Yearly Archives: 2009

The Numidian headbutt

770px-ne_200bc

Slight change of pace from our philosophical discussions in recent posts: I just checked my impressively detailed stats in WordPress, and made an intriguing discovery: My all-time top post by far is the one about Numidians looking like…. Zidane.

I won’t even link to it, for fear of perpetuating the cycle, but I find this funny. That rather silly post came about when I was researching my book and trying to visualize what Numidians probably looked like.

Numidians were the ancient inhabitants of northern African, to the west of Carthage. (Click on map above to enlarge.) They supplied Hannibal with his cavalry, which was the best in the ancient world. The Numidians rode without stirrups and bridles, came out of nowhere and disappeared again just as fast. They were deadly.

In any case, it turned out that they were the ancestors of today’s Kabyle Berbers, so I looked around for pictures and chanced upon one particularly good specimen. Ever since, according to my stats, I have been getting a steady stream of visits, though Google perhaps, from Algeria and France in particular and the soccer world in general. (Sorry: football world.) I hazard the guess that you guys are surprised when you arrive here.

And now to business: Using the same Numidian specimen, we shall examine the tactic they used against the Romans when they dismounted:


Wu wei: doing by non-doing

Lao Tzu

One of the subtlest notions in my book is the Taoist idea of wu wei, or non-doing. It doesn’t come up often, but in one or two chapters, for two of the main characters and several of the minor ones, it is crucial. What is it?

The idea ultimately comes to us from Laozi, pictured riding away on his water buffalo above. (I’m using the modern Pinyin. You may know him as Lao Tse or Lao Tzu). He was the subtlest of all the philosophers of the Axial Age. He talked the least and said the most. That’s because the Tao is not understood by words.

Fine, but words are what a blogger has. So what is wu wei?

It is not: staying in bed and doing nothing.

It is (my definition): exerting the minimal effort in any situation in order:

  • not to interfere with the natural flow of things but instead
  • to go with the flow, as though “letting” things happen and harmonizing yourself with them.

There’s no need to get too philosophical about this. In my experience, sailors grasp the concept intuitively. How utterly foolish would you look trying to act against the wind! Instead, you tack through it in order to let it blow (suck, technically) you to where you want to go. You don’t interfere, you harmonize.

The same principle applies in all sorts of situations, small and large. Just think about your own life.

Thus wu wei becomes a vital ingredient for winning and success, its violation for failure and disaster. And so you have the relevance for my book thesis.


Milton Friedman on success

What is success?

According to Occam’s Razor, the simplest answers are the best, and Milton Friedman, the great economist, has this one:


In effect, he was describing people who achieve flow.


“East” vs “West”: Where it started

Every now and then I amuse myself by taking some notion that seems so familiar that we take it for granted, and tracing it to its origin. Where did it start?

So, in today’s episode, let’s look at the notion of East versus West.

This gives me a great excuse for a  map. I love playing with maps, in case you haven’t noticed. So let’s look at today’s answer (click to enlarge):

greco-persian-wars

This is a map of the Persian invasions of Greece, ending with the Persians’ utter defeat and expulsion in 479 BC. And this is when it started. Long, long before Kublai Khan and Marco Polo and all that.

Until 500 BC, nobody, as far as I am aware, made any cultural or civilizational distinction between East and West. There had been Sumer, Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Persia and so forth. But those thought of themselves as in the middle (as did, independently, China, the “middle kingdom”).

The first “Greek” civilization in Crete was mostly a Middle-Eastern culture. Then, when the Greeks came out of their weird and unexplained dark ages between about 1150 BC and 800 BC (Trojan war to the rise of city states), they did not yet think of themselves as “a West”.

But then the Persians started coming. They were mighty, despotic, decadent, effete and rich. We were ascetic, virile, democratic and free. And we kicked their proverbial.

At least that’s how the Greeks saw the matter. Herodotus, the world’s first historian, kicked the tradition off, Aeschylus ingrained it on the stage, and off we ran with it. The idea was born. Now it would develop.

