Philosophy

I’ll Be Happy When …

October 19, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

It is fallacious to let life slip away in the pursuit of the illusion that, “When I achieve something, I will be free to live in happiness.”

If you pursue a job, a relationship, a house, a material possession, or the settlement of a debt, happiness will never come because there is always another “something” that will follow the present one. The circumstances that you thus wait for do provide a transitory elation, but, too soon, they withdraw into the dull and mundane, only to be replaced by the next fantasy of happiness.

The Art of Simple Existence is One of the Most Difficult to Master

According to Buddhism, the art of simple existence is one of the most difficult to master. If you aren’t living in peace and happiness at this moment, you’ll never be able to. If you truly want to be at peace, you must be at peace right now. Otherwise, there is only the aspiration of peace “someday when I accomplish something.”

The experience of pleasure, freedom, and love are available now, whatever your circumstance. The American clinical psychologist John Welwood reminds us of this in Ordinary Magic: Everyday Life as Spiritual Path:

Our society would have us believe that inner satisfaction depends on outer success and achievement. Yet struggling to “get somewhere” keeps us perpetually busy, stressed out, and disconnected from that essential inner resource—our ability to be fully present—which could provide a real sense of joy and fulfillment. Our life is unsatisfactory only because we are not living it fully, but instead we are pursuing a happiness that is always somewhere else, other than where we are right now…

Cultivating the capacity to be fully present—awake, attentive, and responsive—in all the different circumstances of life is the essence of spiritual practice and realization. Those with the greatest spiritual realization are those who are “all here,” who relate to life with an expansive awareness that is not limited by any fixation on themselves or their own point of view. They don’t shrink from any aspect of themselves or life as a whole.

Idea for Impact: When One Lives, One Must Live Entirely

However difficult your circumstances, however uncertain the times, peace is not to be earmarked for a future time. The definitive source of happiness lies in the quality of your thoughts. Real sustainable peace springs from a healthy and nurturing relationship with yourself. Let nothing and nobody take that away from you. Don’t postpone being at peace.

I Admire Business Leaders Who’re Frugal to an Extreme

October 4, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Business folks are rarely frugal, especially when they’re on their clients’ dime or using nameless stockholders’ funds.

I admire businesspeople and companies that are frugal to an extreme and are obsessed with reducing waste. Here are three prominent examples of leaders who’ve successfully inculcated frugality in their companies’ cultures.

Walmart founder Sam Walton was famously frugal and lived a humble life right up until his death. He drove a red 1985 Ford pickup and said, “What am I supposed to haul my dogs around in, a Rolls-Royce?” On business trips, Walton required Walmart’s buyers to lodge two to a hotel room, eat in family diners, and even bring pens from the hotel rooms for use at “home office.” One of their travel goals was to limit expenses to less than 1% of their purchases. Walmart did not have a corporate jet until they had $40 billion in sales. Walton wrote in his biographical Made in America: My Story (1992; my summary,) “A lot of what goes on these days with high-flying companies and these overpaid CEO’s, who’re really just looting from the top and aren’t watching out for anybody but themselves, really upsets me. It’s one of the main things wrong with American business today.”

Amazon is obsessed with reducing waste. From the very beginning, founder Jeff Bezos built a company focused on providing value in terms of prices and customer service. A micromanager, Bezos audited all corporate expenses when the company was much smaller and reproved everything not warranted for delivering value to customers—no first-class travel for executives, no color printers, office desks made from wooden doors, etc.

Thriftiness is at the heart of the Brazilian private-equity group 3G’s operating model. 3G is notorious for pressing the zero-base budgeting method of cutting operating costs at companies it acquires. Julie MacIntosh’s Dethroning the King (2010) has an interesting story about 3G-run InBev CEO Carlos Brito‘s first visit to Anheuser-Busch’s St. Louis headquarters after InBev purchased the American brewer in 2008:

To honor Brito’s visit and pay him the respect it felt he deserved as the soon-to-be new chief, Anheuser-Busch arranged for him to stay in a suite at the cushy Ritz-Carlton. The Ritz wasn’t Brito’s style, though, especially since he was just about to start indoctrinating Anheuser-Busch’s staffers to InBev’s frugal way of life. He had flown commercial into St. Louis from New York’s LaGuardia Airport.

He had someone call back and say, “No, no no, I’ve already reserved a room at such and such a place—like the Holiday Inn,” said one InBev insider. “I think that’s when it probably, for the first time, hit home in St. Louis that things were going to be different.” Rather than hitching a town car or helicoptering in to Anheuser-Busch headquarters from his hotel on Tuesday morning, Brito accepted a ride from [Anheuser-Busch President] Dave Peacock.

