Alexandersmap

    Tag: Thomas Mann

    • Beyond Clever

      “There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst.” ― Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

      Clever is one-upmanship. It’s not really listening to what someone is saying, it’s waiting for them to stop talking so you can say something to show how on-the-ball you are. Clever is different from bright and funny. It doesn’t take very long to know you’re in the presence of someone working to be clever. Like porn, we know it when we see it. And we aren’t the better for having stumbled across it.

      I used to work to be clever, until I began to see that clever was weakness on display. It’s a way for insecurity to escape and join the conversation. Whoever really said that it’s “better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and to remove all doubt.” was on to something.

      But then I changed again. When everyone is silently waiting for someone to speak up, there ought to be someone who speaks up. Not to be clever or foolish, but to be engaged. To draw out the perspective of another soul and mix it with our own, just to see what develops. Sometimes nothing much develops, and sometimes there’s magic. Who’s to know which unless we practice a little alchemy?

      The practice of conversational alchemy utilizes empathy and focused listening to draw out deeper conversations with others. Which sounds like a clever way of saying that one is a good listener. But being a good listener doesn’t mean much without having something to offer to the conversation as well. Listening skills are one of the leading indicators of success in life, but so is a willingness to go out and experience things from which to build one’s own knowledge and skill, insight and perspective.

      Unless we have a career as a therapist, socialite, salesperson or investigator, aspiring to be a conversational alchemist shouldn’t be our primary aim. But it’s a life skill worth developing to maximize the experience of living through deeper and richer conversation. We ought to engage with others and learn from their experience as well if we are to reach our own potential within the tribe. The tribal experience isn’t everything, and surely not the only path to personal excellence, but engagement with others offers a broad and rich life, perhaps more than simply going it alone.

      Henry David Thoreau, retreating to his cabin by Walden Pond, had regular visitors and a curated ability to communicate with others. That perspective made him a better writer, even as his inclination to retreat to the woods made him an oddball to some in the community. But that retreat also made him a better writer. We can be both engaged with society and strategically removed from it. The right balance is intuitive. Listening to ourselves is another essential skill developed over time.

      “Seek first to understand, and then to be understood.” — Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

      There’s a reason that seeking to understand makes us highly effective people. Each person we effectively engage with becomes another ally in our growing tribe. It was never about being clever, it’s always been about development of the self in a social world. We may sometimes have a desire to go free solo, but in reality we’re all in this together. Our bond is somewhere well beyond clever waiting for us to reach it.

    • Weaving a More Effective Life

      “Habit is a rope. We weave a thread every day, and eventually we can’t break it.” — Thomas Mann

      “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” — Aristotle

      This business of repeatedly doing is leading somewhere, with our destination highly dependent on what we repeatedly do. Such is the way. Mann’s observation rings true as well, for habits become nearly impossible to break once established. Each small choice is another thread—another resounding, audacious statement about who we want to be.

      Our natural inclination is to be a part of something. To build an identity around community or family. This can reinforce positive behavior, or amplify the worst in us. The choice isn’t always ours to decide which pond to swim in, but we may choose whether to keep treading above the surface or drift down into the muck on the bottom.

      When our identity is wrapped up in a community that is slowly drifting away, as people get older or recede from view towards other communities, we also choose how to react to that. People come and go. Our health and work and feelings about the world we live in change moment-to-moment. To be highly effective in life we ought to weave a thread of consistent activity that remains independent of the whims of fate. When the world unravels around us, and eventually it will feel that way for all of us, just how resilient are we?

      “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”— Viktor Frankl

      Life is constantly testing our mettle. We control so very little in the big scheme of things. Frankl’s famous observation reminds us that we do get to choose how we react. We have a say in what we might become in our brief dance with the universe in all its harsh indifference. We still might decide what to be and go be it.