“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Updates from October, 2011
-
Primary vs. Secondary
Jocelyn Ling
-
Aspirational Writing
Jocelyn Ling
“You write in order to change the world…. The world changes according to the way people see it, and if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way people look at reality, then you can change it.” –James Baldwin
-
On Being Afraid
Jocelyn Ling
“If your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough.”
- Her Excellency Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, President of the Republic of Liberia and the first elected female Head of State in Africa
-
Being a smarter human vs. Being a better person
Jocelyn Ling
“Wittgenstein made the wonderfully enigmatic remark: “I work quite diligently and wish that I were better and smarter. And these both are one and the same.” Really? One and the same thing – being a smarter human being and a better person?
I am, of course, aware that modern transatlantic usage has drowned the distinction between ‘being good’ as a moral quality and ‘being well’ as a comment on a person’s health (no aches and pains, fine blood pressure, and so on), and have long ceased worrying about the manifest immodesty of those of my friends who, when asked how they are, reply with apparent self-praise, ‘I am very good.’ But Wittgenstein was not an American, and 1917 was well before the conquest of the world by vibrant American usage. When Wittgenstein said that being ‘better’ and being ‘smarter’ were ‘one and the same thing’, he must have been making a substantial assertion.
Underlying the point may be the recognition, in some form, that many acts of nastiness are committed by people who are deluded, in one way or another, about the subject. Lack of smartness can certainly be one source of moral failing in good behaviour. Reflecting on what would really be a smart thing to do can sometimes help one act better towards others. That this can easily be the case has been brought out very clearly by modern game theory. Among the prudential reasons for good behaviour may well be one’s own gain from such behaviour. Indeed, there could be great gain for all members of a group by following rules of good behaviour which can help everyone. It is not particularly smart for a group of people to act in a way that ruins them all.
But maybe that is not what Wittgenstein meant. Being smarter can also give us the ability to think more clearly about our goals, objectives and values. If self-interest is, ultimately, a primitive thought (despite the complexities just mentioned), clarity about the more sophisticated priorities and obligations that we would want to cherish and pursue would tend to depend on our power of reasoning. A person may have well-thought-out reasons other than the promotion of personal gain for acting in a socially decent way.”
- Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice