The Organ

[AdamSmith]

On 11/24/2017 at 11:03 AM, AdamSmith said:

 

Occurs that the radar operator in this scene was very possibly modeled on one Jacob Beser, the expert 24-year-old radar technician who flew on the Enola Gay mission to bomb Hiroshima, and then also on the Nagasaki run. To help record the effects of the bomb, but more importantly to try to detect, and counter, any possible use by the Japanese of radar that would interfere with, and possibly prematurely set off, the radar-based proximity-fusing mechanism of the atomic bomb.

Over Hiroshima, Missing the Target by 500 Feet Was Kind of Academic

By Bruce Goldfarb

Jacob Beser Crewman at Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Jacob Beser was a 24-year-old radar specialist aboard the Enola Gay on Aug. 6, 1945, when it dropped the "Little Boy" atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, Beser was aboard Bock's Car when "Fat Man" was dropped on Nagasaki. He was the only person who crewed in the attack aircraft of both missions. His responsibility aboard the planes was to monitor the workings of a fuse-device that set off the bomb when radar beams bounced off the ground indicated that the weapon had fallen to a precise altitude for an air burst of maximum destructiveness. In Hiroshima, the altitude was 1,850 feet. His other job on the flight to the targets was to make sure that there were no enemy radars using the same frequency as the fuse -- which could have set off the bomb prematurely.

Jacob Beser, November 1945

Little Boy produced an explosion equal to 12,000 tons of TNT and killed 78,150 of Hiroshima's population of 255,000. More than 25,000 people were injured and 13.425 people were never found. In Nagasaki, 35,000 were killed or never found and 40,000 were injured, out of a population of 195,000.

Beser is a native of Baltimore. Prior to enlisting in the Air Force, he studied mechanical engineering at Johns Hopkins University and worked on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos in the area of firing and fusing. After 27 years of service, Beser recently retired from Westinghouse, where most of his work was classified.

This summer Beser plans to return to Japan for the first time since the war, and has been invited to attend memorial ceremonies in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He lives with Sylvia Beser, his wife of 36 years, in Pikesville, Md., where he is active in Jewish organizations. The Besers have four sons and five grandchildren.

[Jacob Beser died in 1992 at age 71]

---

Q: Do you often think of August 1945?

A: Yeah, I think of it because people like you and others don't let you forget it. It's not that I care to forget it, but there's always constant reminders.

Q: Before you were aware of what the mission was, you requested a transfer to a combat unit. Were you pretty anxious to fight?

A: I was quite anxious to get into it. I wanted to go to Europe. Classmates were there. I had family in Germany who had been chewed up already.

I went up to Washington to see the adjutant general of the army, who theoretically could send you anywhere you wanted to go. He said, "I don't know why, but even I can't touch you. Your file has been flagged for some reason."

Eventually I got transferred into the [Army Air Corps] 393rd [Heavy Bombardment Squadron, the one assigned to the Manhattan Project]. A month after that, orders came down from Washington freezing all the personnel in the 393rd. Nobody in, nobody out. And they were alerted for a temporary move to Wendover Air Force Base. They said take everything you own with you, which was quite unusual. All your trucks and your organizational equipment.

Crew of Enola Gay before Hiroshima mission. Beser, standing far right

We were at Wendover a couple of days and we got called together in the base auditorium to meet Paul Tibbets, our new group commander. He said we were going to form a new group, independent, able to operate anywhere in the world, the purpose of which was not to be told to us for a while. Don't ask questions, just trust me. It was secret. And everybody could go home on two weeks leave except Lt. Jacob Beser, please report to my office immediately.

I was ushered into his office with two more army personnel, a naval officer and a civilian, Dr. Al Brode, who had just come off a college campus. A light came on in my head and I said, "Hey, this guy is a big wheel in physics." They wanted to know where I was from, how old I was, where I went to school and what my background and experience had been.

Brode looked me straight in the eye and said, "How do you feel about flying combat?" "I have a pair of wings," I said. "That's what I was trained for. What's the problem?" He said, "Well, this job we want you to do, it’s not that we don't have people that can do it in our organization but they're too valuable to risk." I could see my life expectancy going down, my insurance rates going up.

