Girard discovered that most of what we desire is mimetic (mi-met-ik) or imitative, not intrinsic. Humans learn—through imitation—to want the same things other people want, just as they learn how to speak the same language and play by the same cultural rules. Imitation plays a far more pervasive role in our society than anyone had ever openly acknowledged. (Location 81)
Tags: orange
An unbelieved truth is often more dangerous than a lie. The lie in this case is the idea that I want things entirely on my own, uninfluenced by others, that I’m the sovereign king of deciding what is wantable and what is not. The truth is that my desires are derivative, mediated by others, and that I’m part of an ecology of desire that is bigger than I can fully understand. (Location 250)
Tags: orange
characters in these novels rely on other characters to show them what is worth wanting. They don’t spontaneously desire anything. Instead, their desires are formed by interacting with other characters who alter their goals and their behavior—most of all, their desires. (Location 262)
Tags: orange
But after meeting our basic needs as creatures, we enter into the human universe of desire. And knowing what to want is much harder than knowing what to need. (Location 287)
Tags: orange
Models are people or things that show us what is worth wanting. It is models—not our “objective” analysis or central nervous system—that shape our desires. With these models, people engage in a secret and sophisticated form of imitation that Girard termed mimesis (mi-mee-sis), from the Greek word mimesthai (meaning “to imitate”). (Location 294)
Tags: orange
“Human beings fight not because they are different, but because they are the same, and in their attempts to distinguish themselves have made themselves into enemy twins, human doubles in reciprocal violence.” (Location 327)
Tags: orange
fluid. A company in which people are evaluated based on clear performance objectives—not their performance relative to one another—minimizes mimetic rivalries. (Location 382)
Tags: orange
The more people fight, the more they come to resemble each other. We should choose our enemies wisely, because we become like them. (Location 435)
Tags: orange
We are tantalized by models who suggest a desire for things that we don’t currently have, especially things that appear just out of reach. The greater the obstacle, the greater the attraction. (Location 524)
Tags: orange
Rather than learning what other people want so that we can help them get it, we secretly compete with them to possess it. (Location 611)
Tags: orange
Animals imitate sounds, facial expressions, gestures, aggression, and other behaviors. Humans imitate all of those things and more: retirement planning, romantic ideals, sexual fantasies, food preparation, social norms, worship, gift-giving rituals, professional courtesies, and memes. (Location 631)
Tags: orange
He gave the illusion of autonomy—because that’s how people think desire works. Models are most powerful when they are hidden. If you want to make someone passionate about something, they have to believe the desire is their own. (Location 765)
Tags: orange
People don’t only model the desire for third parties or objects; they can also model the desire for themselves. Playing hard to get is a tried-and-true method to drive people crazy, but few ever ask why. Mimetic desire provides a clue. We are fascinated with models because they show us something worth wanting that is just beyond our reach—including their affection. (Location 799)
Tags: orange
Mimetic desire is profoundly human, and it will always be with us. It’s not something “out there” to be engineered and life-hacked away. It lives loudly within us, closer than we can see with our own eyes. (Location 904)
Tags: orange
We are generally fascinated with people who have a different relationship to desire, real or perceived. When people don’t seem to care what other people want or don’t want the same things, they seem otherworldly. They appear less affected by mimesis—anti-mimetic, even. And that’s fascinating, because most of us aren’t. (Location 950)
Tags: orange
The fastest way to become an expert is to convince a few of the right people to call you an expert. (Location 1154)
The key is carefully curating our sources of knowledge so that we are able to get down to what is true regardless of how many other people want to believe it. And that means doing the work. (Location 1176)
Desire doesn’t spread like information; it spreads like energy. It passes from person to person like the energy between people at a concert or political rally. (Location 1340)
“There’s great stuff out there,” Ramchandani says. “Why wouldn’t we learn from it? Why wouldn’t we use it as an example, and build something on top of that rather than alongside it?” (Location 1443)
Austin Kleon, author of Steal Like an Artist, put it this way: “If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”8 (Location 1445)
Competition can be good up to a certain point. The key is knowing what that point is and having the wherewithal to pivot around it. (Location 1499)
