No Stupid Questions

We are always getting the horizon for threats. We are much less likely to be reflexively grateful. We more ruminate on the bad things.

Better to be early one hour than to be five minutes late.

Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.

I was just watching this Broadway play called The Lehman Trilogy, which I highly recommend.

Try to pose for yourself this task not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursive thing will come to mind every minute.

And there's a book out now I really recommend it the author Paige Hardin she is a behavioral geneticist and what she tries to communicate in this book it's called The Genetic Lottery is that we have to all get a little more sophisticated about our genes and how they play out which is impossible to get from just like reading a couple paragraphs on Wikipedia

I read the memoir of Arthur Ashe, the great tennis player, and I remember being struck by the part where he talks about being the first black player for the US Davis Cup.

every internal team should be small enough that it can be fed with two pizzas.

She wrote a book about the movie, about the book Bonfire of the Vanities?

Correct, she wrote a book about the making of the movie because it just was one disaster after the next and the book was called Devil's Candy.

I may be wrong on this, but I believe the Stoics or some of the Stoics at least argued that there is no such thing as rejection.

So like there's the event itself. And then there's the story we tell ourselves about what the event means.

Epictetus told this story that so and so was carted off to prison. What happened? He was carted off to prison, but now add to this. He's had bad luck or someone was out to get him.

what upsets people is not things themselves, but their judgment of things.

the thing that I remember most especially from when my kids were really little was reading this book called Tools of the Mind

So like there's a biography of Ring Lardner, a writer that I loved.

It was a biography by Jonathan Yardley and I can picture the cover. I can picture the feel. I can picture the smell of the book. I can picture the table I bought on.

I'm reading here from a piece called Breaking Out of the Drama Triangle by Sherry Stines.

Blaming, criticizing, accusing, lecturing, scolding, monitoring, threatening, preaching, obsessing, overreacting or underreacting.

So don't overreact. Don't underreact. This is a tightrope.

I don't think that Sherry Stines' advice, no offense to Sherry Stines, is going to work for me.

Robin Kowalski...wrote a book in 2003 called Complaining, Teasing, and Other Annoying Behaviors

And what I found interesting is she describes the variety of reasons that people complain and I'd like you to maybe think about your coffee cup encounter in the context of this and maybe we can broaden the context a little bit because she argues there are at least five easily recognized functions that complaining serves: venting feelings for catharsis

In his 1861 work Utilitarianism, Mill does claim that higher pleasures are more intrinsically valuable, but he also says that they are quote, preferences of a competent judge.

I think back to the story about the Ring of Gaijes in Plato.

In Plato's Republic, Glaucon, Plato's older brother tells a story about a shepherd named Gaijes. And Gaijes comes upon a ring, maybe finds it in a cave. I don't remember the circumstance. So anyway, Gaijes puts the ring on. It makes him invisible. This is like the Lord of the Rings. He seduces the Queen. He kills the King and he seizes the kingdom.

And the reason that Plato is telling us this story is the philosophical or moralistic idea that if we can act with impunity, without the threat of punishment, we will do all kinds of things for our own purposes that are not so noble.

He says, before an interview, I sometimes reread this great passage from Philip Roth's American Pastoral.

You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before you meet them while you're anticipating meeting them. You get them wrong while you're with them. And then you go home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion, empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.

It's a play on your Erogenous Zones.

It was like one of these early self-help books.

The reason I'm reading it is because my literary agent Richard Pine told me it's a book that changed his life.

What this book says is that I have choices and I am the sum total of those choices. I have agency.

So as I was listening to the audio version of this book, I think the author's Wayne Dyer and Wayne says in Your Erogenous Zones that at an earlier point in his life he didn't think there would be such a thing as a bad day. If you did everything right and part of growing up is just realizing that no matter how successful you become and even if you do make all the quote unquote best choices, that you should expect that you will have some days that don't feel good and that should be okay.