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42 posts tagged reflections
Love Karma
Love is like karma. You’ll keep coming back to the same love life if you don’t evolve with every relationship. We become jaded by love because we don’t learn in it and thereby keep recreating the same problems in our relationships. We don’t understand that love is our opportunity to transform to something new. And something new, does not, by definition, love the same way. If love doesn’t make you a new man, then you didn’t love deep enough.
“
Why do I once again turn to writing?
Beloved, one mustn’t ask such a clear question,
For the truth is, I have nothing to tell you,
All the same, your dear hands will touch this note.
[quote above from The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe]
Young Werther’s inquiry as to why one writes a love letter reveals a paradoxical dimension inherent in any amorous correspondence: a letter is like a signifier that can convey an amorous message even though it may be empty or say nothing at all. It is the instrument of a tactile extension just as it transmits the language of devotion. Roland Barthes, distinguishes, in fact, between two forms of love notes: there is the amorous correspondence, where one seeks to “defend positions, insure conquests, [and thereby] articulate the image of the Other in various points that the letter will try to touch,” and there is the love letter proper, where one is purely affectionate, engaging the Other in a “relationship, not a correspondence.” The enterprise of writing amorously can thus be “both empty (encoded) and expressive (laden with a yearning to express one’s desire).” A note sent to the object of one’s affections is a deliberate extension of one’s language, an attempt to touch the Other (“as if my words were fingers”) despite the message conveyed: the irreducible “I love you.” In a letter, words need say nothing at all, “save that it is to you that I tell this nothing” and, paradoxically, it is via this “nothing” that one overcomes the Other’s absence.
”Source faculty.arch.utah.edu
On Leadership
In an era still dominated by a naive belief in scientific method [1] many people believe that if they just diligently follow a step-by-step guide on leadership, in addition to imitating what their current leaders do, that will somehow eventually result in them becoming leaders too. But that is the mindset of those who obey, not those who lead. If it leads anywhere, it is not some place new other than a dull reproduction of the status quo.
Having the courage to disobey and venture alone into the unknown because you feel something better can be built there as an enactment of indepedent thought instead of a juvenile reaction to authority constitutes a large part of what it means to lead.
But where to? You’d think an answer to that question would make an essential chapter in every contemporary leadership book. Yet a casual glance at the contents of Leadership 101: What Every Leader Needs to Know by John C. Maxwell, one of the most celebrated authors on leadership alive today, reveals that knowing where to lead is apparently not something a contemporary leader needs to know [2]. Perhaps the fact that we’re more interested in becoming leaders than in knowing where to lead is why we’ve been going nowhere.
Leadership is not just about expertise. What’s the value of expertly leading people over a cliff? Not much; by that logic Hitler and Stalin were great leaders. To make a fetish out of the techniques of leadership is to glorify the means over and above the ends. I think we can do better than that. We have to.
I studied philosophy, not management. I wanted to know what the good life is before trying to lead myself or others to it. You can’t be a good leader if you’re not a wise one, and wisdom is the province of philosophy, not management. We need to integrate both.
When you integrate both you want to lead somewhere better, not just lead. That’s what’s at the core of being an entrepreneur. If we want a better future, we need more entrepreneurs and better managers.
Successful leaders abolish the conditions that make them necessary, just like teachers through teaching students successfully, lessen the gap between themselves and their students till it disappears, thereby creating an equality that enables a more sublime relationship to emerge [3].
Notes:
[1] Paul Feyerabend’s Against Method and Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions did a good job in demolishing the idea that there is a single prescriptive scientific method and that science progresses in a uniform way by following its dictates.
[2] Don’t be fooled into thinking Chapter 4 “How Should I Prioritize my Life?” has anything to do with overall ends. It’s more about how to prioritize not what those priorities should be and why.
[3] See Erich Fromm, The Sane Society, 1955. New York: Owl Books, 1990, p.96-97.
The Curious Captain
One could think of a captain that always questions the value of the destinations he sets and as a result has not traveled more than a couple of square miles.
“Yes, horizontally…but vertically? Perhaps while questioning, the ship itself turns into a submarine and, who knows, one day may turn into a plane.”
“A lock of hair was not the biggest conquest of the Romans; it was however, one of the longest lasting; they often recover from the tombs of women this ornament intact: it has withstood the scissors of the stars, of the girls of night, when they would seek in vain the brow and the hearts that it once decorated. The myrrhed braids, item of worship of the most transient of the passions, lived longer than empires. Death, that breaks all chains, could not destroy this light net.”
“I believe that the justification of art is the internal combustion it ignites in the hearts of men and not its shallow, externalized, public manifestations. The purpose of art is not the release of a momentary ejection of adrenalin but is, rather, the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.”
You don’t study the flat tire to build a spaceship
I will not waste time learning about a system that doesn’t work. I will spend it envisioning, understanding, designing, and building one that does. You don’t study the flat tire to build a spaceship.
I do not strive for happiness
I do not strive for happiness. Yet happiness follows my striving.
I do not want to “relax”, “have fun”, “hang out”, “wind down”, “get wasted”.
I do not want to work for petty ends, vanities and cheap thrills.
I do not want to react without understanding, but act because I do.
I want freedom to be without a cause. To loiter, play and contemplate.
It’s only a choice. Between Fear and Love. What’s yours?
