☕ saturday mornings - february 11, 2023

makings of success, cancer & the price of authenticity

Tommy Dixon

Feb 11, 2023

Happy Saturday!

I hope you’re having an excellent start to your weekend.

What I’ve been up to:

I went skiing with family to prepare for a trip to British Columbia later this month.
As a fun exercise, I went back through every edition of saturday mornings written and pulled out my Top 10 Favourite Quotes. If you love a good quote, you can check them out here.
I've been writing like a maniac. I'm working on a new essay, which will be ready to share in a few weeks. It'll end up being the longest thing I've ever written (and hopefully the best).

Here's a recap of the most interesting ideas I've explored this week.

Enjoy.

✍️ quote i’m pondering:

Bill Ackman, billionaire hedge fund manager, on success:

"I’ve always had this view that success is not a straight line up.
If you read the stories of successful people, almost every successful person has had to deal with some degree of hardship, whether that hardship is personal hardship, health-related hardship, or a business issue.
I’ve always had the view that how successful you are is really a function of how you deal with failure. If you deal with failure well and you persist, you have a high probability of being successful."

(Ackman’s first investment fund, Gotham Partners, failed and was shut down before he started his second fund and “made it big”. He also lost $4B in a single catastrophic investment.)

📚 book passage i loved:

The moment a person learns he's got terminal cancer, a profound shift takes place in his psyche.
At one stroke in the doctor's office he becomes aware of what really matters to him. Things that 60 seconds earlier had seemed all important suddenly appear meaningless, while people and concerns that he had till then dismissed at once take on supreme importance.

― The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

💡 idea from me: the price of authenticity

Study for The Pilgrim of the World on His Journey, 1846 - 1848 - Thomas Cole — The Pilgrim of the World on His Journey (Thomas Cole, 1848)

Many people think clichés are useless.

Silly, overused, dollar-store phrases that contain zero value. I disagree. While I don't think clichés contain the answers to life's problems, most contain more wisdom than your average self-help book.

My favorite cliché: Be Yourself.

authenticity is the goal

“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

If you regularly read my writing, you know how much we talk about the importance of authenticity.

One pattern I've noticed is that the more authentic you can be, the happier you will be. If you do the things you were made for, and stop trying to be like someone else, your life will be better. Naval Ravikant would add you'll also become richer.

It's easy to talk about authenticity.

But we forget how hard "being yourself" actually is.

the world wants you to be normal

If you're trying to figure out what you want to do with your life, there are a lot of forces that will push you towards following train tracks laid by others rather than charting a course yourself.

What your parents want you to do, what friends are doing, and (worst of all) what "successful" peers have done. There is a ton of pressure to merge into your surroundings. To forget about "being yourself".

In his final Amazon shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos included a section titled "Differentiation is Survival and the Universe Wants You to be Typical."

He writes:

In what ways does the world pull at you in an attempt to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain your distinctiveness? To keep alive the thing or things that make you special?
We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to “be yourself.”
What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness.
The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you.
Don’t let it happen.
You have to pay a price for your distinctiveness, and it’s worth it. The fairy tale version of “be yourself” is that all the pain stops as soon as you allow your distinctiveness to shine. That version is misleading.
Being yourself is worth it, but don’t expect it to be easy or free.
You’ll have to put energy into it continuously.

The struggle to be yourself is amplified by social media.

We're constantly fed updates on what other people are doing. Told what we should value. Lectured on what's cool and not cool.

We compare our behind-the-scenes with everyone else's highlight reel.

Being yourself is a meaningful goal, but it's not easy. Authenticity has a price. No one really wants you to "be you"... except you.

Don’t expect it to be easy.

Then, you can begin the life journey to discover yourself.

your journey to yourself

In May of 1999, Anna Quindlen stepped up to the microphone at Mount Holyoke College to deliver the commencement speech.

As she looked out at the graduating students, she prepared to share a simple message: Be Original.

“The thing that is really hard, and really amazing," Quindlen said, "is giving up on being perfect in the way people expect and beginning the work of becoming yourself."

“This is more difficult because there is no template to follow, no mask to wear.”

“Set aside what your friends expect, what your parents demand, what your acquaintances require.”

“Set aside the messages this culture sends, through its advertising, its entertainment, its disdain and its disapproval, about how you should behave."

“Begin with that most terrifying of all things, a clean slate."

"Then look, every day, at the choices you are making, and when you ask yourself why you are making them, find this answer: for me, for me. Because they are who and what I am, and mean to be."

“This will always be your struggle whether you are 21 or 51. I know this from experience. When I quit the New York Times to be a full-time mother, the voices of the world said that I was nuts. When I quit it again to be a full-time novelist, they said I was nuts again."

"But I am not nuts. I am happy. I am successful on my own terms."

"Because if your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all.”

be wonky

"They laugh at me because I'm different; I laugh at them because they're all the same."
— Kurt Cobain

When everyone wants to be like everyone else, being different is an advantage.

How do you know where to start?

Follow your genuine intellectual curiosity. Explore what you're uniquely interested in. Don't be afraid to be a little wonky.

In offering life advice to college graduates Patrick Collison, the brilliant founder of Stripe, writes "Make sure that the things you're pursuing are weird things that you want to pursue, not whatever the standard path is."

"Do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange?"

"If not, maybe it's too normal."

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If I had $50M in the bank, what would motivate me to work today?

📸 photo of the week:

This passage is from a book I read last week, The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

It’s a helpful reminder to slow down.

The last line hits hard: "People are never happy where they are."

I wrote about a similar idea a few weeks ago in a short piece, Anywhere, But Here.