Bob's Books

Why this book:  I listened to Tim Ferriss’s interview with Sebastian Junger on The Tim Ferriss Show podcast and was impressed with his ideas.  A couple of my friends,  also Tim Ferriss devotees, who were similarly impressed.  We all agreed to read the book and get together to discuss it.  We did so within a week.

My impressions: This book makes a single point, and makes it from a number of different perspectives:  We are genetically, and socially programmed to function in close, relatively small, and inter-dependent groups, working closely together to deal with adversity.  Adversity draws us together, brings out the best in us, and holds us together, because we know that united we stand, divided, or as individuals, we fall – that is, we  do not survive. It is what we and other primate species have learned over the millennia. And natural selection and evolution have made this a key part of who we are.

But Western Civilization has taken much of the existential adversity out of our lives – in most settings, we no longer have to work together to merely survive.  Our culture promotes individualism and independence, more so than tribalism and inter-dependence.  Junger brings in a variety of examples and studies to help make the point that as a whole, humans are happier living in more communal societies, working together to deal with threats and challenges, than they are living  independently, as individuals, or in smaller separate entities, with little need to depend on, or contribute to the social structure.  One of the examples he gives is of American Indian tribes which had kidnapped and adopted whites, during the 18th and 19th centuries. Very often, the captured whites, after integrating with the native American tribes,  did not want to return to white society – in fact often whites left white society to go live with the Indians, who by and large integrated them fully into their tribes. There are few if any instances of Indians choosing to live in white society. He offers other similar examples that make his point that when people experience a close knit, interdependent and egalitarian society, they are happiest.

He offers examples of how Westerners can become more tribal and inter-dependent  – temporarily – when faced with disaster, or an existential threat.  After 9-11 people all over the US set aside differences to create a unified response to a threat – just like our ancestors did regularly.  Once the newness of the threat wore off, we reverted to competitive behavior and fostering internal competition that dissipated the unified feeling  we experienced after 9-11.  He looked at London during and after the German bombing Blitz in 1940, and gave examples of how natural disasters seemed to melt away class and income distinctions and bring people together. And once the immediate threat and requirement to support each other was past, people reverted to arguing, fighting, competing and undermining each other.  And he notes, depression increases, suicides increase.

Indeed I’ve heard of recent research that says that a sense of belonging is one of if not the most important on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and may be more fundamental than the need for food,  shelter, or security.  Junger says we ignore that at our peril.

His more controversial point is that much of PTSD is a result of servicemen leaving a tribal, communal, purpose-driven life in the military in combat, and return to peacetime  life disoriented and with less of a sense of community and common purpose.  He makes the case  that a certain percentage of PTSD sufferers are in fact suffering from inability to re-adapt to an atomized and alienated culture when they return from the intense and very cohesive environment of combat. They are missing that innate need to be part of a close-knit tribal inter-dependence, taking care of each other in response to threats to the tribe.

The book is a short and compelling read and I enjoyed it. Tim Ferriss’s interview with Junger covers much of the content of the book in about 2  1/2 hours.  The interview and the book complement the other, but if you are interested in the topic, but don’t have time to read the book, listen to the podcast, entitled, “Lessons from War, Tribal Societies, and a non-fiction life.”

Possible shortcomings: 

1. David Morris, author of  The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder  sharply disputed Junger’s claims about the extent to which PTSD may be related to inability to adapt to peacetime or civilized society.  In his Wall Street Journal review of Junger’s Tribe    he argues that Junger’s statistics are severely skewed to help him make his case.  I thought Morris’s review made some good points but was  unfair in calling Junger  a “war tourist” – Sebastian Junger has seen more of combat and war as a journalist than the vast majority of people in uniform.  Whether a fair percentage of PTSD is a indeed a consequence of an inability to adapt from a tribal to a modern world as Junger claims, his argument that the epidemic of depression, suicide and “existential despair”that one finds in Western societies is probably in large part due to people feeling isolated from each other and protected from the requirement to work together in adversity, makes sense to me.
2. I felt that Junger could also have given credit to the many advantages that accrue from societies where individual effort, striving, and competition are primary.  Some  people indeed attain their greatest achievements and fulfillment when unhampered by often suffocating social and communal requirements.  Small villages and tribal societies are notorious for their conservatism, for squelching innovation and believing in tradition and superstition, in the face of new ideas and arguments for change.  I didn’t think Junger adequately offered counter-arguments to his points in Tribe.

SOME QUOTES from Tribe: (page numbers from hardback Twelve Hatchett Book Group edition) 

“How do you become an adult in a society that doesn’t require sacrifice? How do you become a man in a society that doesn’t require courage?”  xiv

“As affluence and urbanization rise in a society, rates of depression and suicide tend to go up rather than down.  Rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a  society seems to foster it.” 19

“The mechanism seems simple: for people are forced to share their team and resource more than wealthy people are, and as a result they live inclosed communities.”  21

“..the evolutionary basis for moral behavior stems from group pressure.” 27

“To the  extent that boys are drawn to war, it may be less out of an interest in violence than a longing for the king of maturity and respect that often come with it.”  38

“Communities that have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters almost never lapse into chaos and disorder; if anything, they become more just, more egalitarian, and more deliberately fair to individuals.” 44 (note: Junger goes on to dispute how the press reported how the majority of people in New Orleans responded to Katrina)

“<Charles> Fritz theory was …that disasters thrust people back into a more ancient, organic way of relating. Disasters, he proposed, create a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring connection to others.”  53

“As soon as relief flights began delivering aid to the area, class divisions returned and the sense of brotherhood disappeared. The modern world had arrived.”55

“That risk-taking tends to express itself in vary different ways in men and women….risking male lives to save female lives makes enormous evolutionary sense… But women are more likely than men to display something called moral courage.” 55-57

“The beauty and tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good.” 59

“What catastrophes seem to do – sometimes in the span of a few minutes – is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.”  66

“But in addition to all the destruction and loss of life, war also inspires ancient human virtues of courage, loyalty, and selflessness that can be utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them.”  77

“…the National Research Council found that a person’s chance of getting chronic PTSD is in great part a function of their experiences before going to war.”  82

“…high unit cohesion is correlated with lower rates of psychiatric breakdown.”  85

“Horrific experiences are unfortunately a human universal, but long-term impairment from them is not..”. 87

