You said you tried to write from the inside-out so that you wouldn’t pretzel your text through bits you liked. Can you share with us some of the parts that you wrote that didn’t make it into the book?
The discarded edits fall into three categories: Sentences, Quotes, and Passages
Sentences
- Obviously, the truth is what's so. Not so obviously, it is also so what?
- While you are waiting for your ship to come in, build a dock.
- There are two people who lived at about the same time: which would you rather be? The first is the person who introduced the potato, which has fed millions, to Europe. The second is Rembrandt. Would you rather be the unsung potato man or the sung artist? (I think I stole this from Joseph Heller.)
- Sparta, not Athens, won the war for the ancient Greeks, but Athens, not Sparta, made it worth winning.
- Not if, but how. What are the necessary antecedent conditions that will make it happen?
- Necessity may be the mother of invention, but play is its father.
- The fire always goes out. The horse always throws you. You always get knocked down. How quickly can you rekindle, remount, and get back up?
- If not for yourself, then for those whom you might help.
- Character—sometimes it’s all that keeps you going.
- The end doesn’t interpret the whole. The whole interprets the end.
- What is a man above men? The sort of person my son deserves to have as a father, my wife as a husband, my friends as a friend.
- Hokey-pokey principle. Put your whole self in = passion. Take your whole self out = solve the problem that needs to be solved.
- Life is shit and God is a dung beetle rolling me through the sands of time.
- If you don’t say something counter-intuitive, then you’ve probably not said anything at all.
- Defeats shape life, but life is built on victories. Build on what you have.
- Many of the things we seek do not exist to be found, but they can be created.
- Sustained drive: It is all about work and only work is work.
- Multiple causes, multiple effects.
- Tactics are a function of the problem space.
- Your circle of influence should be larger than your circle of concern.
- Everybody has the capacity to be great. Your potential is limited by how you choose to spend your freedom of choice, your reaction, your attitude.
- There is a strong connection between focus and integrity.
- Do the 10,000 things right.
- What guarantees you’ll have an impact 50 years from now?
- Aristotle said that there are qualities in men that can be brought out only by war, perhaps because they learn the lesson of William the Silent: It is not necessary to hope in order to persevere.
- The ship isn’t coming. Build your own.
Quotes
Longfellow
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
老子, 道德經
為學日益,為道日損
General Douglas Macarthur
Defensive strategy has never produced ultimate victory.
Georg C. Lichtenberg
A book is a mirror: If an ass peers into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.
三字經
玉不琢,不成器.
B.F. Skinner
Anyone who is capable of making a long-term contribution may wisely resist the effect of other consequences which, no matter how important they may be to him personally …confine him to short-term remedial actions. A classic example…is Albert Schweitzer. Here is a brilliant man who…dedicated his life to helping his fellow men—one by one. He has earned the gratitude of thousands, but we must not forget what he might have done instead. If he had worked as energetically for as many years in a laboratory of tropical medicine, he would almost certainly have made discoveries which in the long run would help—not thousands—but literally billions of people. (From J. T. Wilson, et al, (Ed.s) Current trends in Psychological Theory. University of Pittsburg Press. Reprinted in Skinner’s Cumulative Record, NY, ACC, 1961.)
St. Francis de Sales
While I am busy with little things, I am not required to do greater things.
Alfred Adler
It is easier to fight for one’s principles than to live up to them.
Emerson
Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind.
and
A man cannot utter two or three sentences without disclosing to intelligent ears precisely where he stands in life and thought.
Bertrand Russell
Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.
Samuel Johnson
Integrity without knowledge is weak and useless, and knowledge without integrity is dangerous and dreadful.
William James
A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.
Thomas Edison
People are not remembered by how few times they fail, but by how often they succeed. Every wrong step is another step forward.
Paul Fix
The only reason some people get lost in thought is because it’s unfamiliar territory.
Erica Jong
If you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.
G. K. Chesterton
It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem.
孔子
人有不為也，而後可以有為.
人無遠慮，必有近憂.
Jonas Salk
I feel the greatest reward for doing is the opportunity to do more.
Edward J. Phelps
The man who makes no mistakes does not usually make anything.
Reuben Smeed
You can either get something done or you can get credit for it, but not both.
George S. Patton
Success is how high you bounce when you hit bottom.
