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We will talk more about Morning Brew a little later but for now let's get on with 7 Life
lessons from Aristotle.
Aristotle is a Promethean figure in the history of the world, who lived between 384–322
BC, He is considered "the father” of logic, biology, political science, zoology, embryology,
of natural law, scientific method, rhetoric, psychology, realism and even of meteorology.
He was first a student of Plato, then, when Plato retired, he left the Academia which
Plato founded, and he became the tutor of Alexander The Great, and the two other future
kings: Ptolemy and Cassander.
He established a library in the Lyceum which helped him to produce many of his hundreds
of books on papyrus scrolls.
Unfortunately, only a third of his magnificent work has survived.
For example, the “treatises”, “Physics”, “Metaphysics”, “Nicomachean Ethics”,
“Politics”, “On the Soul” and “Poetics” - have influenced more than two millennia
of scientists and theologians alike, both fascinated by his ideas.
Being the founder of so many disciplines and having such a tumultuous life living in the
company of great kings, Aristotle has many life lessons to offer us, so with that in
mind, in this video we bring you 7 life lessons from Aristotle.
Don’t run away from your problems Aristotle says: “To run away from trouble
is a form of cowardice and, while it is true that the suicide braves death, he does it
not for some noble object but to escape some ill.”
It is easy to be optimistic when everything in our lives goes well.
But it is much harder when we are faced with problems or even tragedies.
It is important to focus on the solution if you can fix the problem or, if you cannot
fix it, it is important to find peace with the situation and focus on what you have learned
from the experience.
Aristotle invented the concept of “catharsis” in his book “Poetics'', explaining that
a negative experience can always teach us a moral lesson.
But, if there is a solution for the respective problem, if it is something you can change,
then you should be brave and face reality and do everything you can to solve the problem.
Aristotle was the tutor of Alexander The Great and he taught him what it means to have courage
to face your problems.
Alexander was a great visionary and strategist, he conquered many battles even when his army
was outnumbered, he didn’t shy away from anything, even if it was against a huge army
of people accompanied by 200 elephants.
Following the teachings of Aristotle and the bravery of Alexander the Great, we should
try to be a little more courageous in life, to not run away from our problems.
Before running away from people, from problems, from circumstances, it is always better to
look reality in the eye and we can understand that what we thought was terribly scary is
not actually as scary as you think.
Even if you do not have the power to change things for the better by yourself, you can
always ask for help.
You will eventually find someone to help you overcome the problem.
For example, if you have seemingly insurmountable debts with the bank, instead of hiding yourself
in a corner ruminating over your problems, you should better talk to your friends, and
the members of your family and through them you may even find a solution with them to
help pay your debts.
Do not hide in your desperation, be proactive and share your problems with others in order
to find the best solution.
However, there are some situations when there is nothing else you can do, other than to
think what kind of moral lesson you can learn from the event.
For example, if somebody close to you betrayed you, a close friend stole a fortune from you
or a spouse cheated on you, your moral lesson would be to get to know the other people better
before you confide in them or marry them, before you give them your full trust.
Do not judge yourself too harshly for this mistake, but rather develop a life principle
to never trust someone before you really know them.
Try to Find the golden mean Aristotle tells us “Virtue is the golden
mean between two vices, the one of excess and the other of deficiency”
One of the main ideas of Aristotle’s teachings is the idea of finding balance.
In the book Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle identified that what makes people good and
successful is a set of 11 virtues: courage, temperance, liberality, magnificence, magnanimity,
pride, patience, truthfulness, wittiness, friendliness, and modesty.
Each virtue is the balance between 2 extremes.
For example, courage is in the middle of cowardice and rashness.
A courageous person is neither too much of a coward, nor too rash.
Similarly, losing your temper is a vice - it is much wiser to find a middle ground and
use a moderate amount of anger when you try to express your fury about something.
You would not want to explode over anything you dislike, living every day with high blood
pressure, but you also don’t want to keep quiet and let people take advantage of you.
You need to find the happy medium.
A balanced person, Aristotle argues, will be a virtuous and happy person . They have
found the Golden Mean.
In our modern day society, where everything is so easily available, a lot of us fail to
apply this rule.
We either over-consume or stay in our shells out of fear and anxiety.
We either succumb to the extreme of excess, which can take form in the accumulation of
wealth, food, drugs and alcohol or descend into deficiency, like inadequate attention
to education, intellectual pursuits or healthy sport & lifestyle activities.
We all know that lack of sleep or too much drinking can harm our health and yet we keep
continuing to fall into this trap time after time.
