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119. The Problem of Pain

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   C.S. Lewis

Genre:  Christian, Theology, Non-Fiction

176 pages, published 1940

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

For centuries people have tried to answer the existential question: If God is good and all-powerful, why does he allow human beings to suffer pain? And why do animals suffer when they neither deserve pain nor can be improved by it?  C.S. Lewis, one of the twentieth century’s greatest Christian thinker, endeavors to answer this tough questions and make his case for God.   

 

Quotes

“We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

 

“To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity.”

 

“We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it’s there for emergencies but he hopes he’ll never have to use it.”

 

“Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself”

 

“The human spirit will not even begin to try to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it. Now error and sin both have this property, that the deeper they are the less their victim suspects their existence; they are masked evil. Pain is unmasked, unmistakable evil; every man knows that something is wrong when he is being hurt.”

 

“A man can no more diminish God’s glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word ‘darkness’ on the walls of his cell.”

 

“His Omnipotence means power to do all that is intrinsically possible, not to do the intrinsically impossible. You may attribute miracles to Him, but not nonsense. There is no limit to His power.

If you choose to say, ‘God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it,’ you have not succeeded in saying anything about God: meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prifex to them the two other words, ‘God can.’ It remains true that all things are possible with God: the intrinsic impossibilities are not things but nonentities. It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.”

 

“Love may, indeed, love the beloved when her beauty is lost: but not because it is lost. Love may forgive all infirmities and love still in spite of them: but Love cannot cease to will their removal. Love is more sensitive than hatred itself to every blemish in the beloved… Of all powers he forgives most, but he condones least: he is pleased with little, but demands all.”

 

“The real problem is not why some pious, humble, believing people suffer, but why some do not.”

 

“For you will certainly carry out God’s purpose, however you act, but it makes a difference to you whether you serve like Judas or like John.”

 

“The mold in which a key is made would be a strange thing, if you had never seen a key: and the key itself a strange thing if you had never seen a lock. Your soul has a curious shape because it is a hollow made to fit a particular swelling in the infinite contours of the divine substance, or a key to unlock one of the doors in the house with many mansions.  Your place in heaven will seem to be made for you and you alone, because you were made for it — made for it stitch by stitch as a glove is made for a hand.”

 

“Mental pain is less dramatic than physical pain, but it is more common and also more hard to bear. The frequent attempt to conceal mental pain increases the burden: it is easier to say “My tooth is aching” than to say “My heart is broken.”

 

“All your life an unattainable ecstasy has hovered just beyond the grasp of your consciousness. The day is coming when you will wake to find, beyond all hope, that you have attained it, or else, that it was within your reach and you have lost it forever.”

 

“My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else.”

 

“Let me implore the reader to try to believe, if only for a moment, that God, who made these deserving people, may really be right when He thinks that their modest prosperity and the happiness of their children are not enough to make them blessed: that all this must fall from them in the end, and if they have not learned to know Him they will be wretched. And therefore He troubles them, warning them in advance of an insufficiency that one day they will have to discover. The life to themselves and their families stands between them and the recognition of their need; He makes that life less sweet to them.  If God were proud He would hardly have us on such terms: but He is not proud, He stoops to conquer, He will have us even though we have shown that we prefer everything else to Him, and come to Him because there is ‘nothing better’ now to be had.”

 

“The problem of reconciling human suffering with the existence of a God who loves, is only insoluble so long as we attach a trivial meaning to the word “love”, and look on things as if man were the centre of them. Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake. “Thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created.” We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us, that we may become objects in which the divine love may rest “well pleased”.”

 

“Everyone feels benevolent if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.”

 

“Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.”

 

“Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it — tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest — if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself — you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say “Here at last is the thing I was made for.”

 

“We are, not metaphorically but in very truth, a Divine work of art, something that God is making, and therefore something with which He will not be satisfied until it has a certain character. Here again we come up against what I have called the “intolerable compliment.” Over a sketch made idly to amuse a child, an artist may not take much trouble: he may be content to let it go even though it is not exactly as he meant it to be. But over the great picture of his life—the work which he loves, though in a different fashion, as intensely as a man loves a woman or a mother a child—he will take endless trouble—and would doubtless, thereby give endless trouble to the picture if it were sentient. One can imagine a sentient picture, after being rubbed and scraped and re-commenced for the tenth time, wishing that it were only a thumb-nail sketch whose making was over in a minute. In the same way, it is natural for us to wish that God had designed for us a less glorious and less arduous destiny; but then we are wishing not for more love but for less.”

