A Mystery Hidden in Plain Sight (Part Two)

The second part of a four part essay

1. David Perell

Source: perell.com

Have you heard of the famous golfer David Perell? No, neither have I.

David Perell is a famous writer, with 367,000 Twitter followers and a weekly newsletter with a huge following. David’s insights into writing are so deep he founded the highly successful company Write of Passage, the premier on-line writing school in the world.

That’s not how he started. David grew up thinking he was going to be an excellent golfer—if not on the PGA Tour, at least as a top pro at a prestigious country club. David had a secret, though: although he loved golf, and was a promising golfer bursting with talent and promise, it’s wasn’t his passion. His passion was writing.

The problem was that everybody told David he was terrible at writing. David has often talked and written about how he struggled through school. He was the despair of his teachers, and he just didn't seem to learn well in the classroom. A few years ago, David met his former high school counselor at a class reunion. By this time, David was already a success, and his counselor felt comfortable telling David he’d never met a set of parents in his entire career more worried about their son than David’s parents.

Photo © Jozef Micic | Dreamstime.com

David was repeatedly told he was a terrible writer. David didn’t read a book until he was twenty years old. He was accepted to college, but his big achievement was eking out a “C-” in Composition class. A generation ago, his grade would probably have been a “D” or an “F”. His college professor told him about his first essay, “This is the worst essay I’ve ever seen. You don’t know how to write.” Even though David graduated from college, he was fired from his first job in New York City, and his boss told him the reason he lost his job was because he was a terrible writer.

Research tells us the foundation for motivation is a belief we can make a difference in our lives. Many people today seem to have lost that belief. We've been taught that science means everything is chaotic, meaningless, and random. We’re tempted to react to a setback by giving up and trying something else. But that’s not how David views the world. And even in the depths of rejection, somewhere deep inside David received the signal that defeat can be the first step to greatness. In a sense, David was even stronger-minded—or crazier—than Mike Agostini, whom we discussed last week. No doctor told Mike he couldn’t walk. But David was repeatedly told by all the credentialed professionals he knew growing up he was a hopeless writer.

Photo © Valentino Visentini | Dreamstime.com

Mike never talked much about the long years of training that followed his recovery from his injury, but David has told us quite a lot about his long, difficult path to becoming a great writer. Immediately after being fired from his first job, David began writing ninety minutes, every day, and posting short essays on the Internet. He started a podcast. He also posted a YouTube video daily for 114 days. For many months David received very little feedback from the daily writing he posted. By the end of almost four months his YouTube channel had only 37 subscribers: it was a failure.

Like Mike, David’s perseverance through boredom and rejection activated transformational changes in his brain, making possible the development of new mental abilities, which in turn nurtured intellectual skills that allowed David to accumulate relevant technical experience. One day, after more than six months of daily posts, David wrote an essay called “Naked Brands” which went viral after being recommended by Ev Williams, co-founder of Twitter, receiving tens of thousands of views. Around that time, David also scored an interview for his podcast with Neil deGrasse Tyson as part of the Tyson’s launch of his #1 Best-selling book. Soon, North Star podcast guests included luminaries like Tyler Cowan, James Clear, Ryan Holiday, and Balaji Srinivasan. We can’t compare David’s patterns of neural functioning between 2017 and today because we don’t have a before and after fMRI of David’s brain, but the results speak for themselves.

Source: https://writeofpassage.school/

David was still a one—man show at this time. But something else started happening as David persevered on his quest to become a great writer. While David’s extraordinary commitment and perseverance was at its core a deeply personal quest, he also opened himself to the world. And the world took notice: David began to attract supporters who recognized his gifts and offered their advice and support. It reminds me of what Mike told me about how he continued to improve after his basic recovery from losing his kneecap. The other great runners of African descent on the international running circuit helped one another by sharing what they called “the Lore”. The Lore was an informal body of knowledge, techniques and ideas they’d developed in their own running practices. These world class athletes shared this information with each other decades before computer imagery and bio-mechanical analysis revealed these techniques to other athletes.

The economist Tyler Cowan arranged a $20,000 grant that allowed David to start his company Write of Passage. After the very first Write of Passage cohort, a student sent David a follow up email with a series of concrete suggestions for improving the course. David was open to those ideas and hired the student, Will Mannon, to implement them as chief operating officer at Write of Passage.

Like Mike, David’s perseverance transformed him. Both Mike and David originally just wanted to be like their peers, but perseverance generated a transformational process that resulted in wildly overshooting their original goal and setting them on a path to greatness.

(This excerpt is the Second Part of a Four Part essay called “A Mystery Hidden in Plain Sight”)

2.         The Annunciation

“Mary said to the angel, 'How will this be, since I am a virgin?' And the angel     answered her, 'The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy—the Son of God . . . .' And Mary said, 'Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word.' And the angel departed from her." 

