Reading Biographies To Trigger Inspiration

00:00:00.000 | Question from Natalia.

00:00:01.920 | You've mentioned that one way to answer the question,

00:00:04.400 | what makes a good life good is to turn to biographies

00:00:07.320 | of people whose life you admire.

00:00:09.720 | Who do you personally admire?

00:00:11.200 | - Well, I have a lot of answers to that question,

00:00:13.640 | but why don't I just give you one example

00:00:16.400 | of someone I admire and that admiration has been developed

00:00:19.640 | and nuanced through the reading of biographies.

00:00:21.820 | And one of my classic examples there is Abraham Lincoln,

00:00:25.880 | real influence on me.

00:00:28.040 | I'm actually reading John Meacham's new biography

00:00:30.640 | of Lincoln and there was light.

00:00:32.520 | So I'm about halfway through that.

00:00:33.400 | I'm enjoying that one.

00:00:34.220 | I've read a lot of Lincoln books,

00:00:36.520 | but that one is ranking pretty high up so far.

00:00:39.320 | So I like what he's doing there.

00:00:41.360 | All right, so here's the two things I learned about Lincoln

00:00:46.360 | through going deep through biographical material

00:00:50.400 | that makes him someone I admire.

00:00:53.240 | One is the fact that Lincoln was a moral being.

00:00:57.840 | I wanna be really clear about what I mean by that.

00:01:02.000 | I don't mean that in the sense that he was a superlative

00:01:05.960 | example of morality that even by 21st century standards,

00:01:10.400 | we look back at everything he did or think and said,

00:01:13.520 | wow, he had found some sort of crystalline, pure morality.

00:01:16.640 | He had broken free from any sort of parochial

00:01:19.600 | or cultural influences and just saw

00:01:21.200 | the abstract platonic light of the perfect moral sentiments.

00:01:24.680 | It's not that his morality was at a very high polished

00:01:29.360 | plane, but that he saw his morality

00:01:33.160 | as an important part of his life.

00:01:34.680 | And he worked on it explicitly throughout his life.

00:01:37.600 | He is a moral being.

00:01:38.800 | What you get out of reading his biographies

00:01:40.680 | is the degree to which he thought that maintaining

00:01:43.480 | and evolving his sense of principles

00:01:45.720 | and living his life by them was a key project

00:01:49.520 | of a life well lived.

00:01:51.480 | A good book that really looks at this

00:01:53.920 | is William Lee Miller's "Lincoln's Virtues."

00:01:57.800 | Miller, it's a moral biography or an ethical biography,

00:02:01.920 | I think he calls it, of Lincoln.

00:02:03.600 | And he goes through just the development

00:02:05.280 | of how Lincoln repeatedly would interrogate

00:02:09.720 | his own underlying principles and evolve them

00:02:13.040 | and grow them and nuance them and then let that then

00:02:15.520 | speak back to what he was doing in his life

00:02:17.600 | and in his political career.

00:02:19.280 | That's what I think was important.

00:02:20.840 | He thought that was key.

00:02:23.960 | I am more impressed by someone who throughout their life

00:02:27.600 | really cares about, struggles with, and tries to evolve

00:02:31.040 | and live by a evolving empathetic moral code

00:02:34.800 | than I am by someone who maybe has, in isolation,

00:02:38.280 | the better moral beliefs but came by it easy.

00:02:40.960 | That they were born at a time where it was

00:02:42.520 | just really obvious.

00:02:43.440 | And in fact, if you had a different belief,

00:02:44.920 | someone would yell at you anyways.

00:02:47.240 | There's no strain there.

00:02:49.520 | It's the life interrogated.

00:02:51.200 | That's really rare.

00:02:52.320 | And he really did that.

00:02:54.520 | All right, number two, the other thing I've learned

00:02:56.560 | about Lincoln, why I admire him,

00:02:58.920 | is the fact that he has a purposive intelligence.

00:03:02.320 | P-U-R-P-O-S-I-V-E.

00:03:04.800 | I think it was actually William Lee Miller

00:03:06.560 | who used that term in talking about Lincoln.

00:03:09.920 | What that means by purposive intelligence

00:03:11.440 | was he had a brain that worked and he put this brain

00:03:15.720 | to work to try to impact the world in positive ways.

00:03:20.240 | He saw his brain as an asset and systematically

00:03:24.960 | developed this asset to try to get a return out of it,

00:03:29.160 | and a particular return in terms of making

00:03:31.440 | a positive impact on the world.