While on the subject of leaders and indulgence, I’d like to mention private jets, those symbols of corporate indulgence. Corporate jets were famously ridiculed when the CEOs of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler flew them to Washington DC to seek government bailouts in 2008. General Electric’s former CEO Jeff Immelt’s was disparaged recently for flying around the world with a needless “backup jet” in case something happened to the corporate plane he was using. But a corporate jet isn’t an indulgence for a big company, it is a business necessity. Having used corporate jets during a previous job, I can swear that flying commercial is relatively counterproductive and costly. In the 1990s, Warren Buffett, the poster boy of thriftiness, reluctantly bought a private plane. He christened it “The Indefensible,” but within a few years, renamed it “The Indispensable.”

Why I’m Frugal

October 1, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Frugality Over the Ages: Frugality as a Virtue

Frugality Over the Ages

From Socrates to Thoreau, from Franklin to Gandhi, philosophers, moralists, and spiritual leaders have identified frugality as a virtue and associated simple living with wisdom, integrity, and happiness. The Cynics were the first to reject wealth, power, sex, fame, and other desires in favor of a simple life free of all possessions. Diogenes the Cynic (portrayed in image) famously lived in a wine barrel and had no worldly goods.

For the Puritans, the love of material consumption was an evil; their spiritual doctrine stressed, in the words of the American historian Edmund Morgan,

A man was but the steward of the possessions he accumulated. If he indulged himself in luxurious living, he would have that much less with which to support church and society. If he needlessly consumed his substance, either from carelessness or from sensuality, he failed to honor the God who furnished him with it.

Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, a doyen of the self-improvement movement, listed frugality as one of the 13 virtues he followed as a young man. Between 1732 and 1757, Franklin published such famous aphorisms in his Poor Richard’s Almanack as “be industrious and frugal, and you will be rich,” “beware of little expenses; a small leak will sink a great ship,” and “he that goes a-borrowing goes a-sorrowing.”

For the American philosophers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, frugality or “transcendental simplicity” was a means to a higher end. In Man the Reformer (1841,) Emerson wrote, “Economy is a high, humane office, a sacrament, when its aim is grand; when it is the prudence of simple tastes, when it is practiced for freedom, or love, or devotion.” For Thoreau, “high thinking was preferable to high living;” he wrote in Walden (1854,) “Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind. With respect to luxuries and comforts, the wisest have ever lived a more simple and meager life than the poor”.

Thoreau inspired the Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. After suffering a mental breakdown in the late 1870s, Tolstoy, who was born into Russian nobility, rejected his family’s estate and serfdom. He renounced his decadent, racy lifestyle and engaged in a revolutionary brand of Christianity based on spiritual and material austerity.

Tolstoy’s philosophy showed the way for the creation of utopian communities of simple, self-sufficient living—the most famous example being the “Tolstoy Farm” ashram that Mahatma Gandhi established in South Africa. Gandhi was the quintessence of simplicity and sported austere homespun clothing. He famously said, “you may have occasion to possess or use material things, but the secret of life lies in never missing them,” and “our civilization, our culture, our [nation] depend not upon multiplying our wants—self-indulgence, but upon restricting our wants—self-denial.”

Frugality is a Moral Virtue

The distinguished career coach Marty Nemko once wrote, “I even take care to tear-off single sheets of toilet paper. Because I’m cheap? No. Because it’ll help the environment? No. I just think wasting is wrong.” That, in a nutshell, is why I’m frugal.

For me, frugality suggests an appropriate limit on individual and collective desires; it denies the materialistic expectations that the modern society imposes upon us.

Frugality is not some form of world-denying asceticism or austerity. It is a part of principled stewardship of not only the resources I’ve been blessed with but also of myself.

Frugality is about forgoing a subset of desires—as part of a quest for an abundant life. In other words, frugality restricts my indulgence of materialistic appetite, with the intention that I leave space for the cultivation of diverse forms of pleasure.

When I started to work while still in college, frugality was an element of my quest for financial independence. It became the lynchpin of a deliberate set of lifestyle choices and values. But my focus on achieving financial freedom never let me pining for the pleasures I might have had.

Six years ago, I gave up a corporate job and significant earnings in favor of a simpler life with plenty of discretionary time and money for world travel, leisure, learning, culture, and meaning.

Idea for Impact: Enjoying a rich life is more important than zealously stewarding one’s savings and investments.