The Gospel according to Luke

Wikimedia Commons

The bewildered Judean teenager Miriam, impregnated with a child whose father she cannot identify, has vanished within the splendour of this gorgeous royal mother, Mary, Mother of God and Queen of Heaven, endowed by Pinturicchio with great beauty and adorned with all the riches of the High Renaissance.

The magnificent painting depicts how we might imagine the Mother of God, but the teenager’s reality was that, according to Jewish law, she had become subject to death by stoning as an adultress.  Furthermore, her pregnancy put at risk her engagement to her fiancé Joseph.  Catholic tradition tells us Mary was a pious girl dedicated to life-long virginity. The purpose of Joseph and Mary’s marriage was to bring Mary under his protection without consummating their marriage. It was was a common first-century convention among religious Jews for an older widower to marry a young woman who had consecrated herself to serving God. 

Through all the obscure religious traditions and Eastern Mediterranean social customs, it’s easy to sympathize with the shocked and bewildered teenager: she had already chosen to abstain from sex for the rest of her life and devote herself to serving God. And, behold! She does find favour with God, who dispatches a messenger (the meaning of “angel”) to tell Miriam that, subject to her consent, he’s going to make her pregnant. 

She hardly has time to fully process the extremely daunting consequences of her divine selection, before she utters the words that ring down the centuries in the Latin of her land’s conquerors:  “Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum (Let it be done with me according to your word”), resonating with the great opening of Genesis depicting the creation of the universe:  “Fiat lux (Let there be light)”.  The convergence between these stories shows us that Mary is co-creator with God. It is through her body that light comes into our world.

I love Pinturicchio’s wondrous vision of glory, tender and triumphant—even more so because Pinturicchio himself expressed his soul so purely only by overcoming any bitterness or resentment he may have felt for being himself small, deaf, and considered ugly.  He created a vision that all religious people would love to consider a sign of God’s favour in their own lives:  becoming rich, elegant, beautiful, high status, and triumphant in worldly terms.

Wikimedia Commons

But Miriam’s selection by God would have felt very different to her. Botticelli with his penetrating psychological insight brings us close to teenage Mary’s state of mind in that moment. Of course, he follows the conventions his European Catholic audience expected of him, by placing Mary in a palace and adorning her with gorgeous clothes.  But she is disheveled, her hair in disarray.  God’s fecundating spirit spurts in hot golden jets towards her as she bows, and Mary is subdued and humbled, seemingly shocked by her own receptive power to be a vessel of divine energy.

Miriam’s experience illustrates the truth about the nexus of divine and human in a religious life: it is often abrupt, a shock to our expectations, and unforeseeable in its consequences.

Links:  https://arsartisticadventureofmankind.wordpress.com/2021/02/02/painting-during-the-early-renaissance-1400-1495-painters-outside-tuscany-pinturicchio/

3.         Alma

This is Alma, our rescue dog. We’ve had her for a year and a half, and she’s slowly recovering from her traumatic first two years of life before we adopted her.  She was trucked up from Georgia in a rescue expedition, had already borne two litters of puppies, her ribs and vertebrae were clearly visible, and she had heart worm.

Her name means soul in Latin and Spanish, and is also the name of my great-grandmother, about whom I’ve already drafted a post I’ll send one day.

Our Alma was jittery and submissive from the very beginning.  It tooks months before we saw her run and jump joyfully, and she’s only now beginning to wag her tail regularly.  We don’t know what haunts her, but she flinches at the sound of metal against metal, and is very reluctant to enter vehicles.   Even now that she’s a big, powerful dog weighing almost 80 lbs and able to run down deer she still has nightmares at night and is easily cowed by unexpected noise or movement.

Hopefully, Alma will one day heal from the traumas of her early life, but I must say she reminds me of one my uncles.  Uncle Jeff was a West Pointer, and his father and grandfather were both First Captains of the Corps. 

Source: Knight family archives

Uncle Jeff was a paratrooper, fought bravely in Vietnam as an advisor to a South Vietnamese battalion, and was in the same Ranger class as Charlie Beckwith, founder of Delta Force.  On Sundays, Uncle Jeff made parachute jumps while my aunt and cousins went to church.  I was cleaning leaves out of a gutter for Uncle Jeff once.  Uncle Jeff was steadying the ladder but was looking down at his feet. I asked him why, and he told me that he was afraid of heights.  I said, “But Uncle Jeff, you’ve jumped out of planes hundreds of times!  How could you be afraid of heights?”  “Son, when you’re that high up it just looks like a pattern!”

Source: Knight family archives

Uncle Jeff was born with acrophobia and faced his irrational fear by joining Airborne and becoming a paratrooper, forcing himself to jump out of planes time and again.  Even though he never overcame the fear, he did his duty regardless.  That is real courage.