道德經
為學日益, 為到日損
Kurt Vonnegut
[In Bluebeard the protagonist, Karabekian, is a painter whose sole art is to paint giant canvases solid green. He is doing so when a friend comes to visit:]
‘Slazinger was another one who had never seen me draw, who wondered if I could really draw. I had been living out here for a couple of years by then, and he came by to watch me paint in the potato barn. I had set up a stretched and primed canvas eight by eight feet, and was about to lay on a coat of Sateen Dura-Luxe with a roller. It was a shade of greenish burnt orange called “Hungarian Rhapsody.” …
“Tell me, Rabo—” said Slazinger, “If I put on that same paint with that same roller, would the picture still be a Karabekian?”
“Absolutely,” I said, “provided you have in reserve what Karabekian has in reserve.”
“Like what?” he said.
“Like this,” I said. There was dust in a pothole in the floor, and I picked up some of it on the balls of both my thumbs. Working both thumbs simultaneously, I stretched a caricature of Slazinger’s face on the canvas in thirty seconds.”
“Jesus!” he said. I had no idea you could draw like that!”
“You’re looking at a man who has options,” I said.
And he said: “I guess you do, I guess you do.”’
孙子兵法
故明君賢所以動而聖人成功出於眾者先知. (孫子兵法用間篇四)
非利不動,非得不用,非危不戰. (孫子兵法火攻篇十七)
故用兵之法無恃其不來,恃吾有以帶也;無視其不攻,恃吾所不可攻也. (孫子兵九變篇十一)
應形於無窮（虚实篇)以分合為變者也 (军争篇）)
There are not more than five musical notes, yet the combinations of these five give rise to more melodies than can ever be heard. There are not more than five primary colors, yet in combination they produce more hues than can ever be seen. There are not more than five cardinal tastes, yet in combination they yield more flavors than can ever be tasted. In battle there are not more than two methods of attack—the direct and in indirect—yet in combination these two give rise to an endless series of maneuvers. 声不过五，五声之变，不可胜听也；色不过五，五色之变，不可胜观也；味不过五，五味之变，不可胜尝也；战势不过奇正，奇正之变，不可胜穷也。(势篇）
Ray Bradbury
Any group, any face, any nation that does not rush to seize the future is doomed to dust away in the past.
Passages
Gutenberg
It is often said, quite mistakenly, that the West got a jump on the world with the Gutenberg Revolution. This ignores the fact that the Chinese had the same revolution 500 years before Gutenberg. The difference is what was done with the press—write in the vernacular. With the Gutenberg Revolution, people wrote in vernacular German. This made knowledge available to the masses. The Chinese continued to write in classical language. This hypothesis is confirmed when you take into consideration that China didn’t get a Gutenberg-like revolution until they started writing in the vernacular, a movement led by Dewey’s student Hu Shih. When China began to write in the vernacular, the masses had access to more ideas and China began to show progress. When Horace Mann helped institute widespread education in the US, we began to have similar progress. The exact same story is told again with the GI Bill.
Observation
I sat this morning on the stump of a tree I took down last weekend. Friday I noticed it was diseased. Saturday I dropped it, missing both the fence and the flowers! Sunday I had it all cut and stacked. So there I sat in the first sunshine I’ve seen in an age. Suddenly stabbed by red. I cocked my head and got purple. Then amber. The sun shone through a drop of dew. Perhaps Newton wasn’t so much brilliant with his prism as he was observant.
I used to have a fantastic office on the top floor of a building that looked out over a forest. I saw the sunrise most mornings from my desk. That the sun rises in different places was soon obvious. Stonehenge’s mystery drained away. Just by observing from a fixed point over the course of a year or two would pretty much give you all you’d need for a solid understanding of basic celestial events.
I don’t recall ever hearing an American talk about cultivating one’s powers of observation, but I have often heard Chinese and Japanese do so. Some Disney executive once said that intelligence is 99 percent context. Though I think that’s an over-estimate; perhaps observation gives you context.
On the other hand, I camped once among apple trees. Plunk, thud, bonk. Apples fell day and night. I observed apples falling but could never go from there to a theory of gravity. Interpretation is what you do with the observation.