I was excused from the room and about 10 minutes later invited back and everybody shook my hand and congratulated me. I'd been hired. What for? Nobody was saying, but I was now part of the crowd. I didn't know what I was part of.

Several days later we were told to be on the flight line at 7 the next morning and be packed for three or four days travel. I said, "Where are we going?" "You'll find out when we get there." That's interesting. "And do I take warm clothes or summer clothes or what?" "Take 'em both." They wouldn't give me the slightest clue.

I crawled in the airplane. I didn't know the rest of these fellows too well. But I did know the pilot and I said, "Arthur, where are we going?" He said, "I don't know but when we get near we'll find out. All I know is I filed a clearance for a place called Y. The letter Y. I've never been there before."

Pilot Col. Paul Tibbets before take-off for Hiroshima mission

Q: And that turned out to be Los Alamos?

A: Yeah. I was escorted there by Col. Tibbets and Navy Capt. Richard Ashworth. We went right to the office of Dr. Norman Ramsey, who was a young PhD from Columbia University. He ran the fusing and firing section.

Q: Nobody ever said atomic in that briefing?

A: No, no. No way. They just told me "a weapon." Ramsey said that they wanted this weapon to burst over the ground at a precise altitude and they had been working on the problem but they weren't nearly as far along as they should be.

We would have lunch at the lodge and there were names like Nils Bohr bandied around, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe. It all began to add up. Then in conversations with Ramsey one day he pretty much filled me in without ever saying words like atomic bomb. He talked about fundamental forces of the universe. He hit all around it, and it spelled mother...

http://brucegoldfarb.com/beser.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Beser

http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/20/obituaries/jacob-beser-dies-at-71-flew-a-bomb-missions.html

https://www.manhattanprojectvoices.org/oral-histories/jacob-besers-lecture

https://www.atomicheritage.org/profile/jacob-beser

[AdamSmith]

Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated

A new book challenges how we think about human progress.

Updated by Sean Illing@seanillingsean.illing@vox.com Nov 22, 2017, 10:40am ET

Is civilization good for us? Has it made us any happier?

The takeaway from a new book by James Scott, a professor of political science and anthropology at Yale University, is that the answer to the first question is yes but it’s complicated, while the answer to the second question is, well, even more complicated.

In Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States, Scott explores why human beings decided to shift from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more sedentary, agrarian lifestyle roughly 12,000 years ago. The accepted narrative is that humans abandoned hunting and gathering as soon they discovered agricultural technology, because it made life easier and safer.

But Scott argues that this is not quite right. Humans, he says, spent thousands of years trying to preserve their hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Sure, settling down in agrarian societies provided the basis for the modern state by allowing large numbers of people to live in one place for extended periods of time, but it also led to the spread of diseases and forced people to give up the freedom of an itinerant lifestyle for the affluence of a modern one.

The story we tell ourselves about human history is one of linear progress, fueled in large part by moral and technological development. There is some truth to this, and on a long enough timeline it makes sense, but Scott says the sacrifices made along the way are rarely understood.

I spoke to him recently about those sacrifices, and what we tend to get wrong about early civilizations. For Scott, the price of civilization — for the individual and the environment — has been higher than we think.

Our conversation, lightly edited for clarity, follows.

---

Sean Illing

Has civilization been good for humanity?

James Scott

So much of what I thought I had understood about early civilizations and pre-modern men and women was just wrong. I’ve tried to offer something of a counternarrative that suggests the domestication of grains centuries ago did not lead directly to humans living in large groups in one place for long periods of time, as we now do.

It turns out that the kind of agriculture that early humans practiced was onerous and involved a tremendous amount of work. The first civilizations were very hard and unhealthy places that gave us most of our first infectious diseases, many of which are still with us. They also produced the first coercive states that took slaves and oppressed large numbers of people.

Now, that doesn't mean that the modern state since the French Revolution is not the ground of both our freedom and our oppression, but it does mean that the early states were by no means a simple advance in leisure, freedom, emancipation, or help.

Sean Illing

We can circle back to that last point about what we lost in terms of leisure and freedom, but first tell me what you initially got wrong about early civilizations — and presumably what a lot of us get wrong.

