How Not to Go to Seed in 2024
There is never a time that you have "arrived."
At the end of his recent instructive essay on financial forecasting, Bob Seawright writes:
We will never act with perfect foresight. We will rarely act with decent foresight. Living with uncertainty, after all, “remains the essence of the human condition.” We will always have to navigate challenging and changing conditions, relying on experience, training, instinct, and imperfect assumptions, prone to our old familiar flaws (chiefly, “our never-failing propensity to discount the future”).
Seawright’s warning is essential. We may not be able to forecast the future, but we can be aware of a cognitive bias almost all of us share—we will put off what needs to be really done in favor of shallow rewards in the present. We will, for example, binge-watch our favorite series instead of reading a book. We will watch Sunday football all day and ignore our children. We are abrupt with a customer service agent because we don't recognize their humanity if they don’t meet our needs.
One of the reasons we are beginning Mindset Shifts U with Marcus Aurelius’s timeless and priceless Meditations is that Aurelius constantly reminded himself of his tendency to discount the future. Admonishments such as “before long, I shall be dead” appear often not in a morbid way but as a reminder to live according to his principles today and not tomorrow. No matter what the world brings us in 2024, we can live according to our principles and Nature.
Mindset Shifts U Begins This Month
Aurelius, unlike many of us, never went to seed. In his book Self-Renewal, John W. Gardner tries to answer “the puzzle of why some men and women go to seed while others remain vital all of their lives.”
Over and over, Aurelius reminded himself of the power of choice: “If it’s up to you: why are you doing what you’re doing? If it’s not up to you: who or what do you hold responsible?”
“Exploration of the full range of his own potentialities is not something that the self-renewing man leaves to the chances of life.” Gardner explains, “It is something he pursues systematically, or at least avidly, to the end of his days.”
When I was a young boy, one of my most cherished books was One Hundred Greatest Sports Heroes. Often, having overcome great adversity, these sports heroes exhibited incredible resiliency.
Roger Bannister, the first man to run a four-minute mile, was one of the “100 greatest”; I returned to his chapter many times. Bannister’s mindset strengths are legendary and can inspire us all.
In Bannister’s day, for a human to run a mile in four minutes was thought to be impossible. Runners were warned against even trying.
Another great English runner and Olympic champion, Sebastian Coe, explained the belief barrier that Bannister had to break: “Not only was it seen as a physiological, physical, mental barrier but learned treaties in medical journals basically saying if anyone tries this then there’s a chance they may lose their life in the process.”
In 1954, Roger Bannister broke that belief barrier. Bannister, because he did not share the same belief system as others, could develop new training methods, methods he had to fit into his strict schedule as a medical student.
Running the first four-minute mile, Bannister shattered an unquestioned belief about the limits of human performance.
Looking back at his miraculous run in unfavorable weather, Bannister reflected, “The earth seemed to move with me. I found a new source of power and beauty, a source I never knew existed.”
Coe reports that Bannister was always learning, “always interested in training techniques, altitude training, why we were running quicker and faster…Conversations could go anywhere. He was always full of questions.”
In other words, Roger Bannister never went to seed. His life story is a lesson in self-renewal.
To be sure, Gardner’s standard for self-renewal is not that we become a champion like Roger Bannister. In a 1990 speech, Gardner made clear that self-renewal is for everybody, including “people who fail to get to the top in achievement.” Gardner continued, “We can’t all get to the top, and that isn’t the point of life anyway. I’m talking about people who — no matter how busy they seem to be — have stopped learning or growing. Many of them are just going through the motions.”
One way we go to seed is by clinging to rigid beliefs. Gardner warns, “We can’t write off the danger of complacency, growing rigidity, imprisonment by our own comfortable habits and opinions. Look around you. How many people whom you know well — people even younger than yourselves –are already trapped in fixed attitudes and habits.”
Going beyond rigid beliefs is at the heart of Bannister’s legacy. Chris Chavez eulogizing Bannister in Sports Illustrated said, “The first sub-four-minute mile remains one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. It opened the floodgates to something people believed to be physiologically impossible and broke down the walls of what our minds believed could be accomplished.”
“Limits,” Bannister showed, “are just a creation in our minds,” Chavez tells us. Bannister didn’t stop there; he continued to be a life-long learner.
Learning is not just becoming more skilled. “You come to understand your impact on others,” Gardner advised, and so you develop your character:
The things you learn in maturity aren’t simple things such as acquiring information and skills. You learn not to engage in self-destructive behavior. You learn not to burn up energy in anxiety. You discover how to manage your tensions, if you have any, which you do. You learn that self-pity and resentment are among the most toxic of drugs. You find that the world loves talent, but pays off on character.
Bannister ran not for personal glory but “so that others might follow.” Within four years of his 1954 race, sixteen other athletes ran the mile in under four minutes. Today, even high school students can run four-minute miles.
“Don’t believe,” Gardner cautions, “that there is a point at which…[you] have arrived.” No scoring system “tells us when we’ve piled up enough points to count ourselves successful.” Instead, Gardner advised us to see life as providing endless opportunities to discover and renew:
Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.
Bannister, Chavez writes, “always felt more proud of his accomplishments in medicine than his work on the track.” Bannister “became a world-renowned neurologist” and “was knighted in 1975 for his work in researching the failures of the autonomic nervous system.”
Roger Bannister never went to seed and lived a life “of endless unfolding.”
Aurelius chided himself: So what’s your purpose in life? To experience pleasure? Is that a sustainable idea, do you think?”
We are made of the same stuff as Aurelius and Bannister and can make the same choice they did to never go to seed.
Portions of this essay originally appeared at Intellectual Takeout.
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I finally retired from formal work this past November at age 72. Much of my time is now spent learning-by-doing at bread baking. Got my sourdough starter going, trying different recipes, and bringing smiles to family and friends. Also helping my wife with her projects. No moss growing on either of us.