(Quoting Sharon Abromowitz) “We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow drop of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents.  Our society is alienating, technical, cold and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that.”94

“..three factors seem to crucially affect a combatant’s transition back into civilian life….First, cohesive and egalitarian tribal societies do avery good job a mitigating the effects of trauma. …Secondly, ex-combatants shouldn’t be seen – or be encouraged to see themselves – as victims……Perhaps most importantly, veterans need to feel that they’re just as necessary and productive back in society as they were on the battlefield.”  101-102

“More dignified might be to offer veterans all over the country the use of their town hall every Veterans Day to speak freely about their experience at war. ” 123

“Today’s veterans often come home to find that, although they’re willing to die for their country, they’re not sure how to live for it.” 124

“How do you make veterans feel that they are retuning to a cohesive society that was worth fighting for in the first place?” 127

“Acting in a tribal way simply means being willing to make a substantive sacrifice for your community – be that your neighborhood, your workplace or your entire country.” 131

Why This Book:  This book was recommended to me by my son, who said it was short, powerful, and very much worth reading.  Then another friend told me she had read it and her reaction was identical to my son’s.  So I put it at the head of the line of books I was planning to read.

My Impressions: This is indeed a powerful book.   I recommend it to anyone who is willing to learn about life and mortality  from a gifted and thoughtful doctor, scientist and writer, who unexpectedly was forced to face a much shorter life expectancy, just as he was hitting his stride in the prime of life. As a New York Times reviewer commented on the book jacket, this is not a book you’ll forget.  I just finished it and have already given it as a gift to three friends who I know will thank me for it.

My most recent Bob’s Corner post is entitled “Living Heroically,” and this book provides an excellent first person account of living heroically, and dying heroically.  Paul Kalanithi’s story is an example of a thoughtful, intelligent man heroically facing uncertainty and death, which unless we avert our eyes, we all face.  With his extensive background in medicine, science AND the humanities (he had a BA in English literature and an MA in Philosophy and History) he offers us a unique perspective.  I was inspired not only by how Paul Kalanithi struggled against cancer, but also how he struggled to live well, to continue his life’s work while in pain and discomfort, only retreating when his energy dramatically ebbed and he saw that his time was very limited.

The first part of the book is a brief autobiography, in which he shares his life’s trajectory up to the point he learned that he had aggressive lung cancer.  We learn a bit about his childhood, decisions to go to Stanford University, choosing medicine over becoming an English professor and writer.  We learn briefly of the struggles of medical school, how he decided to go into neurosurgery, one of the most demanding branches of medicine.   And then as a resident surgeon, he shares how he struggled with and eventually learned to serve patients who found themselves afraid, disoriented, and feeling helpless in that netherworld between life and death.  Some of the most moving parts of his story are his accounts of doing all he can on behalf of patients who did not survive, or who did survive, but with unexpected disabilities, and a few stories of those who miraculously and unexpectedly made complete recoveries.  The work of neurosurgery is figuratively and literally on the cutting edge of what we know about the brain and how it affects who we are and how we live.

He tells of courting and marrying his wife Lucy who was also going thru her medical residency in a different field, while he was.   Within a few years, their marriage is struggling because of the stress of two very demanding schedules, and so little time together. They work on their marriage, and as he becomes one of the rising stars in neurosurgery at Stanford Medical Center, and separately an award-winning researcher in neuroscience, he finds out he has cancer – that has already metastasized.

The second part, entitled “Cease Not ’til Death,” is about his struggle to hold on to his calling, to maintain some semblance of the trajectory of his life, while fighting, and ultimately losing in his battle against cancer.  The disease brings him and his wife closer together;  initially, there is hope for recovery, and they decide to have a child.  As Lucy is going through her pregnancy, his cancer returns and hope fades.   He has to give up many of the things that are most important to him as his body fails him, as his energy ebbs and as he sees his time running out.  He has to prioritize in a most severe way.  From his extensive readings in literature, he finds consolation in the wisdom of great thinkers and great stories of the past.   He shares with us insights and inspiration that gave him solace and allowed him to love and appreciate what little time and energy he had left -never abandoning his love for his family, his life, for life itself.  He shares with us a brief but beautifully inspired explanation for why he rejected a purely materialistic view of life and the “reasoning” behind his faith, stating that “…the basic reality of human life stands compellingly against blind determinism.”   He fought the temptation to feel a victim of a cruel fate, and never fell into bitterness.   His life’s final project was to write this book, to tell his story and share with the world what he learned about himself, about life, and about death through his own struggle.

The epilogue is written by his wife, who shares how important it was for him to write this book – how he struggled to write it, while under the effects of not only the cancer, but the drugs that sapped his energy as they eased his discomfort and perhaps prolonged his life.  She told us of  his last months, after he no longer had the wherewithal to write, and ultimately, of his last weeks, days, and hours. After we got to know this amazing man and his struggle in his own words, it was hard to read Lucy’s description of his final days and hours without tearing up.

My Key Take-Aways: 

• Surgeons – especially neurosurgeons –  work really hard. The closest thing I can think of is being in a SEAL detachment, deployed into a combat zone.  The intensity, commitment and hours are similar.  Every time they perform surgery, they have the life and future quality of life of their patient in their hands – in my mind that is far more difficult than putting one’s own life at risk.
• When Paul learned he had cancer and began treatment,  he decided to do all he could to hold on to his pre-cancer life’s trajectory. He heroically stayed committed.
• One of his key messages was the consolations that he got from the wisdom of  literature and the humanities, teaching him not only how to live well, but how to die well.
• He only spent about 2 pages on religion and faith,  but these two pages were very well done and profound.  He found consolation in a faith was very different from that of most people – his was a faith born of a very thorough study of science and philosophy.
• As his time and energy shrank, he had to make hard decisions about how to spend what little time and energy he had.  We see the greatest importance he gave to his very closest friends and family – when all else was fading into the realm of no-longer-important.
• His and Lucy’s daughter was only a few months old when he died.  But the last words in his book address how important it was to him to leave a positive legacy to his daughter.
• A practical lesson:   He wrote-off signs symptoms of his disease as “merely” the consequences of stress and too much work, and not enough rest.  Doctors are notorious for ignoring their own guidance. If I’m tired, weak, and losing weight, I need to go get checked up, to see if I can catch this monster before it grows too big.
• He didn’t mention this, but I was reminded of the Stockale Paradox named by Jim Collins (author of Good to Great) after VAdm Jim Stockale’s quote: “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”  Stockdale advocated holding on to one’s values, principles, and fundamental identity, even (especially)  when there is no light at the end of the tunnel. VAdm Stockale was  awarded the Medal of Honor for his leadership as the senior PoW for nearly 8 years in North Vietnam. Stockade and Kalinithi fought hard to hold on to their honor and values, when there was no light at the end of the tunnel.
• As I noted at the beginning of this piece, this  book is a primer on living well and dying well; living heroically, and dying heroically.

