Read to lead, and manage the distance
The habit, the leading, the reading, and the pain
The habit
Last year, I read in Massimo Pigliucci’s wonderful How to Be Stoic about Aristotle’s view on eudaimonia and the cultivation of aretē. As the old greek brother was a bit of a taxonomic savant, he articulated in Nicomachean Ethics “two and a bit” sources of good in a man —
(1) Education — learned nature; one must learn what society and those before thought were good in order to add the wisdom of their lives to his own.
(2) Nature —the self-awareness of the drives that move you; the limbic brain that tells one what feels right.
(3) Habit — a daily practice toward the direction set by education. with enough habit, the good of education becomes a second nature.
I decided then-and-there to embark on a personal development project in 2019 to build a set of habits (app: mine|others) — as of late February, it’s going resoundingly well — despite professional tumult as well as the birth of my first child — as it’s connected to half-habits I already have; and of course the daily practice makes it harder to stop.
Leading
There’s many of these habits that pertain to leadership, the lifelong challenge, duty, and obligation that I have crafted for myself in General Management. Primary among these is reading, but the other habits fall into a theme of ‘family, fitness, frugality’ as well as being aligned to these personal goals:
(1) Grow myself — so I have both more of; and a higher quality of; me to give
(2) Widen myself — so I think more systemically, more broadly, with more opportunity to grow wise.
(3) Distance myself — that I might pursue this with greater acceleration and thus ‘flywheel’ the two previous items. It is also required in order to achieve the perspective that informs the first two.
Reading
So then, reading to grow, to widen, to distance. It is true that as I read more, distance becomes a pain (more on that below); but at the same time I gain new closeness to the authors of the pages.
In many ways, I feel I am closer in mind and spirit to Ursula Le Guin, to Benjamin Franklin, to Orwell, to James Baldwin and to Epictetus and his Stoic peers than I do anyone surnamed Ma. Perhaps they are better people to form my board of directors than any one living!
I am resigned, through reading, that this is an inevitability. As Seneca is apt to say On the Shortness of Life:
…we can say as much of those who’ll want to have Zeno, Pythagoras, Democritus, and the other high priests of philosophical study, and Aristotle and Theophrastus, as their closest companions every day.
None of these will ever be unavailable to you, none of these will fail to send his visitor off in a happier condition and more at ease with himself. None will let anyone leave empty handed; they can be approached by all mortals by night and by day.
None of these philosophers will force you to die, but all will teach you how. None of them will diminish your years, but each will share his own years with you. With none of them will conversation be dangerous, friendship life threatening, or cultivation of them expensive. From them you’ll take whatever you wish; it will be no fault of theirs if you fail to take in the very fullest amount you have room for.
What happiness, what a fine old age lies in store for the person who’s put himself under the patronage of these people! He’ll have friends whose advice he can seek on the greatest or least important matters, whom he can consult daily about himself, from whom he can hear the truth without insult and receive praise without fawning, and who will provide a model after which to fashion himself.
There is a common saying that it was not in our power to choose the parents we were allotted, and that they were given to us by chance; yet we can be born to whomever we wish. There are households of the most distinguished intellects: choose the one into which you’d like to be adopted, and you’ll inherit not just the name but also the actual property, which is not to be hoarded in a miserly or mean spirit: the more people you share it with, the greater it will become.
These will open for you the path to immortality, and raise you to an elevation from which no one is cast down. This is the sole means of prolonging mortality, or rather of transforming it into immortality.
Honors, monuments, all that ostentatious ambition has ordered by decree or erected in stone, are soon destroyed: there’s nothing that the long lapse of time doesn’t demolish and transform. But it cannot harm the works consecrated by wisdom: no age will efface them, no age reduce them at all. The next age and each one after that will only enhance the respect in which they are held, since envy focuses on what is close at hand, but we more freely admire things from a distance.
So the sage’s life is ample in scope, and he’s not constricted by the same limit that confines others. He alone is released from the limitations of the human race, and he is master of all ages as though a god. Some time has passed? He holds it in recollection.
Time is upon us? He uses it. Time is to come? This he anticipates.
The combining of all times into one makes his life long.
The Pain
Recently, loved ones told me that I spoke arrogantly. When pressed, the articulation was that I used big words and deep concepts. There is likely more to it than that, so I do a disservice when summarising so briefly.
It’s not the first reflection on others that I have received in regards to my tendency to speak towards learning I have done or habits I am built. In building this distance, we create a chasm that empathy must bridge. The wider the gap, the greater the empathy required and the deeper the pain when it fails.
The right path of course, is to pursue it irrespective, for allowing love to hold oneself back is a disservice to the self, the family and the polis.
At the same time, I should explore how to build continuously the bridge back; as extending this distance over time would cause the intent and thus the mission itself to fail.
I don’t have all the answers on this one yet; but I’ll let you know how it goes.
