July Edition, 2021
“ LIFE IS SHORT, ART IS LONG”
Chekhovian Brevity.
'Brevity is the sister of talent' says a Russian expression. It was coined by the famous Anton Chekhov who was a master of conveying eternal wisdom in his short sentences and short stories.
For months I've been searching for a phrase that could express the theme, or better to use the word 'leitmotif', of this newsletter. It was a hard task, but I think I've found it.
'Ars longa, vita brevis' says the Latin saying I chose. It translates from Latin as 'Life is Short, but Art is long'.
It combines two ideas that drive me in life.
The first is the incessant sense of urgency. Our time here is limited. However as Seneca said: 'Life is not short, if we don't waste it'. Ever since I read this quote I became more careful with what I focus my attention on. It is not easy to do this in our age of attention-based economy and I often fail. In this newsletter, however, I try to share books which follow this sense of urgency; books that are worth of your attention, in my opinion.
If we translate this phrase from its original Greek it takes a whole another meaning. From Greek it means 'skilfulness takes time and life is short'. We've all heard about ten thousand hours. The rule, which was popularised by Malcolm Gladwell, that every genius who ever lived had to spend 10,000 hours on their craft before achieving greatness. Gladwell cites Mozart, Beethoven, Einstein and others.
This is another theme that unites not only the books that I recommend but also the guests of my podcast. They are dedicated to their craft, they found their vocation. Whether it is the German pianist Martin Kohlstedt who from teenage years doesn't part with the piano; or Donald Robertson who spent last two decades of his life developing new mental resilience techniques. I choose guests who have vocation, not a job.
Every person who I follow or admire has such phrase that unites their work. For Ryan Holiday it is 'Obstacle is the Way'; for N.D. it's 'Life is a series of experiments'; and for this newsletter it's 'Life is short, but Art is long'.
Hope you're doing well!
Vashik Armenikus.
The Code Breaker by Walter Isaacson.
Another brilliant book by the biographer of Da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs.
In this latest book, Walter Isaacson explores the life of one of the most important scientists of our time - Jennifer Doudna.
The woman behind groundbreaking gene editing technology; Nobel Prize winner for Chemistry in 2020; and the creator of vaccine against Covid 19.
You can findmy notes from this book here.
I've also done a separate video whereI dive deeper into this book.
At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell
'Paris, near the turn of 1932-3. Three young friends meet over apricot coctails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beuavoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking...'
Recommended by @Ani_Elizaveta (find her on Insta).
A brilliant and super engaging book that will open your eyes to the ideas of the great existentialists.
You will meet Albert Camus, Husserl, Heidegger, Simon Weil and of course - J-P Sartre and Simone de Beuavoir.
'Every act of human behaviour has multiple layers of causation, spiralling back seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, years, even centuries, right back to the dawn of time and the origins of our species.'
Robert Sapolsky's 'Behave' is a must read if you want to discover how your biology defines you.
Sapolsky teaches at Stanford University and I wish he was my biology teacher at school... I would have definitely paid more attention at his classes. ha!
Here's his absolutely brilliant lectures on human behaviour he gave at Stanford.
People pay a fortune to get this knowledge.
What's on my shelf?
Book(s) that I am looking forward to reading soon.
Oliver Buckerman's 'Four Thousand Weeks', Steven Pinker's Rationality.