Rubbernecks
People complain about rubbernecks, those who gawk at the sight of an accident. I’m not against rubbernecking. It is motivated by curiosity and it was curiosity that got us out of the trees and into space. Slowed traffic and some boorish behavior is a small price to pay for that which has driven the progress of the species.
Chinese Games
In Chinese games you are made aware that your moves can be used against you. In Chinese checkers your opponent can travel your road of pieces. In Chinese chess you can attack by jumping over your own cannon, but your opponent can attack you by jumping over your cannon too.
My father, Mr. Proper, took my sister, her friend, and me to dinner. My sister’s friend’s dinner arrived first. She and I had been teasing each other all evening so she picked up her knife and fork and turned to me and said, “Ha, ha, you have to wait.”
I looked at her, at my father, and back at her and said, “No, ha, ha, you have to wait.” She looked at me, at my father, back at me, put down her knife and fork, and waited.
Now that I think about it, that is less an example of how your moves are used against you than it is of Confucian Magic. I cast a spell that controlled her behavior. You can do it too. Walk up to somebody, stick out your hand, and introduce yourself. Then watch, as if by magic or magnetism, as their hand is drawn to yours. The magic is that something as flimsy as propriety can move physical things, like hands.
Courage
I became an intellectual at 3:41 a.m. on Thursday, April 12, 1990. I was doing a Masters degree at the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. By day I read Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method on hermeneutics, the philosophy of how to understand a text. Meaning does not come from the text. It doesn’t come from you. It is not found in divining what was in the head of the author at the time the piece was written. Meaning arises out of the dialectic between you and the text, from a to-and-fro-ness, from play between you and the text.
By night I translated Han Yu (768–824), a Tang Dynasty essayist. I have American friends who are very good at classical Chinese, but I found it to be extremely difficult. I’d already spent 25 hours on it and the passage was only 120 words long. I threw my pen down, shoved back from the table, and said, “I just want somebody to tell me what this means.” Then it hit me. Nobody can tell me what it means. The meaning is between me and the text. Finding that meaning is my responsibility. If my professor had walked in right then and told me what the phrase I’d been working on meant, I would disagree, because I had already rejected that interpretation for good reasons. He would then say that I’d forgotten about some fourth-century text. I’d say I hadn’t because it had been trumped by a second-century text and Han Yu was clearly drawing on that text in this other passage. Given that each of the hundreds of interpretations I’d tried had strengths and weaknesses, I still had to choose an interpretation and run with it. The meaning of the text is my responsibility. Mine alone. I might be wrong, but here I stand and I have good reasons for doing so.
This experience not only made me a better scholar, but also a better executive and a better parent, because it taught me to have the courage to make tough decisions. I don’t recall where I heard the quote, but I found it relevant: “Grant used to say that he knew officers who would risk their lives in battle, but who lacked the moral courage to make decisions for which they would be held accountable.”
Race
My son and I rode our bikes to the park tonight, where we met a bunch of Chinese, including an African guy with his two daughters. He’d spent five years in China going to school and working. He’d married a Chinese woman and their kids were born there. From a distance you’d think it is just another city scene, black kids playing basketball. Then you come closer and they are speaking Chinese, their mother tongue.
I did not misspeak when I said, “Chinese, including an African guy.” One of the ways Chinese have an advantage over Americans is that they judge race not as we do, by skin color, but by behavior. If you can speak Chinese, if you can read Chinese, if you can use chopsticks, if you know how to behave—in short, if you are civilized—then you are Chinese. Which is the higher definition of race and of civilization, the one that says, “As you were born, so is your destiny,” or the one that says, “You play by our rules, and we’ll let you play”? Matteo Ricci, the 16th century Jesuit, played by Chinese rules. He mastered the Confucian classics and tested into the Imperial Court, the intellectual equivalent of pitching a perfect game when you’ve only just learned baseball.
Business
There is the academic, ivory-tower snobbishness not to be sullied by the real world. It is certainly true that academia can make you a better person and that it does so by raising the roof—by showing you wider horizons and pushing you to know more, to think more clearly. None of this can be said of business. But business can push you to become a better person by raising the floor. You get a lot of experience taking responsibility for problems and dealing with them quickly, effectively, and with equanimity. When my wife scratched the car, that was just the problem number 10,001 that I had to deal with. No big deal. I've seen other husbands flip out at such. They are lesser businessmen than I. When disaster strikes, as is inevitable, I can handle it better because of the crap I have put up with at work. And I am a better person for it.