Why this book: A good friend and currently active-duty SEAL officer and I agreed to read some literature related to our chosen profession.  I had read Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried and liked it, and attended a lecture at which he spoke about his book, his life, his thoughts – and I was impressed. My wife Mary Anne just read another of O’Brien’s  books If I Die in a Combat Zone: Box me up and Ship me home, and thought it was well done  – reminding me of a decision I’d made a couple of years ago to read more of Tim O’Brien’s work. Cacciato  is the book that brought him into national prominence by winning the National Book  Award, less than a decade after the Vietnam War, the setting in which this story takes place.

My impressions:  Going After Cacciato is a fascinating read, creatively written, and it kept me on my toes throughout.  For the first half (or more) I wondered  where it was going – and then for a while, I thought I knew, and at the end, was again surprised.  It is very broad in scope.  I have described it to friends as a cross between Catch 22, Slaughterhouse Five, and 100 Years of Solitude, in a context similar to Saving Private Ryan.  Let me explain.

Saving Private Ryan:  On a very superficial level, the book is about a squad of soldiers trying to find one guy- in this case Cacciato, who went AWOL while serving with his squad in Vietnam. Similar to Private  Ryan, the reader and the soldiers involved sense the absurdity of taking so much effort and assuming so much risk for one guy in the midst of a crazy war, in which there is so much death.

 Catch 22:  In both Cacciato and Catch 22 we experience the absurd consequences of attempts to maintain some of the order and discipline of civilized life in the chaos and craziness of war, how those who enforce regulations meant to maintain order, can create so much havoc and chaos, and the sometimes bizarre unintended consequences that result when short-sighted people try to impose regulations on creative soldiers in an un-regulatable context.   The clever ones exploit the system to get what they want, others are victims, and many more, like Yossarian in Catch 22 and Paul Berlin in Cacciato, and most of us in our own lives, simply try to survive and get what we can, as we are  swept along by events we don’t fully understand, trying to make sense of it all….

Slaughterhouse Five: The protagonist in Cacciato, Paul Berlin, reminded me a lot of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse Five, confused, unfocused, feeling like a leaf in the wind of events blowing him around, trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense, while also trying to do his job and survive.  All the while, others around him are fully engaged in the craziness of what is happening around them, never in question, never in doubt.  Paul Berlin (like Billy Pilgrim) seems to be the most self-aware person in the world he inhabits, and we wonder if this is more a curse than blessing.  In both Slaughterhouse Five and Cacciato,  the reader shares the protagonist’s confusion about the chronology of events, and what is REALLY going on.

100 Years of Solitude: The line between fact and fancy, between reality and dream becomes blurred.  We are not sure when the narrative shifts from what “really” happened, to what might have happened, to what probably didn’t happen, but is interesting to think about – when the author is taking s0-called real events in the story, and spinning them into fantastic and yet intriguing, provocative, and inspiring possibilities.

On the book jacket, someone is quoted as saying “To call Going After Cacciato a novel about war is like calling Moby Dick a novel about whales.”  I didn’t really get this until 3/4 of the way through the book – when I saw how the scope of this novel was much larger than I had realized.   The fantasy that is built into the book allows the author to take the readers into contexts and environments other than the Vietnam war, and we recognized courage, cowardice, fear, love, compassion, integrity, confusion and disingenuousness that we know in ourselves and our own lives.

Toward the end, the author asks us to imagine Paul Berlin sitting at a table on stage in a theater with a young woman who had become his lover.  We are asked to listen to the two of them negotiate whether and how they would move forward together, based on their very different needs. I thought O’Brien brilliantly described a classic challenge that nearly every couple faces in struggling with the tensions between obligations to each other and duties to others.

This book won the National Book Award for a reason – it is a creatively written novel about a war  – but the scope is so much broader and takes the reader geographically from Vietnam to Paris and psychologically from the war in Vietnam, to a bizarre Odyssey, to our own lives.

A few quotes that I found provocative and meaningful that may help to give a sense of the book (page numbers from the paperback edition Broadway books 1999):

“Paul Berlin, whose only goal was to live long enough to establish goals worth living for still longer, stood high in the tower by the sea, the night soft all around him, and wondered, not for the first time, about the immense powers of his own imagination.”  26

“The real issue is the power of will to defeat fear….somewhere inside each man is a biological center for the exercise of courage, a piece of tissue that might be touched and sparked and made to respond, a chemical maybe or a lone chromosome that when made to fire would produce a blaze of valor that even the biles could not extinguish. A filament, a fuse,that if ignited would release the full energy of what might be.”  81

“But the lieutenant knew that in war purpose is never paramount, neither purpose nor cause, and that battles are always fought among human beings, not purposes. He could not imagine dying for a purpose.”    166

“He was a professional soldier, but unlike other professionals he believed that the overriding mission was the inner mission, the mission of every man to learn  the important things about himself.”  166

“Unreal, he thought. Just a creature of his own making – blink and she was gone – but even so he liked the way she closed her eyes to the music, the way her chrome cross bounced on her sweater, her braided hair swishing so full.”  202

“What you remember is determined by what you see, and what you see depends on what you remember.”  206

“And then, with the war ended, history decided, he would explain to her why he had let himself go to war.  Not because of strong convictions, but because he didn’t know.  He didn’t know who was right, or what was right; he didn’t know if it was a war of self-determination or self-destruction, outright aggression or national liberation; he didn’t know which speeches to believe, which books, which politicians; he didn’t know if nations would topple like dominoes or stand separate like trees; he didn’t know who really started the war or why or when, or with what motives; he did not know if it mattered….he didn’t know where truth lay….”  264

“They did not know even the simple things… they did not know how to feel… they did not know good from evil.”  270

“‘Paris is not a place. It is a state of mind.’  Paul Berlin smiled, but secretly he hoped it was  more than that.” 298

“He tried to imagine it differently, he tried hard, but the power to make a wish was no longer the power to make it happen. It was a failure of imagination.”  313

Why this Book:  My literature reading group selected it as a companion piece to The Paris Wife, since both are about Hemingway’s experiences living in Paris during the 1920s. The Paris Wife is a novel based on the experiences of Hemingway’s first wife, and A Moveable Feast is Hemingway’s own story of his experiences during that same period.

