The School of Life by Alain De Botton - A Book Review

The School of Life is a beautiful book written by Alain De Botton with wonderful insights on each page. The book has five sections Self, Others, Relationships, Work, and Culture. Sharing a few of the snippets from the book here.

The School of Life by Alain De Botton

Alain maps many of our life habits and reactions to our childhood upbringing. He says, “Children can’t go anywhere. They have no extended social network. Even when things are going right, childhood is a gentle open prison.” A volatile parent may be the reason for our current meekness. A continually busy, inattentive parent was the catalyst for someone to be an exhausting attention seeker.

The markers of emotional health are self-love, candour, and communication. A few signs of self-love are not pleasing others indiscriminately and being willing to leave an abusive union. Candour is the ability to accept negative feedback about ourselves because valuable lessons come in painful guises. Communication is not to think that others can read our minds and thoughts. One needs to know how to formulate one’s complaints into a convincing, perhaps humorously framed point that has a chance of winning over its target.

Alain beautifully talks about fame and its invariable negative impacts in four pages. He says, “One wants to be famous out of a desire for kindness. But the world isn’t generally kind to the famous for long. This is because the celebrity of a few people will always contrast painfully with the obscurity of the many. So, soon enough the world will comment negatively on their appearance, it will pore over their setbacks, it will judge their relationships, and it will mock their new ventures. The assessments will flood in from people who will express from the safety of the newspaper office or screen.”

As a cure, Alain says that appreciation and understanding are only available through individuals one knows and cares about, not via groups of thousands or millions of strangers. There is no shortcut to friendship – which is what the famous person is in effect seeking. A famous person can market and advocate for their products in public but ignore the good and bad comments of strangers in the wider world.

In a debate between materialism and virtue, he talks about The Fable of the Bees written by Bernard Mandeville. In the book, Bernard mentions that shopping for pleasure and vanities helped the economy to grow. It was the consumption of Mandeville called “fripperies” – hats, bonnets, gloves, butter dishes, soup tureens, shoehorns, and hair clips – that provided the engine for national prosperity and made a genuine difference to the lives of the weak and the poor.

Alain talks about the 12 ingredients of wisdom. In that, he says the following about Regret. In our ambitious age, it is common to begin with dreams of being able to pull off an unblemished life, where one can hope to get the major decisions, in love and work, right. But the wise realize that it is impossible to fashion a spotless life. We will make some extremely large and utterly uncorrectable errors in a number of areas. Perfectionism is a wicked illusion. Regret is unavoidable. The errors in life are not coincidental but structural.

The book has 295 pages. Apart from the book, the YouTube channel by the same name, The School of Life, @theschooloflifetv has wonderful videos. The videos have so many animations and graphics and are well presented. I have been handing out copies of School of Life book to my family and friends and I’m sure you will too once you read the book. Go for it! 

Why You are Sad and How to Overcome it?

Why do we suffer when we are sad? Not because we are sad. But because we think we should not be. That we are supposed to be up and about, social, productive, whatever else. We have, what Carl Rogers called, the “idealized image” of ourselves. This image is based on how we want others to perceive us.

Our “suffering” begins when we sense or imagine our state being perceived by another (the perceived image as sensed by us) as different from our idealized image. You may call this as judgment (except you are judging your self). The suffering is an unwillingness to accept current state with a concurrent desire to be somebody else and the feeling that you can’t.

How can you decrease it? Allow you to be sad for few hours. Accept your state as is and you will find a burst of energy at the end of exercise.

There is a trick, though. You have to set some outcomes for the next day/evening. Two or three simple ones – like a walk, cook, clean, call, etc. 

Once you have accepted your state, your system is no longer struggling. You are congruent and in charge of your emotional states again. That is why you find energy at the end of the exercise. However, now you have to continue to be in charge of your state. Which is why planning outcome for next day/evening is important.

- by Bhavana Nissima - Lightweaver|NLP Passioneer|Innovator|Artist|Counsellor|Educator

Visit her website here.

The 50 Things - Lessons for When you Feel Lost by Peter Dunne - Few Snippets

On Compromise:

 

Compromise is an old person's word. When I say 'old' I am talking about anyone over the age of thirty. By thirty you have hopefully grasped that you are possibly not operating from the geographical centre of the universe, that life does not always go your way and that you just may, sometimes (often, actually) have to adjust your aims and your expectations and learn to deal with the disappointment that it brings. Before thirty, you may think you are the master of the universe and you spend a lot of time being aghast that God/ the universe/ everyone you know has not recognized this fact and brought you all you demand on silver platters while carrying you around on a bejeweled bier. Or was this just me?

 

As I've said, in my opinion, getting your own way all the time is bad for you. It creates false expectation and discourages effort, be it in relationships or business or life generally.

 

On Courage:

 

In  cyber-bullying your yardstick has to be this - Am I letting someone else determine my movements, my self-expression, or in any unwelcome way moderate my life or my actions? You must never appease a bully. As Goethe put it, 'Be bold and mighty forces shall come to your aid.'

 

On Friendship:

 

One loyal friend is worth 10,000 relatives - Euripides.

 

On Optimism:

 

In his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela said: "I am fundamentally an optimist. Whether that comes from nature or nurture, I cannot say. Part of being an optimist is keeping one's head pointed towards the sun, one's feet moving forward. There were many dark moments when my faith in humanity was sorely tested, but I would not and could not give myself up to despair. That way lay defeat and death."