 

“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble.”

My Take

When I listened to the audiobook version of The Problem of Pain, I had just finished reading two books about St. Paul (I Live, No Longer I and Galations for You).  Since a large part of Pauline theology discussed in these books deals with how we approach human suffering, I was receptive to the message of The Problem of Pain, i.e. human suffering is necessary to bring us closer to God.  When everything is going well in my life, my thoughts only sometimes turn to God.  It is only when the world is crashing down do I really implore God for help.  As C.S. Lewis so eloquently explains, if we handle it correctly, the suffering that we necessarily experience as human beings can help mold us into better people.  In The Problem of Pain, Lewis implores us to take a hard look at how we are living our lives and consider whether our actions are bringing us closer to God.

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118. Galatians for You

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  First Presbyterian Church

Author:   Timothy Keller

Genre:  Christian, Theology, Non-Fiction

199 pages, published February 12, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The first book in a series of expository guides to the Bible, Timothy Keller’s Galatians For You closely examines the text of Galatians and demonstrates how it relates to your own life.  

 

Quotes

“Our hearts love to manufacture glory for themselves.”

 

“But we need to realize that there are deeper harvests that happen even when we don’t meet with much outward success. We will find our own character changing deeply through ministry. Our consciences will be clear and our hearts happier, since we’re less self-indulgent. We’ll develop a less selfish and more satisfied character, which will serve us well when we are under pressure. We may not reap quickly, and we may not see all that we reap; but we can know that there is a great harvest for those who sow to please the Spirit.”

 

“Verse 20 is a restatement of verse 14: we need to live our lives “in line” with the truth of the gospel. Now that Christ’s life is my life, Christ’s past is my past. I am “in Christ” (v 17), which means that I am as free from condemnation before God as if I had already died and been judged, as if I had paid the debt myself. And I am as loved by God as if I had lived the life Christ lived. So “it is not me that lives, but Christ” is a triumphant reminder that, though “we ourselves are sinners”, in Christ we are righteous.”

 

“Now when I live my life and make my choices and do my work, I do so remembering who I am by faith in Christ, who loved me so much! The inner dynamic for living the Christian life is right here! Only when I see myself as completely loved and holy in Christ will I have the power to repent with joy, conquer my fears, and obey the One who did all this for me. Everything or Nothing? It’s worth remembering that Paul is still speaking to Peter here! And so he finishes by reminding Peter that the Christian life is about living in line with the gospel throughout the whole of life, for the whole of our lives. We must go on as Christians as we started as Christians. After all, if at any point and in any way “righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing!” (v 21). Christ will do everything for you, or nothing. You cannot combine merit and grace.”

 

“If justification is by the law in any way, Christ’s death is meaningless in history and meaningless to you personally. Imagine that your house were burning down but your whole family had escaped, and I said to you: Let me show you how much I love you! and ran into the house and died. What a tragic and pointless waste of a life, you would probably think. But now imagine that your house was on fire and one of your children was still in there, and I said to you: Let me show you how much I love you!, ran into the flames, and saved your child but perished myself. You would think: Look at how much that man loved us. If we could save ourselves, Christ’s death is pointless, and means nothing. If we realize we cannot save ourselves, Christ’s death will mean everything to us. And we will spend the life that He has given us in joyful service of Him, bringing our whole lives into line with the gospel.”

 

“The gospel comes and turns them all upside down. It says: You are in such a hopeless position that you need a rescue that has nothing to do with you at all. And then it says: God in Jesus provides a rescue which gives you far more than any false salvation your heart may love to chase.”

 

“Christians who are no longer sure that God loves and accepts them in Jesus, apart from their present spiritual achievements, are subconsciously radically insecure persons, much less secure than non-Christians, because of the constant bulletins they receive from their Christian environment about the holiness of God and the righteousness they are supposed to have. Their insecurity shows itself in pride, a fierce defensive assertion of their own righteousness and defensive criticism of others. They cling desperately to legal, pharisaical righteousness, but envy [and] jealousy and other … sin grow out of their fundamental insecurity.”