My Impressions. This book prepared by Hemingway during his final years, was published after his death, and was edited by his family and others, all of which may explain why it doesn’t feel like the other meatier Hemingway works I’ve read.  When Hemingway was preparing this in his last years, using notes and notebooks from thirty years earlier, he was probably running out of gas. This book doesn’t have the energy of his other writings.   To me it seemed like  a collection of autobiographical short stories about things that had happened to him a long time ago.  These stories, as chapters, ‘sort of’ hang together, but each can be read almost independently of the others.

While written in Hemingway’s classic sparse style, they didn’t seem to me to have been written to be a book.  Reading the Wikipedia article on the book I learn that indeed Hemingway had intended these stories to be a book – he had by chance recovered notebooks of stories and anecdotes he had written during his time in Paris in the 1920s, and worked on them off and on up until shortly before he took his own life, to make them into what became A Moveable Feast. 

It is not his best work – and my guess is that late in life, with little energy or inspiration to do anything new, he was willing to publish these stories, knowing that his name and notoriety would probably make the book of interest and probably profitable.  My recommendation is to read this book only as part of a study of Hemingway, who he was in the 1920s, and one can read the chapters separately without losing much.  I also wouldn’t recommend reading A Moveable Feast until or unless one has read several other of Hemingway works, most importantly The Sun Also Rises written during his time in Paris.  I would also read The Paris Wife first.   I would also suggest the Wikipedia article and perhaps some other analyses of  A Moveable Feast  to help better understand the background, context,  and intent of this book, Hemingway’s last published piece.  There continues to be some controversy around apparent edits to Hemingway’s draft in what finally became the published version, by his wife Mary, and grand son Sean.

Why this Book:   My reading group had selected The Paris Wife and A Moveable Feast to read for our next selection.  Hemingway wrote The Sun Also Rises during his time living in Paris described in these two books.  A member of our group noted that reading The Sun Also Rises would add a lot to understanding the other two, and recommended listening to it on Audible -that William Hurt was the reader and he did an excellent job.  He was right.   As I normally do with classics, I read the Cliff Notes along with the book – going back and forth to see what their reviewer had to say about the section I had just read.  It helped a lot. There is a lot more in the story than I had picked up, just listening to the story.

My Impressions: Listening to  William Hurt perform the various characters in this book, with different voices and accents was fascinating and enjoyable.  Given that the book had French, Spanish, Scottish and English accents as well as American, that was quite a feat and he did it well.  It was a different experience listening to rather than reading the story, and I know I missed a lot.  I know that because of insights I got out of the Cliff Notes.   In this case I realized that there was a lot going on beneath the surface of the story that I just wasn’t catching.   Listening to it, the story just rolls along, and it is easy to appreciate as an interesting story, but there was indeed much that I missed that I might have picked up, had I read it, taken it a bit slower, paused as I read,  and gone back and re-read some sections.  I will read it again, with a new appreciation.

Hemingway’s style is well known and remarkable for its simplicity and austerity.  He eschews elaborate descriptions – just tells us what he sees and what happened, and leaves it up to us, the readers to visualize it, experience it, seek to understand it, and derive our own interpretation. I’ve heard that he described his style as following the “iceberg theory” – on the surface we see only his sparse and economical prose, just the bare facts, but most of the meaning and significance is unstated and below the surface. Through his seemingly simply story telling, Hemingway seeks to build a relationship with the reader and trusts us to sense and grasp his intent, what is really happening, without having to explain things.  There is a certain Zen-like quality to his descriptions – just what is, without elaboration.   I recently listened to an interview with Paolo Coelho (The Alchemist) share the same philosophy of writing.

The protagonist in The Sun Also Rises  is Jake Barnes, a young man living in Paris, a few years after having received a wound in WWI which made him impotent.  And though this “fact” is alluded to, it is given very little explicit attention; it remains part of the iceberg in this story – unseen, but sensed, below the surface of the story.  Jake is part of a group of expat friends,  most notably Brett, a very attractive and “liberated” English woman with whom Jake is in love, and Robert Cohn, an American with whom Jake has a rather tense friendship.   Brett is very sexual, openly has a brief affair with Cohn, while also being engaged to marry one of the other members of the group.  Brett and Jake have a history – we are not clear what it was – but they clearly know each other well and are close.

The story mostly takes place in Spain during a trip the group takes to visit the running of the bulls in Pamplona. The context of the story is this adventure –  the experiences, interactions and tensions within the group during the bull fights, the running of the bulls, and the partying that goes on around this annual event.   As Hemingway describes this remarkable setting in Spain, we see the tensions grow between Jake and Cohn, and between Cohn and Brett’s fiancé, and we sense the evolving relationship between Jake and Brett. And yes, there is a bull-fighter involved.  The story finishes with an interesting and inconclusive “epilogue” that I found very well done.

This is a story about people – somehow unhappy – dissipating their time, in search of something.  This book was written during the window when Gertrude Stein referred to Hemingway as the voice of the “Lost Generation” –  those who were disoriented and alienated after the trauma and loss of idealism during and after WWI.  It was very instructive to read The Sun Also Rises after reading The Paris Wife, which I’ve reviewed elsewhere, and which it seems, pretty accurately describes the world in which Hemingway was living when he wrote The Sun Also Rises.   In The Paris Wife, we see that Sun is very autobiographical – Hemingway did indeed take a trip with a group of friends to Pamplona, and many of the characters in the book are based on real characters in Hemingway’s life who were on that trip with him.  The story itself is interesting, as is the back story on which it is based.  Indeed, a book has recently been published about the “true story” behind The  Sun Also Rises, entitled Everybody Behaves Badly.  It looks like a good read.

