Eric Tian

Anyone who knows war films will know the movie Braveheart, a 3-hour historical epic about the life and sacrifice of a man named William Wallace. The film is based around the overthrow of King Edward in the 13th century and features a lot of fighting, politics and screaming. Classic war stuff, right?

But in his interview with Jordan B. Peterson, the producer of Braveheart Randall Wallace said something surprising.

I’ve been asked why I make war movies and I say, “I don’t. I make love stories. I want to know what you love enough to sacrifice your life for.”

When we think of war stories, we usually imagine what’s on the surface; the fighting, blood and the politics. We rarely think that behind all this violence is one of the purest of all emotions: love.

But if you think about it, all conflict is really about love. It’s about what you care enough to stand up for.

A child might love his sweets and yell for it. A teenager might love a cat and sacrifice money for it. A businessman might love power and neglect their health for it. And in perhaps the greatest sacrifice, a soldier might love his country enough to sacrifice their life for it.

War is love: what a strange but beautiful oxymoron.

From Derek Sivers’ extraordinary book Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur:

I was in Las Vegas for a conference, taking a taxi from the airport to the hotel. I asked the driver, “How long have you lived here?”
He said, “Twenty-seven years.”
“Wow! A lot has changed since then, huh?”
“Yeah. I miss the mob.”
“Huh? Really? What do you mean?”
“When the mafia ran this town, it was fun. There were only two numbers that mattered: how much was coming in, and how much was going out. As long as there was more in than out, everyone was happy. But then the whole town was bought up by these damn corporations full of MBA weasels micromanaging, trying to maximize the profit from every square foot of floor space. Now the place that used to put ketchup on my hot dogs tells me it’ll be an extra twenty-five cents for ketchup! It sucked all the fun out of this town! Yeah, I miss the mob.”

Sometimes MBA types would ask me, “What’s your growth rate? What’s your retained earnings rate as a percentage of gross? What are your projections?”
I’d just say, “I have no idea. I don’t even know what some of that means. I started this as a hobby to help my friends, and that’s the only reason it exists. There’s money in the bank and I’m doing fine, so no worries.”
They’d tell me that if I analyzed the business better, I could maximise profitability. Then I’d tell them about the taxi driver in Vegas.

Never forget why you’re really doing what you’re doing. Are you helping people? Are they happy? Are you happy? Are you profitable? Isn’t that enough?

Related: The Parable of the Mexican Fisherman

A quote from Leo Tolstoy, quickly emerging as one of my favourite writers of all time:

One of the most widespread superstitions is that every man has his own special, definite qualities; that a man is kind, cruel, wise, stupid, energetic, apathetic, etc. Men are not like that. We may say of man that he is more often kind than cruel, oftener wise than stupid, oftener energetic than apathetic, or the reverse; but it would be false to say of one man that he is kind and wise, of another that he wicked and foolish. And yet we always classify mankind in this way. And this untrue.

Men like like rivers: the water is the same in each, and alike in all; but every river is narrow here, is more rapid there, here slower, there broader, now clear, now cold, now dull, now warm. It is the same with men. Every man carries in himself the germs of every human quality, and sometimes one manifests itself, sometimes another, and the man often becomes unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.

Related: Two Conflicting Rosebushes

When embarking on a new ambition or task, the goal to reach everybody is alluring. But often, just reaching enough people is fine; reaching everybody would be a pointless and exhausting ordeal. Here are some examples.

In public health, you don’t need everyone to be vaccinated against a disease. You only need to reach herd immunity for the population to be safe.

In business, you don’t need to sell to everyone. You only need to serve enough people who will buy your product to be profitable.

In friendships, you don’t need to please everyone. You only need enough friends to make you feel heard and accepted.

In many domains, the question isn’t how can I maximise my reach? but rather, what is enough, and how can I best serve these people?

The vast majority of our emotional and spiritual suffering comes from the violent collision between our expectations and reality. And in the aftermath, broken and bruised, we further torture ourselves by screaming at the world; outraged at how reality dared defy what we demanded of it.

Recently, I was deeply wounded by a close friend. I’ll keep this person anonymous and the details hidden but it was one of the most hurtful and disorienting periods of my existence. This injustice has darkened my painting of the world, now botched with disappointment and resentment. My faith in human relationships – a force I once trusted so strongly – has begun to crumble.

