Alexandersmap

    Tag: A.G. Sertillanges

    • My 12 Favorite Books of 2021

      I’ll finish the year having read somewhere between 34-36 books. That includes some heavy lifting non-fiction, some escapist pager turner fiction and a couple of books of poetry. All but one are older classics that I finally tackled in 2021. We ought to live a bit outside ourselves more often, and reading is an easy way to travel back in time, far into the future, or to places we thought we knew better. Here, in no particular order, are some favorites:

      The Intellectual Life: Its Spirit, Conditions, Methods – A. G. Sertillanges
      “If you produce nothing you get a habit of passivity; timidity grows continually and the fear caused by pride; you hesitate, waste your powers in wasting, become as unproductive as a knotted tree-bud.”

      Referenced in Newport’s book (next), I immediately purchased a copy and placed it on the top of the pile. The book is a bit dated, certainly written through the lens of a French Catholic philosopher in the first half of the 20th century, but bits of brilliance shine through. I’ll return to this one now and then in the future.

      Deep Work: Rules For Focused Success in a Distracted World – Cal Newport
      “To learn hard things quickly, you must focus intensely without distraction. To learn, in other words, is an act of deep work. If you’re comfortable going deep, you’ll be comfortable mastering the increasingly complex systems and skills needed to thrive in our economy.”

      Reading this book finally pushed me to delete Facebook from my phone, and to put the phone itself in another room when I want to get deep work done. The world is increasingly distracted, but we don’t have to be. The people capable of focusing and rising to the next level will fare well in a world where artificial intelligence and globalization threaten more and more jobs. Go deeper and differentiate from the shallow, distracted masses.

      The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals – Chris McChesney, Jim Huling, and Sean Covey
      “When a team defines its lead measures they are making a strategic bet. In a sense, they are saying, “We’re betting that by driving these lead measures we are going to achieve our wildly important goal.” They believe that the lever is going to move the rock, and because of that belief, they engage.”

      A classic in business writing, this book outlines the steps needed to identify and execute on the most important goals for an organization. The secret is deep focus on no more than one or two wildly important goals. The magic is in drawing the entire organization in to help make the dream a reality. Most people want meaning in their careers. When they identify the actionable tasks that contribute to the overall win and execute on them, everybody wins.

      Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania – Erik Larson
      “In his final log entry on the attack, at 2:25 P.M., [Kptlt. Walther] Schwieger wrote: It would have been impossible for me, anyhow, to fire another torpedo into this crushing crowd of humanity trying to save their lives.”
      Schwieger directed his U-boat out to sea. His crew was jubilant: they had destroyed the Lusitania, the ship that symbolized British maritime prowess.”

      Larson is one of the great historians of our time, and he unpacks moments like the Blitz and the sinking of the Lusitania with a style that few can match. We all sort of know the story of the Lusitania, but Larson unpacks the tragedy of it in a page-turner style. This book will fascinate you, and even as you know the inevitable ending you’ll be surprised by many of the details.

      Mastery – Robert Greene
      “Your true self does not speak in words or banal phrases. Its voice comes from deep within you, from the substrata of your psyche, from something embedded physically within you. It emanates from your uniqueness, and it communicates through sensations and powerful desires that seem to transcend you. You cannot ultimately understand why you are drawn to certain activities or forms of knowledge. This cannot really be verbalized or explained. It is simply a fact of nature. In following this voice you realize your own potential, and satisfy your deepest longings to create and express your uniqueness. It exists for a purpose, and it is your Life’s Task to bring it to fruition.”

      How do we reach mastery? Most don’t. Most settle for a life of unfocused and relative comfort, unwilling to spend the hours of apprenticeship to master their craft. For those who want to rise above the average, this is an excellent playbook. Greene walks the talk–few take the time to research and perfect a topic as he does.

      Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind – Yuval Noah Harari
      “We believe in a particular order not because it is objectively true, but because believing in it enables us to cooperate effectively and forge a better society. Imagined orders are not evil conspiracies or useless mirages. Rather, they are the only way large numbers of humans can cooperate effectively.”

      Enlightening book that reveals how humans got to be who we are. Harari makes a strong case for the rise of humanity being great for us but catastrophic for every other species. This is a foundational book that I’d delayed reading until 2021 despite consistent prompts from friends.

      Keep Sharp: Building a Better Brain at Any Age – Sanjay Gupta M.D.
      “We don’t usually think about dementia when we’re entering our prime, but we should, because it provides a remarkable opportunity. Data from longitudinal observational studies accumulated over the past few decades have shown that aside from age, most other risk factors for brain disease can be controlled. That means you indeed have a powerful voice in controlling your risk for decline. As you might guess, some of the most influential and modifiable factors related to that decline are linked to lifestyle: physical inactivity, unhealthy diet, smoking, social isolation, poor sleep, lack of mentally stimulating activities, and misuse of alcohol.”