The Paris Wife and The Sun Also Rises together fascinated me, and I’m intrigued to know Hemingway better.  I also look forward to reading Sun again, and soon – and once again explore these somewhat self-indulgent, alienated literary misfits of my grand parents’ generation, trying to sort themselves out and find meaning, in each other and their own lives in both Paris and a small city in 1920s Spain.

Why this book: Selected by my literature reading group, along with Moveable Feast, Hemingway’s own version of life during the time described in The Paris Wife.  A few of us also are reading The Sun Also Rises, the novel Hemingway wrote during his initial Paris period, while married to Hadley Richardson.  Yes, a Hemingway extravaganza.

My Impressions: The Paris Wife is essentially a novelized autobiographical account of Hadley Richardson’s courtship and short marriage to Ernest Hemingway, and concludes at the end of their life together in Paris during the 1920s. It is well written and offers a well-articulated interpretation of how Hadley Richardson felt, thought, experienced the world and her relationship with Ernest Hemingway.  We get to know and appreciate her by being inside her perspective, and we get to know and appreciate Ernest Hemingway as she perceived him.   It is usually fascinating and enriching for me to read books written from an intelligent and sensitive woman’s perspective – it is always different from mine, and I appreciate the differences.

It was hard not to like Hadley Richardson.   Paula McLain paints a sympathetic picture of her protagonist, and from what I’ve read about her elsewhere, justifiably so.  I also appreciated that McLain was fair to Ernest Hemingway.  We got to know him through Hadley Richardson’s adoring and ultimately heart broken eyes , but McLain included a few short chapters, written in third person, which offer us a fair and sympathetic view of his perspective on what he was experiencing.

McLain built her novel upon much research into the facts, events, and accounts that are extant surrounding Richardson’s and Hemingway’s real lives and experiences.  And there are numerous resources to draw from – so the story she wrote is probably not too far from the reality. Hadley Richardson had grown up in a sheltered upper-middle class environment and was six years older than Hemingway.  He was in his early 20s, and was recently back from serving in WW1 where he had been injured in the fighting in Italy (his novel Farewell to Arms is semi-autobiographical account of his experiences).  Hemingway courted her aggressively, they fell in love,  and after less than a year they married and moved to Paris.

There he intended to launch his career as a writer. Their circle of friends included such luminaries in American letters as Gertrude Stein, Ford Maddox Ford, Scott Fitzgerald, Jon Dos Passos among others.  An interesting part of the book is the picture it paints of a group of fairly well-to-do Americans living in Paris, with a fair amount of freedom, travelling, amusing themselves in different settings in Europe, lots of alcohol and socializing.  After several years, Hadley and Hemingway had a child, and their marriage was happy and thriving, until Hemingway fell in love with another woman who was part of their circle of friends.  He insisted on loving them both, didn’t want a divorce, and saw no reason why he couldn’t love two women simultaneously.  Hadley insisted that that wouldn’t work, at least not for her, and though for a while she tried, she realized she could not share him with the other. In the last quarter of The Paris Wife we experience the sad unraveling of a marriage between two good people who still very much loved each other.

Though McLain is generally sympathetic to Hemingway, many of the women in our reading group really don’t like him.  Most of the men do.  Interesting, eh?

A Moveable Feast did not add much to The Paris Wife – it was published posthumously and is more a collection of loosely connected short stories based on Hemingway’s recollections from when he was much older. These stories just don’t have the energy or pathos that would make them compelling.   The Sun Also Rises was different. Hemingway was writing it through much of the period described in The Paris Wife, and I could get a sense of the man Paula McLain’s Hadley Richardson was describing in The Paris Wife.  in fact, Sun is based on a key piece of The Paris Wife story.  For those interested in knowing more about that connection, I’d recommend a recent article in Vanity Fair  which explains it pretty well. My recommendation would be to read The Sun Also Rises immediately after The Paris Wife, and perhaps read A Moveable Feast a chapter (story) at a time, separately.

Why this book: Suggested by one of the members of my literature reading group, who had read it in college, was intrigued, wanted to read it again, and wanted to discuss it with this group.  Toni Morrison is a very prominent American Author and her book Beloved had won a Pulitzer prize.

My impressions:  Song of Solomon is a different sort of  book.  I just finished it, and am still digesting how it affected me.  It had a lot of parts and sub-plots – it may have been a mistake to read it in increments, rather than in a concentrated couple of sittings, within just a few days.   The prose is wonderful. It is a fascinating, but complex book.

The central character is a black American– before the term “African-American” came into vogue. His name was Macon Dead, same as his father and grandfather, but was knows as Milkman – a nickname he didn’t understand until adulthood –  that came from having been breast fed beyond his toddler years.  Milkman was born in the early thirties and grew up in urban Michigan (Detroit?) in the 30s, 40s and 50s, and the meat of the story takes place in the early 1960s, just before the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King became national phenomena. Lots of inside-the-black-community use of the “n” word. Not many white characters in the book.

Milkman is the youngest of three children, and the only son in a strangely dysfunctional family. The history of both his parents’ families is obscure and confused, a mish-mash of old stories, rumors, and family remembrances. This becomes increasingly important later as Milkman, stumbling through life, begins to search for – or rather create – his identity.   A confusing but influential figure in Milkman’s life is his very eccentric and almost other-worldly Aunt Pilate, his father’s sister, who his overbearing father orders him to not to have anything to do with.  Later we come to understand why.

Milkman matures into a directionless, self-centered young man with no vision for himself beyond going-along-to get-along, looking for the easiest path to immediate gratification. Along the way, a number of things start coming together that help him realize that the uncertain pieces of the puzzle of his family’s past may have more significance to him than he had realized.  The promise of great wealth at the end of this obscure rainbow inspires him to go after his roots, to uncover the confusion of his family’s past.  What he discovers gives him (and the reader) insight, not only into the source of his own personal confusion, but also into the disparate threads of the African-American experience in America, from just after the Civil War until the 1960s.

This book is filled with interesting and eccentric characters. The story seems to meander along with a number of mini-stories and vignettes, which though they do hang together, the theme isn’t readily apparent – and it takes some stepping back from the pieces of this mosaic, to see the picture Ms Morrison is painting.  There were times in reading it when I thought the book was as wayward and unfocused as Milkman’s life, and I wondered if that may have been the point.  It was not.