Living frugally, with the particular intention of achieving financial freedom, requires a good measure of renunciation. This renunciation is easiest when one regards it not as deprivation, but as a deliberate choice in a trade-off for an enriched life.

That Burning “What If” Question

August 8, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

The Rightness of Past Choices Become Obvious in the Clarity of Future Hindsight

In the Czech novelist Milan Kundera’s philosophical novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984; film adaptation, 1988) the womanizing protagonist Tomáš deliberates if he wants to be single or with his eventual wife Tereza:

We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.

…

There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything as it comes, without warning, like an actor going on cold. And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself? That is why life is always like a sketch. No, “sketch” is not quite the word, because a sketch is an outline of something, the groundwork for a picture, whereas the sketch that is our life is a sketch for nothing, an outline with no picture.

The Mournful “What If” is a Powerful and Emotional Inquiry about Alternative Lives You Could Have Lived

Oftentimes, when dealt with adverse circumstances, life’s self-criticism apparatus kicks in. Plagued with self-doubt, life asks the questions “Why did things turn out this way?” and “Why wasn’t this experience what I expected it to be?” Regrets gnaw in the back of the mind, “How would my life be different?” and “I never shouldn’t have done this.”

And when you cognize life in hindsight, your lived life doesn’t usually compare favorably with your imagined, could-have-been life.

And that’s why you should refrain from ruminating about those non-lived lives—such projections of your mind only instigate sorrow.

Idea for Impact: Sketch the Picture of Our Own Choosing

One of the most effective ways of eliminating regrets is to eliminate the underlying ignorance that is the cause. The wise fancy what the past was once and appreciate how it is molded them. But they no longer desire to live there or evoke the choices of the life that could have been.

As the great Stoics taught, you must reject regret, appreciate that you are now the distillation of all your past choices and experiences, and take the next positive little step. Reflecting on “What do I want to make of all of this?” and “What am I looking forward to?” can clarify your potential.

As Viktor Frankl emphasized in his 1946 masterwork on positive approach to psychological treatment, “Live as if you were living already for the second time, and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Who wants to lament the life not lived when you can do dive into the life you’re actually in and do so much good now?

Live this choice. Sketch the picture of our own choosing.

Disproven Hypotheses Are Useful Too

June 21, 2018 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Hypotheses are conjectures—often merely proposals or intuitions—about what may constitute facts.

A specific hypothesis can be tested for its adequacy and proved correct or incorrect using the scientific method. Sometimes, a hypothesis is accepted for the time being, until further evidence suggests an amendment.

It does not matter if a certain hypothesis is proven incorrect because, in itself, the falsification of a hypothesis can offer precious insight about the “what is not” to enhance the “what is.”

Hypotheses are the bedrock of scholarship. Scientific understanding accrues when many interrelated and tested hypotheses are used to develop theories, and rethink and restructure our knowledge.

Kinship with Nature

December 4, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

I’m currently reading Indian philosopher and statesman Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan’s The Philosophy of Rabindranath Tagore (1918.)

Remarking that “a true seer sees in natural facts spiritual significance,” Radhakrishnan comments about Tagore’s revealing of the relation of the individual to the universe, showing how the Indian way of thinking not only emboldens oneness with nature, but also—or especially—with the divine consciousness therein. Radhakrishnan quotes from Tagore’s Sādhanā: The Realisation of Life (1916,)

The Indian mind never has any hesitation in acknowledging its kinship with nature, its unbroken relation with all.

…

The earth, water and light, fruits and flowers, to her were not merely physical phenomena to be turned to use and then left aside. They were necessary to her in the attainment of the ideal of perfection, as every note is necessary to the completeness of the symphony.

…

The man whose acquaintance with the world does not lead him deeper than science leads him, will never understand what it is that the man with the spiritual vision finds in these natural phenomena. The water does not merely cleanse his limbs, but it purifies his heart; for it touches his soul. The earth does not merely hold his body, but it gladdens his mind; for its contact is more than a physical contact, it is a living presence. When a man does not realise his kinship with the world, he lives in a prison-house whose walls are alien to him. When he meets the eternal spirit in all objects, then is he emancipated, for then he discovers the fullest significance of the world into which he is born; then he finds himself in perfect truth, and his harmony with the All is established.

Image Credit: Joshua Earle at Unsplash

Making Exceptions “Just Once” is a Slippery Slope

October 30, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Keeping Our Commitments Unwaveringly is Tough

The Harvard business strategy professor Clayton Christensen (of The Innovator’s Dilemma (1997) fame) often tells a story from his college days when he played basketball for his university team. His team worked hard all season and made it to the finals of some big tournament. The championship game was scheduled on a Sunday.