      Brain health is top of mind for me, and this book proved a reassuring playbook for controlling some of what happens with my own brain health over the second half of my life. Not surprisingly, what’s good for the body is usually good for the brain. Good nutrition, restorative sleep, proper hydration and exercise all help the brain as much as the body. Knowing this, you can fold the right kind of lifestyle choices into your daily routine and put yourself in a better position to have a vibrant, healthy brain to our final days.

      The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts – Shane Parrish
      “If we never learn to take something apart, test our assumptions about it, and reconstruct it, we end up bound by what other people tell us—trapped in the way things have always been done.”

      A playbook for conceptual thinking, this is one of three books Parrish published on mental modelling. It’s a helpful guide for framing a problem or decision using proven methodology. Parrish has an excellent podcast called The Knowledge Project that builds on this framework by exploring just how the world’s great thinkers frame their own decisions and build great organizations.

      West With The Night – Beryl Markham
      “The air takes me into its realm. Night envelops me entirely, leaving me out of touch with the earth, leaving me within this small moving world of my own, living in space with the stars.”

      This is a breathtaking book that sparkles with magic. Markham writes with an elegance that Hemingway would strive to match, raising the bar for writing in the 20th century. If you want to travel back in time to the barnstorming days of early flight, elephant hunting when the elephants had the upper hand and a glimpse of the changing landscape of Africa between the two World Wars this book is for you.

      Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action – Simon Sinek
      “Before it can gain any power or achieve any impact, an arrow must be pulled backward, 180 degrees away from the target. And that’s also where a WHY derives its power. The WHY does not come from looking ahead at what you want to achieve and figuring out an appropriate strategy to get there. It is not born out of any market research. It does not come from extensive interviews with customers or even employees. It comes from looking in the completely opposite direction from where you are now. Finding WHY is a process of discovery, not invention.”

      Why do we align ourselves with brands, political parties or people? Because they speak to us on some level. We desire to belong to something. How we arrive at that feeling of belonging is the “why” that drives the “what” something is and “how” it’s done. Organizations that do this well, think Apple, create a compelling case to identify with the brand. The very best leaders create a compelling why.

      On the Road – Jack Kerouac
      “Dean took out other pictures. I realized these were all the snapshots which our children would look at someday with wonder, thinking their parents had lived smooth, well-ordered, stabilized-within-the-photo lives and got up in the morning to walk proudly on the sidewalks of life, never dreaming the raggedy madness and riot of our actual lives, or actual night, the hell of it, the senseless nightmare road. All of it inside endless and beginningless emptiness. Pitiful forms of ignorance.”

      On the Road nagged me for years. For a few years in my early 20’s I chased the legend of Kerouac through the streets of Lowell, Massachusetts. I drank in some of the same bars that Kerouac drank in. Walked the same streets he grew up on. But I stubbornly kept his most famous book at arm’s length. I made a point of reading it in 2021 and saw the brilliance in his prose even as it betrayed the lifestyle that would eventually kill him.

      Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life – Richard Rohr
      “By the second half of life, you have been in regular unwelcome contact with your shadow self, which gradually detaches you from your not-so-bright persona (meaning “stage mask” in Greek) that you so diligently constructed in the first half of life. Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not “true.” It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die.”

      If we’re lucky, we all live two lives. We eventually transcend the character we are in the first part of our lives and “fall upward” into a higher self. I wouldn’t say I’ve arrived at that higher self, but I’m aware that it’s there should I stay on the path. Reading is a big part of that journey, and this and the other books finished in 2021 are stepping stones across the shallow stream to the other side.

    • The Slow and Gradual Cure of Blindness

      “Great discoveries are but reflections on facts common to all. People have passed that way myriads of times and seen nothing; and one day the man of genius notices the links between what we do not know and what is every minute before our eyes. What is knowledge but the slow and gradual cure of blindness” – A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

      The accumulation of knowledge doesn’t make one an intellectual, though it might make one better at trivia. It’s the connection of the jigsaw pieces into a complete puzzle for all to see that makes the genius. Something to aspire to, I think, and something valued. The person who can draw together disparate bits of information and turn it into insight will have no problem working in a world with an increasingly short attention span.

      Becoming that sort of person takes time and a good filter. What do you say no to? The very distractions everyone else is obsessing over. Cultural, technological, social distractions designed to pull our attention from more productive uses to linger a moment just over here. Harmlessly fun. Distractingly fun. Blindingly fun.

      The people that see the obvious we’ve all been missing tend to look at the world through a different lens. Perspective matters, and we need those who can make sense of it all more than ever. Look around the world at the noise and you’ll see some folks are too eager to drink the Koolaid and less likely to ask “why?”

      There are exciting things happening at the genius bar. Rockets bringing telescopes to deep space. Huge advancements, accelerated by mRNA sequencing, in the treatment of disease. Robotics and Artificial Intelligence that have the potential to clear mechanical and intellectual hurdles humans have been unable or unwilling to clear. What will it all mean? And who’s paying enough attention to care?

