Is It Better to Be Loving than to Be Right?
Jeff Weiner, CEO of LinkedIn, in a New York Times interview:
Among many things that [my mentor Ray Chambers] has taught me are five rules for happiness. So the first one is living in the moment. The second is that it’s better to be loving than to be right, and if you’re in a relationship, you know how challenging that can be. The third one is to be a spectator to your own thoughts, especially when you become emotional, which is almost impossible to do. The fourth is to be grateful for at least one thing every day, and the last is to help others every chance you get.
The second rule stopped me: Is it really better to be loving than to be right?
A quick Google search revealed that I first heard of author Philip Roth in 2006, the year in which his book “Everyman” was published. I was a junior in college whose interestingness was closely correlated with how many NPR podcasts I’d listened to, so I figure that’s how I learned of the author, the book and its premise. Back then, Metacritic included book reviews, and with high ratings confirming my interest, I added the book to my reading list. Except I never got around to it. And this is despite his name coming up many times — America’s greatest living novelist! — in the past six years.
Well, now that Philip Roth is retiring from writing, his name has come up once again, a reminder of perhaps my longest lasting to-do. And yet, the first thing I have read is not one of his books but this 2008 profile of him in GQ, written by one of his most adoring fans, who realizes that his hero has zero interest in his readers’ adulation and refuses to be conflated with his work.
“So after all this nattering,” I say, “my question is: At the age of 75, do you walk around the world with your imagination lit up? So that you’re perpetually open to anything being writable, anything being a metaphor?”
“No.”
A silence.
“You have to remain…childlike? In a way?”
“You have to remain alert,” Roth says. “Which adults can do.”
An excellent bitch-slap.
“I’m not writing when I’m walking around,” he continues. “I can only really write when I’m alone in a place that’s mine, that I’m accustomed to, and there’s no interruption. I don’t have a phone. I don’t have anything that can distract me. And I spend the hours ruminating. If you spend six or seven hours ruminating on your invention, the next part of it will come to you. When I’m walking the streets, I don’t have that kind of concentration. Nor do I want to be writing when I’m not writing.”
The thing is, this unfussiness also defines Roth’s disregard, which comes with none of the accoutrement most people use (unthinkingly) to show disregard. No wandering eyes. No leaning back in his chair. No folding of hands behind the head. Philip Roth is entirely present when he disregards you, his body still, his eyes fixed on yours, his hands at rest on the table in front of him, his feet flat on the floor.
Only took 3 hours to edit the first video I’ve done in 10 months, of a spontaneous camping trip with friends last June.
Time lapse video of HD photographs taken onboard the International Space Station
Perhaps the same could be said about life itself.
Ergonomic experts at Cornell don’t recommend standing desks, instead:
Sit to do computer work. Sit using a height-adjustable, downward titling keyboard tray for the best work posture, then every 20 minutes stand for 2 minutes AND MOVE. The absolute time isn’t critical but about every 20-30 minutes take a posture break and move for a couple of minutes. Simply standing is insufficient.
![Stephen Fry:
The use of [the] phrase “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.
Steven Levy:
Once [Steve Jobs] recalled for me some of the long summers of his youth. “I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.” The man who popularized personal computers and smartphones — machines that would draw our attention like a flame attracts gnats — worried about the future of boredom. “All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”
Malcolm Gladwell:
I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge.
Jack Cheng:
In the coming years, Steve Jobs’s life and work will be even more scrutinized, even more imitated than they are now. But to simply ask “what would Steve do?” would be to miss the point. It would be accepting the very dogma he warned us against, living with the results of his thinking, not our own. To be true to Steve, we must listen to the music playing within each of us, and tune our actions accordingly. To honor his life, we must honor our own, taking inspration not merely from his actions and beliefs, but their integrity.](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lsryoe6XPx1qz57o3o1_500.png)
The use of [the] phrase “style over substance” has always been, as Oscar Wilde observed, a marvellous and instant indicator of a fool. For those who perceive a separation between the two have either not lived, thought, read or experienced the world with any degree of insight, imagination or connective intelligence. It may have been Leclerc Buffon who first said “le style c’est l’homme – the style is the man” but it is an observation that anyone with sense had understood centuries before, Only dullards crippled into cretinism by a fear of being thought pretentious could be so dumb as to believe that there is a distinction between design and use, between form and function, between style and substance.
Once [Steve Jobs] recalled for me some of the long summers of his youth. “I’m a big believer in boredom,” he told me. Boredom allows one to indulge in curiosity, he explained, and “out of curiosity comes everything.” The man who popularized personal computers and smartphones — machines that would draw our attention like a flame attracts gnats — worried about the future of boredom. “All the [technology] stuff is wonderful, but having nothing to do can be wonderful, too.”
I’ll know it when I see it. That was Jobs’s credo, and until he saw it his perfectionism kept him on edge.
In the coming years, Steve Jobs’s life and work will be even more scrutinized, even more imitated than they are now. But to simply ask “what would Steve do?” would be to miss the point. It would be accepting the very dogma he warned us against, living with the results of his thinking, not our own. To be true to Steve, we must listen to the music playing within each of us, and tune our actions accordingly. To honor his life, we must honor our own, taking inspration not merely from his actions and beliefs, but their integrity.
Susan Piver in the new edition of Emerson’s Self-Reliance.
I’ll take an honest person over a “nice” person every time.
New York Times:
In both studies, men watched videos of male and female same-sex intimacy while genital sensors monitored their erectile responses. While the [2005] study reported that the bisexuals generally resembled homosexuals in their responses, the new one finds that bisexual men responded to both the male and female videos, while gay and straight men in the study did not.
Bisexuals of the world, I’m sorry I doubted you.
Couchella > Coachella
Last April, instead of dropping serious coin on Coachella tickets, my friends and I threw a party, projected live streams of Coachella performances, and called it “Couchella”.
I made this music video with footage from my iPhone.
Andrew Sullivan thinks it’s a no-brainer — Obama:
Here are the political accomplishments: defeating the most heavily favored party machine in decades (the Clintons) while actually bringing his biggest rival into his cabinet, where she has performed extraordinarily well; helping to cement the GOP’s broad identity as extremists opposed to compromise; entrenching black and Hispanic loyalty to his party; retaining solid favorables and not-too-shabby approval ratings during the worst recession since the 1930s. 44 percent of the country still (rightly) blame Bush for this mess, only 15 percent blame Obama.
On policy: ending the US torture regime; prevention of a second Great Depression; enacting universal healthcare; taking the first serious steps toward reining in healthcare costs; two new female Supreme Court Justices; ending the gay ban in the military; ending the Iraq war; justifying his Afghan Surge by killing bin Laden and now disentangling with face saved; firming up alliances with India, Indonesia and Japan as counter-weights to China; bailing out the banks and auto companies without massive losses (and surging GM profits); advancing (slowly) balanced debt reduction without drastic cuts during the recession; and financial re-regulation.
Yes, there have been failures. The election of Scott Brown; the 2010 mid-terms; the surrender to Netanyahu and AIPAC; the botched and ill-conceived war in Libya; the failure to embrace Bowles Simpson up-front; the collapse of cap and trade (maybe not such a bad thing anyway). But notice what hasn’t happened. Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin? Where are his Katrinas and Monicas?
When I read commentaries expounding on the notion that this man is competely out of his depth, I just have to scratch my head. Given his inheritance, this has been the most substantive first term since Ronald Reagan’s. And given Obama’s long-game mentality, that is setting us up for a hell of a second one.
And if that’s not impressive enough.