The “West”, over the coming centuries moved further west, then north. To the Romans, the Franks, the Saxons and Normans, the Americans and then the Texans (just kidding). It became a complex mixture of all its ancestors.

The “East” kept moving further east, to Huns, Tartars, Mongols and Chinese.

And thus a “Middle East” opened up.

But the place where the “East” starts is still the same as it was in 479 BCE: the Hellespont, now called the Dardanelles.


Why I chose to write the book I’m writing

Here is David McCullough, author of fantastic biographies and histories including Truman, which is in my bibliography, speaking words that might have come out of my own mouth verbatim.

So, when somebody asks why I chose Hannibal, Fabius, Scipio (and Cleopatra, Ludwig Erhard, Truman, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carl Jung and the rest of them)–as the characters for a book about success and failure today, I could just play this clip:



Editing as “desophistication”

Every writer has stories about editors–the great ones and the other ones. But I wanted to share what Johnny Grimmond, our doyen of style at The Economist and author of our Style Guide, has to say on the matter. I have already quoted Johnny on the vital issue of like versus as (never to be confused!). Here now is what he says about editing (British spelling, of course):

It is quite easy to rewrite an article without realising that one has done much to it at all: the cursor leaves no trace of crossing-out, handwritten insertions, rearranged sentences or reordered paragraphs. The temptation is to continue to make changes until something emerges that the editor himself might have written. …

The moral for editors is that they should respect good writing. … A writer’s style, after all, should reflect his mind and personality. … Editors should exercise suitable self-restraint. … Bear in mind this comment from John Gross:

Most writers I know have tales to tell of being mangled by editors and mauled by fact-checkers, and naturally it is the flagrant instances they choose to single out–absurdities, outright distortions of meaning, glaring errors. But most of the damage done is a good deal less spectacular. It consists of small changes (usually too boring to describe to anyone else) that flatten a writer’s style, slow down his argument, neutralise his irony; that ruin the rhythm of a sentence or the balance of paragraph; that deaden the tone that makes the music. I sometimes think of the process as one of “desophistication”.

Look who reads Plutarch

I’ve told you about Plutarch, the father of biography, who has an important place in my bibliography. A lot of people of course love Plutarch. J.K. Rowling does, Truman did. And so does Sam Donaldson, who recommends the Parallel Lives here:

Plutarch’s Lives is simply the biographies of people back in an ancient era, Caesar and the Antonines. You study how they lived and what they did, and how they thought. I can’t tell you I came away from it saying, “Now I’ll pattern myself after this guy, and this guy.” But I came away with the sense that some of the people who were very ordinary when they started out could make something of themselves. … But lives, what is it about various people’s lives who are successful, who make something of themselves, who make a mark on history and on the world? That book influenced me.


Creativity vs effort

Thousand-fold failure

Edison, a thousand-fold failure

I recently mentioned the role that impudence played in liberating Einstein’s prodigious imagination and creativity. Well, it helps to have tenure when you’re impudent.

I bring this up because I am re-reading a paper by Gustavo Manso at MIT’s Sloan School about Motivating Innovation. It’s a little bit too geeky to make it into my book, but aspects of it rhyme with my thesis that success and failure–in this case failure–are Impostors.

Gustavo Manso

Gustavo Manso

Let’s define, for the moment, innovation as success. Innovation, says, Manso

is the result of the exploration of untested approaches that are likely to fail, and failure is usually associated with low wages and termination.

So, to enourage innovation and thus success,

the optimal compensation scheme that motivates exploration exhibits substantial tolerance (or even reward) for early failure and and reward for long-term success.

Examples: Academic tenure, debtor-friendly bankruptcy laws, golden parachutes in business. If the professor, entrepreneur or boss fails, he still gets paid.

This is a controversial topic, given the current anti-CEO tenor (which I share, as would my great uncle). But it helps to understand Manso’s distinction between things that “merely” require effort and things that require creativity.

