“Overly Cerebral” — it’s an accusation frequently hurled against philosophy, the pursuit of excellence (arete/virtue), or even modern ideas of success.
“Mancoded” was how one acquaintance described the writing of Marcus Aurelius to me. Others consider excellence capitalistic, unempathetic, or not set up for those with different cognitive abilities or impoverished circumstances.
Maybe they’ve tried stepping up in traditional ways and can’t or won’t make them work, and so they decide the game is rigged and not worth playing.
I find this unfortunate, since I’ve faced my fair share of struggles and find virtue to be one of the best parts of my life and a source of happiness. Maybe I’m preaching to the choir here, but this article might reach a handful of people who think excellence isn’t for them, and if it does, maybe it will do some good.
I’m going to make the case that excellence can be a balm even for those who see themselves as “other.”
Enter Rome:
I recently found the best “big tent-oriented” call to virtue I’ve seen. It’s from ancient Rome, where virtue was in the air but standards differed wildly:
“Virtue is not exacting in her admittance. She allows personalities with vibrant lives to appear before her, and presents them with a taste of her offerings that, with regard to distinction between people, is neither lavish nor stingy. She is open to everyone on an equal basis, and evaluates the desire you carry with you more than your social status. In taking a quantity of her good offerings, she leaves the final weight for you yourself to calculate, so that the quantity you carry away with you is what your spirit is able to bear. So it happens that persons born to lowly stations may surge to the highest pinnacle of status, and conversely, the brood of the most distinguished figures may collapse into dishonor, converting the brilliant light they inherited from their ancestors into a shameful gloom.”
— Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings, 3.3
My Takeaways From Maximus:
* The type and “amount” of virtue to bring to bear in any situation isn’t a fixed standard.
* Our own strengths, weaknesses, personalities, circumstances, and values determine what’s right.
* The most disadvantaged person might achieve greatness while the more advantaged plummet to ruin on the level playing field of virtue.
Excellence, in other words, is open to all without precondition.
If virtue has been man-coded, christianized, capitalistized, or cognitiveized in a way you find unapproachable, that doesn’t mean excellence isn’t for you. Excellence may have simply been translated poorly.
If you’re playing someone else’s abhorrent game, you should expect excellence to be unappealing and counterproductive. Until you start playing your own game, the one aligning with your values and goals, excellence might worsen you and your world. It might hurt. But then it isn’t excellence, but merely dancing on a puppet-master’s strings.
There’s only one way to find out what your values are. Consider Socrates: “The unexamined life is not worth living.”
We all need to identify the truth as we see it. And then never stop questioning all the days of our lives.
Once you find your targets, excellence is just a state of mind. You know what’s important, so you try to move closer to it, understanding that moderation is a virtue, and doing too much might fling you away from excellence as you crash and burn.
Modern Excellence For Unusual People:
Modern education and employment are ill-fitting straitjackets for many. It often doesn’t serve typical people well, and atypical people struggle all the more.
Yet not all hope is lost if you find a way to play that aligns with your values and abilities.
I once dated a physical therapist, one of the most impressive and gifted people I know. She specializes in injured athletes, and surgeons and other physical therapists refer injured patients to her after throwing up their hands in befuddlement.
She looks at broken people and sees things everyone misses. In hours or days she improves injuries they carried for months or years. I often saw people limp into her office and walk out with a sure step.
“God-given talent” is a phrase that gets thrown around, but she clearly has something special. Yet she’s dyslexic and reading is an unpleasant struggle for her.
If we judge her by her facility with books, she’s among the least able. But if scrawled lines are hard for her eyes to decipher, the play of muscle and scar tissue across the human frame is crystal clear. Society might stupidly expect excellence in scrawl interpretation, but she’d be a fool to let her desire for excellence be warped by a standard that’s unrealistic and of minor relevance for her path.
Luckily, she found her game and mastered it. To start playing, she had to learn to dance through the education system, finding ingenious workarounds for her shortfalls.
But then, that’s virtue, isn’t it? We do the best with what we have.
Hippy Excellence in The Chihuahuan Desert
I once knew a man whose appearance screamed “hippy.” Ragged pantaloons, dreaded dirty blond hair, and an affinity for permaculture are the traits that stuck out to me. We were very different, but I liked him immediately because of his drive to do good via Earthcare and Peoplecare and his devotion to simple engineering and hydraulics.
He reminded me of a hippy version of The Man Who Planted Trees.
He bought a cheap scrap of desert in West Texas with a small inheritance and set about — with nothing more than hand tools — to dig swales and earthworks to increase rain infiltration into the subsoil.
When I visited him after a few years there were green shrubs, mesquite, and Texas persimmons growing where baked hardpan had reigned. With hard labor applied to his interpretation of excellence, he changed his small corner of the earth in a way that will endure for centuries. Those earthworks will make incremental progress on the threats we all face.
If we judge him based on economic output or educational attainment, he’s a failure. If we judged his home’s opulence, we’d see a small camper and give him a D+. But if we judge him by the metrics he values, he’s a paragon of excellence.
Hidden Potential:
There’s no question that atypical cognition can be disadvantageous, yet the genes producing it were either advantageous enough to provide a historical survival advantage, or at least not harmful enough to dramatically reduce survival.
Researchers find that dyslexia, autism, and ADHD provide advantages mixed in with their disadvantages. The real question is how to tap the upside to better persue excellence while bypassing as many downsides as possible
* Dyslexics have fantastic spatial reasoning, big-picture problem solving, and pattern recognition.
* The Autism spectrum has traits like hyper-focus, detail orientation, and rule and pattern-based memory strengths.
* Those with ADHD react faster to sudden changes and unexpected events—advantages in dynamic or rapidly shifting environments. And some types of ADHD allow for hyperfocus.
In her book, The Knowledge Gene, Lynn Kelly makes the case that these atypical cognitive patterns were historically boons for individuals and communities, and they can be again.
She thinks they’re primed to use humanity’s powerful visual-spatial memory, which can give them a leg up in our recall-heavy education system if they learned how to use it.
Arguably, everyone would be better off enhancing their memory with these ancient mnemonic techniques, but those with atypical cognition may benefit the most.
If you’re interested in learning how to do that, see my course, Memorize for Meaning.
But whatever your values, your abilities, and your starting state, there’s a version of excellence for you.
It all starts with know thyself.
Thanks for reading Socratic State of Mind.
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