Latest / Giant Ideas / Why Success Is A Trap… And How to Achieve It: Philosopher & Author, Alain De Botton

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Why Success Is A Trap… And How to Achieve It: Philosopher & Author, Alain De Botton · Giant Ideas

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: We will say don't retire.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: What I think is really meant psychologically is don't stop.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you stop, you will notice that you've been trying to fill a hole which can't be filled, and you will fall prey to such despair.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_02: Hello, and welcome to Giant Ideas with me, Cameron McLean, and me, Tommy Stadlin.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: We're co-founders of Giant Ventures, which builds and backs purpose-driven companies.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: At Giant, we're lucky to meet extraordinary people with giant ideas that are changing the world.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: This podcast brings you behind-the-scenes access to those ideas and the inspiring stories of the people behind them.
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_01: We explore how one giant idea can kickstart a billion-dollar company, shape culture, and transform life as we know it.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_02: Today on the podcast, we are joined by Alan de Botton, philosopher, author, and founder of the School of Life.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: The School of Life provides emotional education to help people lead more fulfilled lives.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: Alan is a world-renowned philosopher.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_01: He shaped much of the discourse of 21st century philosophy.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: He's the author of over 20 books, from novels like Essays in Love to nonfiction books like Religion for Atheists, Artist Therapy, and Status Anxiety.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Today we're talking about success.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: What is it?
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_01: Why does it drive us?
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_01: Can we be happy and successful?
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: And is it okay to be ordinary?
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_02: Well, welcome, Adam Ans.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_02: Thank you so much for joining us today.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_02: It's a pleasure.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_02: We'd love to start today by talking about traditional notions of success as they're usually understood.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_02: How would you define the traditional notion of success in today's society?
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're using traditional and you know now.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: Which which tells us immediately that um notions of success have shifted throughout history.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you were in uh you know 16th century England, um, a successful person had absolutely nothing to do with commerce.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: If you had to dip your hand in the tainted fat of commerce, you were immediately thought to be a failure.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: Um what what mattered um as a member of the landed aristocracy is you needed to show valor in battle.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you also needed to be Christian and very devoted to God through all sorts of uh good works, etc.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: But if you were an Inuit, you know, success meant um success in hunting and uh you know the tracking of animals and all that.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it keeps shifting.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's that's a very important notion because it lets air into the discussion.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um, because very often we're up against our own society's definition of success, um, which I should add, no society has ever been in total agreement.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, let's let's wheel back to the 16th century in England.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: Um, there would have been priests uh in the um in the uh in the kingdom who would have thought that the knightly vision, the military vision of success, was blasphemy, was actually went against the sacred principles of Christ, um, who you know marched in peace through the world, and that actually this was a a deeply unchristian notion.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: So there were, you know, every society has jostlings around its concept of success.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_00: We can we can talk of a dominant notion, that every society probably has a dominant notion, but um but let's not forget that that it's a it's a democracy of ideas um bubbling away there, lots of interest groups pushing their notion.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: So it's very important to sort of start to realize this because you you start to unpick it.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: It creates a bit of oxygen in the discussion.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, okay, so I've grown up in this environment.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: What am I picking up as the dominant notion of success?
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, where have they come from?
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, do I agree with them?
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_00: Are there others around?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um but but I suppose really the emphasis is on uh the notion of an option, that that you don't have to swallow it uncritically.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Ross Powell, How would you typify the dominant modern Western notion of success?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I think we'd have to say that it was a mercantile one, that it's uh essentially um to do with um success in commerce.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um that that is the dominant notion um that you will um in some ways r realize value.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: Financial value.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_00: Financial value uh by seizing opportunities.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_00: The entrepreneur probably occupies the role that you know the knight used to occupy in the military society.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's an emblematic figure.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um say there are others, but that is probably the dominant one.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: And if you're a Marxist, uh, which we can all be over this issue, I think Karl Marx made an enormous contribution to intellectual um theory in this very basic notion that, uh, as he put it, the leading ideas of uh every age are the um outcome of material forces.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, the richest, most powerful people in society don't just control material resources, as people had always understood.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: Um, more interestingly, they also control the mental landscape.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: They are the merchants of ideas rather than just of goods.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, it's good to flip it that way around.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_02: Is that what we think we see happening today in the US and I guess modern politics more generally, a battle of ideas around what is a notion of success?