 

“Second, the gospel leads to emotional freedom. Anyone who believes that our relationship with God is based on keeping up moral behavior is on an endless treadmill of guilt and insecurity. As we know from Paul’s letters, he did not free Gentile believers from the moral imperatives of the Ten Commandments. Christians could not lie, steal, commit adultery and so on. But though not free from the moral law as a way to live, Christians are free from it as a system of salvation. We obey not in the fear and insecurity of hoping to earn our salvation, but in the freedom and security of knowing we are already saved in Christ. We obey in the freedom of gratitude. So both the false teachers and Paul told Christians to obey the Ten Commandments, but for totally different reasons and motives. And unless your motive for obeying God’s law is the grace-gratitude motive of the gospel, you are in slavery. The gospel provides freedom, culturally and emotionally. The “other gospel” destroys both.”

My Take

I read Galations for You as part of a Women’s Bible Study at my church.  The book and Keller’s questions interspersed throughout the text sparked some excellent conversations that allowed us to go deep into our faith.  I also appreciated Keller’s careful analysis of the seemingly contradictory concepts of being saved by accepting Christ rather than by “following legalistic biblical precepts,” but that the life of anyone who truly accepts Christ will necessarily reflect those precepts.  Good food for thought.

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116. Everything That Remains: A Memoir by the Minimalists

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Authors:   Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus

Genre:  Memoir, Self-Improvement

234 pages, published December 23, 2013

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Well known for their website on minimalism, Joshua Fields Millburn and Ryan Nicodemus ask the reader to consider the question of what if everything you ever wanted isn’t what you actually want?  On the corporate fast track in his late twenties, Millburn thought he had it all.  A wife, an executive position with the promise of upward mobility, a large house filled with designer furniture and objects, and a late model car.  After losing both his mother and his marriage in the same month, Millburn started questioning every aspect of the life he had built for himself, ditched almost all of his belongings and discovered a lifestyle known as minimalism.  Everything That Remains tells the story of Millburn’s journey with commentary provided by his best friend and fellow minimalist Nicodemus.  

 

Quotes

“The things you own end up owning you.”

 

“You can’t change the people around you, but you can change the people around you.”

 

“For me, minimalism has never been about deprivation. Rather, minimalism is about getting rid of life’s excess in favor of the essential.”

 

“We’re taught to work foolishly hard for a non-living entity, donating our most precious commodity—our time—for a paycheck.”

 

“A ROLEX WON’T GIVE YOU MORE TIME”

 

“Unless you contribute beyond yourself, your life will feel perpetually self-serving. It’s okay to operate in your own self-interest, but doing so exclusively creates an empty existence. A life without contribution is a life without meaning. The truth is that giving is living. We only feel truly alive when we are growing as individuals and contributing beyond ourselves. That’s what a real life is all about.”

 

“Now, before I spend money I ask myself one question: Is this worth my freedom? Like: Is this coffee worth two dollars of my freedom? Is this shirt worth thirty dollars of my freedom? Is this car worth thirty thousand dollars of my freedom? In other words, am I going to get more value from the thing I’m about to purchase, or am I going to get more value from my freedom?”

 

“The most important reason to live in the moment is nothing lasts forever. Enjoy the moment while it’s in front of you. Be present. Accept life for what it is: a finite span of time with infinite possibilities.”

 

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

 

“Truthfully, though, most organizing is nothing more than well-planned hoarding.”

 

“In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never feel you have enough. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, you will end up feeling like a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”  —David Foster Wallace, This Is Water”

 

“Success = Happiness + Constant Improvement”

 

“a career is one of the most dangerous things you can have if you want to find fulfillment.”

 

“Happiness, as far as we are concerned, is achieved through living a meaningful life, a life that is filled with passion and freedom, a life in which we can grow as individuals and contribute to other people in meaningful ways. Growth and contribution: those are the bedrocks of happiness. Not stuff. This may not sound sexy or marketable or sellable, but it’s the cold truth. Humans are happy if we are growing as individuals and if we are contributing beyond ourselves. Without growth, and without a deliberate effort to help others, we are just slaves to cultural expectations, ensnared by the trappings of money and power and status and perceived success.”

 

“When purchasing gifts becomes the focal point of the season, we lose focus on what’s truly important.”

 

“Go without. This option is almost taboo in our culture. It seems radical to many people. Why would I go without when I could just buy a new one? Often this option is the best option, though. When we go without, it forces us to question our stuff, it forces us to discover whether or not we need it—and sometimes we discover life without it is actually better than before.”

 

“People often avoid the truth for fear of destroying the illusions they’ve built.”

 

“When I had the opportunity to meet Leo Babauta four months ago during a trip to San Francisco, he said there were three things that significantly changed his life: establishing habits he enjoyed, simplifying his life, and living with no goals.”

 

“Ultimately most of us come to believe there’s more value in a paycheck—and all the stuff that paycheck can buy us—than there is in life itself.”

