Five For Your Hive: The Past is our Teacher, Not our Master
Facemash, The Burden of Experience, The Shadow, Good Luck vs. Bad Luck, Memento Mori
The Past is our Teacher, Not our Master
At Harvard, Joe Green helped his college mate Mark Zuckerberg launch Facemash in his dorm room. After a few days, it shut down because of security breaches that violated copyrights and individual privacy. Soon after, Mark asked Joe to help run the business side of the new online community he was building. “I don’t think you should do any more of these Zuckerberg projects,” his Dad told him. So he turned Mark down. Eight years later, the company was worth $104 billion, of which six percent could have been Joe’s. This reminded me of what Mark Twain said about experiences: “We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it and stop, lest we be like a cat that sits down on a hot stove lit.” She will never sit down on a hot stove lid again—that is well—but she will not sit down on a cold one anymore. The past is our teacher, not our master—that’s the idea for today.
The Burden of Experience
In just his second year at Pittsburgh National Bank, Stanley Druckenmiller surpassed eight senior colleagues to become the director of equity research. It was appalling to him that, despite the others having far more experience, the management chose him—an inexperienced 24-year-old—to lead the research team. He asked why. “For the same reason they send 18-year-olds to war,” his boss told him, “You’re too dumb, too young, and too inexperienced not to know to charge.” Since 1968, many of the senior executives had been scared by the bear market while Druckenmiller did not carry the burden of experience of the crash. He never sat on the hot stove lit, which made him the perfect contender for the job ahead. “[It’s] 1978. I think a big secular bull market’s coming. We’ve all got scars. We’re not going to be able to pull the trigger. So I need a young, inexperienced guy to go in there and lead the charge.”
Stop Hiding The Human Part of Yourself
According to psychiatrist Phil Stutz, those who have experienced a traumatic event in the past will often carry the Shadow. “The easiest way to say it,” Stutz explained, “is that the Shadow is the part of yourself that you’re ashamed of…It’s a flawed part of yourself that you feel you have to hide and once you start to hide things, you become very sensitive to whether other people can see them or not. It becomes an obsession—How do they see me, what do they think of me, do they like me, love me?” A traumatic past is what makes us hide our shame. The paradox is that the more we do this—the more we’re weighed down by the burden of experience—the more ashamed we feel. We become like the cat. “But the beauty is,” Stutz said, “once you stop hiding it, you can relax and then you get flow. If you stop hiding your Shadow, if you stop hiding the human part of yourself, you get flow. And that’s what everybody wants.”
Good Luck vs. Bad Luck
Of course, this is not to say we should charge ahead without taking a step back to see if it is the right course of action. When there are defeats, there are also moments of victory, and it is in those highs where the greatest danger often disguise itself. “The powerful vary their rhythms and patterns,” Robert Greene writes in The 48 Laws of Power, “change course, adapt to circumstances, and learn to improvise. Rather than letting their dancing feet impel them forward, they step back and look where they are going. Good luck is more dangerous than bad luck. Bad luck teaches valuable lessons about patience, timing and the need to be prepared for the worst” while “good luck deludes you into the opposite…making you think your brilliance will carry you through.”
Memento Mori
Legend has it that, after a major military victory, Roman generals would parade through the streets with a slave trailing behind. The sole responsibility of the slave was to continuously whisper into the general’s ear: Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori! (Look behind. Remember you are mortal. Remember you will die!) Nothing keeps us in perspective than the mere reminder of our mortality. For all that we’ve been through—the Shadow, the good luck, the bad luck—knowing that everything will come to an end suggests we have nothing to lose. The burden of experience should not hide the human part of yourself. It should teach you to forge ahead with full speed, to fulfil our life mission and purpose, and to maximise ourselves—with patience, timing and preparation—lest we become the person controlled by our past, lest we become the person that will not sit on a stove, anymore.