“Really? That was the answer?”
“That couldn’t have been the answer. It’s so…so…well, it’s so simple.”
Yes, that’s what I hope people will be saying, this time next week. Or perhaps on the tenth of February — my 53rd birthday. I hope they will say those types of things and realize that I am no different than anyone else — except that on this particular puzzle I probably was a little more diligent in my efforts to solve.
Stupid kid to figure out he could deduce the first steps to World Peace?
Stupid, sure. But the kind of kid it’s helpful to keep around. You have to preserve the way so that the dreamers can live here in peace, too. You have to make allowance for them.
It’s Kipling’s If stated in reverse:
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream — and not make dreams your master;
If you can think — and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings — nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And — which is more — you’ll be a Man, my son!
You must trust yourself even when all men doubt you. Even if every single last person on the earth — the ones you’ve talked to and the ones whose opinions you’re pretty sure you could imagine — even if all of them doubt you.
You have to do this; without this you will bring no new knowledge to the world with your four score and seven — should you be lucky enough to get that many.
You have to know that what Kipling said up there is ‘strangely true.’ You have to, at least as a child you must do this —
You have to be able to tell the difference between a wise man and a fool.
Like, that’s mission priority 1. I could explain it, but no one needs that done (exception: Han Solo.) Don’t explain what didn’t need explaining is what I say.
Which of course comes with the caboose: explain the things that do.
And also the boxcar: you still have to figure out the difference between what needs explaining and what doesn’t.
Yeah. I was a seriously mixed up kid. I didn’t know up from down. It’s a good thing my nose was always buried in Narnia or Aesop’s Fables or the Tales of the Brothers Grimm.
Good thing I thought of Gandhi as my greatest hero, with Einstein coming in a close second. *[didn’t discover Darwin or Dawkins until much, much later. I wonder how far I might have come — and how fast — had I known about those guys a little more completely or earlier.]
I had a voracious appetite for knowledge. I loved facts, too, but it was easy to know — early on, even — that knowing all the words in the dictionary was just…well, kind of wasteful of my processing power. Same held true with the encyclopedia.
You could know…well, let’s just say you could definitely know the paltry number of English words I know and do a reasonably good job of describing the way you saw things.
The way you saw things. The way you’d emphatically declare “they just were.”
You should not really need to be Napoleon Hill to know that
“Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve.”
You don’t have to be a wise man to be stubborn, but you do have to be a wise man to realize how stubborn you should be.
This is a familiar concept for people, I’m sure, but I daresay I’ve never heard it formally stated, the longest form (as I can think of it for the moment) is:
A wise man is a man who knows when and where to be stubborn.
A wise man knows that, although there certainly are many different approaches to doing any given thing we might wish to do there is only one way which is the best of them all.
Perhaps some people are shaking their heads. Perhaps I’ve ‘lost’ a few people…perhaps they don’t believe me.
To those I say, forget (for a moment) one particular part of your Kipling. Forget this part:
“And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise”
Forget that you ‘know’ that you should ‘never’ look too good or talk too wise.
For a few solitary moments in these fifty or sixty or eighty or twenty million minutes of our lives please forget what incredibly wise man #ER56–7891 said about
the attention we should give to what others think of what we’re doing when we’re doing it.
Forget for a moment the almost-always-true idea that you should never ‘make’ people feel bad, or lesser, or worse. I say forget that you think you can “make up their minds” about you by something so trifling and so simple as perhaps
mistakenly
behaving slightly better than they’ve yet learnt how to behave.
In other words, just because Kipling said to do it *(remember now, it was during the course of trying to ‘compress’ what he knew down to an ‘easily carry-able’ lesson)* as I say, just because Kipling said to do it that way
Doesn’t mean he said you had to (or should, which might be even more important) do it that way.
Simpler if you think of yourself talking to the man and saying, “What did you mean by this, Rud? Did you mean never ‘look too good’ and never ‘talk too wise’?”
None of this is hard. It couldn’t be hard. It’s just a keyboard sitting here, after all. It’s just a matter of figuring out which series of keys to press.
I told you it was not that complicated.
It certainly appears to be complicated. It certainly appears to be something we like to, perhaps good-naturedly, “tease” people with words like,
“Well, it’s complicated.”
We’ve said that. All of us have. Certainly when tired more often than when not tired. More often when we are frustrated than when we are not.
More often when we allow ourselves to be convinced that another person ‘can’t get it’ than when we allow ourselves to believe that they can.
My belief is that any person — any person who is perhaps at least ten, though some kids today are certainly far more amazing in their fast-deductions about the world around them — any person, I say, can know these things just as surely as I know them.
Many people will no doubt learn them far better than have I.
The only difference with me is that I learned virtually everything I know the hard way.
I did this life like a road test. Precisely so. And I pushed my poor heart so hard that I wound up with a-fib among other things.
I broke my own heart long before you broke it, Anna. Or you did, EJ. Or the rest of you did, and you know who you are.
Elon broke my heart when I tried as best I could to help him and everyone I talked to at Tesla branded me a dangerous fool of the most epic proportions. They branded me. Top to bottom — though in complete fairness I didn’t meet all of them.
I was not smart enough to work for Tesla. I was not smart enough even to warrant a reply to several applications.
But was I not smart enough or was I not obedient enough? Obedient to the “conventional approach” to things has never been my strong suit.
Obedient even to the proven but unconventional approaches of the exemplary people who find themselves daily huddled ‘under the roofs of’ Tesla, SpaceX, and the Boring Company — to name a few — well, that much obedience was not something I think anyone could ever coax out of me.
Not even if Elon personally told me he’d hand me $10 billion to just sit still and don’t alarm the humans all around us.
*I* am not alarming. I am sounding the alarm.
Those two? Very different.
I am obedient to first principles. That’s all. And now you are beginning to see the current limits to which a person can take things…
one…
step…
too far.
One step too far is still too far, guys. One step too far is still all it takes. And you may not think of things that way. You may not.
Yet. Not yet you don’t.
Yes, that’s how I’ll say, because someday you may come to consider them (your steps) as I do. As a ‘one at a time’ thing.
One too many days of one too many people following the wrong kind of leader and we will (not just might) end up in a place we just plain can never return from.
Please, if you like this piece, write a 100 word comment. Long as you like, surely, but if you liked it please put 100 words together which reflect your appreciation. I do not normally ask for such conventional rewards from people; I usually just ask them to listen to me for a few minutes.
This time, don’t clap more than once if you wish to clap, and leave not less than but rather at least 100 words for me to look over.
I don’t need to see the way I see things any more thoroughly or clearly than I already do. I need to see the way *you* see things, and among your comments I hope some will at least share with me what their sincere evaluations of what this work
this work which is the culmination of an entire life’s worth of effort
means.
I want to know what you think it means.
Thanks.
OPeace Out.
This one is also worth watching. Without it, I would not have survived this.
You may also want to listen to this:
I have simply been through a heart-wrenching catacomb; I have long been alone and seen things I daresay no man has ever seen — though I would not for one single second believe that these are things others cannot also see.
I will not hear my thoughts taken as the thoughts of a fool, anymore.
Whoever I answer to, I will not listen to those fools who would call me a fool — merely because it is the simplest explanation for why a person would endeavor to deliberately force themselves through the life I lived.
The truth of it is really that I didn’t even do it for God. I didn’t know He was around before I did it.
I did it for the rest of you.
