PRAGMATIC AND PRINCIPLED

“Wherever a person can live, there one can also live well; life is also in the demands of court, there too one can live well.”
—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS,

William Lee Miller, in his unique “ethical biography” of Abraham Lincoln, makes an important point about this famous president: our deification of the man makes a point to pretend he wasn’t a politician. We focus on his humble beginnings, his self-education, his beautiful speeches. But we gloss over his job, which was politics. That misses what was so truly impressive about him: Lincoln was all the things he was—compassionate, deliberate, fair, open-minded, and purposeful—while being a politician. He was what we admire in a profession we believe to be filled exclusively with the opposite of that type of person.


Principles and pragmatism are not at odds. Whether you live in the snake pit of Washington, D.C., work among the materialism of Wall Street, or grew up in a closed-minded small town, you can live well. Plenty of others have.

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Kassa was born on January 6, 1811 (E.C.). His birthplace was a village called Dawa, located about 12 kilometers from the city of Gondar. On February 16, in the church of Abba Abiye Egzi, which is found in the city of Gondar, he was baptized into Christianity, and his Christian name was given as Gebre Kidane.

Kassa, who later came to be known as Emperor Tewodros, was the son of Ato Haylu Welde Giorgis. Ato Haylu married Woyzero Atitegeb Wond, a native of Enfranz, in the month of Meskerem in 1810 (E.C.). In the same year of their marriage, Atitegeb gave birth to a son for Ato Haylu, and the child was named Kassa.

Before seeing the growth of his last child, and before his longing for him was fulfilled, Ato Haylu Welde Giorgis died in the year Kassa was born—that is, in 1812 (E.C.).


Pawlos GnoGno
Happy Birthday to His Majesty, Emperor Tewodros

Yesterday was the birthday of His majesty for whatever reason I forgot.

One of the best emperor we have in the history of Ethiopia is Emperor Tewodross.(personally)

START WITH WHERE THE WORLD IS

“Do now what nature demands of you. Get right to it if that’s in your power. Don’t look around to see if people will know about it. Don’t await the perfection of Plato’s Republic, but be satisfied with even the smallest step forward and regard the outcome as a small thing.”

—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 9.29.

Have you ever heard the expression “Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough”? The idea is not to settle or compromise your standards, but rather not to become trapped by idealism.


The community organizer Saul Alinsky opens his book Rules for Radicals with a pragmatic but inspiring articulation of that idea: “As an organizer I start from where the world is, as it is, not as I would like it to be. That we accept the world as it is does not in any sense weaken our desire to change it into what we believe it should be—it is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be.” There is plenty that you could do right now, today, that would make the world a better place. There are plenty of small steps that, were you to take them, would help move things forward.


Don’t excuse yourself from doing them because the conditions aren’t right or because a better opportunity might come along soon. Do what you can, now. And when you’ve done it, keep it in perspective, don’t overblow the results. Shun both ego and excuse, before and after.

This is sad
Rest In Peace

This is shocking

In 1895, at the age of 16, Einstein failed the entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. He excelled in mathematics and physics but did poorly in other subjects such as language and history.

"From Osho, I learned freedom of the self; from Che Guevara, the courage to resist injustice; from Kafka, the weight of solitude; from Nietzsche, the strength to question and deny imposed truths; from Marx, class consciousness; from Voltaire, resistance to religious tyranny; from Dostoevsky, the deep inner conflict of humanity; from Gibran, spiritual awakening; from Freud, the complexities of the human mind; and from Manto, the courage to expose society’s naked realities.”

© Secret of life 📚

STICK WITH JUST THE FACTS

“Don’t tell yourself anything more than what the initial impressions report. It’s been reported to you that someone is speaking badly about you. This is the report—the report wasn’t that you’ve been harmed. I see that my son is sick—but not that his life is at risk. So always stay within your first impressions, and don’t add to them in your head—this way nothing can happen to you.”

—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 8.49

At first, this can seem like the opposite of everything you’ve been taught. Don’t we cultivate our minds and critical thinking skills precisely so we don’t simply accept things at face value? Yes, most of the time. But sometimes this approach can be counterproductive.

What a philosopher also has is the ability, as Nietzsche put it, “to stop courageously, at the surface” and see things in plain, objective form. Nothing more, nothing less. Yes, Stoics were “superficial,” he said, “out of profundity.” Today, while other people are getting carried away, that’s what you’re going to practice. A kind of straightforward pragmatism—seeing things as their initial impressions make them.

NO TIME FOR THEORIES, JUST RESULTS

“When the problem arose for us whether habit or theory was better for getting virtue—if by theory is meant what teaches us correct conduct, and by habit we mean being accustomed to act according to this theory—Musonius thought habit to be more effective.”

—MUSONIUS RUFUS, LECTURES, 5.17.31–32, 5.19.1–2

As Hamlet says,

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

There is no time to chop logic over whether our theories are correct. We’re dealing with the real world here. What matters is how you’re going to deal with this situation right in front of you and whether you’re going to be able to move past it and onto the next one. That’s not saying that anything goes—but we can’t forget that although theories are clean and simple, situations rarely are.

Shabbat Shalom

MAKE THE WORDS YOUR OWN

“Many words have been spoken by Plato, Zeno, Chrysippus, Posidonius, and by a whole host of equally excellent Stoics. I’ll tell you how people can prove their words to be their own—by putting into practice what they’ve been preaching.”

—SENECA, MORAL LETTERS, 108.35;

One of the criticisms of Stoicism by modern translators and teachers is the amount of repetition. Marcus Aurelius, for example, has been dismissed by academics as not being original because his writing resembles that of other, earlier Stoics. This criticism misses the point. Even before Marcus’s time, Seneca was well aware that there was a lot of borrowing and overlap among the philosophers. That’s because real philosophers weren’t concerned with authorship, only what worked. More important, they believed that what was said mattered less than what was done.

And this is as true now as it was then. You’re welcome to take all of the words of the great philosophers and use them to your own liking (they’re dead; they don’t mind). Feel free to tweak and edit and improve as you like. Adapt them to the real conditions of the real world.

The way to prove that you truly understand what you speak and write, that you truly are original, is to put them into practice. Speak them with your actions more than anything else.

TAKE CHARGE AND END YOUR TROUBLES

“You’ve endured countless troubles—all from not letting your ruling reason do the work it was made for—enough already!”
—MARCUS AURELIUS, MEDITATIONS, 9.26

How many things you fear have actually come to pass? How many times has anxiety driven you to behave in a way you later regret? How many times have you let jealousy or frustration or greed lead you down a bad road?

Letting our reason rule the day might seem like more work, but it saves us quite a bit of trouble. As Ben Franklin’s proverb put it: “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.” Your brain was designed to do this work.

It was meant to separate what is important from what is senseless, to keep things in perspective, to only become troubled by that which is worth becoming troubled about. You only need to put it to use.