“You’re cut off from everything. There’s no day or night. There was no window in my room. Even when people are at your bedside, there’s all this garb in between you and them. You have no relationship to the natural world. You can touch nothing. You’re also in a fair amount of pain, of course, which does not necessarily reward your paying attention to anything. It’s not fun.
“So that was November. At some point in December—maybe it was early January—there were two nurses in particular I felt very close to, and it may have been one of them [who brought me the snowball]. [One was named] Joi Varcardipone. It may have been Joi. It was snowing outside and I didn’t know that.
“She had the bright idea of smuggling in a snowball to me so I could feel snow. Man, it was just stunning. What a simple little thing, right? But she put it in my hand, and just feeling the contrast of that cold snow on my sort of crisp, burnt skin—the obnoxious, inflamed skin—and watching it melt and watching the snow become water, the simple miracle of it, was just a stunner for me. It really made it so palpable that we as human beings, as long as we’re in this body, are feeling machines. If we’re cut off, if our senses are choked off, we are choked off. It was the most therapeutic moment I could imagine.
“I would never have guessed this. First of all, the sensation, just holding that snowball. But also the implied, inherent perspective that it helped me have. That everything changes. Snow becomes water. It’s beautiful because it changes. Things are fleeting. It felt so beautiful to be part of this weird world in that moment. I felt part of the world again, rather than removed from it. It was potent.”
The Power of Bearing Witness and Listening
I asked BJ, “If you were brought in as a physician or mentor to someone who had just suffered nearly identical injuries to yours, what would your conversation look like? Or what resources, reading, or otherwise would you point them to?” He replied with:
“I think I’ve gotten in trouble when I’ve tried to come in with some predetermined idea of advice-giving. Oftentimes, that’s not really what’s needed. It’s more just the camaraderie and bearing witness. So to answer your question, when I do go into folks’ rooms, I’m there and I’ll avail myself to any questions they have. But I think most of the power of the visit is just visiting, just being together and sharing this awkward body.”
TF: Since chatting with BJ, I’ve noticed how this applies in many areas. To “fix” someone’s problem, you very often just need to empathically listen to them. Even on social media or my blog, I’ve realized that people knowing you’re listening—valuing them, collectively—is more important than responding to everyone. For instance, I sometimes put a period before readers’ names when I reply to someone on Twitter (e.g., “.@Widgett, that’s a good question. The answer is . . .”), so that everyone sees the reply. Even though I can’t respond to everyone, it shows I’m paying attention to blog comments and @ replies. It’s a simple “I see you.”
✸ If an introverted hospice patient were to say, “Give me one to three things that I can watch, do, absorb, look at, etc., without human interaction,” what would your answer be?
“I guess I’d put a picture book of Mark Rothko paintings in front of them. I would put probably any music by Beethoven into their ears. And I probably would reserve that third thing for staring into space.”
✸ Favorite documentary?
“Grizzly Man. Any piece of art where I’m not sure whether to sob or laugh hysterically—I love that feeling. Where you just go in either direction, and you’re not even sure which is the correct emotion. You’re simultaneously attracted and repulsed by something. That was my experience watching that film, so I think it’s an amazing piece of filmmaking.”
Sometimes Cookies Are the Best Medicine
For hospice patients at death’s door, big existential conversations aren’t always the needed medicine. One oddly powerful alternative is baking cookies together.
“Just the basic joy of smelling a cookie. It smells freaking great. [And it’s like the snowball.] You’re rewarded for being alive and in the moment. Smelling a cookie is not on behalf of some future state. It’s great in the moment, by itself, on behalf of nothing. And this is another thing back to art. Art for its own sake. Art and music and dance. Part of its poignancy is its purposelessness, and just delighting in a wacky fact of perhaps a meaningless universe and how remarkable that is. One way for all of us to live until we’re actually dead is to prize those little moments.”
✸ Advice to your 30-year-old self?
“Let it go. I do mean to take life very seriously, but I need to take things like playfulness and purposelessness very seriously. . . . This is not meant to be light, but I think I would have somehow encouraged myself to let go a little bit more and hang in there and not pretend to know where this is all going. You don’t need to know where it’s all going.”
“If you’re looking for a formula for greatness, the closest we’ll ever get, I think, is this: Consistency driven by a deep love of the work.”
“Life is a continual process of arrival into who we are.”
Spirit animal: Standard poodle
* * *
Maria Popova
Maria Popova (TW: @brainpicker, Brainpickings.org) has written for outlets like the Atlantic and the New York Times, but I find her most amazing project to be BrainPickings.org. Founded in 2006 as a weekly email to seven friends, Brain Pickings now gets several million readers per month. Brain Pickings is Maria’s one-woman labor of love—an inquiry into how to live and what it means to lead a good life. She often reads a book a day, distilling the most timeless and meaningful wisdom worth remembering and sharing. Her quality and output are staggering.