 

“After a series of promotions—store manager at twenty-two, regional manager at twenty-four, director at twenty-seven—I was a fast-track career man, a personage of sorts. If I worked really hard, and if everything happened exactly like it was supposed to, then I could be a vice president by thirty-two, a senior vice president by thirty-five or forty, and a C-level executive—CFO, COO, CEO—by forty-five or fifty, followed of course by the golden parachute. I’d have it made then! I’d just have to be miserable for a few more years, to drudge through the corporate politics and bureaucracy I knew so well. Just keep climbing and don’t look down. Misery, of course, encourages others to pull up a chair and stay a while. And so, five years ago, I convinced my best friend Ryan to join me on the ladder, even showed him the first rung. The ascent is exhilarating to rookies. They see limitless potential and endless possibilities, allured by the promise of bigger paychecks and sophisticated titles. What’s not to like? He too climbed the ladder, maneuvering each step with lapidary precision, becoming one of the top salespeople—and later, top sales managers—in the entire company.10 And now here we are, submerged in fluorescent light, young and ostensibly successful. A few years ago, a mentor of mine, a successful businessman named Karl, said to me, “You shouldn’t ask a man who earns twenty thousand dollars a year how to make a hundred thousand.” Perhaps this apothegm holds true for discontented men and happiness, as well. All these guys I emulate—the men I most want to be like, the VPs and executives—aren’t happy. In fact, they’re miserable.  Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t bad people, but their careers have changed them, altered them physically and emotionally: they explode with anger over insignificant inconveniences; they are overweight and out of shape; they scowl with furrowed brows and complain constantly as if the world is conspiring against them, or they feign sham optimism which fools no one; they are on their second or third or fourth(!) marriages; and they almost all seem lonely. Utterly alone in a sea of yes-men and women. Don’t even get me started on their health issues.  I’m talking serious health issues: obesity, gout, cancer, heart attacks, high blood pressure, you name it. These guys are plagued with every ailment associated with stress and anxiety. Some even wear it as a morbid badge of honor, as if it’s noble or courageous or something. A coworker, a good friend of mine on a similar trajectory, recently had his first heart attack—at age thirty.  But I’m the exception, right?”

My Take

After taking and keeping a “no-buy” pledge last year (something everyone should try), I was interested in learning more about the concept and culture of minimalism.  Everything that Remains fulfilled that desire.  Millburn recounts his inspiring journey from an unhealthy, overweight, dissatisfied workaholic with a lot of stuff to a relaxed, content, fit person who enjoys and is fulfilled by the present.  This book made me think about the wisdom of always acquiring more and better things and challenged me to be happy with what I have or, even better, with a lot less than what I have.

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114. Reimagine Government, a 21st Century Solution

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Christopher Funk

Author:   Christopher Funk

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Public Policy

100 pages, published 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Reimagine Government casts a critical eye on our current political system and proposes another solution based on the rapid technological change that the United States and the world will experience during the next 20 years due primarily to information technology and artificial intelligence.  Funk argues that intelligent systems prospective ability to outperform their human counterparts means that we will finally have the means to solve some of our most intractable problems.  His main focus is what this paradigm shift will mean for our government and envisions a new form of government comprised of intelligent systems rather than human politicians.   Citizens would evaluate and vote for plans rather than candidates and the intelligent systems would implement the plans.

 

My Take

Full disclosure, Reimagine Government was written and self-published by my father, Chris Funk.  He asked me to read it prior to a weekend visit and I was happy to comply.  The reading style is easy.  It is not dense at all.  In the first part of the book, he identifies numerous problems facing our nation and the world.  While I did not agree with his take on the nature and scope of the problems (eg. I don’t think income inequality is per se a big problem), I think he did a good job with this section.  My disagreement with his thesis arose with his solution.  He advocates an all citizen vote for different plans to then be implemented by intelligent systems.  As an attorney with a great deal of admiration and belief in the United States Constitution, I would never voluntarily agree to scrap our founding document and trust the majority and the machines with our precious Constitutional rights.

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113. Escape to Cabo

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Pam Dupont

Author:   S. A. Lapoint

Genre:  Memoir, Crime

221 pages, published October 14, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Scott Frieze (aka S. A. Lapoint) had a comfortable life in Tuscon until he decided to act on his lifelong fantasy of robbing a bank.  He got away the first time, but during his second bank job, he was apprehended and thrown into the maw of our criminal justice system.  Escape to Cabo documents how he got there and his pre and post incarceration experience.

