Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

Rich Engle · January 11, 2011

I think this is a pretty good talk:

Michael Stuart Kelly · January 11, 2011

Rich,

That is a very, very wise man. I don't agree with everything he said, but as always, I want to take the good and leave the bad behind.

One thing I found particularly annoying with him is that he made some oversimplified claims using a double standard. For instance, he claimed meritocracy is a great thing, but that it is impossible in reality because of accidents. There are many holes in that argument, starting with the fact that he means a human habit of justice in the first and a finished product in the second, but these are quibbles.

I prefer to dwell on the things he said that made me think. He certainly captivated me right at the start when he bashed snobs and snobbery. I like the fact that his definition of a snob also suits a bigot.

Here is a cherry-picked set of quotes from the talk (with thanks to the Interactive Transcript on TED). These are parts I found valuable, even the comedy--those tabloid headlines for classic tragedies are a hoot.

What is a snob? A snob is anybody who takes a small part of you and uses that to come to a complete vision of who you are.
. . . . .
You know, we're often told that we live in very materialistic times, that we're all greedy people. I don't think we are particularly materialistic. I think we live in a society which has simply pegged certain emotional rewards to the acquisition of material goods. It's not the material goods we want. It's the rewards we want. And that's a new way of looking at luxury goods. The next time you see somebody driving a Ferrari don't think, "This is somebody who is greedy." Think, "This is somebody who is incredibly vulnerable and in need of love." In other words -- feel sympathy, rather than contempt.
. . . . .
I think it would be very unusual for anyone here, or anyone watching, to be envious of the Queen of England. Even though she is much richer than any of you are. And she's got a very large house. The reason why we don't envy her is because she's too weird. She's simply too strange. We can't relate to her. She speaks in a funny way. She comes from an odd place. So we can't relate to her. And when you can't relate to somebody, you don't envy them.
. . . . .
Tragic art, as it developed in the theaters of ancient Greece, in the Fifth Century B.C., was essentially an art form devoted to tracing how people fail. And also according them a level of sympathy. Which ordinary life would not necessarily accord them.
I remember a few years ago, I was thinking about all this. And I went to see "The Sunday Sport," a tabloid newspaper that I don't recommend you to start reading, if you're not familiar with it already. And I went to talk to them about certain of the great tragedies of Western art. And I wanted to see how they would seize the bare bones of certain stories if they came in as a news item at the news desk on a Saturday afternoon.
So I told them about Othello. They had not heard of it but were fascinated by it. And I asked them to write the headline for the story of Othello. They came up with "Love-Crazed Immigrant Kills Senators Daughter" splashed across the headline. I gave them the plotline of Madame Bovary. Again, a book they were enchanted to discover. And they wrote "Shopaholic Adulteress Swallows Arsenic After Credit Fraud." And then my favorite. They really do have a kind of genius all of their own, these guys. My favorite is Sophocles' "Oedipus the King." "Sex With Mum Was Blinding."
. . . . .
The other thing about modern society, and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves. And so we should. We've put people on the moon. We've done all sorts of extraordinary things. And so we tend to worship ourselves.
Our heros are human heros. That's a very new situation. Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent. A god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe. Whatever it is, something else that is being worshiped. We've slightly lost the habit of doing that. Which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature. Not for the sake of our health, though it's often presented that way. But because it's an escape from the human anthill. It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. And that's why we enjoy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human. And that is so deeply important to us.
. . . . .
And the thing about a successful life, is a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully, are not our own. They are sucked in from other people. Chiefly, if you're a man, your father. And if you're a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one is quite listening hard enough. But I very much believe that that's true.
And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces That define what we want, and how we view ourselves. When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession a lot of us want to go into banking. When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.
So what I want to argue for, is not that we should give up on our ideas of success. But we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas. And make sure that we own them, that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough, not getting what you want. But it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out at the end of a journey, that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

Michael

Michael Stuart Kelly · January 11, 2011

Here is another TED talk I heard this morning. I found it to be stellar in its simplicity.

Neil Pasricha: The 3 A's of awesome

Here is Pasricha's prize-winning blog: 1000 Awesome Things.

For those who do not watch, the three A's of awesome are:

Attitude

Awareness

Authenticity.

In Pasricha's formula for awesome in his own life, attitude means choosing to see good, even when things are bad--literally forcing your mind to see good when you don't want to. (That's a moral choice if I ever heard of one.) The awareness he presents is to recapture the focused attention to details of a three-year-old who is seeing the world for the first time, and letting in the innocent sense of delight that goes with it. As Pasricha says, we were all three years old once and we all carry that child within us. By authenticity, he means not being embarrassed by what delights you, no matter how silly it seems to others.

I fully agree with this.

Maybe with one caveat. I don't think you should replace your other perspectives in life with it, but since we live within a stream of time, and not a closed box, there's room for choosing different perspectives. So I think it is refreshing to use some of that time looking at the simple things in the world according to Pasricha's manner of awesome.

It's a feel-good thing and those who don't like it can suck lemons.

Looking at something in a Pasricha-like manner kinda keeps your awesome chops honed for reacting to brilliant achievement. And for thinking about how awesome you, yourself are.

Michael

Sign In

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

Recommended Posts

Rich Engle

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Michael Stuart Kelly

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Michael Stuart Kelly

Link to comment

Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

Create an account

Sign in

Browse

Activity