Sweet Bites
January 19, 2024
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with some thought-provoking finds to send you off into the weekend with.
This week we explored the concept of fortune as it relates to fate, our January theme. Below are the Monday Meditations and Wednesday Wisdom for the week:
Any of the below bites resonate? Hit the reply button and let me know.
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🏋️♂️ Exercise
In Stoic philosophy, there is an exercise known as premeditatio malorum, the practice of preparing oneself for the misfortunes of life. Seneca reminds us that we often build things larger in our imaginations than they actually are in reality.
Premeditatio malorum, in an effort to fight this distortion, grounds us to reality by practicing the misfortune ahead of time.
Writing to his friend Lucilius, Seneca offers the following [emphasis my own]:
“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: “Is this the condition that I feared?” It is precisely in times of immunity from care that the soul should toughen itself beforehand for occasions of greater stress, and it is while Fortune is kind that it should fortify itself against her violence. In days of peace the soldier performs maneuvers, throws up earthworks with no enemy in sight, and wearies himself by gratuitous toil, in order that he may be equal to unavoidable toil. If you would not have a man flinch when the crisis comes, train him before it comes.”
🕺🏼 Experience
The writer Michael Lewis, famed for such books as The Big Short, Moneyball, and The Blindside, seems, in hindsight, like he was always destined to be a successful writer.
But as Lewis explained in a Princeton graduation address, his trajectory to successful writer was anything but a clear shot. While at Princeton, he handed in his thesis to his professor and asked what he thought of the writing. The professor responded bluntly:
“Put it this way, never try to make a living at it.”
It is comical now given Lewis’ massive success as a writer, but it is only comical because we like to apply narratives to life, to the often random, chance-filled occurrences that we encounter. Or as Lewis has said, we like to rationalize success stories.
“People really don’t like to hear success explained away as luck — especially successful people. As they age, and succeed, people feel their success was somehow inevitable. They don’t want to acknowledge the role played by accident in their lives. There is a reason for this: the world does not want to acknowledge it either.”
We’re not self-made, regardless of how much we like to believe we are. We’re built by circumstance, culture, and those around us. We just like to rationalize that we did it all ourselves.