As I read the last 50 pages or so, I began to get a sense for what it was all leading up to, as Milkman visited the rural South, where things had not changed dramatically since the Jim Crow era, and Milkman got to know the people of his roots, their world, and about his ancestors and relatives. Milkman then returns to urban Michigan. and shares what he has learned with his family– to include his eccentric Aunt Pilate.  He agrees to take her back to rural Virginia, to help her put some closure on a tragic incident in the family’s past, and we are left with a fascinating conclusion, which does NOT tie a nice ribbon around the story.  Many questions are left unanswered.

One of the many disorienting mini-stories within this book is about Milkman’s best friend from childhood who is on a campaign to surreptitiously kill innocent whites, to avenge the deaths at the hands of whites, of innocent blacks. Milkman stays apart from this terrorism, but it affects him. His friend has focus and purpose – albeit evil.   Milkman remains uncommitted to anything in his life, but is confused and unsettled by his friend’s commitment to a cause Milkman finds unjust, even obscene.

I’d recommend reading Song of Solomon with others, so that as a group, you can help each other sort out the pieces to this interesting story. A few themes that came up in the fascinating discussion in my reading group regarding this book:

-Urban life vs Rural life. The juxtaposition of urban life in the North with rural life in the South . Urban life is quick hurried. People don’t have time to listen, watch, pay attention.  Rural life is much slower and there is time to pay attention and remember. Milkman was challenged in his effort to adjust to the slow pace of life in rural Virginia. But it seemed to mature him.

-Milkman’s life was dramatically affected by events in his family’s past of which he had little or no knowledge. So are we all – and most of us don’t realize the impact on us of things that happened in the obscure past in our families, events of which we are not even aware.

-Toni Morrison threw a LOT of symbology into the book, which we had fun trying to decode: the sudden appearance of a white peacock; Aunt Pilate’s gold box earing, biblical names, flying…

-A lot of occult references – Aunt Pilate’s relationship with the ghost of her father, and other fascinating allusions to an unseen order of things.

– There is a sense of “magical realism” in the book. There were times I wasn’t sure whether what I was reading was meant to be a dream or real, whether I was reading about a “100 years of Solitude” event, or whether it was an event that Ms Morrison wanted us to believe really happened. And maybe it doesn’t matter….

– In the end, all of the characters somehow redeemed themselves as not completely good, or evil. As the book concludes, Milkman seems to be on the threshold of great insight, but we’re left wondering what really happened to him.

Why this book: Bounce was selected by my All American Leadership reading group as a good follow up to our last book, Mindset by Carol Dweck.  Many of us felt that Dweck’s book needed more depth and we decided that Bounce might provide it.

My Impressions: Similar to Mindset, Bounce focuses on extreme high performance -especially in sports and athletics, but sports is a metaphor for high performance in any endeavor. In sports, quality of performance, results, and success are often easier to measure than in other fields.  Syed breaks his book into three sections: The Talent Myth, Paradoxes of the Mind, and Deep Reflections.  For me the most valuable was Paradoxes of the Mind.

The first section, The Talent Myth,  was an effective repackaging of the ideas of Carol Dweck’s Mindset, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code (which I haven’t read, but I think I’m familiar with the message.)   Syed was at one point a world class table tennis player, having been a record 3 time British Commonwealth champion and two time Olympian, so he knows first hand the world of extreme high performance athletics.  Syed brings his personal experience and vignettes into the discussion, reinforcing the point that great performance is the result of mental and acquired abilities, not physical and natural talent.  He also echoes Gladwell in pointing out how extraordinary opportunities provide a trajectory for success – but that those who succeed are those who take advantage of those opportunities with unusual focus, motivation, and dedication to “Purposeful Practice.”   He has a whole section that reinforces the point that QUALITY of practice – what he calls deliberate or purposeful practice, is what counts, not quantity. It’s not 10,000 hours of practice, but 10,000 hours of purposeful practice that is transformative. I recall a sign in my high school wrestling room: “Practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect. ”

The most interesting section of this book to me was Paradoxes of the Mind, which included three chapters: The Placebo Effect, The Curse of Choking and How to Avoid it, and finally a chapter on the power of rituals and superstitions.

In The Placebo Effect, he gives examples that reinforce what most of us already know – that belief in one’s self, believing that you can win is fundamental to success.  He writes that  “…the thing that often separates the best from the rest is a capacity to believe things that are not true but which are incredibly effective.” (italics Syed’s).   I include a few more reinforcing quotes from this section below, but he reinforces the belief in the power of the mind to drive success, or at least to perform way above what we and others might expect. At the highest levels, where the margins of victory can be razor thin, this is the real difference-maker.

The chapter on Choking had the one really new insight for me in this book: That we seem to perform with two minds – an automatic mind and a deliberate mind – a reacting and a thinking mind.  True champions give themselves, after incredible amounts of practice, over to the automatic mind.  Hundreds and thousands of hours of practice are designed to develop the automatic mind.  Choking can occur when an expert performer loses confidence and tries to revert to the deliberate mind, which s/he is not used to using. The deliberate mind is not instinctual and performs more slowly.  This reminds me of the story of the centipede who was asked how he walks with all those legs moving at the same time,  and when he tried to figure it out, he fell over on his side and couldn’t get up.  It also is reminiscent of “the Zone” made famous by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and now part of our everyday sports vocabulary.   We perform best, we get into “flow” by getting to where we perform without thinking about what we’re doing, but simply doing it. (The Rise of Superman, by Steven Kotler is a recent excellent update on Mihaly Cs…’s work)  BUT it takes thousands of hours of practice to get to where one can truly find flow.  Amateurs have to be deliberate, to think about what they’re doing.

High performers can choke when they switch from mindless automatic performance, to deliberate performance, thinking about the pieces of what they do, rather than letting it all “flow.”  This too-much focus kills flow and performance.  He spoke of the need to develop a form of “doublethink”:  The extreme high performer must train and prepare believing that great performance is extremely, extremely important, but when it counts, and comes time to perform, to be great,  the performer must relax and perform as if it doesn’t mean anything.  He concludes this chapter with the easy-to-say-hard-to-do advice:  To try  to develop the art of “playing as if it means nothing when it means everything.”

