Everything I needed to know, I learned in the 1600s.

grant — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 15:23:12 -0500

It's taken as a given that we now deal with more information than previous generations ever imagined, living lives in which "number of clicks" is a meaningful measure of time. As Spanish productivity guru Balthasar Gracian says:

There is more required nowadays to make a single wise man than formerly to make Seven Sages, and more is needed nowadays to deal with a single person than was required with a whole people in former times.

Except he wrote that in the 17th century.

I first heard about Balthasar Gracian's The Art of Worldly Wisdom from an old friend - the mother of a girl I grew up with. Later, I went into a pretty good bookstore with a couple of college buddies and asked the guy behind the counter if they had any copies. He got very excited and said, "Gracian's Manual? Why, that's been an underground classic for four hundred years!"

I'm continually surprised at how much it remains underground, since it's really quite useful in almost every way. It's a collection of aphorisms - short little bits of advice - so maybe it's just permanently unfashionable. Gracian was a Jesuit scholar, army chaplain, philosopher, raconteur and novelist, and his most famous little book is something like a cross between D.T. Suzuki's digestible Zen Buddhism, Machiavelli's political scheming, Dale Carnegie's personal diplomacy, Schmidt & Eno's Oblique Strategies and Sun Tzu's advice on overcoming conflict.

If you're interested in increasing your mindfulness and basically putting things in order, there are worse books to keep on your nightstand. Or, you know, bookmarked for a quick glance between projects.

”Everything I needed to know, I learned in the 1600s.” was written by grant balfour for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 07, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

wisdom

Everything I needed to know, I learned in the 1600s.