What I think
This book was recommended to me four times by my friend Jonny Miller before I read it. I put it off because it sounded cheesy. Now I read whatever Jonny tells me.
I loved this book, and it influenced my thinking a lot. It was probably my favorite book of 2020.
My takeaway: the work of your life is finding what matters and then building a life around it.
It’s a great exploration of the Hindu idea of dharma and the stories of many famous artists and how they discovered it through their lives. The coolest thing about this book is the individual stories and how they articulate their battle for finding work that matters. All of these people, Thoreau, Frost, Susan B. Anthony, Keats, Annie Dillard, and Jane Goodall, had one thing in common: the search for work that matters was primary.
People often confuse this with the work that can be paid for. But his mindset is really about how you can create the life conditions to do the things you’re pulled to do. If you started with what is employable, you probably wouldn’t start with “I want to read stuff 10 to 12 hours a day.”
This book helped me have the confidence to write my own book, and it inspired the second half of The Pathless Path, where I make a similar claim: the search for work worth doing is the real work and one of the most important pursuits in life.
It’s a great book with a misleading title (it comes off as too hustly), but I usually recommend this book before I’d recommend mine! I also made a short video recapping some of the key takeaways:
What the book is about
Cope uses the Bhagavad Gita and its idea of dharma, your true calling, to tell the stories of people who devoted their lives to it, including Jane Goodall, Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, Susan B. Anthony, John Keats, and Beethoven. The book is organized around four teachings from Krishna: know your dharma, do it full out, let go of the outcome, and turn it over to God.
Highlights
The Gift
We have a responsibility to The Gift. The Gift is God in disguise.
my take
He argues that most people have something they are meant to be doing or things they wish to bring forth. I don’t buy into the meme that you can always get paid for the things you love, but I do think all humans have something resembling “gifts.”
Like every good yogi, Thoreau saw his entire life as a kind of trek toward dharma. “A man tracks himself through life,” he wrote. “One should be always on the trail of one’s own deepest nature. For it is the fearless living out of your own essential nature that connects you to the Divine.”
Do it full out
One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.
my take
That’s Annie Dillard, from his chapter “Do It Full Out!” When you find it, go all in.
Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness.
Find out who you are and do it on purpose
In this chapter, he talks about how Robert Frost knew all he wanted to do was write. Once he figured this out, the game was to shape his life so that it would naturally happen. It drove him to move to a farm in New Hampshire for ten years. But then that shifted, and he had a new journey.
“For me,” he says, “the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.”
Creating the right conditions
Bringing forth what is within you is mostly about creating the right conditions. These conditions themselves give birth to dharma.
my take
I think about this a lot in terms of the people I’m surrounded by, what I eat, how I move, and what kind of working environment I’m in.
I had a motto: Suit up and show up. That’s all I had to do! Show up every morning in the best possible shape for writing.
Once you’ve had a taste of Unity in Action, nothing else seems quite like living fully.
my take
This parallels Fromm’s idea of attaining union, one way being through creative activity.
“When a person is devoted to something with complete faith,” said Krishna to Arjuna, “I unify his faith in that form.”
Exemplars
I realize now that one cannot understand Mark—or anyone—without understanding his exemplars, his mentors, his heroes.
Turning the wound into light
“In the middle of winter I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer,” wrote Albert Camus, in the midst of a similar period of despair.
Turn it over
Know your dharma. Do it with all your passion. Let go of the fruits. And now he adds a fourth and final teaching: And turn it over to me.