Eric Tian

A few days ago, I came across a pretty sad fact.

According to Google, there’s about 130 million books in existence. And that was written in 2010, so now the number’s probably close to 150 million. And there’s an unimaginable number of books that have been lost into the cosmos, so the real number is probably way higher.

Suppose some brilliant person reads one book a day for 100 years. That person will read 36,525 books. Which is impossible, because firstly nobody reads a book a day, and secondly you only start reading when you’re 6 or 7. But even this fictional person will read less than 0.03% of all the books in the world (assuming 130 million in existence, which is a low estimate).

So that’s why I’m a little sad. There are so many books in the world that I’ll never read; in fact, I’ll probably read less than 0.001% of all the books out there. How many beautiful ideas, poetry and stories will I never know in this life? The thought is heartbreaking.

And this is just books – let us not forget places, people and activities that will pass us by.

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows has a word on this: Onism. It’s defined as:

n. the frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time, which is like standing in front of the departures screen at an airport, flickering over with strange place names like other people’s passwords, each representing one more thing you’ll never get to see before you die—and all because, as the arrow on the map helpfully points out, you are here.

A few weeks ago, I approached strangers around Melbourne University and asked them questions on their life. It was a beautiful day and hearing the stories behind different people was amazing. I think it’s one of my best videos yet.

My biggest surprise that day though, was that people are often really willing to have a chat.

When you see a stranger, it’s easy to assume they’re preoccupied in whatever they’re doing. Yet, many times that day I found myself surprised at how friendly people were. People who looked busy on approach responded to my invitation with curiosity and excitement, rather than a swift rejection. There was one gentleman who was eating lunch and who I felt guilty for interrupting; he ended up asking me to send me the raw footage for his grandkids. Even my barista, who I’ve found a little intimidating for a while, said yes with a laugh.

I guess we know a lot less about strangers than we think. Which makes sense, of course – they’re strangers. But there’s a beauty behind every individual, should we only give them the opportunity to show it. Perhaps more than we think.

I find it profoundly interesting when one reaches a destination in an unexpected way. For example:

• As a tutor, my favourite moments are when a student reaches the answer in an unconventional way.
• As a student, my favourite moments are when someone with an unorthodox path to medical school teaches me something random.
• As an explorer, my favourite moments are when I marry together two completely unrelated ideas.

When we have our eyes on a goal, it’s easy to think of any deviations from it as being failures. Perhaps you didn’t get that score you wanted. Perhaps a lifelong friend disappointed you. Perhaps a dream you’ve been working for, at the final step, crumbled right before your eyes.

It’s okay! Straight paths are kind of boring. As long as you know what your key back in is, enjoy the temporary tangent. It’s way more interesting to treat each day as a new experience and go in whatever direction you want.

The best way to remain mediocre is to follow the status quo.

A parable from the priest and psychotherapist Anthony de Mello, on the stories we tell ourselves:

“A man found an eagle’s egg and put it in a nest of a barnyard hen. The eaglet hatched with the brood of chickens and grew up with them.

All his life the eagle did what the barnyard chicks did, thinking he was a barnyard chicken. He scratched the earth for worms and insects. He clucked and cackled. And he would thrash his wings and fly a few feet into the air.

Years passed and the eagle grew very old. One day he saw a magnificent bird above him in the cloudless sky. It glided in graceful majesty among the powerful wind currents, with scarcely a beat of its strong golden wings.

The old eagle looked up in awe. “Who’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the eagle, the king of the birds,” said his neighbor. “He belongs to the sky. We belong to the earth—we’re chickens.”

So the eagle lived and died a chicken, for that’s what he thought he was.”

We’ve all heard of the “classics”; works like Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, and more. Finishing a classic is often associated with an internal badge of honour for completing a book regarded by so many as important. But the question must be asked: what makes a book a “classic” and what is so important about reading them?

The Italian writer Italo Calvino addresses these questions in his 1991 book Why Read the Classics? – perhaps a classic in its own right.

Within this collection of essays, Calvino proposes these 14 definitions that make a classic:

1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: ‘I’m rereading…’, never ‘I’m reading….’

2. The Classics are those books which constitute a treasured experience for those who have read and loved them; but they remain just as rich an experience for those who reserve the chance to read them for when they are in the best condition to enjoy them.

3. The classics are books which exercise a particular influence, both when they imprint themselves on our imagination as unforgettable, and when they hide in the layers of memory disguised as the individual’s or the collective unconscious.

4. A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much of a sense of discovery as the first reading.

5. A classic is a book which even when we read it for the first time gives the sense of rereading something we have read before.

6. A classic is a book which has never exhausted all it has to say to its readers.

7. The classics are those books which come to us bearing the aura of previous interpretations, and trailing behind them the traces they have left in the culture or cultures (or just in the languages and customs) through which they have passed.

8. A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.

9. Classics are books which, the more we think we know them through hearsay, the more original, unexpected, and innovative we find them when we actually read them.

10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans.

11. ‘Your’ classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent, and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it.

12. A classic is a work that comes before other classics; but those who have read other classics first immediately recognize its place in the genealogy of classic works.

13. A classic is a work which relegates the noise of the present to a background hum, which at the same time the classics cannot exist without.

14. A classic is a work which persists as a background noise even when a present that is totally incompatible with it holds sway.

