Looking up, I spot wasps, buzzing near the garden table, about two metres away. This is around three o’clock in the afternoon, and I’ve been sitting outside for about an hour now, trying to soak up some sunrays, while reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. I decide to put the red hardbound cover back down onto my lap. I don’t want these wasps anywhere near me, especially while I’m trying to decipher the toughest part of Dante’s epic poem, Paradisio. As a sidenote, I liked Inferno and Purgatorio, but Paradisio reaches new levels of abstraction and preachiness, which I don’t particularly care for. My cat doesn’t care either way, as usual. He’s dozing off right next to me, in the shade.
I get up to take a closer look.
There are two wasps. They’re circling around two planks of wood, which used to belong to the very same garden table, but after years of rain, they’ve detached from the table altogether. We’ve been meaning to throw them away, but we just didn’t get to it. The two wasps are circling around each other. After doing their little sky-dance, they go to one end of the plank, where the wood has rotten away. They go inside for a while, after which they fly out again.
I’m no wasp-expert, but this didn’t seem like good news to me. The two rotting pieces of wood were thrown away soon afterwards. I’d like to tell you that was the end of the story. But after seeing wasps once, now, I’m in full on wasp detection mode. I guess it’s the same after you’ve bought a car, when it seems to you everyone drives the same car as yours.
Meanwhile, another wasp is flying near the garage window. Now, these windows are about thirty years old, and held in place by wooden frames. And while that wooden frame has been painted over many times, I noticed a crack between the wood and the cement, with two or three wasps flying in and out of it. Yep, no doubt about it: these wasps have decided that the Belgian coastal region is not such a bad place after all, and that they’d gladly add our garage window to their real estate portfolio.
Obviously, these wasps didn’t just appear out of nowhere that particular day. Most likely, one or two scouted this location weeks ago, and ever since they’ve been building their little mansion. It’s just because my attention was drawn to it that day, that I’ve come to notice.
It’s the same with some of the themes I’ve discussed in my past newsletters. Recently, I came across this podcast, where the guest went something like, “They’ve looked into what succesful people did and…” Here’s what I want to know: why say ‘successful’, when you clearly mean ‘rich’? Is it because it’s frowned upon to openly admit you’re pursuing wealth in polite society, and saying as much would put a spotlight on your true intentions? That might be one reason, for sure.
Unfortunately, these people tend to kid themselves and others. Bring this up to them, and they’d say, “Oh, no, I mean success in the broad sense.”
However, here’s an example of someone these types tend to call a ‘success’. So this guy fathered a daughter, abandoned her soon after, only to deny his own fatherhood. All just so he could focus on his business, where he’d regularly push his employees to work overtime. And while he claimed he wasn’t money-motivated, he once lied to his best friend, pocketing a couple of hundred bucks, which he’d otherwise have to share. By now, it should be clear that this is (part of) Steve Job’s story. Clearly it’s the negative part, but there’s a reason for that, as you’ll see.
Was this man a success? Well, he certainly was a success financially speaking, yes. Not so much in other areas of life. And that would be fine, but notice how the success hucksters opt to burry their heads in the sand, ignoring the negative side of the story. And that’s how you know what they truly mean by success: business and financial success. They don’t care much about other forms of good fortune, if they were the least bit honest. These authors and speakers typically don’t discuss how to have a great marriage, or how to get along with others, and so on, do they?
No, what do they do? Well, they purposefully manipulate language for their gain, that’s what they do.
It’s the same with the word ‘genius’. Recently I saw this community post on YouTube, with the picture of a business guru, with a red arrow pointing at him, written in all caps, “GENIUS”. You know what? I’d like to reclaim that word. Let’s reserve that for the likes of Einstein, Oppenheimer, Heisenberg, John von Neumann, etc. The business guru out there, fleecing someone out of their money? Not a genius. Hey, if they want to be called geniuses, let them actually do some intellectually demanding work, rather than copying someone else’s homework.
And what about the word ‘secret’? Oh, people over in successland, they love the word ‘secret’. “If you want business success,” they’d whisper in one of these podcasts, “here’s the number one secret.” I’d like you to start questioning these things. Because I’ve heard plenty of these ‘secrets’, and from what I’ve noticed, they mainly use this word to get your attention – there’s nothing secret about it. It’s used to imply that there’s information that you don’t have access to, but as soon as you know this one secret, your life will magically improve, somehow. It implies a quick fix and easy gains – which is one of the main driving forces in all of what we’re discussing here.
These people, they’re the equivalent of Bing’s clickbait newspaper headlines: it gets people’s attention in the short term, but it trains the audience to avoid them in the long term. The thing is, their misuse of language has seeped into our broader culture, it seems to me. It’s a bit like the wasp nest from before. In the beginning, you don’t quite notice. But as soon as it gets your attention, you can’t miss it. The remedy is to be like Socrates: start questioning all the time. That’s the real secret to success, for a genius like yourself. Food for thought.
Your truly
Vincent J. Dancet