerful is to create a kind of pity for themselves, as if their responsibilities were a burden and a sacrifice. How can one envy a man who has taken on a heavy load for the public interest? Disguise your power as a kind of self-sacrifice rather than a source of happiness and you make it seem less enviable.
The question is, as you stand over a ball and prepare to hit it, which shots do you choose to remember?
A lot of players tell me they don’t choose — that the memories of bad shots jump, unbidden, into their mind. Others say they have realistic memories, that they recall both the bad and the good.
But a golfer can indeed choose. Free will enables him to develop the kind of memory that promotes good shotmaking: a short-term memory for failure and a long-term memory for success. A golfer can learn to forget the bad shots and remember the good ones.
One way is to permit yourself to enjoy your good shots.
Nevertheless, the distribution question also deserves to be studied in a systematic and methodical fashion. Without precisely defined sources, methods, and concepts, it is possible to see everything and its opposite. Some people believe that inequality is always increasing and that the world is by definition always becoming more unjust. Others believe that inequality is naturally decreasing, or that harmony comes about automatically, and that in any case nothing should be done that might risk disturbing this happy equilibrium. Given this dialogue of the deaf, in which each camp justifies its own intellectual laziness by pointing to the laziness of the other, there is a role for research that is at least systematic and methodical if not fully scientific. Expert analysis will never put an end to the violent political conflict that inequality inevitably instigates. Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions. It can help to redefine the terms of debate, unmask certain preconceived or fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scientists, should play, as citizens like any other but with the good fortune to have more time than others to devote themselves to study (and even to be paid for it — a signal privilege).
Measures taken to ensure US national security include:
- Using diplomacy to rally allies and isolate threats.
- Marshaling economic power to elicit cooperation.
- Maintaining effective armed forces.
- Implementing civil defense and emergency preparedness policies (including anti-terrorism legislation).
- Ensuring the resilience and redundancy of critical infrastructure.
- Using intelligence services to detect and defeat or avoid threats and espionage, and to protect classified information.
- Tasking counterintelligence services or secret police to protect the nation from internal threats.
I have 2 kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.