James Scott

A couple of things. One is that I think the standard narrative is that once we had domesticated plants, then we immediately shifted to an agricultural society so that we could stay in the same place. People also assume that before the agricultural revolution, humans had to wander around as foragers and hunter-gatherers. But that’s not quite right. Four thousand years passed between the first firm evidence of domesticated plants, cereals, and the beginning of truly agrarian communities that are living largely by agriculture.

The other mistake, which I had never thought about, was this assumption that we couldn’t wait to settle down, that this was part of the inevitable progress of humanity. That’s not true at all, and it certainly could have gone another way.

The truth is that staying in one place, which is what civilization more or less forced us to do, wasn’t all that healthy for us, and our human ancestors resisted [it] strongly for a very long time.

Sean Illing

So the birth of agriculture, which effectively laid the foundation for modern civilization, was not welcomed by most humans at the time. What were they resisting? What did they see?

James Scott

Well, you have to remember that in places like Mesopotamia, people lived in a kind of wetland paradise, with water levels much higher than they are today and with diverse migrations of mammals and birds and fish that created an extraordinarily rich set of ecosystems. Those early humans had a variety of plant and animal and fish sources of subsistence, and it actually required very little of the year for them to get all of their protein needs.

“It’s important to understand that this was not a choice between hunting and gathering and foraging on the one hand and the Danish welfare state on the other”

Sean Illing

So the hunter-gatherers were healthier than those who switched over to the more sedentary agricultural lifestyle — at least initially.

James Scott

That’s right. Their diet was extremely varied, which is to say extremely healthy. So that when you find the bones of people who died at the same time and you want to know whether they were a part of an agrarian state or whether they were hunters and gatherers and foragers, you can tell because the hunter-gatherers’ skeletons are much larger because they had fewer interruptions in growth, and their bones show almost no signs of malnutrition, whereas the people in the agricultural civilizations are both shorter and their bones and teeth are less robust. You see evidence of growth interruptions that are mostly due to protein deficiency of one kind or another.

It's clear that people outside these grain civilizations were healthier than the people inside.

Sean Illing

People tend to think of human history as a story of steady progress, which is largely true, but it’s also more complicated than that.

James Scott

Even today, there is this idea that life with civilization is easier and affords more leisure, but hunters and gatherers spend only about 50 percent of their time producing or searching for what they needed to survive. The idea that hunters and gatherers and foragers were living hand to mouth and one day away from starvation is nonsense, even for those in pretty marginal areas where there is less access to natural migrations of fish and animals and the fruiting seasons of trees and so on...

Hunters and gatherers only spent half of their time working, and the rest was spent in play or leisure. By contrast, those early agrarian civilizations involved much more labor and drudgery. [They] also involved a narrower diet that turned out mostly carbohydrates. And that’s why people resisted this transition, and why many had to be forced into this change...

Cont.: https://www.vox.com/conversations/2017/11/22/16649038/civilization-progress-humanity-history-technology

[AdamSmith]

Very Fair & Balanced (so seems to me; but our @RA1 would be the authority here) comparison of Boeing vs Airbus design philosophies.

But, on balance, reminds me yet again why (if one had one's druthers, which of course is hard to arrange):

If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going.

P.S. Being a consultant about engineering software, in such things as the above, I find myself more and more in line with Alfred North Whitehead:

'Seek simplicity, and distrust it.'

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

Collaboration Kills Creativity, According to Science

It's impossible to think "out of the box" when you're stuck inside a box with a bunch of other people.

By Geoffrey James

 

The notion that collaboration makes people more creative has become conventional wisdom in the business world. Here's a typical example:

Collaboration has recently emerged as the defining characteristic of creativity and growth in nearly all sectors and industries. The singular genius who works alone is a myth of yesterday.

Despite this kind of corporate-speak truthiness, there is substantial scientific evidence that collaboration, rather than sparking creativity, results in group-think and mediocrity. What does result in creativity? Simple: solitude.

According to a study recently published in the Elselvier journal ScienceDirect.com, the character traits of "shyness, avoidance, [and] unsociability," while generally seen as undesirable, are positively associated with creativity.

