Willingness is the Difference
Nature doesn’t ask questions. It just does what it does.
It’s one of my favorite things Marcus Aurelius talks about, how the birds and the ants and the bees and the plants go about their individual tasks, putting the world in order as best they can.
They’re not coerced or incentivized. They don’t rush. They’re not anxious about the future. They do their job, then they do it again the next day.
They do it willingly.
What good is it, Seneca rhetorically asked, to have accomplished something grand but against your will? If you dragged your feet and complained? If “the body went one way, the mind another…”?
The Stoics compared our free will to a dog attached to a wagon. We can run along with events, or we can be dragged by them.
We can approach each moment on our toes or our heels.
We can trot along with the day or fight against it.
We can do things willingly or unwillingly. Which one we choose is, in large part, the difference between enjoying life and just getting through it.
Oh Yeah, I Remember This Guy
Early in his career, Breaking Bad star Bryan Cranston was auditioning all the time. After each audition, he would nervously wait by the phone to hear if he had gotten the part. “And then when I heard I didn’t get the part, I’d marinate in disappointment and introspection. Could I have done something differently?”
His wife set him up with a self-help guy who told Cranston he needed to focus on the process, not the outcome. That’s when everything changed. He had been attaching himself to the outcome—setting himself up to expect, and therefore fail. He realized auditions weren’t for competing with other guys; they were for giving something. “I wasn’t there to get a job. I was there to do a job. Simple as that. I was there to give a performance.”
From then on, he focused solely on doing his best. He didn’t always get the job, but that wasn’t his concern. Instead of pacing by the phone after each audition, he would throw the script in a basket when he got home and forget about it. “I’d let go. You can’t fake letting go. You have to really genuinely detach from it. If I’d get a callback, I’d fish out the script and say, ‘Oh yeah, I remember this guy.’”
By being willing to keep showing up and giving his all, he freed himself from self-doubt, negativity, and supplication. Auditioning became enjoyable. How could it not? With the outcome irrelevant, with his concern only on what he did—not what anyone else said or did—he was the most powerful person in any room he walked into.
The Carrot Isn’t That Important
In Arbitrary Stupid Goal, Tamaya Shopsin tells the story of a family her father knew named Wolfawitz. They wanted to go on a vacation but didn’t know where to. They decided on a two-week road trip where they would go to as many places as possible that contained their last name: Wolfpoint, Wolfville, Wolf Lake, Wolf anything. On the way to the Wolf places, they looked up stuff to do and found lots of things that were unexpected and fun: “a hotel in a railroad car, an Alpine slide, a pretzel factory, etc.” Afterward, they felt great. They said it was easily the best vacation they’d been on, but they didn’t know why. “My Father says it was because they stopped trying to accomplish anything,” Shopsin writes. “They just put a carrot in front of them and decided the carrot wasn’t that important but chasing it was.”
Whistling Wilbur
On May 29, 1908, Wilbur Wright traveled to Paris to fly his and Orville’s biplane, the Flyer, publicly for the first time. The French reporters were skeptical of the Wright brothers and anxious to see them fly. Wilbur’s business partner, Hart Berg, assured the journalists that the secret trials were over and that Wilbur would fly before the people within two months. Still in the U.S., Orville shipped the parts for the Flyer, and Wilbur received them on June 16.
Eager to begin assembling the plane, he opened the packages—and was shocked by what he saw. The parts were in terrible condition. Large pieces were smashed, essential ones were missing, and everything was a knotted mess. After his initial burst of anger at what he assumed had been a poor packaging job by Orville (the damage had, he discovered later, occurred during shipment), he rolled up his sleeves. He got to work repairing parts and putting things in order. For parts damaged beyond repair, he would create his own, “making a needle if necessary.” Still, even with outside pressure mounting, he refused to overwork himself. He continued his lifelong observance of the Sabbath, using Sundays to sightsee and write letters. Though he had made significant progress, by August 6, the Flyer was still not in the condition he thought it should be.