      The way to get a stool at the genius bar is to think more deeply, seek new perspectives, read material that challenges you, visit places out of your comfort zone, and then weigh these new inputs against the stuff previously stored in your personal data center. Find the connections, find the contradictions, and make sense of it all over time. Here lies the cure for blindness. And maybe the hope for humanity.

    • Rest and Revovery

      “Rest is not death; it is life, and all life bears fruit.” – A.G. Sertillanges

      I worked my way back to the office to finish some work after dinner. There’s a lot to do lately. And it calls at me, nagging for more time. But getting to my desk, my chair was occupied by a cat with a different idea of how to live. Taking the hint, I decided to leave the work for another day and sit down to listen to music instead… and promptly fell asleep myself.

      The end of the year brings a certain level of chaotic completion with it. Things come together in the end, or they don’t and slip into the next year. What are we to do about it but our best?

      Proper rest is the key. Sleep, recover, begin again. The cat knows this, and deep down I do too.

    • Dancing in a State of Solitude

      “The spirit of silence must… pervade the whole of life. That is what matters most of all. It is said sometimes that solitude is the mother of results. Not solitude, but the state of solitude. So much so that we could, strictly speaking, conceive an intellectual life based on two hours’ work per day. But does anyone imagine that having set those two hours aside one may then act as if they did not exist? That would be a grave misconception. Those two hours are given to concentration, but the consecration of the whole life is none the less necessary.” — A.G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life

      Living in a state of solitude sounds lonely, but really it’s just the opposite. Lonely is feeling apart from the world, living with a spirit of silence opens you up to the world, to be a part of it. And this is where the magic happens, or, if you will, the consecration of life. To live sacredly, fully alive, fully aware, and full of possibility. This isn’t derived from background noise and distraction, but from quieting the mind and truly seeing.

      “A crowded world thinks that aloneness is always loneliness and that to seek it is perversion”
      — John Graves

      A coworker resigned earlier this week to return to a job he’d previously left, not because the current position wasn’t lucrative and full of growth potential, but because he felt lonely. What he meant by that was he couldn’t drop by to see old industry friends every week in a route, like someone delivering milk. This is a life of the familiar, and there’s comfort in it that we can all understand. The pandemic robbed us of much of this, and even as variants spike people stubbornly hold on to interaction with others because it’s a part of their lives they don’t want to be away from any longer. Who doesn’t understand the draw of the comfortable and familiar?

      A state of solitude turns inward, not to be antisocial or reclusive, but to open up the senses to awareness. Awareness of the inner tension inside of us helps us see that battle others have inside themselves. And this awareness leads to a state of receptiveness—to take in the world as it comes to you. I’m no expert on such things, but I can see that those hours of concentration have brought me closer to it.

      “When someone is anxious about being aware all the time, you can spot the mild anxiety. They want to be awake, to find out if they’re really awake or not. That’s part of asceticism, not awareness. It sounds strange in a culture where we’ve been trained to achieve goals, to get somewhere, but in fact there’s nowhere to go because you’re there already. ” — Anthony De Mello, Awareness

      Do you want to dance in your awareness? Seek solitude, wherever you might be. Walk in the natural world. Breath deep, listen and look at the world buzzing around you, look inside, and see. And you’ll find, in the stillness of that moment, that you’re already dancing with it.

    • Reaching Your Creative State

      “Do you want to do intellectual work? Begin by creating within you a zone of silence, a habit of recollection, a will to renunciation and detachment which puts you entirely at the disposal of the work; acquire that state of soul unburdened by desire and self-will which is the state of grace of the intellectual worker. Without that you will do nothing, at least nothing worth while.”
      – A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. The Intellectual Life

      Every day is a reinvention, a chance to be reborn into whatever you wish to become in this life. For me, this becoming is the whole point of living. But it begs the question—becoming what? Not an easy question, one most people immerse themselves in distraction to avoid answering (present company accepted). Blogging is a public sorting of this becoming bit. The messier work happens behind the scenes.

      When you have a general idea where your compass is pointing, you must put yourself in a state where you might execute on that vision for yourself. And this is where it gets tricky. All those skills you’ve learned to distract yourself from figuring out what you want to be when you grow up work equally well at keeping you from getting things done.

      “Creative people organize their lives according to repetitive, disciplined routines. They think like artists but work like accountants.” – David Brooks, “The Good Order” The New York Times

      And there lies the secret sauce to doing anything worthwhile: Repetitive, disciplined routines applied daily from now until… ad infinitum. Sertillanges calls this productive place your state of soul. A place where we can actualize the spirit of our deepest work and bring it to the world. What a gift. When you’re in this state, why would you ever want it to end?

      The trick to reaching this state of soul is hidden in plain sight: Establish routines and have the discipline to stick with them. Repeat. None of this is revelatory, what’s required is consistency of effort. So get to it. The world awaits your best work.