The Pearl: Beast of Burden
Written by Martin Vidal | 09/12/2021
Food for Thought:
Toils
I wrote this piece as homage to a force that we ought to be immensely grateful for: the human impulse to create and build. You and I are every moment surrounded by the creations of people we’ve never met. From paved roads and airplanes to opera and a passage of poetry, our human family has gifted us with more delights than we have time for. In the words of George Herbert:
More servants wait on man
Than he'll take notice of
Still, I felt the need to write a second part, because what comes of this creative ambition found in each of us? What lasts or changes things in the end? It is all amusement at base, both for producer and consumer. A dog chases a ball, as a man chases his dreams.
Read it here.
Personal Development:
Exaggeration
Nothing in life that we attempt succeeds 100% of the time. Even the star footballer eventually throws the ball to an unintended place, and the most inspired orator will on some scattered days fail to entrance the audience put before them. Success is, then, a game of probabilities. These probabilities manifest in two forms—hits and misses—and the ratio of one to the other paints the full picture. One must supply sufficient hits and misses to see the thing play out in full. What is required to master this game is a bit of exaggeration. In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, “We aim above the mark to hit the mark.”
Success is never victories alone. It is a matter of quantity over quality, of sheer mass over purity. It takes a vigorous soul to succeed because they must not only have the energy to do a few things well which deserve reward, but to do a great many things deserving of reward, and to have the bulk of them go completely without recognition. It is not enough to do enough; we must do too much. To market our product, we cannot devise one or two excellent strategies; we must turn over every stone and fill every empty space. We must run the full gamut of possibilities: pay for ads, promote it through organic content, post it to seven different sites, incentivize referrals, reach out to past customers, and, then, shout about it on the street corner. The key to the game of probabilities is waste and failure. We must run a marathon to move a single mile. We must give a hundred hours of labor for each hour we are to be paid for.
A 20% chance of success equates to eight wasted attempts for every two that succeed. How difficult are your dreams to bring to fruition? You want to be a millionaire, or a famous celebrity, or a world leader, or any other grand and glorious thing. The odds are not favorable. One in a thousand, one in a million, these are the games we have chosen to play. Probability means you are searching for a diamond in the rough and a needle in the haystack. It will be countless hours of sifting sand and shifting straw before any shiny thing catches your eye. Success is such a grand waste, and this any open-eyed ambition must accept.
A wiser, more self-possessed individual may settle on pushing aside their silly visions of what could be, and focusing instead on the beauty all around them which comes at so little cost. But if there’s some hunger in the soul that can only be satisfied by that single want, then let us recognize that success is, by definition, to spend more time failing than succeeding—to work only to fail as a matter of course—but to craft at last some halcyon life for oneself, which will serve as recompense for so many fruitless hours.
For more content like this, see The Ambition Handbook: A Guide for Ambitious Persons.
Book Quotes:
Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain
Adam was but human — this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple’s sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.
Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example.
Let us endeavor so to live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry.
All say, "how hard it is that we have to die’"— a strange complaint to come from the mouths of those who have had to live.
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.
Better to keep your mouth closed and be thought a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.
You can find the full book here.
A Song I Love:
Performance by The xx
“Performance” captures a central feature of love and, really, of being human: dissembling and hiding our true feelings. It’s about trying not to seem hurt. It’s about that ever-raging battle between love and pride. It’s about the part of you that’s crying out for help being muzzled by the part of you that’s too prideful to be vulnerable. The lyrics are beautiful:
When you saw me leaving
Did you think I had a place to go?
Since you stopped believing
I’ve had to put on my own show
I’ll put on a performance
I’ll put on a show
It is a performance
I do it all so
You won’t see my hurting
When my heart it breaks
I’ll put on a performance
I’ll put on a brave face
The singer, Romy Marley Croft, has a voice that is soft and textured in a way that can’t fail to inspire a profound commiseration in the listener.
Even when I was hiding
You could always find me
Now you’ve stopped looking for me
But I’m still playing hide and seek
I want you to notice
But you just don’t see
The show is wasted on you
So I perform for me
Listen to it here.
A Tiny Thought:
One gets a sense of purpose from striving for what they want—not from getting it.
Until next week,
Martin Vidal
Author of The Ambition Handbook and Flower Garden
Website: www.martinvidal.co