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: Um Yes, although you know, I think that um the debate is fairly settled in that there are lots of competing notions of how uh value is to be created and how capital is to be accumulated and distributed.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_00: But these are sideshows to the central point of agreement which unites left and right, which is that capital is what matters.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there may be disputes about how you get there, but there's absolute agreement that that's that's the notion of the destination.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: If we think about some of the people who come on this show, they're traditionally successful.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_01: They've built very large technology companies that have really shaped culture, their legends of sport, they're political leaders who've somehow forged society in their own way of thinking.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_01: What are some of the traits that you think are shared amongst those type of very successful people?
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean, you've you've um gathered together quite a disparate group of people.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Do you mean psychological traits?
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_01: People who've you know built big companies or got basically people who got right to the top of their game, whether it's in business or sport or entrepreneurship or politics, um, who might not be as well come on to talk about later necessarily that happy, um, but certainly have ticked the boxes of success uh in a traditional sense.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I think you know the the starting point is the notion that um human beings shape their environment and that the environment is there to be shaped by individual agency.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_00: So I imagine that all these people um have woken up and thought humans created this world, it wasn't gods, there wasn't anything set in stone about how things should be.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: Why don't we do something a bit differently?
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um It's not just, you know, lords and ladies, our our betters, our superiors who govern the sing things.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: There might have been people who at school thought it's just the teachers making up the rules, but you know, it's a it's a human rule created world.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um so one could say that these people are not reifying or um uh applying a supernatural veneer onto the current state of things.
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: They think people are doing things now for fairly arbitrary reasons, and we might be able to change them.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: They're shopping here, but why don't they shop somewhere somewhere else, etc.?
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: So that's a fundamentally kind of creative mindset.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: I don't mean artistically creative, I mean sort of um ideologically creative.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that uh that's the first trait.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: Um I imagine also um a trait of confidence, um, by which one really means that um they would be prepared to see quite a lot of opposition as nothing especially to panic about.
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: That the idea that they might not carry everyone with them wouldn't frighten them.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_00: They would be quite prepared to think of themselves as having enemies and sceptics and doubters, and still be quite legitimately in the right.
• 8:20
  SPEAKER_00: And that again takes a certain kind of mindset.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: In a way, it's sort of anti-democratic mindset.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Again, I'm talking psychologically, not not uh politically.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_00: In other words, that they they don't mind if twenty people disagree with them.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: They think it's quite possible 3,000 people could disagree with them, and they still think, well, you know, I could be right about this.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, one can speculate about the origins of this contrary mindset, but it's uh a very powerful tool.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um course it, you know, it can, it has degenerate versions where somebody insists on um not observing the the genuine signals of reality.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um and often this is what happens, you can observe this in sometimes the later careers of people who've been um successful in certain ways, that they're so used to not listening to certain signals, and particularly the more successful they get, then um then it starts to seem almost a sign that they are right, that everybody's telling them they're wrong.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, it's not a logical inference, but it can become a very tempting one if you've had a streak of good fortune.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Aaron Ross Powell You talk there about origins.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_01: Cameron and I, when we're doing due diligence on entrepreneurs, we dig into childhood a lot.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: And what we consistently see is trauma can be a real driver of extraordinary entrepreneurship.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_01: And then another one which is not uh necessarily consistent at all, but is occasional, is entrepreneurs who, as children, have seen a parent do something extraordinary where perhaps they themselves really broke through to become very successful in some way themselves.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they were an incredible athlete, uh, maybe they were right at the top of commerce themselves, and so the child has just seen what's possible.
• 10:03
  SPEAKER_01: If we talk about childhood, what happens in childhood do you think to create these type of ultra successful people?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, firstly, I mean I think it's very wise to look at childhood, because you know, where else, you know, can one look to explain the enormous differences between human beings in terms of their you know, it's not it's not their raw intellectual ability, because actually um that clusters fairly predictably, you, you know, around a mean.
• 10:31
  SPEAKER_00: Um, but the uh the enormous disparities in results, really.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, we have to look uh beyond, let's say, the raw material of somebody.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: So then the question is, well, what is it about a childhood?
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: If we had to uh uh program a robot to have us to work out what a successful childhood was, what would be probably come in soon.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, exactly.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um I mean, you know, you mentioned the word trauma.
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um you know, that's on a good zone, but it's a vague word and it captures all sorts of things.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: So if we try and be a bit more specific, what do we what might we mean by that?
