The Tim Ferriss Show - #459: Books I've Loved — Alain de Botton

Episode Date: September 4, 2020

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types—from startup founders and investors to chess champions to Olympic athletes. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a shorter series I’m doing called “Books I’ve Loved.” I’ve invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books—the books that have influenced them, changed them, and transformed them for the better. I hope you pick up one or two new mentors—in the form of books—from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life.Alain de Botton (@alaindebotton) is the founder and Chairman of The School of Life. He is a writer of essayistic books that have been described as a 'philosophy of everyday life.' He’s written on love, travel, architecture and literature, including the titles How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Consolations of Philosophy. His books have been bestsellers in 30 countries. ***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests.For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

books i've loved on the tim ferris show is exclusively brought to you by audible there couldn't be a better sponsor for this series my dear listeners and readers i have used audible for so many years as long as i can remember i love it audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet i listen when i'm taking walks i I listen while I'm cooking. I listen whenever I can. And if you're looking for a place to start, I can recommend three of my favorites. The first is The Tao of Seneca by Seneca. If you want to hear my favorite letters of all time, touches on stoic philosophy, calmness under duress, etc. The next is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, G-A-I-M-A-N, one of my favorites. Even if you're a nonfiction purist, this is the fiction book that you need to listen to. Neil also has

perhaps the most calming voice of all time. And third, Greg McKeown's Essentialism, subtitle, The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. This is one of my favorite books of the past few years. Combines very well with the 80-20 principle, but more on Audible. Every month, Audible members get one credit for any audiobook on the site, plus a choice of multiple Audible originals from a rotating selection. They also get access to daily news digests from the likes of the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post, as well as guided meditation programs. And here are some other amazing audible features, and I use a bunch of these. You can download titles and listen offline, anytime, anywhere. I use this feature even when I could get access. I'll put my phone on, say, airplane mode,

because I don't want to get bothered with notifications when I'm taking a walk to clear my head, and you can listen to titles offline in a case like that, or on a plane or whatever. Obviously, I'm not flying much these days. The app is free and can be installed on all smartphones and tablets. You can listen across devices without losing your spot. And WhisperSync is another feature I use quite a lot. I love reading my Kindle in bed, for instance, then picking up at the same exact spot where I left off when I go walking and listening the love reading my Kindle in bed, for instance, then picking up at the same exact spot where I left off when I go walking and listening the next day. Kindle and audio versions can be synced up automatically. It's just amazing. And if you can't decide what to listen to,

don't sweat it. You don't have to rush. You can keep your credits for up to a year and use them, for instance, to binge on a whole series, if you like. Audible offers just about everything. Podcasts, guided wellness programs, theatrical performances, A, if you like. Audible offers just about everything. Podcasts, guided wellness programs, theatrical performances, A-list comedy, and Audible originals you won't find anywhere else. And right now, Audible is offering you guys, that's Tim Ferriss Show listeners, a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. And again, my list, if you want to check them out, The Tao of Seneca, The Graveyard Book, Essentialism. Those are just three.

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audible.com slash Tim. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is usually my job to sit down with world-class performers of all different types, startup founders, investors, chess champions, Olympic athletes, you name it, to tease out the habits that you can apply in your own lives. This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a short form series that I'm doing simply called Books I've Loved. I've invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books, describe their favorite books, the books that have influenced them, changed them, transformed them for the better. And I hope you pick up one or two new mentors in the form of books from this new series and apply

the lessons in your own life. I had a lot of fun putting this together, inviting these people to participate and have learned so, so much myself. I hope that is also the case for you. Please enjoy. My name is Alain de Botton. I'm a writer and the founder of an organization called The School of Life, dedicated to emotional fulfillment and self-understanding. I want to talk about two books today that mean a huge amount to me and that I always press into the hands of pretty much anyone that I meet. The first book is called Home is Where We Start From, and it's a collection of essays by a wonderful English psychoanalyst called Donald Winnicott. And Winnicott is wise on so many fronts, but two of his ideas stand out in particular. The first of his ideas concerns what

he calls the true and the false self. For Winnicott, all babies are born with a capacity to express Winnicott's true self. In other words, to express themselves fully and without inhibition. If they're sad, they're going to cry. If they're angry, they might try and bite. If they're happy, they'll giggle. But the point is, a child at a very young age is almost definitely authentic. It is putting forward its feelings as it experiences them. It is unfiltered. And this is what gives babies their charm, but also makes them terrifying, quite difficult to look after, because they're just doing exactly what they need their charm, but also makes them terrifying and quite difficult to look after because they're just doing exactly what they need to do when they need to do it. There's no process of editing. And this is a process of engaging with what Donald Winnicott, a famous child psychoanalyst,

called the true self. Now, key for Winnicott is the idea that if you're going to grow up and be a balanced and healthy and authentic human being, you will need to have been given the enormous privilege of expressing your true self to those around you in the very earliest years that you were on the planet. All of us need to have those moments when we can be totally authentic, even at the cost of giving other people a bit of a headache around us. We need some of this true self. But Winnicott also observed in his work with children that there is a danger that something else happens too soon, and that is the birth of a false self. Now, the false self is created out of the expectations of everyone around the small child. And there are all sorts of expectations. Firstly, that the child will be good, that the child will go to sleep on time, which really means on the parent's schedule, that the child will smile at granny, that the