  
My Take

Escape to Cabo was assigned by my fellow book group member Pam Dupont in anticipation of a trip with our book group to her condo in San Jose del Cabo.  Pam had met the author while in Cabo and thought it would be fun to read this book before our journey.  She was right.  It was a fun read.

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112. The Rosie Effect

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:   Graeme Simsion

Genre:  Fiction, Humor

368 pages, published July 21, 2015

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

The Rosie Effect, which is the sequel to The Rosie Project, follows Don Tillman and Rosie Jarman after they marry and move to New York to study and work at Columbia.  The happy couple faces a new challenge when Rosie discovers she is pregnant.  Don, whose Asperger’s Syndrome makes him a unique and unforgettable character, decides to learn all that he can about becoming a father.  However, it doesn’t take long for his unusual research style to get him into trouble.

 

Quotes

“I thought you were happy about having a baby.’ I was happy in the way that I would be happy if the captain of an aircraft in which I was travelling announced that he had succeeded in restarting one engine after both had failed. Pleased that I would now probably survive, but shocked that the situation had arisen in the first place, and expecting a thorough investigation into the circumstances.”

 

“To the world’s most perfect woman.’ It was lucky my father was not present. Perfect is an absolute that cannot be modified, like unique or pregnant. My love for Rosie was so powerful that it had caused my brain to make a grammatical error.”

 

“It is generally accepted that people enjoy surprises: hence the traditions associated with Christmas, birthdays, and anniversaries. In my experience, most of the pleasure accrues to the giver. The victim is frequently under pressure to feign, at short notice, a positive response to an unwanted object or unscheduled event.”

 

“Watch some kids, watch them play. You’ll see they’re just little adults, only they don’t know all the rules and tricks yet.”

 

“before sharing interesting information that has not been solicited, think carefully about whether it has the potential to cause distress.”

 

“After the most basic physical requirements are satisfied, human happiness is almost independent of wealth. A meaningful job is far more important.”

 

“In marriage reason frequently had to take second place to Harmony”

 

“I watched as she took a second sip, imagining alcohol crossing the placental wall, damaging brain cells, reducing our unborn child from a future Einstein to a physicist who would fall just short of taking science to a new level. A child who would never have the experience described by Richard Feynman of knowing something about the universe that no one had before”

 

“One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich laying bricks in Siberia probably generated a higher level of happiness than one day in the life of a retired rock star in a Manhattan penthouse with all the beer he could drink. Work was crucial to sanity. Which was probably why George continued to perform on the cruise ship.”

 

“It was odd, paradoxical-crazy-that what Rosie seemed to value most about me, a highly organized person who avoided uncertainty and liked to plan in detail, was that my behavior generated unpredictable consequences. But if that was what she loved, I was not going to argue. What I was going to argue was that she should not abandon something she valued.”

 

“Rain Man! I had seen the film. I did not identify in any way with Rain Man, who was inarticulate, dependent, and unemployable. A society of Rain Men would be dysfunctional. A society of Don Tillmans would be efficient, safe, and pleasant for all of us.”

My Take

During the first year of my thousand book quest, I read The Rosie Project and really enjoyed it.  It was clever, light and fun and had a great character in the person of Don Tillman whose Asperger’s Syndrome made for some hilarious situations and dialogue.  In The Rosie Project, Don is looking for a wife and approaches the endeavor with his characteristic logical mind only to end up with the unlikely choice of Rosie Jarmon.  In The Rosie Effect, author Graeme Simsion relies upon a similar formula, but this time applies it to Don’s impending fatherhood.  It’s not quite as clever and fun as the first book, but it was still a treat to read it and there are truly some very funny moments that had me laughing.

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95. Ordinary People

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Marianne Boeke

Author:   Judith Guest

Genre:  Fiction

263 pages, published October 28, 1982

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

Ordinary People is set in upper class town of Lake Forest, Illinois during the 1970s and tells the story of the Jarrett family, parents Calvin and Beth and their son Conrad.  Before the action of the book begins, there was a second Jarrett son, Buck, who was killed in a boating accident while his brother Conrad survived.  The book focuses on Conrad’s coming to grips with his brother’s death.  While Conrad is shunned by his beautiful and perfect, but ultimately cold-hearted mother, his therapist and father are there to help him survive.  

 

Quotes

“Feeling is not selective, I keep telling you that. You can’t feel pain, you aren’t gonna feel anything else, either.”

