Today’s newsletter is inspired by Frank Sinatra’s song, My Way.
It was a beautiful afternoon – blue skies and cool weather. I arrived at my meeting in Indanda, one of Sandton’s old affluent suburbs. The house had various aesthetic qualities – somewhat confused if you ask me. The garden was of course well kept in the old Dutch style with an extra large driveway. The main door was also large and made of frosted glass. I was not sure whether to knock or wait because they had opened for me at the gate, but there was no one at the door and no doorbell.
After a few moments, I knocked and an old gentleman – a black billionaire – with snow-white hair opened for me. He offered juice and ushered me to the back of the house where I absorbed African furniture frowning at the traditional Dutch-style architecture of the building. We pulled chairs from the patio and sat in the sun. The garden was well kept – green. Birds were flirting in the trees. And before I knew it, I was dealing with a treacherous question: what do you want from me? Yes, business meetings can be brutal.
A Way of Life
I once read that a topic is settled when people stop writing books about it. When it comes to business and personal growth, one needs only search Amazon to find an endless corpus of material. I tried to ask ChatGPT how many books are there on personal growth and its response was thousands if not tens of thousands. So, there you have it. It seems that questions about how to live are yet to be settled.
What’s funny is that we have spent almost all of written history trying to figure out the best way to live. Some of the finest minds in history, like Socrates, even resigned themselves to saying, “All I know is that I know nothing,” when facing the seemingly infinite possibilities in which life reveals itself. Furthermore, there are endless philosophies from which to choose a way of life, including Stoicism, Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Ubuntu – the list is endless. Cities have been destroyed in defence of some of these philosophies, which proves how seriously people take them.
However, the question remains: what is the best way to live? In the final analysis, it seems that one must contend with two factors. The first is that one must subsist in this world i.e. one must be able to survive practically. For some, this means working a job and paying rent, school fees, buying food and all the rest of it. For others, it means tending to one’s gardens at a farm and subsisting on the land. Either way, an essential part of the deal seems to be the living itself.
The second factor is more complicated in my view. Some people have concluded that happiness is the ultimate virtue and ought to be pursued. One might scoff at this idea, but consider that the American Declaration of Independents proclaimed, “We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Yes, happiness, according to the American ethos, is an unalienable right. That means one cannot avoid the pursuit of happiness even if one wants to.
Of course, this American creed is one among many. The question is, which one do you resonate with? What ethos drives you, especially when all is put to bear? In Nelson Mandela’s words, what is the ideal for which you are prepared to die?
The Marshmallow
My host also showered me with a lecture on success. He said you have to be prepared to do what you hate in order to earn the right to do what you love. Now that I am studying philosophy, statements like this mean more to me than what they seem at face value. I took him to mean that one must be prepared to be miserable for a time to earn the right to be happy in the long run.
This logic is not foreign to us. We constantly hear it from self-help gurus and life coaches. Another catchphrase to the same effect is to delay gratification. We even have the marshmallow experiment where four-year-old toddlers were put in a room with a marshmallow and told not to eat it, and that if they did not eat it they would receive another one. The toddler was left alone in a room for a few excruciating minutes which made for good entertainment for observers.
After following the children for 18 years, they found that life was milk and honey for those who resisted the temptation to eat the marshmallow. They did better in school and earned more money than those who could not help themselves. The conclusion was that the ability to delay one’s gratification results in having more of what one wants in the long run. This is essentially what my unsolicited lecture in the garden was about.
The question that is never asked is how long must one delay one’s gratification before one eats the proverbial marshmallow as an adult. Another way to put it is as follows: suppose you start a business. In business, the marshmallow is a dividend. This would mean resisting drawing a dividend and even living frugally, as did the longest-reigning richest man in the world Warren Buffet. He is now 93 years old and still lives in the house he bought in 1958. When it comes to buying cars, he looks for second-hand cars that were damaged in a hail storm. Talk about not eating your marshmallow.
Buffet seems to have escaped the gravity of the marshmallow. But does it make sense to live like him? I guess some people would disagree because what is the point of making money if it is not to spend it increasing one’s quality of life – travelling, seeing the world and experiencing the best of what the world has to offer? Nevertheless, the question remains: when would it become appropriate to start enjoying your marshmallow?
Sinatra’s Song
This song was composed by a Frenchman, Jacque Revaux. The original lyrics were discarded by Paul Anka who wrote the English version that Sinatra popularised. The song is a reflection on life. It is about a man who, having seen it all and has had his fair share of joys and pains realises that in the final analysis, he lived his way.
For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught
To say the things he truly feels
And not the words of one who kneels
The record shows I took the blows
And did it my way!
In closing
Life is complicated and sometimes we get lost in its maze. In times of trouble, we look to those we aspire to be like and mimic their way of life. We read their books, listen to their advice and even adopt their mannerisms. But what we truly want is relief from the unjustified pains of life. And because we cannot tell life to get off our backs, except in suicide, one seeks relief, or at least tries to, by whatever means.
The result, as Sinatra sang, is that we love, we laugh and we cry. We make careful plans that, after years of treading, are swept away by a flood of misfortune. We have regrets and highlights. But in the final analysis, one must be able to say I lived this life my way because it is nobody else’s life except yours.
Today I am inspired by Sinatra and I hope you will be too.
Until next week.
Vusi Sindane