00:03:33.080 | It really is an amazing story how this kid,

00:03:38.080 | growing up in the depths of early 19th century

00:03:42.360 | American poverty, just on the strength of his brain alone,

00:03:47.320 | emerged out of this context, backwater Kentucky,

00:03:51.000 | barely literate father, dead mother, single father,

00:03:55.040 | barely literate, who had him just doing

00:03:57.400 | the harshest of manual labors, suspicious of book learning,

00:04:01.220 | renting him out to other people for just labor

00:04:06.520 | for these other people, you don't get to keep the money.

00:04:09.200 | Lincoln hated that.

00:04:10.040 | He emerged from that just off of the strength

00:04:12.520 | of his brain, which he developed,

00:04:14.160 | and he knew there was something there,

00:04:15.680 | and he developed that and applied it.

00:04:17.920 | All of his impact comes from the very careful

00:04:21.080 | cultivation of this intelligence.

00:04:23.800 | You look at his debates with Stephen Douglas.

00:04:26.800 | It's a masterclass in just working through

00:04:31.800 | clarity and thinking.

00:04:33.840 | Look at his Cooper Union address as he's building up

00:04:36.460 | to his potential nomination for the president in 1860.

00:04:39.320 | You see here, again, a masterclass in weeks,

00:04:42.860 | if not months, of research into the history of the country,

00:04:45.400 | building step by step these incredibly logical arguments.

00:04:48.820 | You have to understand how unique this was in its time.

00:04:52.520 | The great rhetoricians of the 19th century were pompous,

00:04:58.560 | and it was emotional.

00:05:00.380 | It was a lot of classical allusions,

00:05:03.840 | a lot of Cicero being quoted, and a lot of personal,

00:05:06.640 | vindictive, or emotional appeals.

00:05:08.780 | It was a lot of trying to get people fired up

00:05:12.800 | by appealing and inflaming their passions,

00:05:15.480 | and there's a lot of ad hominem going on,

00:05:17.400 | and then trying to establish your intelligence.

00:05:19.080 | You look at all these different books I can cite.

00:05:21.000 | Lincoln came in and said, "I'm gonna be logical

00:05:23.240 | "and incredibly plain spoken.

00:05:25.300 | "I'm gonna step by step, like the lawyer he was,

00:05:28.980 | "bring you through why the Nebraska Act

00:05:33.140 | "is actually against the founder's intentions,

00:05:37.060 | "why this would be devastating to the country."

00:05:40.000 | Taking down his anti-slavery arguments

00:05:42.280 | were not like you would get more

00:05:44.740 | from maybe the William Lloyd Garrison,

00:05:48.840 | not barn burners, but we're gonna go A to B to C to E,

00:05:53.320 | and when we get to F, it's clear that this makes no sense.

00:05:56.280 | That was an incredibly effective rhetorical strategy.

00:05:58.720 | It's all based off of purposive intelligence,

00:06:00.580 | and it made a massive difference.

00:06:03.000 | It was why he got nominated for the Republican ticket,

00:06:07.180 | was because he had built this reputation of,

00:06:09.860 | he's not out there inflaming people,

00:06:11.300 | he's not out there in the 1860 equivalent of Twitter

00:06:14.900 | trying to score points for his team.

00:06:16.220 | It's this incredible reasonableness and logic,

00:06:20.660 | and there's a moderatism that actually,

00:06:24.540 | that's what worked, that's what worked.

00:06:26.820 | That's what led to the 13th Amendment.

00:06:29.060 | So to me, that was a big inspiration.

00:06:30.300 | The way that he cultivated an intelligence

00:06:33.900 | to effect change, very systematic.

00:06:36.940 | A good book for that,

00:06:38.020 | so I'm kind of giving book recommendations around the way,

00:06:41.860 | John Stauffer from Harvard, his book "Giants".

00:06:45.380 | What it does, and it's interesting,

00:06:47.620 | is he takes Frederick Douglass and Lincoln.

00:06:50.420 | Here's two people who are coming out

00:06:52.700 | of impossible situations.

00:06:54.180 | Douglass' situation, of course, even more impossible,

00:06:56.320 | being an Eastern Shore slave on the Eastern Shore.

00:07:00.480 | Lincoln, of course, was not a slave,

00:07:01.600 | but they were both coming out of these

00:07:04.080 | impossible circumstances, and they both,

00:07:07.720 | this is what Stauffer really characterizes,

00:07:12.000 | is through the development of their mind,

00:07:14.240 | how they were able to become, in the end, giants,

00:07:16.760 | and their lives became very intertwined.

