Time Capsule #165
On experience & great speeches.
Greetings,
This newsletter is a heavy hitter (in my opinion).
Enjoy!
I pray not for a lighter load but for stronger shoulders.
—St Augustine of Hippo
✏️ The great teacher
Experience is the great teacher. If one does not look back with embarrassment and regret at at least a few actions of the past, he is not growing fast enough.
Experience has taught me an important lesson: to not take things so seriously. When one is young, eager, and ready for battle in the world, everything appears paramount. Set backs are fatal, victories are final; everything is to be taken seriously. There is some value to such an approach — life is serious business. But I find now that I take things much more lightly. Worry is a manufactured good. Most tribulations are trivial, and easily disappear once the attention that makes them manifest is directed elsewhere.
Experience (and good reading) has taught me the criticality of effective communication. Saying what you think in the way you think it can often cost you. Learning to speak tactfully, to appeal to the tendencies of the listener, to not quarrel about things not worth quarrelling about (of which there are very few) — these are especially important in work and life.
Good luck and good mentors can help you avoid many hard lessons, but some can only be taught through experience. A man who knows its value knows to push himself to the edge of his limits — not quite at the breaking point, but enough to stimulate occasions of challenge and responsibility.
Carpe diem
Seize the day
💡 Food for Thought
Money spent building relationships is money well spent.
🔗 Sunday Best
I've Been To The Mountaintop — Martin Luther King Jr.
A masterclass in oratory — and eerily prophetic.
Something is happening in Memphis; something is happening in our world.
We Shall Fight on the Beaches — Sir Winston Churchill
The power of words — during one of the most tense and trying times of human history.
We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.
Blood, Toil, Tears & Sweat — Sir Winston Churchill
Another speech from the last lion. The word choice and delivery is first-rate. He is the standard.
I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this government: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.”
We have before us an ordeal of the most grievous kind. We have before us many, many long months of struggle and of suffering. You ask, what is our policy? I can say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy.
The only way to tell the truth is to speak with kindness. Only the loving man can be heard.
—Henry David Thoreau
See you next week!
AT