On Art

In his timeless classic Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote: 'I have no doubt that some of you who read this book are unable to pay for all the dinners which you have actually eaten, or for the coats and shoes which are fast wearing or are already worn out, and have come to this page to spend borrowed or stolen time, robbing your creditors of an hour.'

I once heard a great thinker arguing that a painting costs more than a loaf of bread; despite that we can’t survive on painting, yet we are willing to pay. What possess us to do such thing?

Artists endure, thus they create Art. Art inspires doing, yet artists don’t. The great Thomas Pine wrote his influential pamphlet Common Sense only to inspire George Washington to lead a revolt against the British. Leo Tolstoy’s essay Kingdom of God is Within You inspired in Gandhi the sense liberation and simplistic life style. It was Emerson who intellectually lectured on antislavery, but Abraham Lincoln led the armies after attending his lectures. It was Thoreau who wrote Civil Disobedience, but Martin Luther King, Jr. championed the Civil Rights movements. 

Did Machiavelli or Milton or Sartre lead revolutions and revolts? No, they led intellectual revolutions and revolts; it was the job of those influenced to execute anarchy and wars. 

Perhaps we buy the painting because it inspires us.

Are Artists passive? Is Art, as Mr. Wile once described it, useless? He once said that 'A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it. That is all that is to be said about our relations to flowers. Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is accidental. It is a misuse.’ I ask here: are those accidentals and misuses are horrible outcomes? Is wrong of me to pair philosophers and their written heritage with Art? Then why would Mr. Wilde incept his masterpiece of a novel with a preface on Art?

I possess little knowledge to answer that.

On Success

If I were to use an analogy to describe success, in my mind rock climbing is an apt one. 

Paired with risk, adventure, autonomy and a constant tackling of the unknown, success in Rock Climbing requires momentous endeavors; for one has to possess the heart, the strength and ambition.

But the aspect of Rock Climbing I wish to expound is of a different nature; it’s broader, and, I hope, if explained justly, we could understand the intricacies of success.

When a person decides to devote himself to this sport, and for him to climb the thorny mountains, he undergoes extraordinary amounts of technical preparation. This is attained in a place known as the climbing gym, where the novices train tirelessly on artificially constructed walls with grips for hands and feet. It is a daunting discipline; it requires deliberate practice, profound mentorship and plenty of patience.But once that is done; once migrated to the outdoors; once the sun replaces the neon-light; once edgy stones replace the artificial grips; once a mere robe replaces the safe trampoline, the odds escalate to astronomical proportions. The adrenaline level is irrepressible; fear of heights is more menacing; hot breaths evaporate rapidly; the limbs tremble and quiver; palms sweat ceaselessly; teeth grind against each other agonizingly. This time it is not artificial; it is life.

As the Climber and the companions ascend from the foot of the mountain, they accumulate inches, and those inches translate to inches of success, if he mistakes, the process corrects him, but in a costly manner.
The further the Climber and the companions ascend, the smaller those who observe them appear; they matter less now. The more those inches of success accumulate, the more perilous the passages becomes. The Climber is aware that one faulty step will drag him a few inches back; he can’t bare it; it consumes more effort, more time. And while the adversaries grin, the supporters distress. The group he leads counts on him as he explores unfamiliar territories; as he places his palms where varmints could be lurking. His decisions are half made; uncertain.

The Climber ascends in a pace that allows his group to be in tandem; he can’t go too fast and ignore them, nor can he go too slow and impend them. If he loses sight of the balance, his journey will be a lonely one; he might ascend to the top alone, or he might descend to the bottom alone.

And such is life: a man is prepped to endeavor his passage with and for those ones he loves, family, friends and followers. The greater he ascends, the more liabilities he accumulates. He can’t distract himself by the adversaries; their negativity might cripple him. And he can’t over celebrate with his supporters; that ecstasy might elude him in to comfort.

He can’t be afraid of accumulating inches, for the disadvantages of stagnation are direr.

On Intellect

Seldom in my inquiries I have received a consistent definition of Intellect, most people erroneously pair it with the act of reading books; but I have met many people who read plentiful, whilst conforming to the doctrinaire of the herd. That is a fallacy that I wish to abolish. Did reading, universally, symbolize acquiring knowledge?

