The Sovereign Artist

Inspiration is simply a sudden spiritual imbalance I take advantage of.

I haven’t written much in “moderate” frames of mind. I don’t pick up my notebook when I’m slightly disgusted or somewhat euphoric. I pick up my notebook when I’m brimming with joy, vanity, guilt, or frustration.

Aphorisms are crisp, well-decorated, rhetorical ideas distilled into a few words. They maximize utility while advancing or at least not degrading the truth.

Aphorists skip the conscious—and rather arduous—creative process and outsource everything to their hopefully reliable subconscious—they care about the outcome, the final product. They don’t want to create the product; they only want to ship it. They don’t want to build; they want to sell.

If you take a look at their lifestyles and routines, most aphorists share similar patterns. They allow themselves plenty of time for silence and boredom. They often take long walks or naps, read old books, sip wine, listen to music, and engage in various kinds of meditation.

This is when the subconscious works really hard and takes care of the creative process. At some point, without notice, a decision is made: the aphorism is ready to be packaged and delivered.

Most self-help books are nothing but kitsch philosophy... A consumerist form of “wisdom” and also a strange modern trend that doesn’t seem to end soon… Terrible advice masquerading as “progressive” literature.

BOTH ACADEMICS and the self-help industry killed philosophy. Academics managed to turn philosophy into the most boring subject on the planet; the self-help industry made philosophy “accessible” by getting rid of the values, rigor, and erudition required to properly produce a work of philosophy.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian philosopher, brilliantly remarked that “a serious philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

“When I was a child, I wanted to become a standup comedian. But then I studied philosophy. So I became the joke.” — Mahmoud Rasmi

Scholia are comments and meditations that emerge thanks to a clear source such as an essay or a book. It’s a note-taking exercise that teaches you to aim for an economy of truth. You’re free to copy an idea; add further interpretation; or link it to another story or thought that was randomly triggered by an insight you just came across.

young people can hardly be original artists or thinkers. They simply can’t. Most of them can’t be original since they’re yet to garner adventures and challenges. And they’re yet to reflect upon them—this is critical.

Mircea Eliade wrote that “reflections make you original, not experiences per se.” Indeed, there are many young people who don’t lack experiences but their understanding.

Eliade adds that “young people are very similar to Balkan musicians who try to reproduce songs they hear; they give the impression that they’re original because they don’t understand the source very well.”

Originality is what happens when you steal ideas you don’t understand and hence misinterpret.

Antisthenes. He was a famous Greek philosopher—an Athenian, although he was said not to be a legitimate Athenian. In his youth, he bravely fought in the battle of Tanagra, which led Socrates to believe that his genes are not pure. He argued that the son of two Athenians could not be so brave, as Athenians would rather theorize about courage than be courageous.[3]

Good philosophers start with theory and end up with action. Great philosophers start with action and end up with theory.

Plato famously said that “the world would only come right when kings become philosophers or when philosophers become kings.”

Alain de Botton wrote, “if we want great ideas to become reality, we need to ally them with power.”

In Sicily, I learned that even top managers working for large companies aren’t impressive—no matter how much money they make. Among Sicilians, the goal is to be free and self-employed.

If you can’t appreciate science and religion at the same time, you understand neither.

A scholar that only trains in libraries is a soft thinker.

The more offended you get, the more accurate the insult was.

One of the worst mistakes we make is believing that waking up in the morning is a right rather than a blessing. It may look like a strong claim; but it’s a fragile gift. Only those who internalize this lesson in their life may finally become alive.

The greatest accomplishment of a human, a busy primate, is to be able to spend hours and hours without doing anything.

Constantly being in a rush is a declaration of slavery. This is no exaggeration; even if you’re the CEO, the boss, the employer—if you sit at the top of a hierarchy—the truth is, you’re not in control of your life. What I find ironic in big cities is that most people who’re in a rush look rich or at least well off.

Emil Cioran’s favorite leisure activity was to travel by bicycle around France, exploring the countryside—always making sure to stop by the cemeteries he came across to meditate on death and the meaning of life.[10]

What doesn’t allow you to live the way you want to live is the belief that you “have” to accomplish what you’re “supposed” to do instead of following your genuine interests and curiosity.