What makes this living in excess or deficiency so tempting for most of us is that we care
more for our short term gratification.
On the other hand, respecting this golden mean, and maintaining equilibrium requires
willpower and long-term thinking abilities, and finding that balance is a very important
aspect of our well-being.
Balancing your desires will strengthen your willpower, build your self-confidence and
will keep you focused on your long-term goals.
Have dignity and grace To quote Aristotle: “The ideal man bears
the accidents of life with dignity and grace, making the best of circumstances.”
Dignity and grace are not accidents.
They are the result of a clear intention.
After Alexander the Great died, people started to develop negative sentiment for him; Aristotle
was accused of impiety and forced to run away from Athens, leaving for Chalcis, in Euboea
island, retiring from political and social life.
Although saddened by this, Aristotle left with dignity and grace, but not without saying
"I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy," meaning that he will
continue his work in philosophy no matter what Athenians do.
Dignity and grace come with having a noble purpose in life; in the case of Aristotle
whose name in ancient Greek means “the best purpose”, this noble purpose in life was
philosophy.
When you know your noble purpose, you can more easily ignore the many others criticising
you at the bottom of your tree, your tree representing your journey towards a noble
goal.
Your decisions made with dignity and grace have a bigger importance in determining your
destiny than the events and circumstances in your life.
You should use your reason to understand that the things people do are more a reflection
of them than of you.
If you have a noble goal in life for example, creating a business which can help thousands
or even millions of people rising up from poverty, funding a school in Africa, or spreading
your knowledge through the books you write, then you’re that much less likely to mind
- for example - that your best friend said some bad things about you.
Because you know who you are and your ultimate noble goal in life, you're less upset about
your partner leaving you because you know you are worthy of love.
As you are on a great journey to have a positive impact on this world, don’t humiliate yourself
when such things happen to you, simply react with dignity and grace.
Be open to others’ points of view Aristotle teaches us: “It is the mark of
an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
During his debates and lectures in the Lyceum, during his long walks with students, Aristotle
was listening to others' ideas and later he was organizing them, coming up with innovative
ways of approaching different problems.
In this way, he could enrich the knowledge of his time and he became a beacon of wisdom
transcending millennia.
Aristotle always emphasized on the importance of good listening, saying that there are three
components of it: virtue, character and education.
Virtue to give the other the right to speak and come with arguments, character to control
yourself and your frustration when you are proven wrong and education to know what are
the best questions to ask in order to decipher what the other is really trying to say.
In general, you need to be able to stay in the conversation even if you see the other
people’s opinions as wrong.
You might still learn something from them, even if it is just one percent.
And that is why Aristotle was saying the mark of an educated person is to be able to entertain
a thought without accepting it.
Seeing a problem from different angles even if they are not entirely correct perspectives
helps you understand the problem better.
For example, consider a talk with a climate change denier.
He might say false things like there is a controversy in science regarding climate change,
that the reports given by the mass media are false.
Instead of walking away from such a conversation, you might prove yourself to be an educated
person and stay in the conversation trying to learn something, to see the issue from
a different angle.
You might reject 99 percent of what he is saying, but you can try as an exercise to
find the 1 percent which is true.
You know there is no controversy as 97 percent of scientists are confident that climate change
is real.
But how about the 3 percent?
How can you prove they are wrong?
If you are an educated person, you would start studying about the problem right away and
you would find that, although it is true that climate is cyclical, with long periods of
ice ages and long periods of warmth, you can also plot the history of temperatures and
you will see the great change happening over the last 200 years which hasn't been the case
throughout the entire history of Earth’s evolution so far.
Those scientists are therefore wrong and it can be proven by a simple plot on a graph.
By listening to a climate change denier, you learn something, that climate is cyclical.
And, at the same time, this didn’t affect your opinion on climate change at all.
Not agreeing with somebody, but still being part of the conversation, might teach you
new things, thus additionally proving that you are an educated person.
Have the right friends In the words of Aristotle: “A friend to
all is a friend to none.”
There is an old saying that people with too many friends have no real friends at all,
and Aristotle’s teaching reflects this saying.
For Aristotle, friendship is an important part of life and he identified three types:
friendships based on utility that is based on mutual help, like helping somebody getting
a job and the other person helping you to get a great deal on buying a car, then there
is friendship that is based on pleasure like going hiking together or to parties and, then
finally, then there is true friendship that is based on virtue.
The first two are superficial and they do not last long.
The third one is based on common values and principles and lasts a long time or even a
lifetime.
Having too many friends means that you only focus on the first two types, you like to
have fun and achieve professional and financial success in life and that is why you focus
on these two types of friends who help you in this.