child will, at school, be polite to the teacher, and then going on into later childhood, will always follow certain rules, writing thank you letters, being a good child. Now, there are obviously good aspects to being a good child, but Winnicott was very alive to the concept of over-early adaptation, what he called over-compliance. And for Winnicott, the over-compliant child has all sorts of problems. What happens is that they are more attuned to the demands of others than to their own needs. And this can give them lots of difficulties in later life when they can no longer be authentic. They lose touch with what they really want because what they really want has been censored so heavily by those around them. In our world nowadays, we know all about

rebels and the problem with rebels. You know, they're the ones who graffiti the underpass and cause social problems, and we know how difficult this can be. But through the eyes of Winnicott, we can also start to see another problem. And in a way, it's perhaps a bigger problem, though it doesn't present itself as such. And that is an excess of compliance in a whole group of people that we can call, with nothing pejorative being meant by this, the good boys and girls. There are good boys and girls everywhere. And the problem with good boys and girls is they've been good too early. They haven't got the bad out of their system. They haven't had a chance to express themselves as they needed to in the early years. They weren't able to bite when they wanted

to bite, to kick when they wanted to kick, to scream when they wanted to scream. All the things that little babies and infants do and shouldn't frighten anyone by wanting to do, if all of that is suppressed with too much energy, there will be a problem. So Winnicott, the great patron saint of being able to get the right relative claims of the true and the false self. A false self, we all need one to navigate adult life, but it only starts to make internal sense if we've also had a chance to express the true self at another point. Another great idea from Winnicott is the concept of the good enough parent. Many parents came to Winnicott very worried that they weren't doing a good enough job as parents. They wanted to be better. They were worried that they weren't educating the kid

right or that there was some eating problem or school problem, etc. And Winnicott could see that these worries were actually getting in the way of the parents doing the fairly good job that they were doing. And so Winnicott made a fascinating intervention. First of all, he told parents, no child needs a perfect parent. Indeed, a perfect parent is very dangerous. It's a one-way route to psychosis, to a psychotic incident, because essentially the job of a parent is to disappoint a child bit by bit and induct them into adult realities. If the parent is perfect, how can the child grow used to living in the world that we all have to live in, which is a deeply imperfect one? So in an ideal world, a good parent is able to break bad news well to the child until the child can accept the whole

panoply of difficulties of adult life, amounting ultimately into the fact that we are all mortal, we are all going to have to die. So Winnicott, in order to capture what he was trying to tell parents, came up with a wonderful phrase. He said, no one needs a perfect parent, all they need is a good enough parent. And this phrase, good enough, is the one that Winnicott launched into the world. And it's a highly useful one because in so many areas, we don't need to be perfect. We just need to be good enough. We only need to be good enough workers, good enough friends, good enough colleagues, and as I say, good enough parents.

All of this comes from the very down to earth, beautifully written and always highly useful and humane wisdom of Donald Winnicott and his wonderful book, Home is Where We Start From. Another book that's very dear to me is by Arthur Schopenhauer, and it's called Essays on the Wisdom of Life. Now, Arthur Schopenhauer is perhaps the most pessimistic of all the panoply of very pessimistic German thinkers that philosophy produced in that country in the 19th century. He stands out for the unrelentingly miserable tone of his voice. He says at one point, it is bad today, tomorrow it will be worse, until the worst of all happens. He says at another point that human life is completely ill-adapted to its purposes,

that no one can expect to be happy ever for more than five minutes at a time. And that anyone who expects anything out of romantic love is sure to be completely disappointed. That nothing is true. That no friends can be constant. That no career ambition will ever come right. I mean, he is the most miserable person on earth. However, reading him is a joy. Firstly, he writes beautifully. He writes beautifully in German. There are some wonderful translations into English.

And there's something about somebody articulating the most despairing thoughts that brings us a huge amount of comfort. For a start, we think, I'm not alone. All those suspicions you have, often, you know, three in the morning in despair or gazing out of the airplane window in a low moment and we just think, what on earth is the point of all this? Well, Schopenhauer has been there. He's investigated the territory of despair and he's put his flag all over it and it is wonderful what he manages to see. Most of us only glimpse despair out of the corner of our eye and we can't bear it. Schopenhauer urges us to look despair in the face, make friends with it, and also laugh defiantly at it. He's all the time sort of grinning slightly as he tells us

these dark, dark truths. So often, sadness comes about because we clash into an expectation of what life should be like that is simply contrary to what reality can actually produce. And Schopenhauer gently, and with real intelligence, nudges us towards a slightly more pessimistic vision of the world. Yes, many of your dreams won't come true. Yes, probably love won't work out for you. Probably large aspects of your career won't come off. Probably many people will disappoint you. The world will seem ugly and dumb. Schopenhauer is saying, I know, I know, I've been here. Let's cry together rather than alone, or rather than escaping into a sentimental bromide that shields us from the fundamental reality that we're engaged with. So this is your man at the moments of real despair he is the friend in darkness and oddly strangely he is

immensely consoling um so these are two books uh by winnicott home is where we come from and uh by schopenhauer essays on the wisdom of life that bring immense cheer in very different ways to the always confusing business of being alive hey guys this, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found

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