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that humans respond to incentives, and one of the incentives to which people respond is um being doubted, being um unloved, in one's raw state, that you know, if somebody is not believed, if somebody's not admired, that tends to kick off enormous attempts to win favor.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_00: You know, human beings are born into the world very helplessly.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_00: And they know, you know, we're all programmed to know that unless we secure the love of those around us, uh, we'll be in s uh great danger.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now, some of us are born into a world where just being is enough.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_00: Um, our our very existence seems to satisfy our caregivers beyond measure.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_00: They're just they're just delighted that we've we've come on board.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um and others are seriously, seriously unimpressed for a long, long time.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_00: They don't like the fact that we're small, have nothing particular to say for ourselves.
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_00: We may have large, cute eyes, but this doesn't interest our caregivers one bit.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_00: Like they're busy, they're distracted, they're depressed, they're alcoholic, they're dead.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: They could be dead.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean, being dead is a way of being very, very unimpressed.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: That's how the child reads it.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_00: It's like, well, my parent didn't stick around, they died.
• 12:28
  SPEAKER_00: Uh why?
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I wasn't worth sticking around for.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: So um, so all of these kinds of disbelief, neglect, um create enormously powerful attempts to secure the affection of these doubters.
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_00: Um, and the greater the doubt, the greater the effort to show this um this parent.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: Now, we have to distinguish because um, you know, two things can happen.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: Um you could try to get noticed um by being very destructive, and this often happens.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you get children who throw rocks through the police station window.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: What are they trying to do?
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying to get noticed.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: They're trying, they're using criminality as a status reward system, um, which it can be used, you know, it's it's perverse, but it it happens.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: People will fail their exams, graffiti the school, etc.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's it's a desperate bid for love, for help.
• 13:27
  SPEAKER_00: Um, shoplifting is another classic one, stealing.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_00: You know, if you feel that you've been robbed, robbed of love, robbed of care, robbed of attention, you'll want to injure the the world in which has done this to you, and you'll want to be very destructive.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_00: So that's you know, that's one thing.
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, interestingly, perhaps some of the people that have come on your show, they might have shown criminal behaviour at certain points in their upbringing, even in small ways, but tends to be a connection.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_00: You might be shoplifting at eight, but by twelve excelling at sport.
• 13:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it's the same person.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_01: We just had Sophia Amarissa on the show uh very recently was talking about shoplifting uh bef just before her entrepreneurial career kicked off.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well done.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_02: So so sort of tie the loop, potentially some sense of abandonment in childhood or or sort of lack of love can lead to very generative drives to try and you know get your parents, I guess, in a Freudian way to say, look at me, look what I've done, or the flip side can be very destructive and lead to more destructive tendencies.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_00: But of course, there's a you know, there's a horrible paradox built in here that if um if you need to fight for something that should have been your birthright, um when you get it, it will merely remind you of your original injury and your original theft.
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Uh it won't satisfy uh the thing that you you know, the the ache that you really have, which is why um it'll never be enough.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, A, it'll never be enough.
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: And B, you know, when people say, don't retire, they say to entrepreneurs, you know, don't retire.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: What I think is really meant psychologically is don't stop, because if you stop, you will notice um that you've been trying to fill a hole which can't be filled, and you will fall prey to such despair and such agony that it might kill you.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's not the retirement that kills you.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know, the sort of language of like, oh, you know, you'll get bored.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, you'll get sad.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_00: You'll you'll realize the tragedy of your existence.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: Um and and so in that case, perhaps better just to keep running.
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: But but of course, it's you know, it's it becomes poignantly futile.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: You know, somebody's got a hundred million and then they've got two hundred million, then four hundred million, you know, and then think, well, what's going on?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and you know, a lot of these very successful people will will invent a kind of futile pseudo-necessity, and they'll say, you know, I I need to do it for my employees, or I need to do it to, you know, I'm just trying to, you know, aim for a benchmark, I'm just I'm just keeping up with others, you know, and it and it it sounds almost sensible until you look at it.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_02: You run the school of life.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_02: Um maybe we can talk a little bit about that.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_02: How how do we raise children?
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_02: We're both uh father to two children.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_02: So how do how do we raise children who don't have that kind of samsaric dynamic in their life?