Take fitness. For example: (1) I want to start working out, because my friend started a new workout program and looks great. (2) That makes me want to eat better, so that I don’t negate my hard work at the gym. (3) So I want to turn down social invites that involve booze and Buffalo wings. (4) The result is that I want to go to the gym in the morning rather than pop Advil, slam coffee, and eat pancakes. (5) And that means I want to spend more time doing productive work. Eventually, I make wellness a virtue—meaning it becomes easy. Making healthy choices becomes something that I want to do instead of something I dread. (Location 1585)
Understanding that some things have a vital principle of development and others don’t is one way to understand the concept of a positive flywheel of desire: it contains the principle within it to help it achieve its purpose. Once you construct a flywheel and get it moving, it takes on a life of its own and begins to self-organize around an objective.17 (Location 1617)
Tags: orange
Desire is a path-dependent process. The choices we make today affect the things we’ll want tomorrow. That’s why it’s important to map out, the best we can, the consequences of our actions on our future desires. (Location 1629)
Tags: orange
Write it out. I suggest that each step in the flywheel be one sentence, contain the word “want” (or “desire”), and link to the next step in the process with a connector like so that, or which leads to, or which makes. (Location 1634)
Tags: orange
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. (Location 1681)
Tags: orange
It’s presumptuous for anyone to think that they can “deliver happiness” to anyone else—even their own spouse. It’s not our job. It’s certainly not the job of a company. (Location 1788)
Tags: orange
Each of us occupies multiple, often overlapping and intersecting, systems of desire. Developing the ability to know which ones we’re in and what to do about them is a key goal of the second half of this book. (Location 2225)
Tags: orange
Some trends in goal setting: don’t make goals vague, grandiose, or trivial; make sure they’re SMART (specific, measurable, assignable, relevant, and time-based)2; make them FAST (another acronym: frequent, ambitious, specific, and transparent)3; have good OKRs (objectives and key results)4; put them in writing; share them with others for accountability. Goal setting has become very complicated. If someone tried to take all the latest tactics into account, it would be a wonder if they managed to set any goals at all.5 (Location 2602)
Tags: pink
Mimetic desire is the unwritten, unacknowledged system behind visible goals.6 The more we bring that system to light, the less likely it is that we’ll pick and pursue the wrong goals. (Location 2619)
Tags: pink
Tactic 8 MAP OUT THE SYSTEMS OF DESIRE IN YOUR WORLD (Location 2698)
Tags: pink
Note: This is super critical for me getting into 2023..
PUT DESIRES TO THE TEST Don’t take desires at face value. Find out where they lead. (Location 2758)
Tags: pink
Steve Jobs, in his 2005 commencement speech at Stanford, noted, “Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.” (Location 2767)
Tags: pink
The approach involves sharing and listening to a particular kind of experience: stories of deeply fulfilling action. Knowing and relating to these stories produces empathy and a greater understanding of human behavior. (Location 2953)
Empathy is the ability to share in another person’s experience—but without imitating them (their speech, their beliefs, their actions, their feelings) and without identifying with them to the point that one’s own individuality and self-possession are lost. In this sense, empathy is anti-mimetic. (Location 2974)
Empathy disrupts negative cycles of mimesis. A person who is able to empathize can enter into the experience of another person and share her thoughts and feelings without necessarily sharing her desires. (Location 2981)
In short, empathy allows us to connect deeply with other people without becoming like other people. (Location 2983)
The desire to invest more time with family, on the other hand, is a thick desire—and the proof is that a person can start to fulfill it today and continue to fulfill it into retirement. It grows with compound interest over many years. It has time to solidify. (Location 2999)
“Before I can tell my life what I want to do with it, I must listen to my life telling me who I am.” (Location 3066)
Ask yourself: How many people do you work with who could name even one of your most meaningful achievements and explain why it was so meaningful to you? (Location 3080)
Core motivational drives are enduring, irresistible, and insatiable. They are probably explanatory of much of your behavior since the time you were a child. Think of them as your motivational energy—the reason you consistently gravitate toward certain types of projects (team versus individual, goal-oriented versus ideation) and activities (sports, arts, theater, forms of fitness) and not others. (Location 3085)