Details
I used to interpret for the American designers at a stuffed animal company in Taiwan. The Chinese boss-lady made one of her rare appearances a couple of weeks after I started. Her diamond ring was about the size of my nose. I was just in the midst of the thought, “She’s too important for details. She goes straight to the essence of the thing,” when she pulled a pocket knife from her purse, cut open the bear, pulled out a single fiber, measured it, and declared that the bear wasn’t soft enough because the stuffing was two centimeters too short.
Oh, I see. She has that ridiculous diamond because she’s good at the details.
Oh, no, now I really see. She does go to the essence of the thing. Details are the essence.
Often I look at trees and think I should be looking at the forest, when I really should be looking at the leaves.
Educated Efficacy
This caricature captures the essence of the problem. Imagine that you are on a beach at point X and there is a drowning swimmer at point Z. Because you can run much faster than you can swim, you can get to point Y very quickly by running. Or, you could take the hypotenuse and go directly from X to Z on the grounds that it is the shortest distance. When faced with business problems with this sort of deep structure, I have seen a pattern. The high-power but low-education executives will say to move to Y first, because speed is of the essence and you can do that quickly. Besides, it shows decisiveness. The slightly more educated types will say to move directly from X to Z and they’ll give you the Pythagorean theorem to prove themselves right. The correct answer is to use calculus to figure out what the minima is; first go to point Q. Because it is not intuitive to the first group and doesn’t fit with the second group’s limited education, the correct solution is seldom chosen.
Grades
I went to Arizona State University for my undergraduate degree. I was quite proud of the fact that I graduated with a 4.0 grade point average. Then I went to the University of Chicago for graduate school, where I learned an important lesson about getting an A. At ASU, it is as if you start with an A and inch downward if you make mistakes. At the Chicago, you start with an F and inch upward if you are good. Essentially you must force them to give it to you. You must do work that is so good that you could easily take them to court and prove that they were mistaken not to give you an A. At ASU you leave feeling vaguely entitled to certain rewards. At Chicago, you get the rewards only if you have vanquished a fierce foe. I think that the tougher standards better prepare you for the real world.
Learning from Mistakes (altered only slightly from its original form, in which I predicted the forthcoming crisis)
After the disaster that was the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy went on television, saying, “There’s an old saying that victory had a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan.” He took the blame and full responsibility. He then asked former President Eisenhower to critique his mistakes. Kennedy thought he’d get a lesson from the general on tactics. Eisenhower grilled Kennedy on how the decision had been made. Kennedy learned his lesson and averted disaster with the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Thirty-nine years later, intelligence failures allowed the United States to be attacked on 9/11, but this time the president wasn’t to blame. He took no responsibility, and he learned nothing. Two years later, President Bush repeated his intelligence failures with his disastrous invasion of Iraq. Still not owning up, still not taking responsibility, and still not learning, the president made analogous blunders in his handling of Hurricane Katrina. Like clockwork, two years later there were early-warning signs of an incipient financial crisis, but since nothing had been learned from the previous three disasters, nothing was done to prevent the Great Recession.
Monkey You
I hike up to an old an old temple. The forest has nearly overrun it but you can still make out the stone carvings, which are to the gargoyles I saw in Germany what Winnie the Pooh is to a grizzly bear.
It is late afternoon, and the weather is designer. I’m wearing a sarong, a batik cotton shirt, and sandals. I’ve been traveling alone for months and I am desperately lonely.
I am not surprised to see monkeys. I’d read they were common, so I brought peanuts. They swarm. I throw them the peanuts. They eat and leave. All but one, who searches my hair for lice. I return the favor, pretending to find and eat two. He sits beside me, throws his arm around my shoulder and watches the sunset with me. I put my arm around his shoulder.
Buber says the I–You relationship happens when the categories with which we think about the world—age, race, gender, species—drop away and we are left with only pure relation between Self and Other. Time and space disappear, as do I and You, and all that is left is a relationship that is heavy with meaning.
You can’t always get what you want, but sometimes you get what you need.