The chapter on rituals and superstition reinforced the concepts in Placebo effect – it is more important that you believe that your rituals or superstitions work, than that they have some independent impact on how you perform.  That rabbit’s foot, that little ritual done before every game reinforces patterns of success in one’s mind that can truly have a performance enhancing impact, and thus effectively lead to greater success.

The final section entitled “Deep Reflections” is a little different. The first chapter fits with the rest of the book, addressing how 10,000 hours of practice changes the way one perceives one’s environment, creating the capacity for great subliminal or intuitive decision making, which distinguishes great performers from the rest of us amateurs.  He references the classic book on decision making in crises, Sources of Power by Klein.  The final two chapters, while interesting, don’t seem to fit. His chapter on performance-enhancing drugs in sports makes some very interesting points – Syed does not support a zero-tolerance approach to performance-enhancing drugs and makes a good case for performance-enhancing drugs and procedures which can ALSO help us lead better and fuller lives.   The final chapter “Are Blacks Superior Runners?”  debunks the myth that racial genetics play a role in performance.  He is not trying to be politically correct, but makes some scientifically based points to show that factors other than race are really at play where it might appear that racial or genetic factors are a key determinant of success.  He says current research in genetics is showing that the whole idea of race and ethnicity is outmoded.  It is interesting stuff, but only marginally related to the theme of his book.

My Reservation:   While Paradoxes of the Mind did truly open my eyes, if you have read and absorbed other recent works that make the point that practice and hard work rather than “talent” drive  great performance, you will find this book  somewhat redundant -though with great anecdotes and arguments.

I have never been, and never will be, a top-level high-performer in anything.  And indeed, I guess I never REALLY aspired to be.  I never wanted to make the sacrifices and pay the opportunity costs that 10,000 hours of purposeful practice demand.  And that is why I continue to describe myself as the Prince of Mediocrity (see post.) This book does not, nor do the others I refer to, address the many sacrifices and opportunity costs that come with the many, many advantages of being a top level performer, in any discipline, from table tennis, to golf, to football, to business.

A few of my favorite quotes from Bounce (numbers refer to pages in the Harper Perennial paper back edition):

The thing that often separates the best from the rest is a capacity to believe things that are not true but which are incredibly effective.(italics Syed’s)  154

The key point in all this is that the power of the mind is exercised through the medium of belief, and it doesn’t matter whether the belief is true or false or how the delusion is created – so long as it is created successfully. 158

The scientific community was forced to accept the rather astonishing fact that religious belief, in and of itself, confers real and tangible health benefits. (italics Syed’s) 159

What the scriptures seem to be saying is that God does not act in proportion to the worthiness of the intercessor, but in proportion to the intercessor’s belief that God will so act.  (italics Syed’s) 160

..articulating the placebo effect: …saying that it is belief itself, not its content, that matters.

(quoting Anne Harrington) “There is an innate capacity for our bodies to bring into being, to the best of their ability, the optimistic scenarios in which we fervently believe.” 165

Note the difference between a scientist and an athlete. Doubt is a scientist’s stock in trade….But doubt, to an athlete, is poison.  168-9

..to win, one must proportion one’s belief, not to the evidence, but to whatever the mind can usefully get away with.  To win, one must surgically remove doubt – rational and irrational -from the mind. that is how the placebo effect operates.  169

This ability to instill belief in others is a vital facet of leadership -whether in politics or the military – but it can also create a huge advantage in sport through its impact on competitors. 171

Why This Book: I often speak about developing a “tribal culture” as an ideal that leaders should strive for.  I recently assumed the role of president of my Toastmasters Club and have begun referring to our club as  a “tribe,” and wanted to meet with my board and get buy-in to taking steps that would tie our members even more closely each other – more like a tribe.  I thought reading Tribes would give me some ideas.  It did – more so and differently than I expected.  (Numbers below refer to pages in the hardcopy edition published by Portfolio.)

My impressions: I really liked this book. It is short, inspirational, and fun to read – just shy of  150 pages of large print on small pages.  It doesn’t  provide a checklist of how to create or sustain a tribe.  Nor does it offer a lot of analytical perspectives of tribal vs non-tribal cultures, or  the difference between the two, or at what point can one refer to an organizational culture as having crossed the threshold of “tribal”  – whatever that may be. So, it is not an academic book written to appeal to those looking for an analysis of the idea of a “Tribe.”  Nor does it pretend to be.  And that is what I liked about it.

Its message is not new or unique. Very similar messages to Disrupt YOU!  and Innovator’s DNA , and very consistent with Legacy and Turn the Ship Around, but Godin offers up his message in an aphoristic way – fun, powerful, easy to relate to .  Godin’s message is that tribes need to be dynamic and agile to keep up with change.  Anyone can be a leader of a tribe – it just takes courage to take the initiative to do so.  The economy and our culture  are changing rapidly, and those who choose to keep their head down, stay safe,  and stay put, are going to be left out, left behind,  out flanked or run over by those who break away to find other innovative, energetic, and impatient leaders who will connect and form new tribes.

The book is full of interesting ideas. He devotes one whole section to his discussion of fear, faith and religion.  He calls “Fear” the “F” word and demands we acknowledge it,  understand it in ourselves and others, and then overcome it.  He describes religion as representing “a strict set of rules that our fellow humans have overlaid on top of our faith. Religion supports the status quo and encourages us to fit in, not to stand out.” (80)  He says that religion works great when it amplifies our faith, but it is at its worst when it “reinforces the status quo, often at the expense of faith.” (81)  When Godin talks about religion, he is not necessarily referring to “the church” or spiritual practice – but any organized dogma which demands that people conform.  Throughout the book he talks about “faith” outside of the context of religion.  He goes on to talk about the tension between religion and faith, all in the context of his message – Become a Heretic.