Furthermore, intelligent people are happier when they have less social interaction, even with their friends, according to a national survey of 15,000 respondents aged 18 to 28 and quoted in the Washington Post:

The more social interactions with close friends a person has, the greater their self-reported happiness. But there was one big exception. For more intelligent people, these correlations were diminished or even reversed. More intelligent individuals were actually less satisfied with life if they socialized with their friends more frequently. [Emphasis mine]

In other words, far from being a "myth of yesterday," the "singular genius who works alone" is much more likely to be creative than the person who seeks interaction and "collaboration." Forcing creative people to "collaborate" simply blunts their creativity.

According to an article in the Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior, there are

two ways in which solitude can facilitate creativity--first, by stimulating imaginative involvement in multiple realities and, second, by 'trying on' alternative identities, leading, perhaps, to self-transformation. ... By separating us from our usual social and physical environments, solitude can remove those people and objects that define and confirm our identities. The people we see and the places we frequent reinforce our identities as students, parents, police officers, or whomever. ... By extracting us from our customary social and physical contexts (or at least altering our experience of them), solitude facilitates self-examination, reconceptualization of the self, and coming to terms with change.

Put another way, being around other people keeps creative people from thinking new thoughts. Indeed, there are few experiences more mind-numbing for a creative person than being forced to interact with dullards on a daily basis. 

Even if your office is full of geniuses, they'll be less creative en masse than if they can work and think alone. In short, it's difficult and maybe even impossible to "think out of the box" when you're literally inside a box (i.e., an open-plan office) that's full of other people.

https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/collaboration-kills-creativity-according-to-science.html?cid=mustread3

[RA1]

16 hours ago, AdamSmith said:

Very Fair & Balanced (so seems to me; but our @RA1 would be the authority here) comparison of Boeing vs Airbus design philosophies.

But, on balance, reminds me yet again why (if one had one's druthers, which of course is hard to arrange):

If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going.

P.S. Being a consultant about engineering software, in such things as the above, I find myself more and more in line with Alfred North Whitehead:

'Seek simplicity, and distrust it.'

I want the boy brand. 

The Baltic Aviation Academy is located in Lithuania but the sims are made in the US.   Good.  Generally what one is being paid to fly is what one likes.  I suppose younger folks will choose technology over function.  

Other things are more important and more memorable.  First solo, first license, first high performance aircraft, first jet, first paying job, first captaincy, etc.

I know a lot of pilots who swear by their Boeings but fly the Airbus anyway.

Best regards,

RA1

[AdamSmith]

12 minutes ago, RA1 said:

I want the boy brand. 

He is very cute! 

[AdamSmith]

Jim Nabors died...sigh.

[Guest Larstrup]

 

[Guest Larstrup]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

'Vud not be difficult, Mein Feuhrer!'

...'Animals could be bred, and slaughtered...!'

 

[AdamSmith]

The beauty and genius of this is well worth reposting.

http://radioopensource.org/whose-words-these-are-15-blooms-hart-crane/#

[AdamSmith]

Viktor Frankl on the Human Search for Meaning

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

By Maria Popova

Celebrated Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl (March 26, 1905–September 2, 1997) remains best-known for his indispensable 1946 psychological memoir Man’s Search for Meaning (public library) — a meditation on what the gruesome experience of Auschwitz taught him about the primary purpose of life: the quest for meaning, which sustained those who survived.

For Frankl, meaning came from three possible sources: purposeful work, love, and courage in the face of difficulty.

In examining the “intensification of inner life” that helped prisoners stay alive, he considers the transcendental power of love:

Love goes very far beyond the physical person of the beloved. It finds its deepest meaning in his spiritual being, his inner self. Whether or not he is actually present, whether or not he is still alive at all, ceases somehow to be of importance.

