Wisdom on the Topic of mission
Quotations
The axis is constructive-destructive
The axis today is not liberal and conservative, the axis is constructive-destructive, and you’ve cast your lot with the destructive people. Fox has become an incredibly destructive force in our society. You can be better, and this is going to be your legacy if you’re not careful.
Each man is questioned by life
Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.
Ends for which We Live
The means by which we live have outdistanced the ends for which we live.
Finish every day and be done with it
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could – some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in: forget them as fast as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it well and serenely, and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.
The intricate riddle of life
There is but one solution to the intricate riddle of life; to improve ourselves, and contribute to the happiness of others.
Let us accept our own responsibility for the future
Let us not despair but act. Let us not seek the Republican answer or the Democratic answer, but the right answer. Let us not seek to fix the blame for the past – let us accept our own responsibility for the future.
The lie of retirement
One of the great lies of American culture is the lie of retirement: that at a certain point in your life, at 65 for god sakes, you’re ready to go to Florida and stare out the window for the next 30 years. Where in the world did that idea come from?
Well, we know where it came from. The government was trying to have young people enter the workforce, right? So it invented this thing called retirement where people stop doing the most essential things of their lives. I mean, lose their purpose. I have so much purpose left.
Living happily ever after
Living happily ever after is not the end of a fairy tale. It is the common purpose that all life seeks.
The malleability of life
It is sobering to contemplate the malleability of life. It only takes five generations to turn a population of mild-mannered chickens into a population of psychopaths. If we don’t manage evolutionary processes, they will very likely take us where we don’t want to go.
Man must believe in an open future
Man’s freedom is a reality – a reality that makes a difference to his physical, as well as his mental health. When Frankl’s prisoners ceased to believe in the possibility of freedom, they grew sick and died. On the other hand, when they saw that Dachau had no chimney, standing out all night in the rain seemed no great hardship; they laughed and joked. The conclusion needs to be stated in letters ten feet high. In order to realise his possibilities, man must believe in an open future; he must have a vision of something worth doing. And this will not be possible until all the determinism and pessimism that we have inherited from the 19th century – and which has infected every department of our culture, from poetry to atomic physics – has been dismissed as fallacious and illogical.
A Meaningful Life
As Nietzsche put it, if you have a why to live, you can bear almost any how. A meaningful life can be extremely satisfying even in the midst of hardship, whereas a meaningless life is a terrible ordeal no matter how comfortable it is.
Our long-term personal and societal goals
Furthermore, as we have seen for genetic evolution, what’s adaptive in the evolutionary sense of the word isn’t necessarily good or right in the normative sense. Genetic evolution often results in adaptations that are good for me but not for you, or us but not them, or good over the short term but not the long term. The behaviors that we adopt by open-ended learning have all the same limitations. If anything, behavioral adaptations are even more shortsighted than genetic evolution because the immediate costs and benefits of our behaviors are more perceptible to us than the long-term consequences. You might want to lose weight, but your mind is causing you to dip your hand into the next bag of Doritos. You might want peace on earth, but your mind is causing you to do what it takes to beat out your competitors for a promotion at the office. A lot of cleverness will be required to align our learning abilities to our long-term personal and societal goals.
Selling sugared water
Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water, or do you want a chance to change the world?
tikkun olam
In Jewish teachings, ‘tikkun olam’ refers to any activity that improves the world, bringing it closer to the harmonious state for which it was created. All people, regardless of religious affiliation, are encouraged to contribute to the common good.
As a company founded by Jews, this healing (tikkun) of the world (olam) is at the core of the mission of The Gottman Institute. Although we are not a religious organization, for more than 20 years, tikkun olam has propelled us forward with a passion for helping people. It’s more than just our ‘why.’
It’s a shared sense of responsibility. If we believe we have information that is helpful to others, which we do, then it is our obligation to use this knowledge for good.
I didn’t always feel this way. As a scientist at the University of Washington, I was making a good living watching couples deteriorate in my research lab. It was my wife, Dr. Julie Schwartz Gottman, a brilliant clinical psychologist, who encouraged me to use my research to help people. It was from a great love that the Gottman Method was born.
According to Rabbi Jeremy Schwartz, ‘At its most basic level, tikkun olam involves arranging our personal lives as well as our politics, culture, and economy on the basis of love.’
To Give in the Same Measure
How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose he knows not, though he sometimes thinks he senses it. But without deeper reflection one knows from daily life that one exists for other people – first of all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness is wholly dependent, and then for the many, unknown to us, to whose destinies we are bound by the ties of sympathy. A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving….
To prolong our presence on the face of the Earth
What we’re doing now is trying to think like nature, in the sense that we are aware that species that have gone before us have disappeared from the face of the Earth. We’d like to use our intelligence and our creative capacity to prolong our presence on the face of the Earth as long as possible. It requires, therefore, that we develop the kinds of tactics and strategies amongst ourselves so as to assure that this can occur, to assure that we will not destroy ourselves or the planet, to make it uninhabitable and to allow the fullness of the potential of the individual to be expressed, to flower.
The welfare of the whole human race
The twentieth century will be chiefly remembered by future generations not as an era of political conflicts or technical inventions, but as an age in which human society dared to think of the welfare of the whole human race as a practical objective.
We make money to make more movies
We don’t make movies to make money, we make money to make more movies.
We should always be fighting evil
All I tried to do in my stories was show that there’s some innate goodness in the human condition. And there’s always going to be evil; we should always be fighting evil.
— Stan Lee
When old men plant trees
A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.
While he was focusing on the inner self, his outer world has gone to pot
At the personalistic level (F-S), man becomes centrally concerned with peace with his inner self and in the relation of his self to the inner self of others. He becomes concerned with belonging, with being accepted, with knowing the inner side of self and other selves so harmony can come to be, so people as individuals can be at peace with themselves and thus with the world. And when he achieves this, he finds he must become concerned with more than self or other selves, because while he was focusing on the inner self to the exclusion of the external world, his outer world has gone to pot. So now he turns outward to life and to the whole, the total universe. As he does so he begins to see the problems of restoring the balance of life which has been torn asunder by his individualistically oriented, self-seeking climb up the first ladder of existence.
A Why to Live
He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.
A Work Ethic Gone Mad
The blend of corporate mysticism and transcendental consumerism he [Tom Peters] offers has its roots planted in the pragmatic, optimistic, can-do American work ethic. But, like the Taylorist philosophy from which it springs, it is also a work ethic gone mad. It begins with the idea that work can be meaningful and stretches it to the point where there is no meaning outside work. It becomes a deluded form of optimism, a feverish activity that masks an underlying anxiety about the meaning of life, a form of self-alienation so complete that the self disappears entirely into its consumer preferences and transactions.
A world that is tolerable
We have to stop and pull back, look at ourselves and each other and wonder if there is a way that each and every one of us (or at least the vast majority of us) can agree on the elements that make a world that is tolerable: a world with enough food and warmth and pleasant distractions; a world where love and belief are okay, even primary.