 

On Gossip:

 

It was only as I got older that I started to realize that Gossip is actually really nasty, It's corrosive, like the worst kind of poison, and it attacks people's reputations. Sadly, an untruth spoken often enough and left unchallenged becomes history. Gossip can twist facts and hearsay into the most poisonous conjecture.

 

On Religion:

 

The problem is that people are fallible. We all fail at some point. Our own fallibility is in letting theirs become the overriding message and drowning out the love.  

 

On Happiness:

 

The fastest way to become seriously unhappy is to focus on yourself and what you think you need, to achieve your right to lasting Happiness. When you throw away your internal balance sheet, Happiness will flood into your life and you will be a blessing to everyone who knows you.

 

On Acceptance:

 

Life was sweeter, fuller, and richer if you went with the stream, rather than tore your heart out rowing against it. - H. E. Bates

 

On Morality:

 

My grandmother Elsie used to say that you should try to live your life in a way that caused no suffering to others. If you think about it, you can almost stop right there. Henry Thoreau, said, ' Do not be too moral. You may cheat yourself out of much life . So aim above morality. Be not simply good - be good for something'

 

On Confidence:

 

So the big question is this: how do you keep a check on yourself, how do you stop it tipping over into that overblown confidence, or worse, arrogance? The answer to that one is the eleventh commandment : 'Thou shall not kid thyself. '

 

On Democracy:

 

Winston Churchill said , in 1938: You see these dictators on their pedestals, surrounded by the bayonets of their soldiers and the truncheons of their police....yet in their hearts there is unspoken fear. They are afraid of words and thoughts: words spoke abroad, thoughts stirring at home - all the more powerful because forbidden - terrify them. A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic.

 

On Money:

 

Too many people go around with the idea that you have to be dishonest to be wealthy or that Money will corrupt you. That is all rubbish. All Money does is give you choices. Money allows you to do things that you would not be able to do otherwise. But it does not, cannot, make you evil. If you are already a bad person, Money will allow you to express it more easily, that's all. If you are the kind of person who thinks it is OK to take what is not yours because you want it, Money may inspire you to theft. But be clear: it's not Money that's in the wrong in that situation. Money represents freedom, the freedom to make better choices. Not necessarily the freedom to always do what I want.

 

On Anger:

 

Anger is vicious and destructive and ugly and will leave you and those around you with the worst of whisky hangovers.

 

About the Book:  The author has quoted many interesting anecdotes from his life to elaborate on the 50 life lessons. An author intro would have been good, because it took time to recognize the author while browsing - a goodreads book info was helpful in tracking him.

 

Here is a glimpse of who the author Peter Dunne is :

 

Peter Dunne is an Emmy and Peabody Award winning producer, writer, and teacher with over thirty years experience. He has held positions as vice-president of development at Viacom, Lorimar (now Warner Bros. TV), and Spelling Television. He has written and/or produced the shows Sybil, Dallas, Knots Landing, Melrose Place, CSI, JAG, among others. He also teaches screen writing at UCLA and lectures around the world.

 

Games Worth Playing

What people really need and demand from life is not wealth, comfort or esteem, but games worth playing. He who cannot find a game worth playing is apt to fall prey to accidie, defined by the Fathers of the Church as one of the Deadly Sins, but now regarded as a symptom of sickness.

Accidie is a paralysis of the will, a failure of the appetite, a condition of generalized boredom, total disenchantment - "God, oh God, how weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world!" Such a state of mind is a prelude to what is loosely called "mental illness." Which...fills half the beds in hospitals and makes multitude of people a burden to themselves, their families, and to society.

Seek, above all, for a game worth playing. Such is the advice of the oracle to the modern man. Having found the game, play it with intensity--play as if your life and sanity depended on it. (They do depend on it). Though nothing means anything and all roads are marked "NO EXIT", yet move as if your movements had some purpose. If life does not offer a game worth playing, then invent one. For it must be clear, even to the most clouded intelligence, that any game is better than no game. 

What is a game? It is essentially a trial of strength by rules. Rules are essential. If the rules were not observed, the game would cease to be a game at all. A meaningful game of chess would be impossible if one player insisted on treating all pawns as queens.

The only game worth playing is the "Master Game", the aim of which is true awakening, full development of the powers latent in man. 

~ The Master Game by De Ropp

Freedom and Compulsion

The basic trouble with the modern world is the intellectual fallacy that freedom and compulsion are opposites. To solve the gigantic problems crushing the world today, we must clarify our mental confusion. We must acquire a philosophical perspective. In essence, freedom and compulsion are one.

Let me give you a simple illustration. Traffic lights restrain your freedom to cross a street whenever you wish. But this restraint gives you the freedom from being run over by a truck. If you were assigned to a job and prohibited from leaving it, it would restrain the freedom of your career. But it would give you freedom from the fear of unemployment. Whenever a new compulsion is imposed upon us, we automatically gain a new freedom. The two are inseparable. Only by accepting total compulsion can we achieve total freedom.

~ Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Unity in Variety

I am not the standard of the Universe. The apple tree should not be judged by the standard of the oak, nor the oak by that of the apple. To judge the apple tree you must take the apple standard, and for the oak, its own standard. 


Not all men and women in any society are of the same mind, capacity, or power to do things. They must have different ideals and we have no right to sneer at any ideal. Let everyone do the best they can to realise their own ideal. Unity in variety is the plan of creation.

Swami Vivekananda

Whatay Pilosophy ;)

This philosophy has, in my opinion, done more collective harm to civilisation than any other. It has given the gift of an excuse that allows to remain gloriously stupid and malformed.

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