If you focus your life on wisdom and virtue, you would not have so much time for the first
two types of friends, you would have more time for making strong connections with a
few, select people - Meaningful friendships require time and effort.
Aristotle teaches us to invest less time in having fun and in climbing the ladder of financial
success and instead, we should invest more time in true knowledge and true friendships.
We should find those people who share our values and principles in life.
You can start by making a list with everything you really value, it can include anything,
from having a safe and healthy family, to a clean environment, peace, democracy, and
believing in equal rights for everybody.
Therefore, you would not be able to make a deep connection with somebody who throws garbage
on the grass, who does not recycle things, or who often expresses racist or sexist points
of view.
It will take time to find the right friends, but it is worth it as these kinds of friendships
based on virtue can last a lifetime.
Put truth before everything else According to Aristotle: “Plato is dear to
me, but dearer still is truth.”
Aristotle had a close friendship with Plato and Plato brought out the greatness in Aristotle.
However, Aristotle didn’t let this friendship blind him and, following Plato’s steps,
he put more importance on truth than on anything else.
Although Aristotle had an enormous respect and admiration for Plato, his philosophy departed
from him in three important aspects: regarding the Theory of Forms, regarding ethics and
regarding politics.
Regarding the theory of forms, for example, in the case of the concept of “beautiful”,
Plato would be interested in defining “beauty” while Aristotle would be more interested in
analyzing the beautiful things that exist in this world.
With regards to ethics Plato believed that knowing what is the right thing to do will
lead you to do the right thing while Aristotle believed this is not enough, to become virtuous
takes a great amount of effort, it is not automatic through knowledge.
And with regards to politics Plato believed that philosophers should be the rulers of
society, while Aristotle defined human beings as “political animals” and “polity”
is the best way to organize a society, meaning that society should be ruled by the interest
of the majority.
Overall, if Plato was concentrated in theoretical studies, Aristotle put more emphasis on experiment,
on the real world and, and in analyzing this world, he used an empirical approach, based
more on experiments and logical reasoning.
Aristotle’s method for logical reasoning is an inspiration even today.
We all need to learn the right ways of using logical reasoning no matter the field we are
working in and we should not compromise our capacity of reasoning for anything, not even
for making a friend happy by agreeing with their false logic.
For example, if you are the co-founder of a small company and the main founder, who
is also your friend tells you about their strategy to buy another small company and
you both know that company has serious financial problems and debts, you should inform your
friend that you disagree with their decisions, you should enumerate all the reasons for that,
enumerate all the negative consequences that can happen and even resign if your friend
still does not listen to you.
Truth is much more important than agreeing with somebody else, no matter how close you
are to each other.
Maximize your potential through constant learning In our final quote from Aristotle for this
video, he says: “Happiness is not god-sent but comes as a result of virtue and some process
of learning or training.”
Aristotle emphasized the importance of education and of acquiring knowledge, stating that every
thing or being on this planet has its unique characteristics, its unique role in this world.
The highest good of everything is achieved when it can fulfill its role: for example,
the purpose of a knife is to cut, the purpose of the sun is to shine and so on.
In the case of humans, the purpose is not evident, but Aristotle came up with the concept
of eudaimonia, which means living well and Aristotle believed this is the purpose of
human beings.
Eudaimonia is not the same as happiness, but this is often how the term is translated in
English.
Eudaimonia does not mean a pleasant physical state or a pleasant state of mind, it means
fulfilling your true potential, becoming the best version of yourself, maximizing your
talents and your capacity to reason.
In order to do so, it is important to know yourself and what your talents are, to plan
your life accordingly to make the most of them.
It is also important to understand that only when you work on something you feel joyful
about, are you capable of giving your best, to go that extra mile in order to provide
top-quality work.
For example, if you’re pretty intelligent and you enjoy learning chemistry and biology,
you might decide to become a medical doctor in order to reach eudaimonia, however you
still need to spend years studying and training to get there.
Anything worth accomplishing requires intense effort and learning new skills.
Once you decide on your career path, you need to learn day by day in order to maximize your
potential and achieve worthy and noble goals.
Also, learning should not be done only for your professional life, but also to satisfy
your curiosity in different domains.
Each of us can try to learn new things every day, be it at work or from newspapers, from
YouTube, from reading books, from online courses, from documentaries on TV and so on.
There is plenty to learn and we can prioritize learning according to our interests and curiosity.
We all need to make the best of our talents and use our capacity to learn and think as
much as possible in order to reach the greatest good, eudaimonia or true happiness in life.
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