Your Character is Your Destiny
Sweet Bites for January 3, 2025
Hi all,
Welcome to another edition of Sweet Bites, Mind Candy’s bite-sized newsletter with thought-provoking finds to send you into the weekend with.
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🍰 Mini Bite - Make the Smart Move
In the early days of their acting careers, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck were like every other actor, running to auditions with big hopes of landing a job.
They both auditioned and got callbacks for the film Dead Poets Society, but neither landed a role.
When asked if it was demoralizing or if it caused self-doubt to get close but lose out, Damon said:
“It wasn’t self-doubt, it was frustration at the system because the system is not built for you to succeed, you know, you have to break through it.”
He and Affleck went from callbacks for Dead Poets Society to being the ticket handlers at a theatre which played nothing but that single film all summer.
“So you go from the possibility of being in the movie to the guy tearing the ticket…”
But that didn’t deter them, instead, it provided them the encouragement they needed to keep at it.
“But we did get called back, so the business was telling us, ‘hey, you know, it didn’t work out this time but you’re doing some things right.’ And then you need to get extraordinarily lucky.”
Rather than wait for luck to arrive, Damon and Affleck made moves to alter their plan of attack for landing a role. Taking a one act play Damon had written for a playwriting class in college, they turned it into a screenplay which would go on to be Good Will Hunting, nabbing nine Oscar nominations and two wins including one for Best Original Screenplay for the duo.
When asked what skillset separated him from others, Damon said it was his ability to outwork others.
“I think my one skill is that I will outwork anybody. You know, like I will work harder…”
But arguably, it was his ability to work smarter than others that made the difference, attacking from a different angle.
This is what Shane Snow would call a “smartcut”, the ability to find ways to create short-cuts in the field you’re pursuing and find ways to advance quicker than the beaten path everyone else is taking.
The virtue of wisdom involves the character traits of creativity, open-mindedness, looking at problems from different perspectives, and a love of learning, all of which were on display by Damon and Affleck in this endeavor.
The two could have sat back and said they’re actors not screenwriters but instead they learned to write a screenplay, wrote themselves parts in the movie, and shopped that around Hollywood trying to make their own luck.
“True innovation occurs only when people have courage…” writes Disney’s Bob Iger in his memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime. “Fear of failure destroys creativity.”
Find what you want to do. Figure out how others do it. Look to exploit paths that haven’t been paved and pave them yourself. Take the risks others aren’t willing to do, it may just pay off.
📚 This Week’s Monday Meditation
✏️ This Week’s Wednesday Wisdom
📰 Articles Worth a Read
Virtues of Uncertainty by Guy Claxton
Some favorite passages:
“If youngsters pick up the belief in fixed ability, the self-fulfilling prophecy gets installed in their own minds like a computer virus.”
—
“Broadly, contemporary societies seem to care about three things: national prosperity, social cohesion and stability, and personal well-being. But the personal attitudes that will lead towards these three ‘goods’ are not eternal: they depend on the nature of the world. So even if those three aspirations are taken for granted, educational values — the traits that we want to develop in young people — will vary. We need to think about the world in which we want our children to flourish before we can say what qualities they are likely to need.”
—
“The thing is, virtues are not just skills, they are also habits or dispositions. Possessing the virtue of curiosity does not simply mean that you have the ability to ask good questions when someone prompts you. It means having a questioning frame of mind. The goal of character education cannot be merely to train skills. A skill is something you can do; not necessarily something that you are constitutionally disposed to do. A virtuous school has to be more than a ‘training’ institution; it has to be an incubator that develops and strengthens the desired qualities of mind through everything it does.”
I also enjoyed the following article:
The Self is Moral by Nina Strohminger
🦉 Wisdom
“A person whose desires and impulses are his own--are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture is said to have a character. One whose desires and impulses are not his own, has no character, no more than a steam-engine has a character.”
John Stuart Mill
Source: Character
💡 Concept Overview
🦉 Wisdom # 2
“But even as virtues once attained cannot depart from us and keeping them is easy, so also it is arduous to begin attaining them. For it is characteristic of a mind that is weak and ill to fear what it has not yet experienced, so that it has to be forced to make a start.”
Seneca
Source: Letters on Ethics, Letter 50
🎙 Podcast Episodes Worth a Listen
If you haven’t yet had a chance to read
’s latest book, How to Think Like Socrates, I definitely recommend you check it out. In the meantime, you can listen to his conversations with Ryan Holiday for the Daily Stoic Podcast which will prime you for the book.And if you enjoyed those discussions, you’ll like this below for the Modern Wisdom podcast.
Until next time,
D.A. DiGerolamo
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