A calendar of wisdom
Breaking bad habits—Quality over quantity—Mood follows action—Effort over results
Hi all,
Just sharing a quick shoutout to all those who completed the Philadelphia Broad Street Run this morning! This is the largest 10 mile race in the United States—and it’s always packed with athletes, young and old, well-prepared and under-prepared. The winning time this year was just over 45 minutes, or about 4:30 for each mile. I finished about 10 minutes after that, slightly beating my expectations for the race given I tweaked my ankle playing basketball on an uneven blacktop last weekend. Things are still looking good for my other big race this year: the Man V. Horse Marathon.
Have a good rest of your Sunday!
Thanks for reading,
—Brendan
Each morning, I walk into the kitchen after my workout, take out a pan, and crack open some jumbo Trader Joe’s eggs. While they sizzle and fry—similar to a Jimmy Dean commercial but without the high sodium sausage—I almost always spend 5 minutes scanning and scrolling through the Wall Street Journal. What do I learn? If anything, it’s that there are a lot of serious problems in the world that I’m entirely powerless, on my own, to solve. Yay anxiety!
This week I decided to suspend this daily news-reading habit. But as James Clear writes in Atomic Habits, it’s difficult to merely break a bad habit cold turkey. Instead, he often recommends replacing a bad habit with a good one. In my case, the good habit I’m hoping to start is reading a few pages of Tolstoy’s A Calendar of Wisdom each day. I’m leaving the book in the kitchen to make the habit “visible”, and therefore, relatively easy to keep.
A Calendar of Wisdom is a calendar book, meaning that there is one page for each day of the year and 366 pages in total. Each day includes a handful of “thoughts to nourish the soul” sourced from various ancient scriptures and philosophers. Each day is organized around a theme, such as kindness, reading or faith. Tolstoy spent over a decade meticulously compiling and summarizing these daily thoughts. He was very proud of this work, which was one of his last. Though it was highly popular in Russia in the early 20th century, the book was unfortunately banned in 1915 and remained so for 80 years.
The book is back now! I’m only a few “weeks” into the book at this point, but I thought I’d share a few of my favorite quotes so far:
#1 Quality over quantity:
“Better to know a few things which are good and necessary than many things which are useless and mediocre.”
—Leo Tolstoy
This quote comes from January 1st… How timely. The book I purchased to break my habit of consuming (relatively) useless and mediocre content recommended doing so on its very first page.
#2 Mood follows action:
“Nobody has any idea about what goodness is, until they start doing it.”
—Harriet Martineau
This reminds me of Rich Roll’s saying: “mood follows action.” You can’t think yourself into a good mood. You have to start with action first.
I notice this particularly when I volunteer for a few hours (which, to be honest, is something I don’t do often enough). Signing-up is always challenging, but I always walk away feeling happy I did it. The same goes for going out for a run or sitting down to finish something I’ve been putting off.
On a similar note, one of the best ways to make yourself happy is to make someone else happy. Start with action.
#3 Effort over results:
“The merit of a man is not in the knowledge he possesses, but in the effort he made to achieve it.”
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
This quote especially applies to all those students graduating this spring. The confidence and grit they develop through the effort to push through school probably pays larger dividends than the actual textbook knowledge they gain.
Thanks for reading! I love when these thoughts lead to conversations with readers. Did you find anything interesting or surprising? Reply to me and let’s have a dialogue.