 

“People have a right to be the way they are.”

 

“Riding the train gives him too much time to think, he has decided. Too much thinking can ruin you.”

 

“Depending on the reality one must face, one may prefer to opt for illusion.”

 

“The small seed of despair cracks open and sends experimental tendrils upward to the fragile skin of calm holding him together.”

 

“Life is not a series of pathetic, meaningless actions. Some of them are so far from pathetic, so far from meaningless as to be beyond reason, maybe beyond forgiveness.”

My Take

I saw the movie version of Ordinary People (a pretty good movie, but undeserving of the Best Picture Oscar) back when it was released in 1980 and was constantly comparing the novel to the movie while reading it.  While the novel is not as good as the movie, it is still readable (while seeming a little dated) and managed to hold my attention.  I found the character study of the ice queen mother Beth to be particularly interesting.  Too bad there wasn’t more of her story in the book.

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90. Ego is the Enemy

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Ryan Holiday

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Philosophy, Psychology, Self-Improvement

226 pages, published June 14, 2016

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

In his book Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday demonstrates how the primary obstruction to a full, successful life is not the outside world, but rather our ego.   In addition to being an author, Holiday is a media strategist, the former Director of Marketing for American Apparel and a media columnist and editor-at-large for the New York Observer.  In Ego is the Enemy, he provides a selection of stories and examples, from literature to philosophy to history to highlight the role that ego plays in our success.  His profiles include historical figures such as Howard Hughes, Katharine Graham, Bill Belichick, and Eleanor Roosevelt and shows how they reached the highest levels of power and success by conquering their own egos.

 

Quotes

“ego is the enemy of what you want and of what you have: Of mastering a craft. Of real creative insight. Of working well with others. Of building loyalty and support. Of longevity. Of repeating and retaining your success. It repulses advantages and opportunities. It’s a magnet for enemies and errors. It is Scylla and Charybdis.”

 

“Your potential, the absolute best you’re capable of—that’s the metric to measure yourself against. Your standards are. Winning is not enough. People can get lucky and win. People can be assholes and win. Anyone can win. But not everyone is the best possible version of themselves.”

 

“Impressing people is utterly different from being truly impressive.”

 

“Most successful people are people you’ve never heard of. They want it that way. It keeps them sober. It helps them do their jobs.”

 

“And that’s what is so insidious about talk. Anyone can talk about himself or herself. Even a child knows how to gossip and chatter. Most people are decent at hype and sales. So what is scarce and rare? Silence. The ability to deliberately keep yourself out of the conversation and subsist without its validation. Silence is the respite of the confident and the strong.”

 

“It’s a temptation that exists for everyone—for talk and hype to replace action.”

 

“Almost universally, the kind of performance we give on social media is positive. It’s more “Let me tell you how well things are going. Look how great I am.” It’s rarely the truth: “I’m scared. I’m struggling. I don’t know.”

 

“When success begins to slip from your fingers—for whatever reason—the response isn’t to grip and claw so hard that you shatter it to pieces. It’s to understand that you must work yourself back to the aspirational phase. You must get back to first principles and best practices.”

 

“Attempting to destroy something out of hate or ego often ensures that it will be preserved and disseminated forever.”

 

“It’s not that he was wrong to have great ambitions. Alexander just never grasped Aristotle’s “golden mean”—that is, the middle ground. Repeatedly, Aristotle speaks of virtue and excellence as points along a spectrum. Courage, for instance, lies between cowardice on one end and recklessness on the other. Generosity, which we all admire, must stop short of either profligacy and parsimony in order to be of any use. Where the line—this golden mean—is can be difficult to tell, but without finding it, we risk dangerous extremes. This is why it is so hard to be excellent, Aristotle wrote. “In each case, it is hard work to find the intermediate; for instance, not everyone, but only one who knows, finds the midpoint in a circle.”

 

“People learn from their failures. Seldom do they learn anything from success.”

 

“One might say that the ability to evaluate one’s own ability is the most important skill of all. Without it, improvement is impossible. And certainly ego makes it difficult every step of the way. It is certainly more pleasurable to focus on our talents and strengths, but where does that get us? Arrogance and self-absorption inhibit growth. So does fantasy and “vision.”

 

“The only real failure is abandoning your principles. Killing what you love because you can’t bear to part from it is selfish and stupid. If your reputation can’t absorb a few blows, it wasn’t worth anything in the first place.”