Reporters on the scene were growing impatient, calling him stubborn and eccentric and accusing him of being “unnecessarily surly” towards them. Wilbur simply responded, “I did not ask you to come here. I shall [fly] when I’m ready.” Witnesses around that time noted his consistently calm demeanor and the buoyant ease with which he walked to his shed early each day for work, whistling. “The impatience of a hundred thousand persons would not accelerate the rhythm of his stride.”
Then, on August 8, the weather was right, and Wilbur was ready. People from Le Mans filled the wooden grandstand at the Hunaudieres race course, chatting happily while they waited. Two notable Russian officers were also there: Ernest Archdeacon, a known critic of the Wright brothers, and celebrated French aviator hero Louis Blériot. Still, Wilbur did not appear nervous or excited. He went about inspecting the Flyer from end to end at his own pace. An observer from the press noted, “Neither the impatience of waiting crowds, nor the sneers of rivals, nor the pressure of financial conditions . . . could induce him to hurry. . . .” Then, three hours into the afternoon, Wilbur opened the shed and rolled the Flyer out, “never hurrying in the least.” At 6:30 pm, he took flight.
The crowd cheered, shouting, “This man has conquered the air!” French Pilot Paul Zens, who had been waiting since morning, told a reporter, “I would have waited ten times as long to have seen what I have seen today.” The enthusiasm was “indescribable”. When he finished his flight, everyone rushed toward him, wanting to shake his hand. Hart Berg “did all he could to keep the men from kissing Wilbur on both cheeks.” Even the typically controlled Wilbur lost his composure around his friend’s ardor. Then, still beaming, “he put his hands in his pockets and walked off whistling,” McCullough writes. “That night, while the normally sleepy town of Le Mans celebrated, the hero retired early to his shed.” Neither criticism nor praise, failure nor success, could keep him from doing his work. Nor could it keep him from whistling while he did it.
Books Read This Month:
-Letters From a Self-Made Merchant To His Son by George Horace is excellent. It’s short but packed with tons of wisdom about business and life. Seriously, there’s so much good stuff in here. I highlighted something on almost every other page.
-My dad gave me his copy of The Gospel in Brief by Leo Tolstoy and it's up there with some of the best books I’ve ever read. Basically, Tolstoy rewrote the Gospel based on what he believed, after years of intense Bible study, were the essential messages of Jesus—the most important being to love all people as you love yourself and to do good for them. Tolstoy said Jesus didn’t care if we went to church. In fact, he discouraged it; rituals and liturgy tend to take our focus away from what’s important. Better to use that time to do good for someone. Tolstoy is refreshingly honest and outspoken about what he saw as evil: the calculated misrepresentation of Jesus’s message. (Also, if you haven’t read A Calendar of Wisdom, you’re in for a treat.)
-High School by Tegan and Sara Quin. I LOVED this book. Literally loved it. It’s one of those books I’m positive will stick with me for the rest of my life. I’m not much younger than Tegan and Sara, so their experiences of life as gay teenagers in the 90s hit close to home. My heart ached for them. I just wanted to hug their teenage selves. I could relate to the sadness and confusion and shame they felt. The dreaded possibility of being a *whisper* lesbian…and the terror of being found out. Their openness and honesty helped me to understand things in myself that I never had before, as if something in me shifted and I’m a little more myself than I was before reading it. If that makes sense. What I found so inspiring about their stories is not that they became world-famous rock stars, which they did, but that they became themselves. I wish more people would read this book. On a side note, I started listening to their music this month for the first time (20 years late to the party, I know), and I currently have their songs on repeat when I run each day.
-I bought The Art of Clear Thinking by Hasard Lee at Changing Hands a few months ago and finally got around to reading it. It’s phenomenal. Lee, a U.S. Air Force stealth fighter pilot who’s flown over eighty combat missions, breaks down how he makes, and how he teaches others to make, split-second life-and-death decisions. (I white-knuckled the first chapter about the 2009 Air France Flight 447 and the human errors that sealed its fate.) This book is super entertaining and teaches how to best make decisions in our own life, however high the stakes.
Quotes I’m Reflecting On:
"If the path before you is clear, you're probably on someone else's". -Joseph Cambell
“The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty bothers.” -Ernest Hemingway
“Stupidity is the same as evil if you judge by the results.” -Margaret Atwood