Behind the Scenes
Maria has a tattoo on one forearm (much like Ryan Holiday, page 334) that says, “What to Focus On:” with a bullseye-like circle below it. In the very middle of the circle is the word “Happy.” From Maria: “This is a piece by the artist Marc Johns, which I had on my wall for years. When I was going through a particularly difficult period in my life, I decided it was one of those simple, enormous truths we so easily forget, and a wonderful incantation of sorts to wake up to. To make it as inescapable as possible in beginning each day, I put it on my arm.”
Sometimes, the Best “No” Is No Reply
“Why put in the effort to explain why it isn’t a fit, if they haven’t done the homework to determine if it is a fit?” Maria could spend all day replying to bad pitches with polite declines. I think of her above policy often. Did the person take 10 minutes to do their homework? Are they minding the details? If not, don’t encourage more incompetence by rewarding it. Those who are sloppy during the honeymoon (at the beginning) only get worse later. For a hilarious example of how to spot-check attention to detail, Google “David Lee Roth Ferriss.” Neil Strauss (page 347) will often put at the very bottom of his job postings on Craigslist “Do not email a response, call [a phone number] and leave a voicemail with A, B, and C.” Anyone who responds via email is disqualified. Don’t succumb to replying to everyone out of guilt. From Maria: “Guilt [is] interesting because guilt is the flip side of prestige, and they’re both horrible reasons to do things.”
On Saying No to the Siren Song of Media Inquiries
“Maybe appearing on CNN for two minutes will make your grandmother proud, but if the travel and the preparation and the logistics eat up 20 hours of your time so that your writing suffers [and] you will ultimately not be proud of the result, then maybe it’s not worth it. Often I think the paradox is that accepting the requests you receive is at the expense of the quality of the very work—the reason for those requests in the first place—and that’s what you always have to protect.”
TF: This is precisely why I have stopped nearly all investing, speaking engagements, and interviews. Maria shared how famed neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks (RIP) used to put a “piece of paper on the wall by his desk that simply said, in
all caps, ‘NO!’ with an exclamation point. It was to remind himself to decline invitations that took away from his writing time.”
✸ What text do you refer to again and again?
“Right now, and this answer might be different in another 9 years, the diaries of Henry David Thoreau. Speaking of this intersection of the outer world and the inner world, nobody writes more beautifully about the immutable dialog between the two than he. There is just so much—and I mean so much—universal timeless truth in his private reflections, on everything from the best definition of success to the perils of sitting, which he wrote about 150 years before we started saying, ‘Sitting is the new smoking.’”
“All those artists and writers who bemoan how hard the work is, and oh, how tedious the creative process, and oh, what a tortured genius they are. Don’t buy into it. . . . As if difficulty and struggle and torture somehow confer seriousness upon your chosen work. Doing great work simply because you love it, sounds, in our culture, somehow flimsy, and that’s a failing of our culture, not of the choice of work that artists make.” This reminded her of a journal entry of Thoreau’s from March of 1842:
“Thoreau writes, ‘The really efficient laborer will be found not to crowd his day with work, but will saunter to his task surrounded by a wide halo of ease and leisure. There will be a wide margin for relaxation to his day. He is only earnest to secure the kernels of time, and does not exaggerate the value of the husk.’ Think of what a beautiful metaphor this is for not mistaking the husk—the outer accoutrements of productivity like busyness, or a full calendar, or a clever auto-responder—not mistaking those for the kernel, the core and substance of the actual work produced. And he then says, ‘Those who work much, do not work hard.’ I love that.”
“Ours is a culture where we wear our ability to get by on very little sleep as a kind of badge of honor that symbolizes work ethic, or toughness, or some other virtue—but really, it’s a total profound failure of priorities and of self-respect.”
To remind ourselves of this “profound failure,” Maria, I, and at least six other guests in this book read and recommend On the Shortness of Life by Seneca.
Maria’s Header Image on Facebook, and a Good Rule to Live By
“This should be a cardinal rule of the Internet (and of being human): If you don’t have the patience to read something, don’t have the hubris to comment on it.”
Note-Taking—Distilling the Gems
Maria and I have a nearly identical note-taking process for books: “I highlight in the Kindle app in the iPad, and then Amazon has this function where you can, basically, see your Kindle notes and highlights on the desktop of your computer. I copy them from that page and paste them into an Evernote file to have all of my notes on a specific book in one place. I also take a screen grab of a specific iPad Kindle page with my highlighted passage, and then email that screen grab into my Evernote email because Evernote has, as you know, optical character recognition. So, when I search within it, it’s also going to search the text in that image. I don’t have to wait until I finish the book to explore all my notes. . . . I love Evernote. I’ve been using it for many years, and I could probably not get through my day without it.”
If Maria is reading a paper book and adding her notes in the margins (what she calls “marginalia”), she’ll sometimes add “BL” to indicate “beautiful language.” I use “PH,” standing for “phrase,” to indicate the same. We both create our own indices at the beginning of books on near-blank pages, like the title page. This makes review later much faster. For instance, I might have “PH 8, 12, 19, 47” to indicate the pages where I’ve found great turns of phrase, and I’ll add in more page numbers as they pop up.
