#459: Books I've Loved — Alain de Botton

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types—from startup founders and investors to chess champions to Olympic athletes. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a shorter series I’m doing called “Books I’ve Loved.” I’ve invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books—the books that have influenced them, changed them, and transformed them for the better. I hope you pick up one or two new mentors—in the form of books—from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life. Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton https://twitter.com/alaindebotton) is the founder and Chairman of The School of Life http://www.theschooloflife.com/. He is a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.' He’s written on love, travel, architecture and literature, including the titles How Proust Can Change Your Life http://www.amazon.com/How-Proust-Change-Your-Life/dp/0679779159/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20 and The Consolations of Philosophy https://www.amazon.com/Consolations-Philosophy-Alain-Botton/dp/0679779175/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20. His books have been bestsellers in 30 countries. *** If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tim-ferriss-show/id863897795?mt=2/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts http://tim.blog/transcripts. Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor http://tim.blog/sponsor. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books http://tim.blog/books. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Now, where does it seem like I'm going to end?

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  Books I've Loved on the Tim Ferriss Show is exclusively brought to you by Audible. There couldn't be a better sponsor for this series, my dear listeners and readers. I have used Audible for so many years, as long as I can remember. I love it. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. I listen when I'm taking walks, I listen while I'm cooking, I listen whenever I can. And if you're looking for a place to start, I can recommend three of my favorites. The first is The Tao of Seneca by Seneca. If you want to hear my favorite letters of all time, touches on Stoic philosophy, calmness under duress, etc. The next is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, G-A-I-M-A-N.

• 1:07Tim Ferriss?

  One of my favorites. Even if you're a nonfiction purist, this is the fiction book that you need to listen to. Neil also has perhaps the most calming voice of all time. And third, Greg McKeown's Essentialism, subtitle, "The Disciplined Pursuit of Less." This is one of my favorite books of the past few years. Combines very well with the 80/20 principle. But more on Audible. Every month, Audible members get one credit for any audiobook on the site, plus a choice of multiple Audible originals from a rotating selection. They also get access to daily news digests from the likes of The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, as well as guided meditation programs. And here are some other amazing Audible features, and I use a bunch of these.

• 1:49Tim Ferriss?

  You can download titles and listen offline anytime, anywhere. I use this feature even when I could get access. I'll put my phone on, say, airplane mode, because I don't want to get bothered with notifications when I'm taking a walk to clear my head, and you can listen to titles offline in a case like that, or on a plane, or whatever. Obviously, I'm not flying much these days. App is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. And WhisperSync is another feature I use quite a lot. I love reading my Kindle in bed, for instance, then picking up at the same exact spot where I left off when I go walking and listening the next day. Kindle and audio versions can be synced up automatically. It's just amazing. And if you can't decide

• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

  what to listen to, don't sweat it. You don't have to rush. You can keep your credits for up to a year and use them, for instance, to binge on a whole series, if you like. Audible offers just about everything. Podcasts, guided wellness programs, theatrical performances, A-list comedy, and Audible originals you won't find anywhere else. And right now, Audible is offering you guys, that's Tim Ferriss Show listeners, a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. And again, my list, if you want to check them out, The Tao of Seneca, The Graveyard Book, Essentialism, those are just three. There's so many good ones out there. Just go to audible.com/tim and browse the unmatched selection of audio programs. Then download your free title and start listening. It's that easy. So check

• 3:19Tim Ferriss?

  it out. Go to audible.com/tim or text TIM to 500-500 to get started today. Check it out. audible.com/tim. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types, startup founders, investors, chess champions, Olympic athletes, you name it, to tease out the habits that you can apply in your own lives. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a short-form series that I'm doing, simply called Books I've Loved. I've invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share

• 4:02Tim Ferriss?

  their favorite books, describe their favorite books, the books that have influenced them, changed them, transformed them for the better. And I hope you pick up one or two new mentors in the form of books from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life. I had a lot of fun putting this together, inviting these people to participate, and have learned so, so much myself. I hope that is also the case for you. Please enjoy.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  My name is Alain Dubotin. I'm a writer and the founder of an organisation called The School of Life, dedicated to emotional fulfilment and self-understanding. I want to talk about two books today that mean a huge amount to me and that I always press into the hands of pretty much anyone that I meet. The first book is called Home is Where We Start From, and it's a collection of essays by a wonderful English psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott. And Winnicott is wise on so many fronts, but two of his ideas stand out in particular. The first of his ideas concerns what he calls the true and the false self.

• 5:10Speaker 01

  For Winnicott, all babies are born with a capacity to express Winnicott's true self. In other words, to express themselves fully and without inhibition. If they're sad, they're going to cry. If they're angry, they might try and bite. If they're happy, they'll giggle. But the point is, a child at a very young age is almost definitely authentic. It is putting forward its feelings as it experiences them. It is unfiltered. And this is what gives babies their charm, but also makes them terrifying and quite difficult to look after because they're just doing exactly what they need to do when they need to do it. There's no process of editing.