He says that, “All you need to know is two things. The first thing …is that individuals have far more power than ever before in history. … The second thing …is that the only thing holding you back from becoming the kind of person who changes things is this: lack of faith. Faith that you can do it. Faith that it’s worth doing. Faith that failure won’t destroy you.”  (71)

Tribes is written in short disconnected sections.  It can be opened at any place and the reader can jump in, go from middle to front, to back, back to middle – each section can be read independently.  You can put it next to the john and be inspired while doing your daily constitutional.   His approach reminded me of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra – unstructured, anecdotal, provocative, inspiring and in some cases simply polemic and disruptive.  Insightful, and incite-ful.  His message is also not dissimilar from Nietzsche’s:  It’s your choice.  It’s all on you, baby!  Go grab life by the throat, fall down, get back up, go for the gusto, take charge of your destiny – and don’t look back.   Leaders use their fear as fuel to take off, rather than as brakes to stop, back up and hide.  Godin’s Leaders (roughly equivalent to Nietzsche ’s “Supermen”) believe in themselves, are filled with passion for what they’re doing and what they stand for, and are not held back by convention or convenience.  Others are drawn to that.  And they form tribes around these leaders and their ideas…

DOWNSIDE? – As I read this book, I was going to give him a down check for being unstructured, disorganized, and non-linear in his approach. But then I decided that this was a strength.  At the very end he says, “I can tell you that I’m going to get a lot of flack from most people about what you’ve just read….it’s too disorganized, or not practical enough or that I require you to do too much work to actually accomplish anything.  That’s ok…criticism like that almost always accompanies change.”

FAVORITE QUOTES:  This book is FILLED with great lines.  I wanted to narrow this down to just a few, but I decided to leave in most of the ones I selected as candidates –just so that I can have them handy to review, and use in remarks, or meetings, or conversation.  Just like the book –  scan the quotes below, jump around, see if any of them resonate with you.  I also found a list of 70 quotes from this book in Good Reads, including many of those I selected.  These are some of the ones I liked most:

The most important tribes are bored with yesterday and demand tomorrow. 31

How many Fans to you have….too many organizations care about numbers, not fans. 33

The Web….and other factors involved in social media mean that everyone…has far more power than ever before. The king and the status quo are in big trouble.  37

By factory…I mean any job where your boss tells you what to do and how to do it…<Most people> want the absence of responsibility that a factory job can give….  39

Organizations are more important than ever before. It’s factories we don’t need…organizations have the scale to care for large tribes. 41

In a battle between two ideas, the best one doesn’t necessarily win. No, the idea that wins is the one with the most fearless heretic behind it. 42

What people are afraid of isn’t failure. It’s blame. Criticism. 46

Heretics are engaged, passionate, and more powerful and happier than everyone else. And they have a tribe that they support and that supports them in turn. 49

Can you imagine Steve Jobs showing up for the paycheck? It’s nice to get paid. It’s essential to believe. 49

Great leaders focus on the Tribe and only the tribe. 50

Great leaders are able to reflect the light onto their teams, their tribes. Great leaders don’t want the attention, but they use it…to unite the tribe and reinforce a sense of purpose. 50

I’m interested in the second kind of marketing, the act of tightening your organization and spreading the word within the tribe. 53

Great leaders don’t water down their message in order to make the tribe a bit bigger. 67

If you’re not uncomfortable in your work as a leader, it’s almost certain you’re not reaching your potential as a leader. 55

A leader who backs off is making a commitment to the power of the tribe, and is alert to the right moment to step back in. Someone who is doing nothing is merely hiding.  Leadership is a choice. It’s the choice to not do nothing.  Lean in, back off, but don’t do nothing.  59

Ultimately, people are most easily led where they wanted to go all along. 66

You’re not going to be able to grow your career or your business or feed the tribe by going after most people. Most people are really good at ignoring new trends or great employees or big ideas.  68

The art of leadership is understanding what you can’t compromise on. 79

When you fall in love with the system, you lose the ability to grow.83

The easiest thing is to react. The second easiest thing is to respond. The hardest thing is to initiate. 86

It takes guts to acknowledge that perhaps this time, right now, you can’t lead. So get out of the way and take the follow instead. 87

I define sheepwalking as the outcome of hiring people who have been raised to be obedient and giving them brain-dead jobs and enough fear to keep them in line.96

Tribes don’t do what you want; they do what they want. 107

The only thing that makes people and organizations great is their willingness to be not great along the way. The desire to fail on the way to reaching a bigger goal is the untold secret of success. 108

The secret of leadership is simple: do what you believe in. Paint a picture of the future. Go there.  People will follow.  108

The safer you play your plan for he future, the riskier it actually is. 111

The timid leave a vacuum….That’s why initiative is such an astonishingly successful tool: because it’s rare. 112

If you hear my idea but don’t believe it, that’s not or fault; it’s mine….If I fail to persuade you to implement a policy that supports my tribe, that’s due to my lack of passion or skill, not your shortsightedness.  117

…real leadership rarely comes from the CEO or the VP of leadership. Instead, it happens out of the corner of your eye, in a place you weren’t watching. 122

Leadership comes when your hope and your optimism are matched with a concrete vision of the future and a way to get there….122

Managers are the cynical ones…pessimists. Leaders, on the other hand, have hope. 123

Caring is the key emotion at the center of the tribe.  125

Remarkable visions and genuine insight are always met with resistance. And when you start to make progress, your efforts are met with even more resistance…the force for mediocrity will align to stop you…129

What’s hard now is breaking the rules. What’s hard is finding the faith to become a heretic, to seek out an innovation and then, in the face of huge amounts of resistance, to lead a team and to push the innovation out the door into the world.  130

Tribes grow when people recruit other people…. The tribe doesn’t do it for you, of course.  They do it for each other.  129

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either. 132

Managers stamp out deviants…..Great leaders embrace deviants by searching for them and catching them doing something right. 133

On positive deviants: Find leaders (the heretics who are doing things differently and making change) and then amplify their work, give them a platform, and help them find followers – and things get better.  They always get better…<this> might be the most important practical idea in this entire book. 134

Einstein: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” … You can’t manage without knowledge.  You can’t lead without imagination. 137

Belief: People don’ t believe what you tell them.  They rarely believe what you show them.  They often believe what their friends tell them.  They always believe what they tell themselves.  What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves.  Stories about the future and about change. 138

Every tribe is different. Every leader is different. The nature of leadership is that you’re not doing what’s been done before. If you were, you’d be following , not leading.   146.

You can choose to lead, or not. You can choose to have faith, or not. You can choose to contribute to the tribe, or not. 146

Once you choose to lead, you’ll be under huge pressure to reconsider your choice, to compromise, to dumb it down, or to give up…. That’s the world’s job to get you to be quiet and follow.  The status quo is the status quo for a reason.  147