00:07:18.440 | So that's sort of, giants sort of gets

00:07:20.360 | into the intertwining of the lives

00:07:21.720 | of Frederick Douglass and Lincoln.

00:07:23.540 | So they kind of have these parallel emergences,

00:07:27.800 | all about taking these minds, cultivating them,

00:07:30.160 | and then putting them systematically

00:07:31.720 | towards what they thought was important uses,

00:07:34.000 | and then their lives end up becoming quite intertwined.

00:07:36.200 | They were, at some point,

00:07:37.640 | at some point, they were almost adversarial.

00:07:41.360 | So you get Douglass' famous speech

00:07:44.520 | on what the Fourth of July means to a former slave,

00:07:47.520 | but they come later in life,

00:07:48.920 | that Douglass is an incredible supporter, actually,

00:07:51.320 | of Lincoln's very systematic approach,

00:07:54.340 | and his very functionalist approach,

00:07:56.340 | and let's try to actually make change happen,

00:07:59.100 | as opposed to making the people on our side

00:08:02.780 | as happy as possible.

00:08:03.780 | And there's a whole interesting story there.

00:08:06.380 | One more book recommendation, then,

00:08:07.840 | if you like that particular line of thinking,

00:08:12.060 | H. W. Brown's "Zealot,"

00:08:14.420 | which contrasts John Brown and Lincoln,

00:08:16.380 | and their approach to antislavery movements.

00:08:19.740 | Brown's was very zealous and very pure,

00:08:22.300 | and we get a lot of likes on the Twitter,

00:08:24.940 | but he ended up not only hung,

00:08:27.060 | but actually perhaps even causing issues with the movement.

00:08:31.300 | Lincoln would not be popular on Twitter,

00:08:33.300 | but did get the 13th Amendment.

00:08:36.100 | So anyways, that's an example, Natalia.

00:08:40.460 | Lincoln is someone who I grew to admire

00:08:42.780 | through reading as much as possible on him,

00:08:44.340 | and picking out these very specific things,

00:08:45.940 | which I think have a general application,

00:08:48.400 | are generally relevant to a lot of us.

00:08:50.340 | Justin, I actually met someone at the live event.

00:08:55.060 | - Mike. - Mike.

00:08:56.500 | Mike gave me a recommendation.

00:08:58.300 | I gotta read this book.

00:08:59.820 | It's about, this sounds so me,

00:09:02.180 | it's Lincoln, Civil War,

00:09:05.100 | and the role of technology in the Civil War,

00:09:09.820 | and how the telegraph and the railroads,

00:09:13.220 | and it was actually these really advanced

00:09:15.500 | technological systems were so intertwined

00:09:17.300 | with Lincoln's managing of the war.

00:09:18.560 | I mean, that's kinda hitting all my buttons probably.

00:09:22.060 | - How many Lincoln books do you think you've consumed?

00:09:25.000 | Like 30?

00:09:26.040 | - Probably not 30.

00:09:27.540 | A dozen, I would say.

00:09:29.220 | - Have you always been a fan?

00:09:30.840 | - I came to him through books.

00:09:32.080 | I came to him through,

00:09:34.400 | it was my mother-in-law bought me Lincoln's Virtues,

00:09:38.800 | and then Miller wrote another book

00:09:41.120 | about Lincoln's time in the White House.

00:09:42.480 | I read those.

00:09:43.320 | This would have been grad school.

00:09:45.640 | And that kinda set me down.

00:09:46.640 | Then John Stoffer we knew.

00:09:47.880 | So John Stoffer, when I was at MIT,

00:09:51.340 | my wife worked at a nonprofit in Watertown

00:09:53.380 | with John's wife, and they did,

00:09:57.000 | it was an education nonprofit,

00:09:58.280 | history education nonprofits.

00:09:59.520 | Like John, he was always involved and would do events.

00:10:02.920 | So I remember John Stoffer and Skip Gates from Harvard

00:10:06.040 | were always sort of around.

00:10:08.600 | And so I remember his book signing party for that book.

00:10:12.320 | So we knew John, just knew him from our time in Cambridge,

00:10:15.000 | babysat his kids before.

00:10:16.800 | So then that book also was exposed to around that same time.

00:10:20.160 | It's a great book.

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Reading Biographies To Trigger Inspiration

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