Naval Ravikant: “better bored than busy” and “only the unscheduled life is worth living.”

I learned that, by constantly setting goals, drafting plans, and committing to plenty of different tasks—you slowly kill your soul. Too much structure turns you into a boring machine.

Being a slave to your curiosity paradoxically sets you free.

“You don’t suffer from stress because you’re doing stressful things,” Ashwin Sharma wrote, “you suffer from stress because you allow yourself little to no time for silence and boredom.” You suffer from stress because you’re terrible at the art of doing nothing.

You’re in control of your life only if you can rest and relax without feeling any remorse.

To live well, don’t look for answers. Learn to love the questions. Life is much more about wonder, adventure, and reflection rather than evidence, order, and direction.

The difference between workaholics and slaves is largely psychological. Slaves are forced to work hard; workaholics are programmed to choose to work hard.

Great ideas are the result of undirected curiosity, creativity, serendipity, and higher pleasures.

We work so hard to the extent that, when we finally take a little break from work—we have no idea how to rest and relax.

Leisure historically meant freedom for social, creative, and intellectual activities.

In Greek, leisure is rendered as scholé—this means school.⁣ The Romans had a similar word for this in Latin—otium—referring to reflection, contemplation, or the pursuit of academic interests.

Jesus used to go fishing with his disciples. Seneca wrote about how Cato loved to sip wine and reflect on the meaning of life.⁣ Emil Cioran, the most famous Transylvanian philosopher who spent most of his time in Paris, liked to relax by writing joyful letters to his friends and family. John Rockefeller used to take regular breaks from his notoriously demanding schedule to mill about in his garden. Benjamin Franklin’s work sessions were broken up by periods of conversation, reading, and boredom.

Pure leisure paradoxically requires discipline, focus, and commitment, not an endless pursuit of dopamine.

Notice the “fort” in comfort. The Latin root of comfort means to fortify—to get stronger. The original sense of comfort was rest that gets you ready for war.

Leisure must not be an escape from effort; it must be unavailable without effort. At royal weddings, theological debates were arranged as entertainment. Logicians debated God at Prince Palatine’s engagement. Aldous Huxley wrote that, in Elizabethan times, regular people “could be relied upon to break into complex musical acts” like madrigals or motets. Some people had to “exert their minds to an uncommon degree to entertain themselves.”

Not long ago, recreation was a consequence of active collaboration between family members and neighbors. The goal of baking bread, my grandma used to tell me, was not to bake bread but to make friends. Italians—largely in the south—deserve their reputation: they still gather to play cards, sing, fish, or sip coffee and wine.

Pure leisure is closely related to the art of wasting your time. This is my favorite form of happiness. And also a divine search tool for wisdom. This kind of art has been long forgotten. And it’s been forgotten because we no longer know how to take control of our free time.

Eliade came up with a bitter observation in 1934. At the time he wrote this, maybe he exaggerated—yet today, his words hit home with the precision of an arrow finding its mark: Never before have there been so many automated, mechanized, commoditized entertainment products as we “enjoy” today... Most if not all modern amusements are designed to dominate your free time and integrate it into fake leisure activities.

Mass-manufactured “leisure” activities turn you into a prisoner. The modern spirit boasts an oddly painful tendency to standardize even the most spontaneous human expressions. We globally agree to have “fun” based on the same rules, rhythm, and intensity.

Boredom is a myth; silence is a fairy tale.

There can be no creativity without silence and boredom since the root of any creative undertaking lies in the ability to waste your time with elegance and style, without feeling guilty.

Paradoxically, only those who know how to waste their time are truly busy, productive, and hard-working.

The quality of your leisure predicts the quality of your work.

How many of us choose to work because our ambition springs from a boundless desire to manifest ourselves spiritually? How many of us start projects, not strictly as a result of financial considerations, but because they are genuine expressions of who we want to be? Are you able to identify five true artists, scholars, or scientists among us? Can you even name one polymath that’s not dead? We work because we simply provide a service.

Are academics today organically interested in the subjects they claim to pursue, or do they simply narcotize their minds with the same set of concepts from 9-5, Monday-Friday to secure an ongoing employment? This is, of course, a rhetorical question.

“Creativity starts with an empty calendar,” Naval Ravikant wrote, “and ends with a full one.” You seldom live more gracefully than when you waste your time.