 

“Take inventory for a second. What do you dislike? Whose name fills you with revulsion and rage? Now ask: Have these strong feelings really helped you accomplish anything? Take an even wider inventory. Where has hatred and rage ever really gotten anyone? Especially because almost universally, the traits or behaviors that have pissed us off in other people—their dishonesty, their selfishness, their laziness—are hardly going to work out well for them in the end. Their ego and shortsightedness contains its own punishment. The question we must ask for ourselves is: Are we going to be miserable just because other people are?”

 

“In failure or adversity, it’s so easy to hate. Hate defers blame. It makes someone else responsible. It’s a distraction too; we don’t do much else when we’re busy getting revenge or investigating the wrongs that have supposedly been done to us.”

 

“Pride blunts the very instrument we need to own in order to succeed: our mind. Our ability to learn, to adapt, to be flexible, to build relationships, all of this is dulled by pride.”

 

“The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool. —RICHARD FEYNMAN”

 

“And why should we feel anger at the world? As if the world would notice! —EURIPIDES”

 

“The world can show you the truth, but no one can force you to accept it.”

 

“Why do you think that great leaders and thinkers throughout history have “gone out into the wilderness” and come back with inspiration, with a plan, with an experience that puts them on a course that changes the world? It’s because in doing so they found perspective, they understood the larger picture in a way that wasn’t possible in the bustle of everyday life. Silencing the noise around them, they could finally hear the quiet voice they needed to listen to. Creativity”

 

“Imagine if for every person you met, you thought of some way to help them, something you could do for them? And you looked at it in a way that entirely benefited them and not you. The cumulative effect this would have over time would be profound: You’d learn a great deal by solving diverse problems. You’d develop a reputation for being indispensable. You’d have countless new relationships. You’d have an enormous bank of favors to call upon down the road. That’s what the canvas strategy is about—helping yourself by helping others.”

My Take

There are many pearls of wisdom in the slim volume Ego is the Enemy, which is what I like to call a “thinker book.”  Holiday made me think about the role that complacency and pride play in my life and also consider the pointlessness of anger.  It’s worth checking out.

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87. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self Control

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Walter Mischel

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Psychology, Self-Improvement

336 pages, published September 23, 2014

Reading Format:  Book

 

Summary

A child is presented with a marshmallow and given a choice:  eat this one now, or wait and enjoy two later.  What will she do?  And what are the implications for her behavior later in life?  Walter Mischel, the world’s leading expert on self-control, has proven that the ability to delay gratification is critical for a successful life, predicting higher SAT scores, better social and cognitive functioning, a healthier lifestyle and a greater sense of self-worth. But is willpower prewired, or can it be taught?  Mischel explains how self-control can be mastered and applied to challenges in everyday life—from weight control to quitting smoking, overcoming heartbreak, making major decisions, and planning for retirement.  

 

Quotes

“What we do, and how well we control our attention in the service of our goals, becomes part of the environment that we help create and that in turn influences us. This mutual influence shapes who and what we become, from our physical and mental health to the quality and length of our life.”

 

“Self-control is crucial for the successful pursuit of long-term goals. It is equally essential for developing the self-restraint and empathy needed to build caring and mutually supportive relationships.”

 

“This is encouraging evidence of the power of the environment to influence characteristics like intelligence. Even if traits like intelligence have large genetic determinants, they are still substantially malleable.”

 

“Frances Champagne, a leader in research on how environments influence gene expression, is convinced that it is time to drop the nature versus nurture debate about which is more important and ask instead, What do genes actually do? What is the environment doing that changes what the genes do?”

 

“most predispositions are prewired to some degree, but they are also flexible, with plasticity and potential for change. Identifying the conditions and mechanisms that enable the change is the challenge.”

 

“the ability to delay immediate gratification for the sake of future consequences is an acquirable cognitive skill.”

 

“James Watson summarizes the conclusion: “A predisposition does not a predetermination make.”

 

“The idiosyncrasies of human preferences seem to reflect a competition between the impetuous limbic grasshopper and the provident prefrontal ant within each of us.”

“In the human body, each of approximately a trillion cells holds within its nucleus a complete and identical sequence of DNA. That is about 1.5 gigabytes of genetic information, and it would fill two CD-ROMs, yet the DNA sequence itself would fit on the point of a well-sharpened pencil.”

 

“The depressives, far from seeing themselves through dark lenses as we had presumed, were cursed by twenty-twenty vision: compared with other groups, their self-ratings of positive qualities most closely matched how the observers rated them. In contrast, both the nondepressed psychiatric patients and the control group had inflated self-ratings, seeing themselves more positively than the observers saw them. The depressive patients simply did not see themselves through the rose-colored glasses that the others used when evaluating themselves.”