A for effort

Whenever the main ingredient is effort, pay-for-performance might be the best form of compensation. More effort = more money. Manso points to a study in the Phillipines which found that agricultural workers paid at piece-rates burn up more calories than others paid fixed salaries. Studies of workers installing windshields on cars and Canadian tree planters had similar results.

A+ for “failure”

As soon as the main ingredient becomes creativity, Manso says, pay-for-performance seems to hurt, rather than help. In Academia, for instance, tenure is important:

Knowing they will not lose their jobs, these researchers are willing to take risks on research directions that are likely to fail, but may lead to breakthroughs.

Who might personify this sort of failure-driven success? Manso starts with a quote from Thomas Edison:

Results? Why, man, I have gotten lots of results! I know several thousands of things that won’t work.


Kafka vs Hosseini: writing vs re-writing

Listen to Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, both best sellers, talk about his writing process, and in particular the role of first and subsequent drafts:

Excerpts:

Writing is largely about re-writing…  So I use the first draft purely as a frame… I understand that it’s going to be lousy…. the heart of the story has to be there in the first draft… I abhor writing the first draft, I love writing subsequent drafts.

This is the exact opposite of the way that Franz Kafka apparently did it:

… it took a single night. On Sunday, Sept. 22, 1912, the day after Yom Kippur, the 29-year-old Kafka sat down at his desk and wrote “The Judgment,” his first masterpiece, in one all-night session. “Only in this way can writing be done,” he exulted, “only with such coherence, with such a complete opening out of the body and the soul.”

My first reaction is to place Hosseini into the catagory of “old masters” and Kafka into that of the “young geniuses”, using David Galenson’s theory. Remember what that means: Some writers see the creative process as a search, as discovery, as learning; others see it as a finding,  as the execution of a bold idea. Cézanne was the first, Picasso the second, and so forth.

And my second reaction? Well, it was to wonder, once again, whether I am more of a searcher or more of a finder. I certainly could not do a Kafka and write my book in one single night. But I did start with one simple idea and the book is hewing closely to it. As I approach the end, it turned out pretty much exactly as planned.

On the other hand, I proceeded exactly as Hosseini did, by racing through a sloppy first draft in order to erect a skeleton which I have since been putting flesh on. And, of course, there were plenty of discoveries along the way.

So perhaps Galenson’s categories are better thought of as poles, with a spectrum between them.

Incidentally, in the same interview, Hosseini talks about how he first got started selling the book.

I cold-called a bunch of agents through mail. I just sent them three or four chapters with a query letter and a synopsis, … I got rejected more than 30 times … I still have the manila folders of all of the rejections that I received from agencies. I didn’t take it personally, I knew that you have to have a thick skin, that rejection is part of the game…

The rest, of course, is history. He ended up being published by Riverhead, which happens to be my own publisher. Let that be an omen!


Eleanor Roosevelt’s Liberalism

A major character in one chapter of my book, as hinted in the synopsis, will be Eleanor Roosevelt, who knew a thing or two about Triumph and Disaster being Impostors. So a few biographies about her are in my bibliography. The best is this one.

She is such a fascinating and engaging personality, that I’ve got loads overmatter of stuff that has nothing to do with the part of her story that I’m telling in my book. Take, for instance, this quote (from page 20) about the word Liberalism, which rhymes verbatim with my post on the matter:

But for the future to be “more rewarding,” she concluded, the United States needed to resurrect with conviction and daring the good American word “liberal,” “which derives from the word free… “We must cherish and honor the word free or it will cease to apply to us.”

Or this comment on intellectual rigor, honesty and diligence (on page 5):

“Argue the other side with a friend until you have found the answer to every point which might be brought up against you.”

Always better to do so with a friend first, because your enemies will oblige very quickly. This also dovetails with Amy Tan’s advice to writers about seeking criticism, but from friends or sources they trust to be honest.

Highly recommended book.