🔥 ambition & striving
#78: a weekly newsletter created to inspire dads to use the challenges of fatherhood as fuel for building an incredible life & an antifragile mind.
Welcome to the 78th edition of the antifragile 2 🔥.
This week, only two items.
As with most wonderful things, I did not foresee them coming together. I didn’t even know they existed before yesterday.
But they’ve paired in a way where any further addition feels like a subtraction.
Without any further ado, I hope you enjoy.
With love,
Chris
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Here’s this week’s antifragile 2 🔥:
😌 George Saunders on ambition
🌅 Do not ask your children to strive
1.) 😌 George Saunders on ambition
But in that early time, one of the things that was so beautiful was that my stupid dreams of being a prodigy were obviously not going to happen.
So for the first time it was like, All right, what if you don’t have any writing career? What if you’re just, hopefully, a good father and husband? And in that space I found that there was plenty to live for. I’d always secretly thought I was kind of shallow, that I was all ambition. And to find out that shorn of that, I still liked being alive and still felt a lot of happiness? That was very sweet.
—George Saunders, New York Times Interview
One of the most respected literary writers of the 21st century (with one of the best commencement speeches to boot), George Saunders did not publish a book until he was 38. Early in his life, like many of us, he harbored an ambitious dream—his of being a generational writing prodigy who put the world on notice.
That dream never came true. At least not in that form.
But in that space, he found a gift: the realization that he liked his life outside of writing enough to be ok with whatever happened inside his writing career.
Two ideas—ambition and contentment—so often at odds are really part of a virtuous cycle.
Because when you love your life—and don’t need your work annointed—you can hunker down and do work you think is great. Then close the laptop and get filled to the brim by a life you adore—which is the perfect foundation for great work the next day.
Thanks to Amr for sharing.
2.) 🌅 Do not ask your children to strive
This poem complements George Saunders perfectly.
William Martin, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching
Just one thing for you this week—
Enjoy the wonder and marvel of an ordinary life 😌
With love,
Chris
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