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um Well, you know, it's it's it is a huge question because you want motivation, but you don't want the sick kind of motivation.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want the paradoxical motivation, which is going to wind up in you know despair, etc.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um and so I think the idea of suggesting to one's child two things.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_00: Firstly, that they are loved, secondly, that there are things they could do better, that that that who they are right now is not the sum total of what they could be, that there are other things to aim for.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: Um the question then is what are these things that one you know can can aim for?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think this is where a parental sense of the meaning of life is quite important.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, if you you know if you have a sense of what a meaningful life is, and perhaps we can discuss that, um that's something you can you know have around the kitchen table.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: What what is it to lead a a good life?
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do that.
• 17:09
  SPEAKER_00: Let's do that, yeah.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_01: I I I once interviewed 80 CEOs for a book I wrote, and I would say 78 of them to me seemed pretty unhappy.
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_01: They were universally content, I think, that they were living up to their potential.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_01: They were pretty rich, they were, you know, masters of their universe or mistresses of the universe, but they basically were not very happy, I felt.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_01: You've talked a lot over your career about what happiness is, what success is.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: We've just talked about a whole set of people who are, you know, in some people's eyes, very successful.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: They've built big companies or been top politicians, whatever it might be.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_01: Tell us about your current thinking on what success looks like.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: Um I think that all of us probably have a sense of what we're capable of before we've been capable of it, as it were, before we've we've shown capacity in the world.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_00: We have a sense of latent potential.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, I might say to you, uh, being a painter, what do you what do you think?
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll just go, well, you know, I admire painters, painters are great, but it's it's I don't feel I just I don't know, it's it's not me.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: Which is interesting, because you might come to that view without having done much painting, but you just kind of you just sense that's not where your capacities lie.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_00: But if I said to you, I don't know, financial engineering, you think, oh, yeah, it's kind of like, yeah, I'm I sometimes think of it as a a metal detector passing over the ground, and there's you know, moments at which a beep is let off.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_00: You think, yeah, there's something here.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: There's something.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I think all of us, as we're sort of starting our careers, feel that in different areas something is beeping.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_00: So the question is, you know, rather like archaeology, and it is, has sort of analogies with archaeology.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_00: You need to start digging and go, okay, well, something something was beeping, but that doesn't mean I know what it is yet.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: So I've got to I've got to get on my knees and start digging.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_00: And, you know, if you're lucky, but also assiduous and uh really thoughtful, you will start to pick up a little bit of pottery or a broken bit of silver aware or whatever it is, and start to assemble from vague intuitions what it is that um you know satisfies that that kind of potential.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that people come very unstuck here by not giving themselves enough time, by not doing the psychological work, um, the amount of people I meet who say things like I just want to be creative.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: And I go, All right, well, what you know, tell me more.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: And they go, I just don't know.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe I should work in magazines.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: And you think, okay, goodness me, they've they've they've really rushed here.
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like, what was it that excited them?
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: What was you know?
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: And then of course, the better you know what it is that uh uh excites you and interests you, the more options you have because you're you've got a much more sort of granular take on the origins of your of your interest.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: And it might turn out that what you thought was exciting you in magazines, which is kind of a dying area, exists even more powerfully in, I don't know, software generation, which is much more lucrative area, or whatever it is.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_00: So keeping going uh is and at the exploration of your sort of true desires is I think a really important part of um uh a well-realized uh life.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_00: Um and I think uh, you know, we also have to hit on the kind of authentic, inauthentic um distinction.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: You know, are you being pulled by external forces or internal forces?
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, we know this, you know, socially.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: Someone, you know, you arrive at a party, someone tells you a a joke.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um what do what do you do?
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: Um you might end up laughing, and then you ask yourself, was that funny?
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_00: No, it wasn't very funny.
• 20:44
  SPEAKER_00: But you've laughed anyway.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: So, you know, we humans are always pointing two different directions, outwards, inwards.
• 20:50
  SPEAKER_00: And some of our reactions owe more to a desire to carry favour with the outward audience, some of them with the inward audience.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I think uh, you know, a a a well-rounded life has paid quite a lot of attention to the inward audience, only because that's the audience that we face at 3 a.m.
• 21:06
  SPEAKER_00: That's the audience we have to uh be accountable for ultimately.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_02: Aaron Powell I was uh I was gonna say it sounds that sounds quite inward looking.
• 21:14
  SPEAKER_02: It sounds like a modern version of know thyself or um but how do you sort of uh and that's been my journey has been sort of very much listening to that that inner voice, but how do you prevent that from being somewhat solipsistic and just sort of sure it has to be a negotiation with with reality, um otherwise you're on the route to what we would sort of blithly call madness, in other words, where your your kind of inner anchor is is you know disconnected from anything external.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: So, yes, you have to check in with the outside.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Um and you know, I think a really successful, happy life is one where something very deep and personal from within meets the needs of the world um in a way that is um observable.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um materially satisfactory.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_00: We can think more about what material success means and what it you know that's a whole big topic.