A Fulfillment Story, as I call it, has three essential elements: It’s an action. You took some concrete action and you were the main protagonist, as opposed to passively taking in an experience. As life-changing as a Springsteen concert at the Stone Pony might have been for you, it’s not a Fulfillment Story. It might be for Bruce, but not for you. Dedicating yourself to learning everything about an artist and their work, on the other hand, could be. You believe you did well. You did it with excellence, you did it well—by your own estimation, and nobody else’s. You are looking for an achievement that matters to you. If you grilled what you think is a perfect rib-eye steak the other night, then you did something well and achieved something. Don’t worry about how big or small the achievement might seem to anyone else. It brought you a sense of fulfillment. Your action brought you a deep sense of fulfillment, maybe even joy. Not the fleeting, temporary kind, like an endorphin rush. Fulfillment: you woke up the next morning and felt a sense of satisfaction about it. You still do. Just thinking about it brings some of it back. Such moments of profound meaning and satisfaction matter. They reveal something critical about who you are. (Location 3096)
knowing something about the interior life of a person is necessary to understand why they do what they do and what it means to them. (Location 3114)
Tactic 10 SHARE STORIES OF DEEPLY FULFILLING ACTION Most people are rarely, if ever, asked to (Location 3190)
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Location 3210)
Our greatest desire gives shape and order to every other desire, (Location 3276)
If truth is not confronted courageously, communicated effectively, and acted upon quickly, a company will never be able to adhere to reality and respond appropriately to it. The health of any human project that relies on the ability to adapt depends on the speed at which truth travels. That holds for a classroom, a family, and a country. (Location 3364)
Tags: orange
Leaders who embrace and model the pursuit of truth—and who increase its speed within the organization—inoculate themselves from some of the more volatile movements of mimesis that masquerade as truth. (Location 3399)
Tags: orange
Many books have been written about improving one’s ability to discern well. Here is a distillation of some key points: (1) pay attention to the interior movements of the heart when contemplating different desires—which give a fleeting feeling of satisfaction and which give satisfaction that endures? (2) ask yourself which desire is more generous and loving; (3) put yourself on your deathbed in your mind’s eye and ask yourself which desire you would be more at peace with having followed; (4) finally, and most importantly, ask yourself where a given desire comes from. (Location 3428)
Tags: orange
My definition of an entrepreneur is simple. One hundred people look at the same herd of goats. Ninety-nine see goats. One sees a cashmere sweater. And the alertness of the one isn’t due to data analytics. It stems from a willingness and ability to look beyond and to see something more than meets the eye, and then to do something about it. (Location 3538)
Tags: orange
The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success, (Location 3646)
Tags: pink
Hope is the desire for something that is (1) in the future, (2) good, (3) difficult to achieve, and (4) possible. (Location 3680)
Tags: pink
Wise people have said that it’s best to compare yourself only to who you were yesterday, not to who other people are today. That’s a good start for escaping the trap of comparison and measurement. (Location 3770)
Brother John: A Monk, a Pilgrim and the Purpose of Life. (Location 3818)
Meditative thinking is the antidote to a culture of hyperspeed mimesis because it allows time to develop thick desires. Transformation happens when I spend enough time with my desires to know them by name and know whether or not I want to live with them. (Location 3844)
“Desire is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want,” he said.36 Ravikant is drawing on the perennial understanding of numerous spiritual traditions about the link between desire and suffering: desire is always for something we feel we lack, and it causes us to suffer. (Location 3996)
“Don’t fit yourself according to the pattern of any external model.” (Location 4014)
Note: This is the best of the lot
“Pick your one overwhelming desire. It’s okay to suffer over that one,” Naval Ravikant said on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Other desires must be let go of.37 (Location 4021)
Annie Dillard. In Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters, (Location 4024)
The simplest definition of love is wanting what’s good for another. Italians have a way of saying “I love you” that is particularly instructive: Ti voglio bene, they say. It means “I want your good”—I want what’s best for you. (Location 4067)
LIVE AS IF YOU HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY FOR WHAT OTHER PEOPLE WANT (Location 4071)
The transformation of desire happens when we become less concerned about the fulfillment of our own desires and more concerned about the fulfillment of others. We find, paradoxically, that it is the very pathway to fulfilling our own. (Location 4080)
lukeburgis.com. (Location 5922)