There’s an intriguing concept I came across (thanks to Evan Armstrong, lead writer at Every) called “afflatus”—it comes from Latin and means a sudden rush of inspiration, seemingly from the divine or supernatural. Few experience this; probably because it’s counter-intuitive. To get there, you don’t have to “optimize” your work but prioritize leisure. You need sacred leisure.

My success has happened because I’ve given myself space to ignore all the extra things I’m supposed to do so I can pursue afflatus.

If your projects lack flavor and you have no skin in the game—your body will not produce energy. You will procrastinate.

Jash Dholani adds extra notes: Energy is simply the by-product of courage. Lethargy is the hint that somewhere, somehow, you made the coward’s bargain. Great ambition appears out of nowhere in the face of great risks and great tasks.

Working less is not laziness.[11] Doing less meaningful work is not laziness. Laziness is enduring an existence you dislike.

Contrary to popular belief, working “hard” and being “busy” all the time is a form of laziness—lazy strategic thinking and management skills.[12]

Your “passion” emerges as a result of trial-and-error tinkering rather than predetermined desire or choice. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t have to aim at something. Follow your curiosity and see what happens.

Artists who only study art happen to be clumsy artists; as well as philosophers who only read philosophy tend to be foolish philosophers.[13]

You can’t bring out the flavor of your mind if you’re afraid to tackle subjects that lie outside of your professional or intellectual comfort zone.

Steven Pressfield came up with a great diagnosis: “The disease of our times is that we live on the surface. Our knowledge is a mile wide and an inch deep.”

We’re brimming with opinions not when we know 70% about 5 topics but rather when we “know” 7% about 50 topics.

There’s a fascinating paragraph in Conspiracy where the author, Ryan Holiday, describes how Peter Thiel leads a conversation: If someone asks him a question—about some controversial issue of the day—he doesn’t simply react with an opinion or pluck a conclusion from nowhere. Instead, he prefaces it with “I tend to believe” or “It’s always this question of” as if what he’s about to tell you is simply capturing where his opinion falls while running a thought exercise... Everything gets punctuated with liberal pauses to consider what he’s saying as he’s saying it, as if he’s always in the process of deciding what he thinks.

We’re no longer to be judged by what we know, but rather by what we know we don’t know.

Judge someone not by their knowledge, but by their level of awareness of its limits.

To win an argument, rely on logic. To win in life, question logic.

The difference between “reading” and doing “research” is similar to the difference between “leisure” and “work”—you turn something playful and nourishing into a form of slavery and suffering.

In Antifragile, the philosopher Nassim Taleb makes the confession that he uses procrastination as a filter for his writing. If he feels strong resistance to writing a certain section, he leaves it out as a service to his readers: “Why should they read something that I myself didn’t want to write?”

Michel de Montaigne reportedly worked on polishing his most famous book, The Complete Essays, from 1570 until 1592. He was quick to start—but very slow to finish. His French comrade, Louis de Bonald, came up with a witty remark: “All that is to last is slow to grow.”

Bill Gates, it seems, is also a “terrible” procrastinator. He often found himself putting off his university assignments to work on his business. That’s how Microsoft was allegedly brought to life. He stopped completing his unnatural duties to work on more meaningful projects.

Instead of fighting procrastination as though it were an illness, maybe we should learn to understand its utility.

Procrastination is not a wicked phenomenon but a source of wisdom.

Philosophers have questions. Scientists have theories. Entrepreneurs have projects. Artists have obsessions. And amateurs have ideas.

Good writers choose their words carefully. Great writers let the words choose them.

The expression of ideas, not ideas per se, is what we seek when reading books.

We often call “open-minded” those who agree with what we think or dislike what we dislike. We sometimes call “open-minded” those who disagree with us the way we expect them to disagree. We seldom call “open-minded” those who challenge our beliefs with unexpected views.

If a book barely challenges you at the first read, you won’t likely read it again. And books that are not worth rereading are not worth reading in the first place.

If you don’t read old books, you must be insane!

There are hundreds of people who have spent years beating their heads against the wall trying to solve the same problems you’re dealing with. And they all decided to distill their wisdom in the books they wrote... You can steal that hard-won knowledge in a few quiet afternoons!