Reading in Motion
Maria does most of her long-form reading at the gym on the iPad. Her first choice is an elliptical, where she does high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Plan B for cardio is sprints (which preclude reading, which is why they’re Plan B), and Plan C is jumping rope. She travels with a weighted jump rope.
When in Doubt, Scratch Your Own Itch
“When Kurt Vonnegut wrote ‘Write to please just one person,’ what he was really saying was write for yourself. Don’t try to please anyone but yourself. . . . The second you start doing it for an audience, you’ve lost the long game because creating something that is rewarding and sustainable over the long run requires, most of all, keeping yourself excited about it. . . . Trying to predict what [an audience will] be interested in and kind of pretzeling yourself to fit those expectations, you soon begin to begrudge it and become embittered—and it begins to show in the work. It always, always shows in the work when you resent it. And there’s really nothing less pleasurable to read than embittered writing.”
TF: To keep things fun for myself, I include inside jokes and Star Wars references in my books that only a few friends will get. In The 4-Hour Body, there was one line that drove copyeditors crazy: “Because I’m a man, meng.” It’s a long story.
✸ Out of more than 4,600 articles on Brain Pickings, what are Maria’s starting recommendations?
“The Shortness of Life: Seneca on Busyness and the Art of Living Wide Rather Than Living Long”
“How to Find Your Purpose and Do What You Love”
“9 Learnings from 9 Years of Brain Pickings”
Anything about Alan Watts: “Alan Watts has changed my life. I’ve written about him quite a bit.”
✸ What is the worst advice you see or hear given in your trade or area of expertise?
“‘Follow your dreams.’ It’s impossible to do without self-knowledge, which takes years. You discover your ‘dream’ (or sense of purpose) in the very act of walking the path, which is guided by equal parts choice and chance.”
✸ Three people or sources Maria has learned from or followed closely in the last year?
“Three writers and thinkers who I came to know through their exceptionally insightful and beautiful writing, and who have since become dear friends: memoirist, novelist, and essayist Dani Shapiro, a kind of Virginia Woolf of our day; science writer extraordinaire James Gleick; cosmologist, novelist, and science-and-society cross-pollinator Janna Levin.”
✸ What is the best or most worthwhile investment you’ve made?
A very rare edition of Maurice Sendak’s illustrated Poems from William Blake’s “Songs of Innocence.”
Short and Sweet
“The culture of news is a culture without nuance.”
✸ If you could guarantee that every public official or leader read one book, what would it be?
“The book would be, rather obviously, Plato’s The Republic. I’m actually gobsmacked that this isn’t required in order to be sworn into office, like the Constitution is required for us American immigrants when it comes time to gain American citizenship.”
* * *
Jocko Willink
Jocko Willink (FB/TW: @jockowillink; jockopodcast.com) is one of the scariest human beings imaginable. He is a lean 230 pounds. He is a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt who used to tap out 20 Navy SEALs per workout. He is a legend in the special operations world, and his eyes look through you more than at you. His interview with me was the first interview he ever did, and it took the Internet by storm.
Jocko spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy and commanded SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser, the most highly decorated special operations unit from the Iraq war. Upon returning to the United States, Jocko served as the officer-in-charge of training for all West Coast SEAL Teams, designing and implementing some of the most challenging and realistic combat training in the world. After retiring from the Navy, he co-founded Echelon Front, a leadership and management consulting company, and co-authored the #1 New York Times bestseller Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win. He now discusses war, leadership, business, and life in his top-rated podcast, Jocko Podcast. He is an avid surfer, a husband, and the father of four “highly motivated” children.
Discipline Equals Freedom
<
br /> To “what would you put on a billboard?” Jocko responded: “My mantra is a very simple one, and that’s ‘Discipline equals freedom.’”
TF: I interpret this to mean, among other things, that you can use positive constraints to increase perceived free will and results. Freeform days might seem idyllic, but they are paralyzing due to continual paradox of choice (e.g., “What should I do now?”) and decision fatigue (e.g., “What should I have for breakfast?”). In contrast, something as simple as pre-scheduled workouts acts as scaffolding around which you can more effectively plan and execute your day. This gives you a greater sense of agency and feeling of freedom. Jocko adds, “It also means that if you want freedom in life—be that financial freedom, more free time, or even freedom from sickness and poor health—you can only achieve these things through discipline.”
“Two Is One and One Is None.”
This is a common expression among SEALs. Jocko explains: “It just means, ‘Have a backup.’” If you have two of something, you will break or lose one and end up with one remaining; if you have one, you will break or lose it and be screwed. One of my favorite Franz Kafka quotes is related: “Better to have, and not need, than to need, and not have.” Where can you eliminate “single points of failure” in your life or business? Jocko adds, “And don’t just have backup gear—have a backup plan to handle likely contingencies.”
Exposing Yourself to Darkness to See the Light
“I think that in order to truly experience the light and the bright, you have to see the darkness. I think if you shield yourself from the darkness, you’ll not appreciate—and fully understand—the beauty of life.”
Tools of Titans Page 42