Christensen is a pious Mormon. Playing on the Sabbath (the “seventh day” is holy occasion and has a particular purpose, i.e. rest and spiritual renewal) was against his religious beliefs. The basketball team’s coach asked Christensen to break the rule for that big game, “I don’t know what you believe, but I believe that God will understand.” His teammates prodded him, “You’ve got to play. Can’t you break the rule, just this one time?”

Christensen prayed to God for guidance. After some reflection, he concluded that he would not play in the finals because he did not want to violate the Mormon way of life and break his personal rules: “Because life is just one unending stream of extenuating circumstances. Had I crossed the line that one time, I would have done it over and over and over in the years that followed.”

Willpower is Character in Action

Christensen’s team, however, played without him and won the basketball championship.

Discussing this experience in writings such as How Will You Measure Your Life? (2012,) Christensen says,

Many of us have convinced ourselves that we are able to break our own personal rules “just this once.” In our minds, we can justify these small choices. None of those things, when they first happen, feels like a life-changing decision. The marginal costs are almost always low. But each of those decisions can roll up into a much bigger picture, turning you into the kind of person you never wanted to be.

…

If you give in to “just this once,” based on a marginal-cost analysis, you’ll regret where you end up. That’s the lesson I learned: it’s easier to hold to your principles 100 percent of the time than it is to hold to them 98 percent of the time. The boundary—your personal moral line—is powerful because you don’t cross it; if you have justified doing it once, there’s nothing to stop you doing it again.

For Christenson, the opportunity cost of missing the championship game was large. Therefore, the marginal cost of breaking his rules “just this once” was comparatively trivial. However, the bigger damage of yielding to demands of the circumstances was larger yet, given his religious devotion.

Idea for Impact: Life becomes so much simpler if you decide what you stand for, stick with your values 100% the time, and make no exceptions.

It’s easy to lose your emotional footing and resist temptations, especially when you feel pressured or depressed, or face some other persuasive incentive.

It’s easy to unearth some justification to infringe a little upon your principles or break commitments you’ve made to yourself.

However, conceding “just once” is a slippery slope—the proverbial thin end of a wedge. If you allow yourself to compromise just the once, you can wind up doing it frequently.

In contrast, if you make up your mind to follow 100% on some standard, all of your prospective decisions are made.

Life becomes so much easier when you no longer need to expend your willpower on internal moral deliberations or justify/ regret your poor choices.

Realize the Truth Yourself

October 13, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

So much of what you’ll hear and what you’re taught may turn out to be incorrect on closer scrutiny.

Whether it’s advice from the experts, what you hear in the media, or what your mother told you, if it is of any consequence, take the time to work out for yourself whether it is factual.

The great Hindu spiritual leader Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) once instructed, “Do not believe in a thing because you have read about it in a book. Do not believe in a thing because another man has said it was true. Do not believe in words because they are hallowed by tradition. Find out the truth for yourself. Reason it out. That is realization.”

Idea for Impact: It’s not sensible to believe any assertion unless you have good reason for doing so. If you care whether your beliefs about the world are reliable, you must establish them on the sound, relevant evidence. Until you can organize that evidence and determine whether a belief is true or isn’t, you must suspend your judgment. The celebrated British mathematician, logician, and political activist Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) wrote in Why Men Fight: A Method of Abolishing the International Duel (1917,)

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth—more than ruin, more even than death. Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible; thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; thought is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, careless of the well-tried wisdom of the ages. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid.

The Power of Counterintuitive Thinking

September 15, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

“The All-embracing quality of the great virtue follows alone from the Tao … Only with Tao can follow the right path,” wrote Laozi in Tao Te Ching.

Translated roughly as “the way of integrity,” the Tao Te Ching is mostly a work of maxims of varying length; but it frequently quotes traditional poems, songs, and hymns.

While the normative meaning of the word ‘Tao’ is just “path” or “way,” the text’s dominant theme is the spirit or quality of mind one needs to cultivate.

Here’s a verse from Tao Te Ching that advocates the power of counterintuitive thinking:

A good soldier is never aggressive;
A good fighter is never angry.

The best way of conquering an enemy
Is to win him over by not antagonizing him.

The best way of employing a man
Is to serve under him.

This is called the virtue of non-striving!
This is called using the abilities of men!
This is called being wedded to Heaven as of old!