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: But but anyway, some kind of some kind of meeting point between the inner and the outer world.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_00: Some sense that I mean, you know, another very important part of a successful life is I think a sense that you're serving other people.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_00: Which sounds kind of weird because we tend to think of ourselves as as you know self-maximizing creatures.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_00: But but actually an enormous part of satisfaction comes from um being able to intervene in others' lives in order to essentially either assuage a pain or increase a pleasure in another person.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_00: I I think this is a bedrock of satisfaction.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: You know, you see it in in children, I don't know if your kids are that age perhaps grown it, you know, when kids will want to feed their parents, they'll get a tray and they'll put bits of plastic food if they've got that, or they'll draw a you know fried egg or something.
• 23:06
  SPEAKER_00: And they'll play waiter and they want to go and serve those who've served them.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we see in primitive form a really important impulse.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_00: I remember once reading a bit of research saying that you know the sort of two fantasies of people who want to start businesses are is to have a cake shop and a BB.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_00: Now both of those terrible businesses really unsatisfactory in lots of ways.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: But it tells us something very in its raw form, we've probably all had some thought in that area of a service business maybe involving food, because that's so basic and it's so I mean I don't mean basic in a pejorative sense.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's so fundamental.
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: Tommy's two dreamers to run a trend run an ice cream shop and not really think my try to dream about what is an alternative life where you just would be very happy.
• 23:54
  SPEAKER_01: I think running an ice cream shop.
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: You're just doling out joy to people left, right and center.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_00: And I think the other really essential part of that fantasy is about time.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: I think that um a lot of what makes modern work really, really frustrating and and unsatisfactory is is its scale, both in terms of number of numbers of people involved and timescales involved.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_00: I sometimes think of it in relation to football.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: The reason why people love football games is 90 minutes and it's you know a team you've got one ball and and you kind of know the objectives and it's very it's kind of easy to follow.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's got a plot.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_00: A football game's got a plot and and it's just on a very handy timescale.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine a football game that took place in 22 countries.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: It went on for seven years there were maybe a thousand balls at any time there were 8,000 players you just you kind of lose interest.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_00: You just think what are we even doing?
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_00: And you know and maybe you were just looking at one tiny part of the pitch and you couldn't even see the whole thing.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_00: You would it you know it lacks kind of what you might call so artistic coherence.
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: And I think a lot of modern work, non-craft based work is like that because it involves very complicated chains of individuals and decisions and geographies and and and office structures.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'm not surprised that you know the fancy of the ice cream because the great thing about serving an ice cream is you know a customer comes in, they say I'd like an ice cream you see their need you see their face and you see their need and then you go, I'm going to be able to help you.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_00: Take the scoop, you give them that thing, and the whole transaction in about three minutes you've gone from need to satisfaction and and that's brilliant.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_00: I mean it's a it's a telescoping of what might otherwise take years and be nebulous when you kind of you know I know you know people who are in finance etc they are satisfying needs.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know they're not disconnected from reality.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: They are doing things.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: But the chains are very, very long and very abstract.
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: Trevor Burrus If we talk about another form of retail most people in this country or the you know the the biggest jobs in this country are are retail and and call centers.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: That's where the vast majority of the population are working in those type of jobs.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: And it's not the type of retail where you're doling out on nice ice cream and it's you know call centres where you're dealing with people that are pretty annoyed and then you're on the clock to answer the neck next call.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: These are not, I would suggest intrinsically joyful occupations.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: Aaron Ross Powell Let's think about the call centre, because again the idea of taking an unhappy person and making them happy is is should be and could be very joyful but um there's a disconnect isn't it that the first of all it's completely anonymous.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: You don't know who the person is the person in the call center is probably disconnected from the organization to which they're you know answerable etc.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: So it's it's not that the job itself has to be awful but it's like so much of modern work it's a um an expansion of a moment it what should be a moment within a set of processes.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: I mean remember Adam Smith's you know famous visit to the pin factory birth of capitalism the birth of um the division of labor where he observes that in a modern pin factory each person um can be doing a very tiny job and so long as they're all working in coordinated movement then they can achieve so much more than an artisan.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that's absolutely right but what Smith was missing out and what you know later kind of observers of capitalism have kind of struggled and in different ways tried to express is yes but it makes life much more boring and horrible so we're richer.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_00: But we've really paid a very very high price as we move from this artisanal world which is why alongside the modern world there are such fantasies of the artisanal world because because it it genuinely picks up on certain centers of satisfaction much more accurately.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: Tell us about why you worry about this concept that you can be anything you want to be, you can achieve anything um look like a lot of optimism it carries dangers because what do you do when it doesn't work?