The fact that knowledge is cumulative and you were born later than Machiavelli, Kafka, Dostoevsky, Sylvia Plath, George Eliot, or Ana Blandiana calls for an opportunity that can’t be missed…

Taleb wrote: “Unread books are far more valuable than read ones; a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool.”

Indeed, the more you read, the more your curiosity grows. Hence you get more books. This means that the more you learn, the more you don’t know, as the number of unread books on your shelves keeps growing and growing.

Even if you “read” all of the books from your library, it doesn’t mean much. The beauty of reading is about rereading. The beauty of reading is about the actions you take and all of the reflections that get triggered thanks to the material in front of you.

Your antilibrary is a constant reminder about both your limits of knowledge and ongoing curiosity.

The human mind doesn’t seek truth and accuracy. Our minds didn’t evolve to be scientific tools; they evolved to be survival tools.

Mother Nature didn’t design them to be truthseekers. She designed them to be useful for our mental, social, and emotional fitness.

In 2002, Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics; although he’s a psychologist. The Wright brothers are credited with inventing, building, and flying the world’s first successful airplane; but they were not aeronautical engineers. Stoicism—arguably the most famous school of philosophy—was not founded by a scholar, but by a merchant, Zeno of Citium.

To innovate, as Arthur Schopenhauer put it, “the task is not so much to see what nobody else has seen but to think what nobody else has thought about that which everybody sees.”

Creativity and discipline are not primary products; they’re the by-products of genuine curiosity.

School is a game—to succeed, there are some rules you have to follow. Life means wilderness—there are no rules; it’s all about survival. One habitat is predictable and organized; the other is complex and uncertain.

Dear student, As soon as you leave school, get ready to exchange obedience with curiosity, logic with psychology, risk-management with risk-taking, and, above all, lecture with adventure.

You’re free if and only if you seldom think about work during the hours not officially spent working—and when you do, your thoughts stir excitement, not anxiety.

Most people no longer have an arsenal of topics, books, poems, songs, and ideas with which to entertain one another in their cups. They drink to fill the moral vacuum generated by their culture.

Wine—drunk in moderation at the right time, in the right place, and the right company—is the path to meditation, peace, and philosophy.

“Desire is a contract you make with yourself,” Naval Ravikant wrote, “to be unhappy until you get what you want.”

“I got out of the rat race,” Daniel Vassallo wrote, “when I looked around me and realized that even the winners are miserable.”

The trick to a better life is to aim for things you can’t measure with numbers. Beauty. Elegance. Peace. Love. Friendship.

“You don’t get any work done,” Mark Baker wrote, “by being around people all the time.”[19]

Emil Cioran complained in his letters to his brother about having too many friends in Paris. He was too busy to write. He liked to flee to Dieppe, a small town and fishing port on the Normandy coast of northern France, every time he couldn’t focus properly.

To be able to finish The Last Supper, Leonardo da Vinci got up early every morning to arrive at the monastery so he could be alone, in silence, with his own thoughts and feelings.

Michel de Montaigne found intellectual refuge in his private library—which was located in the southern tower of his chateau.

When they were quarantined because of pandemic outbreaks, Shakespeare wrote King Lear; Newton invented calculus, developed his theory on optics, and formulated the laws of motion and gravity.

To discover that sense of sacredness at work, you need to give yourself space and time to be alone. Periods of isolation can paradoxically be liberating. “It’s difficult to idealize yourself,” Ryan Holiday wrote, “if you’re never by yourself.”

Courage is much more about acting well in our daily challenges rather than extraordinary circumstances.

“Ordinary life is heroic in its own way,” Alain de Botton argues, “because ordinary things are far from easy to manage.”

A good discussion feels more like an elegant dance rather than a victorious battle.

Instead of thinking at the macro level, begin by designing your perfect day. Once you’re able to live 200+ such days per year, you’re rich—even though you aren’t rich.

You’re a fool not when you can’t speak well on a given topic; you’re a fool when you fail to remain silent.

Redefine work as a collection of projects, income streams, and experiments rather than one “safe” 9-5 contract or overambitious business.

Risk-takers build the world; and most employees benefit from it.

Artists who rely too much on systems, models, templates, methods, and frameworks lack spiritual passion.