Rule-changing definitions
Confucius’ great insight was to change the rules: You want to be a 君子 (prince)? Well, it’s not about birthright; it is about behavior. You would rather be a citizen (人) than a plebe (民)? Well, 人者仁也，民者mean 也 (citizens are benevolent; plebes are mean). Act like one and you are one.
Reading everything
Barthes says that everything is a semiotic system and can be read. I feel I can often tell whether somebody’s parents are alive, whether they have kids, whether they have suffered. I’m not talking mysticism, intuition, or even real sensitivity. It is more like noticing smile wrinkles and furrowed brows.
Look not just at, but into things.
There are other readings or decodings, that illustrate the same point. I think of clocks that run, not surprisingly, clockwise. Clockwise is clockwise because clocks mimic sundials. This tells us that clocks were invented in the northern hemisphere. Shadows move the other way south of the equator.
Is this trivia? It is if you don’t take it anywhere. But if it gets you looking at clocks and wondering why some go I, II, III, IV… and some go I, II, III, IIII…, then the trivia is a doorway to something deeper.
They wrote IIII because many people confused I with J and V with U and it wouldn’t do to go around writing the first two letters of God’s name, Jupiter.
More trivia? Not if you see what this tells you about literacy, religiosity, and superstition. The trick is to recognize that you are dealing with text and to read it, always. My point is that the process is like a walk in the desert. At first glance it is brown and dull. But if you look more closely, you will see tiny purple flowers. On this side of the mountains you’ll find flowers the color of a ripe mango. Observe, question, decode, and you’ll be led on a strange and wonderful journey with unexpected twists and funny recursions.
Reification
In Taipei, I saw an old man wade through a busy intersection as if he were crossing a river. I had the impression that he had no knowledge of or use for traffic lights. I think that for many Chinese the law is a convention that has its uses, like forks on the left, knifes on the right. If it gets in the way, to hell with it. For Americans the law exists. It is reified. Like God, it isn’t just an idea. It’s out there. Lawyers are its avatars. It is real. Don’t mess with it. The Chinese notion of God is also less super-existent. The local god can be bribed to relinquish good luck. While I was hitch hiking once, a truck picked me up. They had a statue of their local god with them. They thought the god was getting bored and decided to take him for a walk-about. Imagine borrowing a crucifix to take on vacation just to give the fellow a change of scene.
The heart of a god
Henry James said, “A mighty will, that’s all there is.” Surely this is to have the heart of a god, but what is that? If you take advantage of the ability of the language to be read in different directions, then the characters define themselves define the term ':
精神
心力
; 精神 = Spirit, mind, essence, gist
? 神力 = Superhuman strength, extraordinary power
> 精心 = Meticulously, painstakingly, elaborately
9 心力 = Mental and physical efforts
( 精力 = Energy, vigor, vim
Dukkha tag
“It’s not fair,” I once overheard a girl in a park say, “There’s no base, no time outs, and everybody’s It.” A child, and she already gets dukkha, the first of the Buddhist’s Four Noble Truths: All life is suffering. You find wisdom in the damnedest places.
Car Jam
Car Jam is a game in which you move cars around a board until you can free up the trapped red one. I started with the baby level and worked my way through the hardest and learned something intriguing. For the easy ones, I could just trust my intuition and solve them, no problem. For the medium ones, I tried my intuition and it didn't work. So I tried variations on my intuition and those usually worked. On the hardest ones, no intuition or variation on my intuition would work so I tried things I thought would not work. They worked, which tells me something about the value of intuition in difficult situations.
Good versus Evil
I’m reading a book in a park. A little girl plays near me. Her mother is far off chatting with somebody. Even if she were paying attention, she could not get here in less than 30 seconds. I look up from my book and wonder how much harm I could do to the girl in 30 seconds. Effectively, an infinite amount.
In 30 seconds, though, how much good could I do for her? What could I do at all? Smile? Compliment her? Give her all of my money? Even if I had 30 days and unlimited resources, how much good could I do? Nothing in comparison to the amount of harm I could do in seconds.
Evil is vastly more powerful than good. Sad, but true, but not depressing. Why not? Look around. For the most part, it’s a pretty good world. The only way it can be a pretty good world when evil is so much more powerful than good is if there are a whole lot of good people out there. Good must be extraordinarily common or this would be a nasty world indeed.