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: And statistically that won't work very well.
• 28:01
  SPEAKER_00: I mean in analogy with relationships if you tell people everybody by birthright will enjoy you know happy mutually satisfying supportive relationship with someone who's you know both attractive and kind that's not a very generous thing to tell people um you know we don't do this in relation to sport we don't tell uh kids everyone can be a great footballer you know you know and and most kids growing up are quite realistic.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_00: They may want to be a footballer but they know the odds.
• 28:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean the odds are you know if you're gonna play uh top level football it's you know it's one in many millions literally many millions and so you don't grow up expecting that you're gonna play in the Premier League you just don't you you you might fantasize about it but you don't expect it.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_00: Whereas there are expectations that are formed around versions of self-realization that just defy all statistical odds and they leave us um incredibly vulnerable to punitive explanations of why we haven't reached our um our our goals and you know one of the you remember how Emile Durkheim the French sociologist makes this famous observation that what separates traditional from modern societies, one of the things is the suicide rate that traditional societies have lower suicide rates than modern societies and this haunted Durkheim who wrote a whole study of this and the essential argument is that so-called individualistic modern societies um place an enormous amount of responsibility for individuals' fate on the individual themselves and their decisions and thereby increase the pressure unbelievably um and the sense of responsibility which may eventually lead people to to crack.
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_02: And was his other big argument that we we no longer have uh sacred spaces?
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_00: Was that Derek Klein Uh it's it absolutely it's it's the notion of the religion, of the religious, the divine, which creates a kind of um a a suprahuman realm in which the deficiencies of humans are contextualized, absorbed, attenuated in some way because um you know I mean in in the old Christian world the king would bow down to an image of Christ you know the the the most powerful earthly ruler would be aware of a divine world.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it was John Ruskin who said that if you want to look at what a society believes in, look at what the most dominant buildings are on the skyline.
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_00: And for thousands, hundreds of years the most dominant buildings were religious buildings around Europe.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_00: You know if you look at the skyline of most major European cities it'd always be a cathedral or a a church the the you know a a spire and um nowadays it's insurance companies it's uh some some might find insurance spiritually enlightening.
• 30:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it but it's it's really about uh relativizing human achievement.
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 31:01
  SPEAKER_00: If if humans are gods and and you know we have secularized the the divine and we have turned um ordinary humans into deities we attribute to them many of the qualities that to which you know in the past we would um uh limit ourselves to to to referring to deities as and and this creates you know a lot of tension.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_00: I mean think of think of ancient Greek culture.
• 31:28
  SPEAKER_00: So the ancient Greeks were obsessed by hubris by the notion that humans run into problems when they forget that they are not gods.
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_00: So you know there's the the world of the gods and then there's the world of humans and you know whether you're reading Herodotus or Herodotus histories or you're looking at Sophocles's plays um there's there's the the or thinking about myths like that of Icarus etc it's always the same thing.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's you know you're you're climbing too close to the sun you think you know what you're doing you think you've mastered it and you haven't.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now the Greeks are kind of there's a bit of Schadenfreuder in there and and the truth is that sometimes people can fly right up to the sun and nothing bad happens to them.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_00: The question is what happens to people on the ground when a human's got up close to the sun it it makes everybody feel awful um uh because most humans don't fly that close to the sun and yeah so we've you know that that simple decision do you believe or don't you believe um which we nowadays answer through science and we we say well you know I'm not going to believe in God because I don't know you can't can't pick up God's existence through any machine that you know we're answering this question far too literally we're we're failing to see that religion provided a kind of psychological therapy um and that was really its justification not its truth value when I've tried to distill what I should be focusing on with my life at work and what the goal should be for me I've kind of distilled it down to just fulfilling my potential.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_01: Do you think that striving as hard as possible to fulfil your potential is basically in conflict with being happy um I mean it it doesn't have to be I guess a lot depends on you know what you feel your potential is um I mean you know is it possible that one's sense of potential is always unrealistic and is always in excess of anything that could bring satisfaction?