My Take

While I had previously heard about the marshmallow test and was familiar with the connection between the ability to delay gratification and life success, it was interesting to go more in depth. The Marshmallow Test is an encouraging read in that researcher Mischel demonstrates that our genes are not our destiny and we can develop an ability to delay gratification.  This book is a good companion piece to Better than Before which focuses on habit formation and why positive habits are so important to our well-being.

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85. Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:   Brené Brown

Genre:  Non-Fiction. Self-Help, Psychology

287 pages, published September 11, 2012

Reading Format:  Audio Book

 

Summary

Brené Brown begins Daring Greatly with the following quote from Theodore Roosevelt:  “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.”   This famous quote captures the theme of Brown’s self-improvement tome. She encourages the reader to dare greatly by being vulnerable, having courage and engaging with our whole hearts.

 

Quotes

“Courage starts with showing up and letting ourselves be seen.”

 

“Because true belonging only happens when we present our authentic, imperfect selves to the world, our sense of belonging can never be greater than our level of self-acceptance.”

 

“Vulnerability sounds like truth and feels like courage. Truth and courage aren’t always comfortable, but they’re never weakness.”

 

“Vulnerability is the birthplace of love, belonging, joy, courage, empathy, and creativity. It is the source of hope, empathy, accountability, and authenticity. If we want greater clarity in our purpose or deeper and more meaningful spiritual lives, vulnerability is the path.”

 

“If we can share our story with someone who responds with empathy and understanding, shame can’t survive.”

 

“Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The power that connection holds in our lives was confirmed when the main concern about connection emerged as the fear of disconnection; the fear that something we have done or failed to do, something about who we are or where we come from, has made us unlovable and unworthy of connection.”

 

“When I look at narcissism through the vulnerability lens, I see the shame-based fear of being ordinary. I see the fear of never feeling extraordinary enough to be noticed, to be lovable, to belong, or to cultivate a sense of purpose.”

 

“The real questions for parents should be: “Are you engaged? Are you paying attention?” If so, plan to make lots of mistakes and bad decisions. Imperfect parenting moments turn into gifts as our children watch us try to figure out what went wrong and how we can do better next time. The mandate is not to be perfect and raise happy children. Perfection doesn’t exist, and I’ve found what makes children happy doesn’t always prepare them to be courageous, engaged adults.”

 

“Wholeheartedness. There are many tenets of Wholeheartedness, but at its very core is vulnerability and worthiness; facing uncertainty, exposure, and emotional risks, and knowing that I am enough.”

 

“Spirituality emerged as a fundamental guidepost in Wholeheartedness. Not religiosity but the deeply held belief that we are inextricably connected to one another by a force greater than ourselves–a force grounded in love and compassion. For some of us that’s God, for others it’s nature, art, or even human soulfulness. I believe that owning our worthiness is the act of acknowledging that we are sacred. Perhaps embracing vulnerability and overcoming numbing is ultimately about the care and feeding of our spirits.”

 

“Those who feel lovable, who love, and who experience belonging simply believe they are worthy of love and belonging. I often say that Wholeheartedness is like the North Star: We never really arrive, but we certainly know if we’re headed in the right direction.”

 

“Vulnerability is not knowing victory or defeat, it’s understanding the necessity of both; it’s engaging. It’s being all in.”

 

“For me, and for many of us, our first waking thought of the day is “I didn’t get enough sleep.” The next one is “I don’t have enough time.” Whether true or not, that thought of not enough occurs to us automatically before we even think to question or examine it. We spend most of the hours and the days of our lives hearing, explaining, complaining, or worrying about what we don’t have enough of. …Before we even sit up in bed, before our feet touch the floor, we’re already inadequate, already behind, already losing, already lacking something. And by the time we go to bed at night, our minds are racing with a litany of what we didn’t get, or didn’t get done, that day. We go to sleep burdened by those thoughts and wake up to that reverie of lack. …This internal condition of scarcity, this mind-set of scarcity, lives at the very heart of our jealousies, our greed, our prejudice, and our arguments with life.”

My Take

While there are some ideas expressed in Daring Greatly that I agreed with and was inspired by, as a whole the book didn’t have a huge impact on me.  However, I did appreciate Brown’s focus on the importance of vulnerability and wholeheartedness and concur that they are both important parts of having a meaningful and courageous life.

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