Frankl illustrates this with a stirring example of how his feelings for his wife — who was eventually killed in the camps — gave him a sense of meaning:

We were at work in a trench. The dawn was grey around us; grey was the sky above; grey the snow in the pale light of dawn; grey the rags in which my fellow prisoners were clad, and grey their faces. I was again conversing silently with my wife, or perhaps I was struggling to find the reason for my sufferings, my slow dying. In a last violent protest against the hopelessness of imminent death, I sensed my spirit piercing through the enveloping gloom. I felt it transcend that hopeless, meaningless world, and from somewhere I heard a victorious “Yes” in answer to my question of the existence of an ultimate purpose. At that moment a light was lit in a distant farmhouse, which stood on the horizon as if painted there, in the midst of the miserable grey of a dawning morning in Bavaria. “Et lux in tenebris lucet” — and the light shineth in the darkness. For hours I stood hacking at the icy ground. The guard passed by, insulting me, and once again I communed with my beloved. More and more I felt that she was present, that she was with me; I had the feeling that I was able to touch her, able to stretch out my hand and grasp hers. The feeling was very strong: she was there. Then, at that very moment, a bird flew down silently and perched just in front of me, on the heap of soil which I had dug up from the ditch, and looked steadily at me.

Of humor, “another of the soul’s weapons in the fight for self-preservation,” Frankl writes:

It is well known that humor, more than anything else in the human make-up, can afford an aloofness and an ability to rise above any situation, even if only for a few seconds. … The attempt to develop a sense of humor and to see things in a humorous light is some kind of a trick learned while mastering the art of living. Yet it is possible to practice the art of living even in a concentration camp, although suffering is omnipresent.

Lithograph by Leo Haas, Holocaust artist who survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz (public domain)

After discussing the common psychological patterns that unfold in inmates, Frankl is careful to challenge the assumption that human beings are invariably shaped by their circumstances. He writes:

But what about human liberty? Is there no spiritual freedom in regard to behavior and reaction to any given surroundings? … Most important, do the prisoners’ reactions to the singular world of the concentration camp prove that man cannot escape the influences of his surroundings? Does man have no choice of action in the face of such circumstances?

We can answer these questions from experience as well as on principle. The experiences of camp life show that man does have a choice of action. … Man can preserve a vestige of spiritual freedom, of independence of mind, even in such terrible conditions of psychic and physical stress.

[…]

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

Much like William James did in his treatise on habit, Frankl places this notion of everyday choice at the epicenter of the human experience:

Every day, every hour, offered the opportunity to make a decision, a decision which determined whether you would or would not submit to those powers which threatened to rob you of your very self, your inner freedom; which determined whether or not you would become the plaything of circumstance, renouncing freedom and dignity to become molded into the form of the typical inmate.

Like Henry Miller and Philip K. Dick, Frankl recognizes suffering as an essential piece not only of existence but of the meaningful life:

If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering. Suffering is an ineradicable part of life, even as fate and death. Without suffering and death human life cannot be complete.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity — even under the most difficult circumstances — to add a deeper meaning to his life. It may remain brave, dignified and unselfish. Or in the bitter fight for self-preservation he may forget his human dignity and become no more than an animal. Here lies the chance for a man either to make use of or to forgo the opportunities of attaining the moral values that a difficult situation may afford him. And this decides whether he is worthy of his sufferings or not. … Such men are not only in concentration camps. Everywhere man is confronted with fate, with the chance of achieving something through his own suffering.

In working as a psychiatrist to the inmates, Frankl found that the single most important factor in cultivating the kind of “inner hold” that allowed men to survive was teaching them to hold in the mind’s grip some future goal. He cites Nietzsche’s, who wrote that “He who has a why to live for can bear with almost any how,” and admonishes against generalization:

Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore no point in carrying on. He was soon lost. The typical reply with which such a man rejected all encouraging arguments was, “I have nothing to expect from life any more.” What sort of answer can one give to that?

What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life — daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.

These tasks, and therefore the meaning of life, differ from man to man, and from moment to moment. Thus it is impossible to define the meaning of life in a general way. Questions about the meaning of life can never be answered by sweeping statements. “Life” does not mean something vague, but something very real and concrete, just as life’s tasks are also very real and concrete. They form man’s destiny, which is different and unique for each individual. No man and no destiny can be compared with any other man or any other destiny. No situation repeats itself, and each situation calls for a different response. Sometimes the situation in which a man finds himself may require him to shape his own fate by action. At other times it is more advantageous for him to make use of an opportunity for contemplation and to realize assets in this way. Sometimes man may be required simply to accept fate, to bear his cross. Every situation is distinguished by its uniqueness, and there is always only one right answer to the problem posed by the situation at hand.

