Books as Mentors, Role Models, & Seizing the Day
Wednesday Wisdoms for September 25, 2024
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I distill worldly advice for better living with 3 quotes, 3 observations, and 3 questions.
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Books as Mentors
🤨 Quote
“If your circumstances limit your contacts, books can serve as temporary mentors... In such a case you will want to convert such books and writers into living mentors as much as possible. You personalize their voice, interact with the material, taking notes or writing in the margins. You analyze what they write and try to make it come alive-the spirit and not just the letter of their work.”
Robert Greene
Source: Mastery
Observation 🧐
The majority of the greatest minds to have ever walked the earth are only available to us in the form of the works they’ve left behind.
Think of the teachings that have come down to us in the form of Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations or St. Augustine’s Confessions.
With their wisdom left for us to consume, we can properly imagine these individuals as mentors to us. Reading the Meditations is not like listening to a teacher but rather like learning from someone dealing with the same troubles we are, working through solutions on how to tackle the issue at hand.
We can therefore create mentors out of these individuals through the works they’ve left behind.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche himself once wrote, in reference to the great philosophers who came before him such as Montaigne, Spinoza, Plato and more:
“In all that I say, conclude, or think out for myself and others, I fasten my eyes on those eight and see their eyes fastened on mine.”
🤔 Question
You are on a desert island and can only have a single book. This book, and its author, will be your mentor for surviving the future. Who is the individual, what is the work, and why have you chosen them?
Role Models
🤨 Quote
“This advice from Epicurean writings: to think continually of one of the men of old who lived a virtuous life.”
Marcus Aurelius
Source: Meditations 11.26
Observation 🧐
Just as the books of individuals we admire help to build mentors for us in the absence of the real thing, so too the men and women of history can be our role models if we properly study them.
History is not about memorizing dates and events, it is about understanding the people who lived during those times—what drove them to act or not act, what they believed, why they pursued the paths in their lives that they did.
By properly studying people of history, we’re given an opportunity to better find individuals who inspire us, who can guide us during trying times. It is from their history—their struggles—that we ourselves in our own times of need can imagine them and think through what they would do.
When Louis Zamperini was held as a POW during WWII, he would repeat to himself a phrase his brother had once said to him: Isn’t a little bit of pain worth a lifetime of pleasure?
Like Zamperini, during trying times we can think back to phrases or situations others have been in and use this as fuel to get through the struggles.
🤔 Question
If you could pick three people from history to hold as your role models, who would they be? What about them stands out? What strengths, and weaknesses, did they possess that you would want to emulate or disregard?
Beneath the paywall this week we explore the wisdom of Heraclitus. Click below to support and get access.