But perhaps the most infuriating reflection is that this disappointment is not to be blamed on the failure of the other, but on my own powers of reason; that had I aligned my expectations closer to reality, this anguish could be avoided and even expected. From Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations:

You’ll find that none of the people who make you lose your temper has done anything that might affect your mind for the worse; and outside of the mind there’s nothing that is truly detrimental or harmful for you… After all, you even had the resources, in the form of your ability to think rationally, to appreciate that he was likely to commit that fault, yet you forgot it and are now surprised that he did exactly that.

I guess the antidote now is slow and gentle progress; to use this experience as spiritual windscreen wipers and be reminded that the project of seeing clearly – a lifelong endeavour – is the greatest defense against emotional anguish.

Today I found out that suicide is the leading cause of death in Australians aged 15-44. This statistic left me deeply troubled.

Throughout medical school, we are taught about conflicts within the body; stuff like cancers, coronary heart diseases or COPD. In these cases, the struggle is between a person and an invading problem. The patient is trying to survive against disease.

But in suicidal cases, the person isn’t necessarily trying to survive. How much loneliness, internal trauma and unsaid conversations have they stored up, just waiting to collapse on them? How many masks must they wear to hide their inner demons? How many were pushed over the edge by one unfortunate misunderstanding, and could have been saved with just one small act of kindness? The ruminations are terribly endless.

To quote from Life of Pi:

Some poor lost soul had arrived on these terrible shores before me. How much time had he – or was it she? – spent here? Weeks? Months? Years? How many forlorn hours in the arboreal city with only meerkats for company? How many dreams of a happy life dashed? How much hope come to nothing? How much stored-up conversation that died unsaid? How much loneliness endured? How much hopelessness taken on? And after all that, what of it? What to show for it?

Nothing but some enamel, like small change in a pocket.

Tonight, my soul mourns for the loneliness and unsaid conversations lost across time and space.

One of the saddest things about life is how little of it we remember. We don’t remember half of it. We don’t even remember half of half of it. To be honest, not even a tiny percentage of life is stored away in our brains. It’s sad to imagine that moments that were so precious in a past moment have been lost, disappeared into nothingness.

If you asked me to write down a list of memories from when I was six, I would really struggle. I don’t remember the name of my teacher or who my best friend was. I don’t remember what food I ate, what games I played or what books I read. And this makes me sad because if nobody – including you – remembers that you did something, I’m not sure you can say you really did it. It’s like that event never happened at all.

This is the fuel for why I obsessively journal. Every day, there’s an anxious part of me that needs to write my life down as evidence. If I don’t record something to affirm my existence right now, then who I am now might not exist in the future. The memory gives this event life.

When I was little, I watched a movie where Santa exists but will only survive if people believe he exists. If nobody believes in him, Santa disappears. The movie is focused around the last kid who believes in Santa and how desperately Santa tries to make the kid hold onto his faith.

I thought the movie was stupid then, but now I kind of get it. We are simultaneously Santa as we don’t want to be forgotten, and the kid as we don’t want to forget something precious.

Psychologists call this fear of forgetting athazagoraphobia. At the end of the day, it’s probably just vanity.

See more at if a tree falls from a forest.

Here’s a hypothesis I came across recently:

Some books have a centripetal force – they suck you in from other books.

Others have a centrifugal force – they spin you out into other books.

For instance, The Little Prince is a centripetal book to me. I often see it referred to in blog posts, quotes and other books. For this reason, I find myself returning to it, time and time again. It continuously sucks me in.

On the other hand, The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness is a centrifugal book. This piece draws insights from other books and encourages the reader to look for them. After reading it, I found myself hungry for the origin of these ideas.

Both types books are valuable; neither is necessarily better than the other. Furthermore, these categories may differ from person to person: one reader’s centrifugal book could be another’s centripetal and vice versa. Some books could even do both sucking in and spinning out.

In my experience, I find non-fiction books tend to be the centrifugal type. These often summarise ideas from different areas and encourage the reader to explore more. In the other hand, fiction books tend to be more centripetal. There’s something brilliant about a good story that seems to suck people in from all walks of life.