Lithograph by Leo Haas, Holocaust artist who survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz (public domain)

In considering the human capacity for good and evil and the conditions that bring out indecency in decent people, Frankl writes:

Human kindness can be found in all groups, even those which as a whole it would be easy to condemn. The boundaries between groups overlapped and we must not try to simplify matters by saying that these men were angels and those were devils.

[…]

From all this we may learn that there are two races of men in this world, but only these two — the “race” of the decent man and the “race” of the indecent man. Both are found everywhere; they penetrate into all groups of society. No group consists entirely of decent or indecent people. In this sense, no group is of “pure race” — and therefore one occasionally found a decent fellow among the camp guards.

Life in a concentration camp tore open the human soul and exposed its depths. Is it surprising that in those depths we again found only human qualities which in their very nature were a mixture of good and evil? The rift dividing good from evil, which goes through all human beings, reaches into the lowest depths and becomes apparent even on the bottom of the abyss which is laid open by the concentration camp.

The second half of the book presents Frankl’s singular style of existential analysis, which he termed “logotherapy” — a method of healing the soul by cultivating the capacity to find a meaningful life:

Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he 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. Thus, logotherapy sees in responsibleness the very essence of human existence.

This emphasis on responsibleness is reflected in the categorical imperative of logotherapy, which is: “Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!”

Frankl contributes to history’s richest definitions of love:

Love is the only way to grasp another human being in the innermost core of his personality. No one can become fully aware of the very essence of another human being unless he loves him. By his love he is enabled to see the essential traits and features in the beloved person; and even more, he sees that which is potential in him, which is not yet actualized but yet ought to be actualized. Furthermore, by his love, the loving person enables the beloved person to actualize these potentialities. By making him aware of what he can be and of what he should become, he makes these potentialities come true.

Frankl wrote the book over the course of nine consecutive days, with the original intention of publishing it anonymously, but upon his friends’ insistent advice, he added his name in the last minute. In the introduction to the 1992 edition, in reflecting upon the millions of copies sold in the half-century since the original publication, Frankl makes a poignant meta-comment about something George Saunders recently echoed, noting:

In the first place I do not at all see in the bestseller status of my book an achievement and accomplishment on my part but rather an expression of the misery of our time: if hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose very title promises to deal with the question of a meaning to life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails. … At first, however, it had been written with the absolute conviction that, as an anonymous opus, it could never earn its author literary fame.

In the same introduction, he shares a piece of timeless advice on success he often gives his students:

Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.

(Hugh MacLeod famously articulated the same sentiment when he wrote that “The best way to get approval is not to need it.”)

If there ever were a universal reading list of existential essentials, Man’s Search for Meaning would, without a shadow of a doubt, be on it.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/03/26/viktor-frankl-mans-search-for-meaning/

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

Also perhaps timely...

 

[AdamSmith]

On 11/23/2017 at 9:14 PM, AdamSmith said:

 

 

[AdamSmith]

Tim 11 Jahre (Orgelklasse Ariane Metz) spielt an der Weigle-Rensch-Orgel der evangelischen Kirche St. Stephan (Würzburg) den 3.Satz aus der 1. Triosonate von Johann Sebastian Bach[Film-Studio K. Valentin L. Würzburg]

 

[AdamSmith]

In Defense of Laziness

Lazy people make the best leaders.

That was the belief of Kurt von Hammerstein-Equord, a famous German general known for his opposition to the Nazi regime.

A quote, from The Silences of Hammerstein:

“I divide my officers into four groups. There are clever, diligent, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and diligent — their place is the General Staff. The next lot are stupid and lazy — they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the intellectual clarity and the composure necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is stupid and diligent — he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always cause only mischief.”

https://betterhumans.coach.me/in-defense-of-laziness-4b6aa9fa6692

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]

 

[AdamSmith]