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure um you know I'm now reaching a stage an age where I observe some friends of mine and indeed myself who we think we've kind of done a lot of what we wanted to do and what we thought of as essential.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now if we hadn't done those things um we might be disappointed and angry but having done those things do we want to do everything else?
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe not you know that the the that I I'm sensing that there can be a moment where you think I don't need to keep proving myself to myself or to others I definitely did that was part of the story but it doesn't necessarily need to be infinite which I think is quite a happy tale.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean that's that's how we would like it to be is that true for everyone I mean I think you know I think we're aware of of people that we think they should have done it.
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I'm thinking of certain musicians you think okay they should have done it by now they don't need to release that other album it's probably going to be a bit of a disaster like and indeed it is you know just you've done it you've done it we you know we got it um we don't need to keep doing it um but then people are often bored you know because life goes on and the other great challenge of life is how to keep having an interesting time um and one of the things about fighting for survival psychological and material is that it's wonderful at um filling filling the hours.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: What other psychological interventions have you made on yourself to I guess to eat eat your own medicine that you dole out to make yourself happier?
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: And what what's worked well for you?
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I'm always my first patient.
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_00: I I am not a an academic I'm not a guru who wants to help others I'm very self-focused.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_00: I'm only trying to help little old me.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_00: And then if other people have any you know interesting times anything I might say good but I didn't start with them and I don't claim to know what they need and and I just do that out of genuine humility.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_00: I can't I know it's much better if I s stick with me.
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: But um so so in answer to your question all the medicine of mine um you know I take and it's meant for me.
• 35:56
  SPEAKER_00: That said um if you know my stuff it's extremely modest about the capacity to be anything other than quite crazy.
• 36:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I'm very mad um most of the time I'm the opposite of somebody who's worked everything out or you know is totally balanced or sane.
• 36:17
  SPEAKER_00: But I think that's that's okay.
• 36:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean I wouldn't want anyone to go oh what do you you know what do you think you're doing telling anyone else how to live?
• 36:23
  SPEAKER_00: I go, no I'm not telling anyone how to live.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: I'm simply providing sort of diary entries around what it's like to live for me.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_00: And and a lot of I mean a lot of the so I you know do the writing for the school of life and a lot of what we pump out into the world through our media channels etc are fairly downbeat messages.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: We we tell people things like happy love you know you'll be lucky um uh you know happiness in general for an afternoon maybe if you're really lucky um they're quite downbeat but they're not meant to depress they're meant to cheer they're meant to laugh you you smile um I think all of us are carrying a lot more grief, disappointment, confusion than we normally let on.
• 37:05
  SPEAKER_00: And if someone creates a space in which that can be safely discharged then we feel more acceptable to ourselves and it's the springboard of into community and friendship really.
• 37:18
  SPEAKER_02: What was the reason you you started the school of life I guess putting the the lens back on yourself and your own notions of success?
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_02: Why did you do that?
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: So interesting.
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_00: So you know a lot of my career I was just a writer I wrote books.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_00: I saw the individual writer I didn't really revere the individual writer.
• 37:42
  SPEAKER_00: It's quite interesting a lot of writers are like I'm a writer and I don't want to do anything else and I hate I hate collective action I don't like anything to do with business etc I came from a very mercantile family and I was always I I've always been interested in how business is essentially an aggregator of effort and a tool of leverage for things that are important in the world.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: And all those things that businesses do, they they they they cohere around certain ideas, they create an entity that survives in time.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_00: The notion of brand is really a it's a version of personal identity but but around a collective and all these things just um deepen and render more consequential effort that one might be making and I remember a turning point for me was reading about the philosophical schools that many philosophers started in ancient Athens.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_00: There's a French academic called Pierre Ador who wrote a book on studying the the business side of philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome who the Stoics the Epicureans the skeptics they had shops essentially they had shops um they set themselves up in business and they got pupils and to come and study and and and it was a marketplace of ideas and I thought that was extremely charming and it led directly to thinking about the school of life and when we opened we had a shop in Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury and we deliberately ate the language of commerce in in in a playful way to to discuss the the idea of selling a concept an idea rather than a loaf of bread.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: You have this phenomenal capacity to create these very pithy lines which really make people think so one of my favorites of yours is that the the greatest challenge of a modern relationship is to be more interesting than your partner's phone.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Which made me laugh and then made me really think.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: What do you think is the key to all the success you've had you have you know this huge following and now particularly on social media your clips are everywhere people I think have a real desire to listen to what what you have to say.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: What would you ascribe your success to?