There are also some books that do neither of these things: they don’t move you in any way or spin you at all.

These books are to be avoided.

If some film directors told you they wanted to turn your life into a movie, what would you want in it?

Would the actor behave differently to the person you are now? What events would you include? What hardships would you make your movie self take?

This is the premise of the book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life – my favourite book of 2021 so far. It is a hilarious and thoughtful book that calls all to a more meaningful life. The author, Don Miller, suggests that any good story requires this recipe:

A character who wants something and overcomes conflict to get it.

Let’s break this down.

1. A character

Hey, that’s you! But who are you?

Maybe you’re Harry Potter – the nerdy kid under 4 Privet Drive. You have abusive guardians and live under a staircase. But one day, you find out you’re a wizard and you receive an invitation to go to a magical school. Nice!

But that’s not interesting enough for a story. There must be more.

2. …who wants something

What do you want? What will the world remember you for?

If you’re Harry Potter, perhaps you’d like to win a Quidditch game, learn more about your parents or take down an evil wizard. Cool!

But everybody has stuff they want. That’s not interesting enough for a good story. We must have more.

3. …and overcomes conflict

How far will you go to get what you want?

If you’re Harry Potter, you will need to overcome incredible adversity. You will need to grieve your mentor’s death. You will need to overcome three-headed giant dogs. You will need to battle against the strongest dark wizards in the world. All of this takes immense courage. Yet, it’s all important for the sake of a good story.

However though this is pretty great, we’re not quite at a good story yet. We need one more piece.

4. …to get it.

Do you succeed, or fail? How did you change from it?

If you’re Harry Potter, you succeeded! You defeated the strongest dark wizard in the world. You made some great friends. You matured in ways you could’ve never imagined. Congratulations!

But there was an immense cost. You faced challenges that nearly killed you. You lost friends and family in the process. You will probably never recover from your physical and mental scars.

But these experiences shaped you into a person worth writing about. And that is what made your story worth sharing.

---

After reading this book, I thought back on my own life and wondered if it would make a good movie. And then I realised that my life wasn’t that interesting.

What part of the piece was missing? The answer came quickly. Step 3: overcoming conflict.

I’m fairly grounded in who I am (a character). I also have dreams and things I want to do in the world (who wants something). The problem is, I’m damn lazy sometimes and often back down in the face of conflict. And that means my life really isn’t all that worth writing about.

A good story requires one to overcome conflict. Harry Potter easily could’ve lived a peaceful life at Hogwarts, doing ordinary student stuff and learning some benign spells here and there. But that would’ve been boring. Nobody would read that.

If we want to leave this world with interesting stories, it’s not enough to reflect and have goals. We must show courage and embrace discomfort to get it. Often, it’s the easy stuff that prevents us from telling better stories.

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: How I Learned to Live a Better Story can be found here. Credits to Lynn for the recommendation!

If your sleep schedule is from 12 to 8am like mine, 11 is a scary number.

If the time is 11am, you’re aware that three hours of your waking day has passed. If you haven’t done anything useful so far, that’s three hours of your day wasted. You can do a lot in five minutes, let alone three hours.

On the other hand, if you see that the time is 11pm, you’re aware that you have to sleep very soon. This is when you think back on what you’ve accomplished since 8am and if it’s not much, you have a mild panic attack. Now you’re faced with a dilemma: scramble to finish a whole day’s work in one hour, or skip it and leave it for tomorrow’s self who will hate you for it. Either one sucks.

Here are some other reasons why 11 is scary:

When you’re 11 years old, you’re in that weird time in your life when you’re not really a kid anymore but still a bit too young to think for yourself. Which means that people expect you to be somewhat “grown-up” but you’re still 11 so you just pretend you’re someone you’re not.

11 is the atomic number for the element sodium, which is troublesome in physiology because so many ion channels in the body are Na+ channels.

11 is the smallest two-digit prime number. Prime numbers give me menacing vibes in general. A number which cannot be divided by anything other than one is to be feared.

11 is the numerical month of November, which is always examination period. If you’re born in October (10) like me, November is also a great guilt reminder that “hey look, a month has passed – how are those resolutions going?”

And this concludes my point: 11 is a scary number.