#136 | A defining decade

"A Decade To Success" led the headline above the grinning faces of Trump, Markle and Bieber.

As I grow older, I pay less attention to what men say. I just watch what they do.

— Andrew Carnegie

He has the most who is most content with the least.

— Diogenes

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On New Year's Eve, 2019/20, I read a Times supplement wrapped with pictures of famous people. "A Decade To Success" led the headline above the grinning faces of Trump, Markle and Bieber.

The premise: In the preceding ten years, these celebrities had gone from Z-list irrelevance or absurdity to global icons. (Some maintained their absurdity.)

I learned we can achieve a tremendous amount in a decade. Most of us will have a decade, and some half dozen, to explore.

"Success" was, of course, judged by the supplement's rather hollow standards. Why hollow? Well, society stamps this artificial value of “success” on our forehead; without realising, we hold it at the front of our minds. The article should have addressed the emptiness of success. Why was Trump featured? Presumably for his presidency, but what about his marriage or his diet? — was it for his wealth or his unreported debts?

It’s too easy to forget that success is a construct. It’s but a perspective. Financial success, and the social gravity that comes with it, was once a uniquely American concept. It’s uniqueness was highlighted by Talleyrand, the late eighteenth-century French political influencer, who visited America in exile from France in 1794.

In Europe at the time, social gravity was inherited, not bought. You could be both poor, like Talleyrand, and respected. In the new American republic, influence was bought. These were two extraordinarily different value systems.

In Tallyrand's memoir, he writes:

To us inhabitants of old Europe, there is something unbecoming in the luxury displayed by Americans. I admit that our own luxury often demonstrates our own improvidence and frivolity, but in America, luxury only serves to emphasise defects which prove that refinement does not exist in that country—either in the conduct of life or even in its incidentals.

Today we (globally) live within the American economic diaspora and have subsumed its value system. And Tallyrand's observation, as an alien, was important: Financial success too often is the kernel of people's dreams, even when it “emphasise[s] defects which prove that refinement does not exist”.

To become truly free, success must be by our own standards, not by society’s. We then have the confidence to persevere through failure (another construct!).

There's a beautiful story about Stephen King — not an overnight success. He submitted 60 stories before he sold his first short. In his memoir, On Writing, he recalls:

By the time I was 14 ... the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it. I replaced the nail with a spike and kept on writing.

We can do a lot in a decade and more in five. But let’s be intentional when we decide what to optimise for. Let’s leave empty “success” to others — to those in the Times supplements. And, like Stephen King, keep on writing (or singing, or poetry or painting…).

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My week in books

The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku. For 1500 years before Christ and four hundred after, the Greeks (and later the Romans) made their way to Eleusis, a town 13 miles from Athens. There, they experienced — at least once — the Mysteries. These were, Muraresku explains, a psychedelic ritual, which helped participants die before they die, so they don’t die when they die. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, and Marcus Aurelius drank trippy wine or beer. The book links these experiences with the dawn of Christianity, hypothesising — not without evidence — that the Eucharist derives from these women-run ceremonies. Given the Church’s stance on both drugs and women, the truth of this has wide implications. It certainly is niche and better in the first half than the second, but recommended for those exploring.

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Live well,

Hector

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