First, there's the "rugged individual"ism of Henry David Thoreau, which most of us know is expressed in his more famous book, but which I think is put clearest in his lecture "Life Without Principle". To be honest, this is the attitude that my own sentiment accords better with.
[9] The aim of the laborer should be, not to get his living, to get "a good job," but to perform well a certain work...Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.[11] The community has no bribe that will tempt a wise man. You may raise money enough to tunnel a mountain, but you cannot raise money enough to hire a man who is minding his own business...
[12] Perhaps I am more than usually jealous with respect to my freedom. I feel that my connection with and obligation to society are still very slight and transient. Those slight labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a necessity. So far I am successful. But I foresee that if my wants should be much increased, the labor required to supply them would become a drudgery. If I should sell both my forenoons and afternoons to society, as most appear to do, I am sure that for me there would be nothing left worth living for. I trust that I shall never thus sell my birthright for a mess of pottage...
Then, there's this other attitude, as expressed here by Daniel Lapin.
Does God want us to be rich?...To tell you the truth, I can't say with any certainty on that subject. However I do know that God does want us to be obsessively preoccupied with the needs and desires of other people, whether they're your clients or your customers, whether they're your vendors or your employees. Be obsessively preoccupied with the needs of other people. And it shouldn't suprise anybody who believes in a loving deity that the result of that is the great blessing of prosperity and wealth. Surely the ultimate way to acheive prosperity - become obsessively preoccupied with the needs of other people.Do not insist on making buggy whips while Henry Ford is building a car down the road. Because now you're not focused on what other people need or want - you're focused on what you want to do...[P]eople sometimes say to you "The important thing in life is to find a job that you really love. Go and work in an area that you've really got passion for." Wrong. Sounds very nice, but it's wrong! It's wrong because it's selfish. What it's saying is "I want to make a living doing what I like doing!" You're missing the point. This isn't about the money, it's about your relationship with other people. You've got to find what other people need and want and then learn how to get passionate about supplying it.
How is the Thoreau book you got for Conception Day?
ReplyDeleteIt's pretty good. Some parts of it are a bit self-indulgent, like really stretched out analogies to what might be classical Greek characters or events. Still very neat, though. It's very neat seeing how simply he was able to live.
ReplyDeleteI don't think I get what makes an analogy to Greece self-indulgent. Does he make himself out to be a continuation of some ancient class of honorable and noble men?
ReplyDeleteNo, not that, it's that he's writing verbose descriptions of some actions or events that he just assumes his readers are going to know about - things that I as a philosophy major are unfamiliar with, and/or things that don't seem to add much to what he's trying to say. It's self-indulgent for that. It feels like it's written entirely for his own pleasure, with a proverbial "fuck you" to bewildered and uninitiated readers. This isn't to say, of course, that I'm at all guiltless of this either.
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