If I had to choose one lesson that outweighs the rest, it would be this. You are responsible for your own life, even for the parts you did not cause. This is not a fair arrangement. Bad luck happens. People fail you. Circumstances arrive that you never chose and never deserved. None of that changes…
We often hear the claim that experience shapes perspective. This ideology, especially in the context of traditional societies, is often treated as a comforting truism. Many of us even falls for it without questioning whether perspective also shapes experience. It is true that prior experience filters present interpretation. A person raised despite conflict may read…
One of the most enduring meditations on wealth was set not in a modern city of glass and steel, but in Babylon, a city of dust and rivers, long returned to the earth. George S. Clason could have written a manual. Instead, he wrote something closer to a fable. And in doing so, he stumbled…
In 401 BCE, a Greek mercenary army of roughly 10,000 soldiers found itself stranded deep in enemy territory after the failure of a Persian dynastic coup. Their leader had been killed and they were surrounded. Their only way home was north through the mountains. And what they met there changed history’s record forever. The Greek…
Most people who pick up Plato’s Republic expect philosophy. What they get in the first book is something closer to a bar argument. Socrates walks into a room, gets pulled into a conversation he didn’t ask for, and ends up in a war of ideas with three very different men. Plato designed Book I as…
To think is to command yourself. But how can one command self without the foundations of thinking and understanding? This is one of the key questions that I ask myself all the time. Here, I want to address it, in my own way of thinking, especially by focusing on the sovereign power of philosophical thought…
In an age of noise, speed, and reaction, I return to writing as a discipline. I am most fascinated by writing for the sake of clarity, but also for pleasure. Since I was 12, I have made myself a hub of miscellaneous ideas, mostly those that shape me and you from an early age passed…