What should be noted from Calvino’s definitions, especially #11, is that classics are often subjective. One person’s classic may do nothing for another.

Right now, I’m reading Graham Greene’s The Power and The Glory. Its reviews are divisive, with most people enjoying it, but a significant amount damning it as a piece of literature. In particular, the novel has been known to offend catholics, given its unusual representation of the church. It’s been claimed that a few years post-publication, the Archbishop of Westminster summoned Greene and read him a letter condemning the novel, claiming it to be paradoxical.

But to me, this book is a classic. It touches upon themes of faith, hope and sin in ways I’ve never seen before. The writing is gorgeous and forces you to chew upon the words rather than inhale it. This is one of the few books I cannot remain indifferent to; it has imprinted an undeniable mark on my unconscious and is something I’ll be re-reading in the years to come – two criteria of a Calvino classic.

The point of a classic isn’t for everybody to enjoy it – that would probably make a very boring piece of literature. As Calvino suggests, A classic is a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off.

Yep

I have a proposal.

We should redefine hard work as hard thinking. We often love to fetishise “hard grinders” but the person who outperforms you generally isn’t spending a copious amount of effort doing so. They’re outworking you in the form of better strategy, finding shortcuts and focusing on only the necessities.

Typically, the hardest work is finding a better way to do it. Hard thinking beats hard work.

One example of hard thinking from my life is from playing online chess. This is a summary of how my rating has fluctuated over the past year:

In the middle of 2020, I hit a plateau of around 1300. No matter how many games I played, I couldn’t seem to break past this point. I remember one day I played 20 games and by the end, had exactly the same rating as when I started.

But one day, I decided to try something that led to rapid improvement: I began to study. It sounds super basic, but from watching tutorials, I learnt basic opening principles, tactics and traps. I began to analyse all my games for mistakes and learnt from them. The growth from these simple changes was amazing. I shot up from 1300 to 1450 in less than two weeks.

I didn’t work any harder, per se. I was probably spending less energy watching tutorials compared to playing 10 games a day. The gains came from better planning.

Hard thinking can be applied everywhere. In academics, the best students have more efficient study habits than the rest. In sports, the best athletes are more strategic over their workouts, diet and gameplan than the rest. In business, the best start-ups have better ideas, innovate more regularly and use customer feedback better than the rest. Of course, luck is a huge confounding factor for all these examples. But generally, luck finds the prepared.

Conventional, head-banging hard work probably plays much less of a role than which we give it credit for.

Where are some areas where hard work could be replaced with hard thinking for better results?

In 1961, the meterologist Edward Lorenz was creating theoretical models of tornadoes when he discovered something incredulous.

Lorenz found that the factors for a tornado to occur were so specific that any minuscule changes to initial weather conditions would drastically transform a forecast. When he rounded an initial condition from 0.506127 to 0.506, the model transformed into something entirely different.

Soon, he posited that if a butterfly flapped its wings several weeks earlier, the fluctuations in the atmosphere was enough to drastically transform the time, place and path of destruction of a present-day tornado. This finding led to the term the butterfly effect, whereby a sensitive change in the initial conditions of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. In other words, small actions now can have great consequences later.

No matter how minuscule, the effects of doing anything has an infinitely greater force than doing nothing. Our actions create changes in the atmosphere, whether we like it or not.

This means that small acts of kindness can manifest in amazing good. A smile beats cold indifference by a huge margin. Indeed, I’ve had average days brightened up by a small, unexpected smile from a passing stranger, one that says, I don’t know what you’re going through, but I’m cheering you on. The transformation is palpable.

But this also means small acts of spite can manifest in overwhelming destruction. One hateful comment might only take two seconds to utter but can have devastating consequences. It’s well-documented that child abuse increases one’s risk of suicide, substance abuse, aggression, homelessness and developmental problems in their adult lives. And interviews of people with child abuse often reveal a story involving repeated acts of neglect and trauma. One beating or curse may have been harmless in itself, but the cumulative effect is devastating.

Some historians attribute Adolf Hitler’s desire of genocide as stemming from him being rejected from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, twice. How much tragedy could’ve been avoided if Hitler applied himself to watercolors instead of genocide? Perhaps a great deal. That decision from the Academy’s board, while quiet in the moment, could have completely transformed the course of history.

We are all flapping our wings in the breeze. The changes may not be evident now, but tiny decisions can lead to incredible consequences.

From Benjamin Franklin:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For want of a horse the rider was lost,
For want of a rider the battle was lost,
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

I have a theory that you get good at something when you start breaking conventional rules.

In chess, beginners are taught principles such as to control the centre, develop minor pieces before major pieces and don’t trade your queen for a pawn.

But in many situations, these rules must be broken. Some positions require an attack on the edge of the board rather than the centre. Some positions require a rook lift instead of developing a minor piece. And some of the most spectacular games in history involved queen sacrifices to push for a positional advantage (examples). These defy all the principles taught to newer players but grandmasters recognise that sometimes, religiously obeying principles can be the wrong move to make.

When you reach a certain level of competency, you realise that some rules are meant to be broken.

In other domains, the moment we start winning is when we begin to innovate; to push and find tactics where traditional principles don’t apply. The best students study more efficiently than the rest. The best athletes do better workouts than the rest. The best companies are more innovative than the rest. Following the status quo is a guaranteed measure to remain mediocre.

Pablo Picasso summarised it well when he claimed, “Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”