Enabling the Highest Degrees of Understanding // Book Summary of Howard Gardner’s ‘The Unschooled Mind’

June 27, 2017 By Nagesh Belludi Leave a Comment

Traditional Schooling Fails to Teach Kids to Ask the Right Questions

In The Unschooled Mind (1991,) Harvard developmental psychologist Howard Gardner makes a persuasive case for why even the brightest students often lack a deep understanding of what traditional schooling purports to teach them.

According to Gardner, students (in elementary schools to graduate colleges) may take exams and earn degrees, but their supposed knowledge turns out deficient in situations that are at variance from the “text-to-test” framework in which they learnt it. To some extent, this disconnect is an outcome of teachers’ settling for “correct-answer compromises” whereby students take the rote repetition of facts, formulas, concepts, and theories for a real understanding of fundamental concepts.

Robust Forms of Intuitive Knowledge

Overall, Gardner argues that children tend to acquire well-established models for perceptive learning and intuitive thinking by the time they are five years old. They develop wide-ranging beliefs about the physical world and distinctive models of events and people.

Subsequently, when children begin their schooling, they are launched into pedagogic methods that often sidestep—even interfere with—the children’s entrenched patterns of learning and understanding. That is to say, children have to put up with a disagreeable dichotomy between their intuitive learning patterns and the academic learning:

In its theoretical resourcefulness and intuitions, [a 5-year old’s mind] is powerful; in its artistic endeavors, it can be creative and imaginative; in its adventurousness, it is exemplary. … Education that takes seriously the ideas and intuitions of the young child is far more likely to achieve success than education that ignores these views, either considering them to be unimportant or assuming that they will disappear on their own.

Experiential Learning, Supplanted by Critical Analysis and Synthesis, Can Enhance Students’ Points of View

The Unschooled Mind contends that far-reaching knowledge and appreciation of education can occur only when students are allowed to integrate their “prescholastic” learning modes with the scholastic and the disciplinary ways of traditional school education. “The problem is less a difficulty in school learning per se and more a problem in integrating the notational and conceptual knowledge featured in school with the robust forms of intuitive knowledge that have evolved spontaneously during the opening years of life.”

Gardner’s solution to this problem is to situate students in educational environments that pique their curiosity about the subject matter and, at the higher levels of education, challenge their preexisting assumptions. Educating children for the utmost degrees of understanding involves designing educational systems that help students synthesize these several patterns of learning.

Real Education Opens the Way to Thinking, Knowing, and Deeper Understanding

For real learning to occur, Gardner argues, students must have an opportunity to realize their own ignorance, and then ask and explore their own questions. Teachers must regularly expose students to “Christopherian encounters”—compelling personal discoveries of the inconsistencies between their various frames of reference—by approaching any subject matter through at least five instructive channels:

through narratives and stories,
through logical and quantitative lines of attack,
through “foundational” or philosophical inquiries,
through aesthetic approaches (exploring the creative and artistic elements) and
through creating and drawing upon the students’ life-experiences.

Gardner claims that traditional schooling should incorporate more apprenticing—apprenticeship programs build most effectively on the ways children learn—and schools should become more like children’s museums.

Recommendation: Read The Unschooled Mind by Howard Gardner, especially if you have a child in school. The key takeaway: to enable the highest degrees of understanding, any skills instruction must be systematically reinforced by instruction in which the deployment of the skills makes holistic sense.

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Philosophy

The Art of Simple Existence is One of the Most Difficult to Master

Idea for Impact: When One Lives, One Must Live Entirely

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Frugality Over the Ages

Frugality is a Moral Virtue

Idea for Impact: Enjoying a rich life is more important than zealously stewarding one’s savings and investments.

Wondering what to read next?

The Rightness of Past Choices Become Obvious in the Clarity of Future Hindsight

The Mournful “What If” is a Powerful and Emotional Inquiry about Alternative Lives You Could Have Lived

Idea for Impact: Sketch the Picture of Our Own Choosing

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Keeping Our Commitments Unwaveringly is Tough

Willpower is Character in Action

Idea for Impact: Life becomes so much simpler if you decide what you stand for, stick with your values 100% the time, and make no exceptions.

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Wondering what to read next?

Traditional Schooling Fails to Teach Kids to Ask the Right Questions

Robust Forms of Intuitive Knowledge

Experiential Learning, Supplanted by Critical Analysis and Synthesis, Can Enhance Students’ Points of View

Real Education Opens the Way to Thinking, Knowing, and Deeper Understanding

Wondering what to read next?