In a way this talk by Alain de Botton is related to my last post with the talk by Mike Rowe. It's very interesting to me as the way we attribute succes and failure is so flawed.
It's good to be wary of this as you can easily fall into the trap of congratuling yourself on your skillful stockpicking when the market is soaring and you are overweight a great sector and at the same time it's hard to let go of a stockpick that turns sour. While the realisation that sometimes it just doesn't work out due to circumstance, can be helpful in dealing with the stresful up and downs. Ofcourse it's not a healthy habit to attribute failures to external circumstances but sometimes there just wasn't much that you could have done different.
In a way Alain de Botton argues not to judge your fellow man by their results in life.
Just like we should not be results oriented with every stockpick.
If your process was sound, you just have to accept the results, whatever they may be.
Status Anxiety
Anyone who’s ever lost sleep over an unreturned phone call or the neighbor’s Lexus had better read Alain de Botton’s irresistibly clear-headed new book, immediately. For in its pages, a master explicator of our civilization and its discontents turns his attention to the insatiable quest for status, a quest that has less to do with material comfort than with love. To demonstrate his thesis, de Botton ranges through Western history and thought from St. Augustine to Andrew Carnegie and Machiavelli to Anthony Robbins.
A few of Alain de Botton's most Famous Books
We don’t think too much about sex; we’re merely thinking about it in the wrong way. So asserts Alain de Botton in this rigorous and supremely honest book designed to help us navigate the intimate and exciting---yet often confusing and difficult---experience that is sex.
Few of us tend to feel we’re entirely normal when it comes to sex, and what we’re supposed to be feeling rarely matches up with the reality. This book argues that twenty-first-century sex is ultimately fated to be a balancing act between love and desire, and adventure and commitment.
Covering topics that include lust, fetishism, adultery, and pornography, Alain de Botton frankly articulates the dilemmas of modern sexuality, offering insights and consolation to help us think more deeply and wisely about the sex we are, or aren’t, having.
How Proust Can Change Your Life
'What a marvellous book this is ...de Botton dissects what [Proust] had to say about friendship, reading, looking carefully, paying attention taking your time, being alive and adds his own delicious commentary.
The result is an intoxicating as it is wise, amusing as well as stimulating, and presented in so fresh a fashion as to be unique ...I could not stop, and now much start all over again.' Brian Masters, Mail on Sunday
'It contains more human interest and play of fancy than most fiction ...de Botton, in emphasizing Proust's healing, advisory aspects, does us the service of rereading him on our behalf, providing of that vast sacred lake a sweet and lucid distillation.'
John Updike, New Yorker
The Consolations of Philosophy
From the internationally heralded author of How Proust Can Change Your Life comes this remarkable new book that presents the wisdom of some of the greatest thinkers of the ages as advice for our day to day struggles. Solace for the broken heart can be found in the words of Schopenhauer.
The ancient Greek Epicurus has the wisest, and most affordable, solution to cash flow problems. A remedy for impotence lies in Montaigne. Seneca offers advice upon losing a job. And Nietzsche has shrewd counsel for everything from loneliness to illness. The Consolations of Philosophy is a book as accessibly erudite as it is useful and entertaining.