In light of this, I wish to rearticulate Intellect as the manner of perceiving intricate foreign ideas, liberated from dogmas. Dogmas are the archenemy of intellect, for intellect stems out of unprejudiced contemplation; a man who passively reads books that were written to his joy and his complicacy, would be underprepared or unprepared to the views of rest of the world, and thus he follows either of two paths: he plunges deeper to his dogmatic ways, where he replicates the immoderate unfitting conducts of his forefathers. Or he contemplates the revelations of what he read, thus he shall attain the universality of thought, and onward he shall meet people of foreign tongues and lands, but reincarnations of thoughts and experiences, regardless of the minor variations; each mind, fundamentally, has their agenda and aspirations. And thus, there exists no absolute intellect, only glimpses of men who strived, and those we tend to idolize.

I once met a man who read Moby Dick, and deemed it as the endeavors of Captain Ahab hunting the White Whale and failed because the Whale is a monstrosity. Whilst another man, benefiting from a religious context, deemed it as Satan hunting God, and he failed because God is might. Another, benefiting from a secular context, deemed it as Man’s attempt to control Nature, and he failed, because Nature is untamable.

Men of intellect seldom speak in absoluteness; they’re privy to their fallibility, to what’s beyond their comprehension and to the vastness and assortments of human genius. This I can say this in absoluteness.

Another archenemy of intellect is pride, the great sin of Lucifer and Hubris. A verse from the Proverbs 18 says: Before his downfall a man's heart is proud, but humility comes before honor. Malcolm X had a humbling experience that liberated him. True men of intellect are often the progenies of certain morbidness; Life humbles men that way.

Aristotle described the prideful as a person who’s a victim of his own gratifications. Pride cripples a man from reading the other’s mind. And therefore he possesses no intellect. Mind you, intellect is not to agree, but to appreciate; they are not mutually exclusive, but also, in brilliant marriages, they can align.

Lest of the perils of pride, Marcus Aurelius appointed a servant to follow him when he entered the gates of Rome whispering to his ear: you are just a man, to fortify himself against the praise of mob. He was wise.

Another crippler of intellect is willful obedience to the teachings of fellowmen. It disallows our faculties from inspecting their façade.

Thomas Jefferson wistfully championed that it is the right of Man to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; alas, he was profiteering from his plantation slave farms.

When Voltaire learnt of Isaac Newton’s fondness of magic, he made great efforts to conceal this fact in his publications of Newton. Hadn’t been for Economist Kinsey it might have remained unearthed. Does Voltaire’s behavior suit a man of intellect? Should this dismiss his formidable contribution to philosophy? I can’t supply an answer, but I ask of you this: would you rather be a Voltaire? Or a Kinsey? Yet who is privy to Kinsey’s intellectual mischiefs himself? The prospects are windingly endless. But we mustn’t forget Rumi’s filed beyond the fields of right-doing and wrong-doing. There lays grayness between whiteness and blackness of life.

Thus I say true intellect is the perusal of greater good, which demands contemplation liberated from ignorance, arrogance, pride and dogmatism.

I shall conclude with this: motives of the intellectual must be driven from within, thus he himself sets the standards of what ought to be and how it ought to be. If the motives were external ones, then his intellect will be his damnation, for he shall frantically measure it against alternating variables. And he is likely to deem himself a deceptionist and thus inherent a sense of inferiority, and his genius would be a squander.

The Virtue of Failure

Success can be illy devious; it alludes us into extended leisures; upon actualizing our goal (promotion, graduation, marriage, etc...) we tend to over celebrate; consequently our drive slows down. 

As the cliché famously says: Success is not a destination, it is journey.

But definitely there are destinations in that journey. In our path we often stumble upon them. We disguise them differently: experiences, learnings, and upward curves... I think we avoid labeling them for what they truly are: Failure. We grow up ashamed of it; toss it to the abyss of memory. Alas, squandering all its fruitful lessons. Failure empowers us, unveils unseen horizons, and keeps us alert. Individuals who ascend from failures' ashes recognize the existence of various unfamiliar paths of success; this in itself cleans the judgmental visor staining our outlook. Failure gifts us with compassion and understanding, thus reuniting ourselves with our hardened humanity. 

In her inspiring speech, author JK Rowling declared that ‘…some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.'

Drawing on this, it’s critical to recognize that we’re not discussing fake success, which I define as laboring unsatisfactorily to gain acceptance of others (parents, managers, peers...), but rather the unreasonable success which manifests our most inner dream, by conquering the demon that awakens us late at nights, that is if we slept at all. 

Conquering that demon leads us to virgin paths; others might have embarked upon parallel paths, but never ours. It's designed for us individually, for we’re the creators of its borders and boundaries.

Poet John Keats dubbed this notion as Negative Capability. He defines it as: 'the willingness to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery, and make peace with ambiguity.'

