Race to de Botton
July 2nd, 2009The Unlearning
June 15th, 2009Lucy Kellaway has an amusing riff on the difference between school and work in today’s Financial Times. From the blandly philosophical:
First, it teaches you that there is a fairly straightforward relationship between effort and result. In exams, if you work very, very hard in the evenings you are going to do an awful lot better than if you spend your evenings in the pub. In most office life, this is not true. The relationship between effort and reward is much more complicated. Read the rest of this entry »
found in an old notebook
June 10th, 2009“How can you bear to be so contemptible, when others are working and striving, and there are so many things to be done—how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world that is useful?” —Middlemarch
Founding Father channels Deepak Chopra, Tony Robbins
April 13th, 2009I’ve just discovered that on a number of quasi-motivational websites, the following quote is attributed to John Hancock:
“A chip on the shoulder is too heavy a piece of baggage to carry through life.”
Sometimes it appears in an extended version:
“The greatest ability in business is to get along with others and influence their actions. A chip on the shoulder is too heavy a piece of baggage to carry through life.”
A gentleman who expired in 1793 alluding to “emotional baggage”? Dale Carnegie-isms? I call nonsense. The concept of getting along “in business” — and referring to it as such — didn’t appear until well into the 19th century. Never mind what would have been, if Hancock did say these things, a remarkably anachronistic style of speaking. (As in…I’m reminded of Buck Rogers.) How do such bizarre fantasies propagate?
On the CBC
April 4th, 2009This short essay led to this. Both inspired a friend to send me this.
What a Bargain
March 27th, 2009I would be far more likely to take Staples up on their kind offer of $10 off (any in-store purchase of $40 or more) if the offer wasn’t mailed to my apartment on a thick, POST CARD-SIZED PIECE OF LAMINATED PLASTIC.
Coupons expire 5/4/09, but landfill-choking junk mail is forever.
My original title had “guys” tacked on to the end.
March 24th, 2009In The Big Money, a brief consideration of workplace goodbyes.
Quote of the Day
March 8th, 2009“I need to stop complaining, and I need to eat my lunch.”
—Erik Benson (is back to basics)
Revisited
March 5th, 2009“Before I go on with this short history, let me make a general observation—the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise. This philosophy fitted on to my early adult life, when I saw the improbable, the implausible, often the ‘impossible,’ come true. Life was something you dominated if you were any good. Life yielded easily to intelligence and effort, or to what proportion could be mustered of both. It seemed a romantic business to be a successful literary man—you were not going to as famous as a movie star but what note you had was probably longer-lived—you were never going to have the power of a man of strong political or religious convictions but you were certainly more independent. Or course within the practice of your trade you were forever unsatisfied–but I, for one, would not have chosen any other…. And then, ten years this side of forty-nine, I suddenly realized that I had prematurely cracked.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The Crack-Up”
Snark
February 19th, 2009Time decides that Gawker—which makes an appearance in Ch. 3—and its sourpuss worldview is “not only cruel but pointless.”
Getting a bad review in the New York Times hurts. I speak from experience. Upon first reading the Times review of HTBU, dozens of ways I might enact revenge—my reviewer, I felt, had been careless at best, intellectually dishonest at worst—flashed before me. I typed up my thoughts. I deleted these thoughts. Finally, I decided this: Were I to meet Mrs. Jacobs at a party, I would say, “Nice to meet you. You’re taller than I expected,” and then excuse myself.
Subtle. Too subtle. But I’m not convinced that responding angrily accomplishes anything, particularly when, as was the case here, several authors the reviewer had scorned previously had already chosen that route. Clearly, my reviewer enjoyed bitch-slapping. No aggrieved bluster on my part could change that.
I mention all this because earlier this week, in response to his bad review in the New York Times, the author Alain de Botton posted the below in the comments section of his reviewer’s blog:
Full disclosure: I know Caleb Crain and like him personally and as an analyst. I’ve liked de Botton’s books—he’s published nine—also. How Proust Can Change Your Life is great, almost as good as The Architecture of Happiness. This screed hardly impresses. It suggests to me that De Botton has not only “lost perspective,” to put it in over-used therapeutic terms, but is so accustomed to adulation that he’s come to feel entitled to it. Or maybe he was having a bad day.
His response reminds me of nothing so much as Jon Gosselin, in fact. Gosselin is paid millions for allowing television cameras into his home, and chronicling his disastrous marriage and parenting misadventures for a national TV audience. He recently got riled up over negative tabloid attention. “I didn’t sign up for this!” he complained. And the only thing you can say to that is, “Well, what did you think all that money was for?”