• 5:53Speaker 01

  And this is a process of engaging with what Donald Winnicott, famous child psychoanalyst, called the true self. Now, key for Winnicott is the idea that if you're going to grow up and be a balanced and healthy and authentic human being, you will need to have been given the enormous privilege of expressing your true self to those around you in the very earliest years that you were on the planet. All of us need to have those moments when we can be totally authentic, even at the cost of giving other people a bit of a headache around us. We need some of this true self. But Winnicott also observed in his work with children that there is a danger that something else happens too soon, and that is the birth of a false self.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Self. Now, the false self is created out of the expectations of everyone around the small child. And there are all sorts of expectations. Firstly, that the child will be good, that the child will go to sleep on time, which really means on the parent's schedule, that the child will smile at Grammy, that the child will at school be polite to the teacher, and then going on into later childhood, will always follow certain rules, writing thank you letters, being a good child. Now, there are obviously good aspects to being a good child, but Winnicott was very alive to the concept of over early adaptation, what he called over compliance.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  And for Winnicott, the over compliant child has all sorts of problems. What happens is that they are more attuned to the demands of others than to their own needs, and this can give them lots of difficulties in later life when they can no longer be authentic. They lose touch with what they really want, because what they really want has been censored so heavily by those around them. In our world nowadays, we know all about rebels and the problem with rebels. You know, they're the ones who graffiti the underpass and cause social problems, and we know how difficult this can be. But through the eyes of Winnicott, we can also start to see another problem. And in a way, it's perhaps a bigger problem, though it doesn't present itself as such.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  And that is an excess of compliance in a whole group of people that we can call, with nothing pejorative being meant by this, the good boys and girls. There are good boys and girls everywhere, and the problem with good boys and girls is they've been good too early. They haven't got the bad out of their system, they haven't had a chance to express themselves as they needed to in the early years, they weren't able to bite when they wanted to bite, to kick when they wanted to kick, to scream when they wanted to scream, all the things that little babies and infants do and shouldn't frighten anyone by wanting to do. If all of that is suppressed with too much energy, there will be a problem. So Winnicott, the great patron saint of being able to get the right relative claims of the true and the false self.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  A false self, we all need one to navigate adult life. It only starts to make internal sense if we've also had a chance to express the true self at another point. Another great idea from Winicott is the concept of the good enough parent. Many parents came to Winicott very worried that they weren't doing a good enough job as parents. They wanted to be better, they were worried that they weren't educating the kid right, or that there was some eating problem or school problem, et cetera. And Winicott could see that these worries were actually getting in the way of the parents doing, you know, the fairly good job that they were doing. And so Winicott made a fascinating intervention. First of all, he told parents, no child needs a perfect parent. Indeed, a perfect parent is very dangerous.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  It's a one-way route to psychosis, to a psychotic incident, because essentially, the job of a parent is to disappoint a child bit by bit and induct them into adult realities. If the parent is perfect, how can the child grow used to living in the world that we all have to live in, which is a deeply imperfect one? So in an ideal world, a good parent is able to break bad news well to the child until the child can accept the whole panoply of difficulties of adult life, amounting ultimately into the fact that we are all mortal, we are all going to have to die. So Winicott, in order to capture what he was trying to tell parents, came up with a wonderful phrase. He said, no one needs a perfect parent, all they need is a good enough parent.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  And this phrase, good enough, is the one that Winicott launched into the world. And it's a highly useful one, because in so many areas, we don't need to be perfect, we just need to be good enough. We only need to be good enough workers, good enough friends, good enough colleagues, and, as I say, good enough parents. All of this comes from the very down-to-earth, beautifully written, and always highly useful and humane wisdom of Donald Winicott and his wonderful book, Home is Where We Start From. Another book that's very dear to me is by Arthur Schopenhauer, and it's called Essays on the Wisdom of Life. Now, Arthur Schopenhauer is perhaps the most pessimistic of all the panoply of very pessimistic German

• 10:58Speaker 01

  That philosophy produced in that country in the 19th century. He stands out for the unrelentingly miserable tone of his voice. He says at one point, it is bad today, tomorrow it will be worse until the worst of all happens. He says at another point that human life is completely ill-adapted to its purposes, that no one can expect to be happy ever for more than five minutes at a time. And that anyone who expects anything out of romantic love is sure to be completely disappointed, that nothing is true, that no friends can be constant, that no career ambition will ever come right. I mean, he is the most miserable person on earth.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  However, reading him is a joy. Firstly, he writes beautifully. He writes beautifully in German. There are some wonderful translations into English. And there's something about somebody articulating the most despairing thoughts that brings us a huge amount of comfort. For a start, we think, I'm not alone. All those suspicions you have, often, you know, three in the morning in despair or gazing out of the aeroplane window in a low moment, and we just think, what on earth is the point of all this? Well, Schopenhauer has been there. He's investigated the territory of despair and he's put his flag all over it. And it is wonderful what he manages to see. Most of us only glimpse despair out of the corner of our eye and we can't bear it.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Schopenhauer urges us to look despair in the face, make friends with it and also laugh defiantly at it. He's, he's all the time sort of grinning slightly as he tells us these dark, dark truths. So often sadness comes about because we clash into an expectation of what life should be like that is simply contrary to what reality can actually produce. And Schopenhauer gently and with real intelligence nudges us towards a slightly more pessimistic vision of the world. Yes, many of your dreams won't come true. Yes, probably love won't work out for you. Probably large aspects of your career won't come off. Probably many people will disappoint you. The world will seem ugly and dumb.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  Schopenhauer is saying, I know. I know, I've been here. Let's cry together rather than alone, or rather than escaping into a sentimental bromide that shields us from the fundamental reality that we're engaged with. So this is your man at the moments of real despair. He is the friend in darkness and oddly, strangely, he is immensely consoling. So these are two books by Winnicott, Home is Where We Come From, and by Schopenhauer, Essays on the Wisdom of Life, that bring immense cheer in very different ways to the always confusing business of being alive.

• 13:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favourite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favourite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance.

• 14:24Tim Ferriss?

  And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com, that's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.