Allow me to assert the notion further and borrow a page from the psychology literature known as Desirable Difficulty; which states that 'introducing certain difficulties into a process can greatly improve long-term retention of the process material.' Life imposes difficulties upon us without permissions; it's wiser if we prepped ourselves to deal with them. Such practice enables us to extract advantages from disadvantages; we become invincible. Indeed, Economic states that the greater the risk, the greater reward.

Now, when I say Embrace failure, I don't mean to have it inferred that rashness and sloppiness should be celebrated. Rather, it’s a invitation to tackling the unfamiliar, and acknowledging the risky destinations on unknown paths, face them with irrevocable grit and unspoiled determination. This undoubtedly bestows happiness upon us; by doing so, our happiness will contagiously shine and allow those around us to bath in our light. 

The Consistency Assumption

Reader’s Digest magazine cited the following story:

'Golf immortal Arnold Palmer recalls a lesson about overconfidence: It was the final hole of the 1961 Masters tournament, and I had a one-stroke lead and had just hit a very satisfying tee shot. I felt I was in pretty good shape. As I approached my ball, I saw an old friend standing at the edge of the gallery. He motioned me over, stuck out his hand and said, "Congratulations." I took his hand and shook it, but as soon as I did, I knew I had lost my focus. On my next two shots, I hit the ball into a sand trop, then put it over the edge of the green. I missed a putt and lost the Masters.’

What happened to Palmer? What crippled his foreseen triumph? His dazzling track demonstrates extraordinary professionalism. He’s anything but incompetent. So why did he miss those seemingly easy shots?

To explain Arnold Palmer failure, we need to borrow a terminology from the language of psychology; What Palmer suffered from is a textbook example of effects of overconfidence.

Not my phone!

What ignited this piece is a personal episode. Few months ago, I purchased a new cell phone, and in order to maintain its brand-new status, I bought a protective leather cover.

And to my bewilderment, I gradually became careless! The phone started drop off more often. At one occasion, I spelled a considerable amount of coffee over it, and I was so confident that the protective cover will do its job. Unfortunately, it did a poor job!

This incident provoked a thought: how often do we assume safety if we are “qualified”, or that certain equipment were in place to ensure our safety? And more importantly, WHY do we make this assumption?

This sort of behavior occurs frequently in different disciplines. Social psychologist and recipient of Nobel Memorial Prize Daniel Kahneman gave it a simple term: Overconfidence. And here is him describing it and its perils: ‘The exaggerated expectation of consistency is a common error. We are prone to think that the world is more regular and predictable than it really is, because our memory automatically and continuously maintains a story about what is going on, and because the rules of memory tend to make that story as coherent as possible and to suppress alternatives.‘

This kind of behavior reveals itself across various disciplines. Chief among them is car driving. Read the accounts of The Royal Automobile Club (RAC) in a survey conducted on drivers to test their level of confidence: ‘The survey revealed that 79 per cent of young drivers think their driving skills are better than other drivers in their own age group.’

Overconfidence doesn't happen overnight. According to Don Moore, associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University, It surfaces in one's behavior when one (or more) of three factors is achieved: overestimation of one's actual performance; over-placement of one's performance relative to others; and over-precision, or the excessive certainty that one knows the truth. For example, in a study conducted by the insurance company PEMCO revealed that for drivers, overconfidence kicks in after 6 to 12 months of driving. This period can be translated to other venues where overconfidence can be a potential peril; think cooking or working on a rig for example.

When we trust our ‘adequate qualification’ we take safety for granted. We assume that external faculties will align with our experience. But in reality we shouldn’t assume that our experience will solely protect us; because that's when we start missing golden Golf shots, or spell coffee over our newly bought cell phones. Because we start to turn a blind eye on contingences and we underestimate the complexity of the world we inhabit.

This is however isn't an invitation to dump basic measurements of confidence, or pretend that you are inadequate to accomplish tasks and deliverables; rather, it's reminder that we should keep our ego in check! Don Moore recommends that we should compare ourselves not to those who inhibit our familiar world; rather to those who are competing with us; thus we keep updating our ledger and stay alert.

In order for us to avoid the perils of overconfidence, we need to dump the auto-pilot attitude we usually operate under. If we don't, it is usually things we adore the most that become at risk; such as championships we designated so much effort for, or an item we designated certain amounts of money for. Or in other more terrifying scenarios, our lives if we drive carelessly.

Safety isn't the thing we execute when accidents happen, it's the practices we do prevent accidents from happening.

Astronaut Neil Armstrong famously said: ‘Well, I think we tried very hard not to be overconfident, because when you get overconfident, that's when something snaps up and bites you.’