17 Lessons From Marginalian

1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.
Cultivate that capacity

for “negative capability.”
2. Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. Those extrinsic motivators are
fine and can feel life-affirming in the moment, but they ultimately don’t make it thrilling to get up
in the morning and gratifying to go to sleep at night — and, in fact, they can often distract and
detract from the things that do offer those deeper rewards.
3. Be generous. Be generous with your time and your resources and with giving credit and,
especially, with your words. It’s so much easier to be a critic than a celebrator.
4. Build pockets of stillness into your life. Meditate. Go for walks. Ride your bike going nowhere
in particular. There is a creative purpose to daydreaming, even to boredom. Most important,
sleep. Besides being the greatest creative aphrodisiac, sleep also affects our every waking
moment, dictates our social rhythm, and even mediates our negative moods. Be as religious and
disciplined about your sleep as you are about your work.
5. As Maya Angelou famously advised, when people tell you who they are, believe them. Just as
important, however, when people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the
only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand
who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about
you.
6. Presence is far more intricate and rewarding an art than productivity. Annie Dillard
memorably put it, “how we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” borrowed from Debbie Millman, The myth
of the overnight success is just that — a myth.
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit. Who are the people, ideas, and books that magnify your
spirit? Find them, hold on to them, and visit them often. [Choose people in your life who are
gutsier than you, more willing to take risks, and absorb that from them and be courageous
yourself. ]
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.
10. Don’t just resist cynicism — fight it actively. Fight it in yourself, and counter it in those you
love and engage with, by modeling its opposite. Like all forms of destruction, cynicism is infinitely
easier and lazier than construction. There is nothing more difficult yet more gratifying in our
society than living with sincerity and acting from a place of largehearted, constructive, rational
faith in the human spirit, continually bending toward growth and betterment. [ethical bend of the
human heart]
11. Question your maps and models of the universe, both inner and outer, and continually test
them against the raw input of reality.
12. There are infinitely many kinds of beautiful lives.
13. In any bond of depth and significance, forgive, forgive, forgive. And then forgive again. The
richest relationships are lifeboats, but they are also submarines that descend to the darkest and
most disquieting places, where our deepest shames and foibles and vulnerabilities live, where we
are less than we would like to be. Forgiveness is the alchemy by which the shame transforms into
the honor and privilege of being invited into another’s darkness and having them witness your
own with the undimmed light of love, of sympathy, of nonjudgmental understanding.
14. Choose joy. Choose it at first consciously, effortfully, pressing against the weight of a world
heavy with reasons for sorrow, restless with need for action. Feel the sorrow, take the action, but
keep pressing the weight of joy against it all, until it becomes mindless, automated, like gravity
pulling the stream down its course; until it becomes an inner law of nature. If Viktor Frankl can
exclaim “yes to life, in spite of everything!” — and what an everything he lived through — then so
can any one of us amid the rubble of our plans, so trifling by comparison. Joy is not a function of a
life free of friction and frustration, but a function of focus — an inner elevation by the fulcrum of
choice. So often, it is a matter of attending to what Hermann Hesse called, as the world was about
to come unworlded by its first global war, “the little joys”; so often, those are the slender threads
of which we weave the lifeline that saves us. Delight in the
I think often of this verse from Jane Hirshfield’s splendid poem “The Weighing”:
So few grains of happiness / measured against all the dark / and still the scales balance.
15. Outgrow yourself.
16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.
17. Everything is eventually recompensed, every effort of the heart eventually requited, though
not always in the form you imagined or hoped for. What redeems all of life’s disappointments,
what makes all of its heartbreaks bearable, is the ability to see how the dissolution of a dream
becomes the fertile compost of possibility. Leaves of Grass is Whitman’s testament to this
elemental truth:
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another,
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs.)

17 Lessons From Marginalian

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1. Allow yourself the uncomfortable luxury of changing your mind.

Cultivate that capacity

15. Outgrow yourself.

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