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_00: Look first of all it's sort of it's an embarrassing thought it's a it's a nice thought but it's a worrying thought um for complex reasons.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_00: You know I'm thinking of Icarus um but but I think um I think I try and stay very honest to what I'm feeling really I think that's the load star.
• 40:15
  SPEAKER_00: I've got a relatively good sort of bullshit detector of my own thought and you know especially as I've got older I've tended to you know if I write when I write um I tend to write only really when the need comes when it when it comes from somewhere deep within and it's very heartfelt and I need to write rather than want to write or have to write to fulfill some brief.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_00: And so I'll tend to write at odd times of the day often in the middle of the night um often the early morning and and it just comes out very quickly and I more and more leave it the way it comes out.
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's unadorned it's I'm not trying to impress anyone I'm not trying to footnote it I'm just just putting it out there.
• 41:00
  SPEAKER_00: And social media is a good mechanism for that it kind of rewards a certain sort of authenticity I think and it and it mirrors what I'm trying to do creatively.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: You know I I remember the sort of in the days you know when I started and there's the concept of a book and I remember very early on my editor saying well a book's about 300 pages.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: I thought oh because I quite want to write a book that's 20 pages because that might be all I have to say.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: Why do you have to pad out for another 300 pages?
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_00: Why is every book 300 pages?
• 41:32
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't need to be and if every book's 300 pages you can you know by definition that some people have cut themselves short and some people have gone on too long.
• 41:39
  SPEAKER_00: It's not possible that every expression of the human spirit comes out in batches of 300 pages.
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we're living in a much more it mirrors other areas of kind of greater authenticity in modern life but we're able to say yeah it maybe it's only 15 lines but it's important lines and let's stick with that.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: My tutor at university was a poet called Craig Rain who published a a book of his essays which he titled More Dynamite.
• 42:04
  SPEAKER_01: So he certainly didn't lack any confidence do you do you have to have an enormous amount of confidence to to to to put these thoughts out there no I don't I don't read it as confidence.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's a psychological imperative I think writing and expression is one of those things that's quite basic to our constitution um I mean I can do a bit of psychoanalysis on me.
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_00: I had parents who really were not interested in anything I had to say as a child.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that my need for expression kind of went inwards and something came out through some other strange thing.
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: And so um and I didn't speak to those around me as a child very much at all.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_00: So so I think something got driven underground it got increased and then driven underground and then sort of came out in an odd way.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_00: So you know and I think in many writers' histories there's something a little bit bizarre like that.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_00: So I don't think it's to do with confidence um and I think I I think it's just to do with psychological makeup because I'm sure the things that you do are not really you don't you don't I don't know it it it's like the proverbial you know walking off a cliff if you look down you'll fall you're not really looking down you're you're looking at where you're trying to get to you're an incisive observer of humanity and and its sort of foibles and and all its brilliance.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_02: Do you think that we are at a moment of inflection where the sort of commercial entrepreneur will no longer be the dominant sort of archetype of success or we've got another hundred years of this so interesting.
• 43:40
  SPEAKER_00: I mean look if you think of what the entrepreneur does is that they they notice things that are missing and they they fill in the gap um and you know whenever people say capitalism's run its course entrepreneur has run its course I always say well think of think of an average day and all the things that are missing from your life not things you've got um I mean you we can observe lots of things that we've got enough of breakfast cereal you just you just don't need another breakfast cereal there's still people launching breakfast cereals but but we we've got that bit of the market crack but um unhappiness stalks us in so many subtle and complex ways we we're bored we're dissatisfied we're in agony etc and and every business is an attempt to to kind of respond to an area of of dissatisfaction I mean the consumer-facing ones and um and there's an awful lot long way to go still because human nature is so complicated.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_00: And so that you know the history of commerce tracks the history of in a way human self-understanding as well it's it's a version of our attempt to understand ourselves commerce because because we're really trying to satisfy one another and yeah that that's got a a a huge way to run still.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: Fascinating.
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: Alan it's a beautiful spring day in London we could talk for hours but we should allow you in the in the hope of happiness to go and enjoy a beautiful afternoon.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for joining us on Giant Ideas.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you what a pleasure if you like the episode don't forget to like subscribe and follow the show and you can find many more giant ideas wherever you get your podcasts