Finding your work

One idea from each of the 9 books on this topic.

• Never go to war just because you are angry. Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being.

  From The Art of War by Sun Tzu

• Arjuna objects that the mind is as hard to hold as the wind. Krishna agrees that it is restless and strong. It can still be trained by habit and self-command. Each time it breaks away, you bring it back.

  From Bhagavad Gita by Vyasa

• Twisting the wording of a deal is its own kind of injustice. A general who agreed to a 30-day truce raided the enemy’s fields at night, because the deal said days. Romans already had a saying for this: “More law, less justice.”

  From On Duties by Cicero

• Pyrrhus beat the Romans at Asculum and lost most of his friends and officers doing it. When someone congratulated him, he answered “that one other such would utterly undo him.” A victory that costs this much is still called Pyrrhic.

  From Parallel Lives by Plutarch

• Faking carelessness is affectation too. A man who lets his cloak drop mid-dance to show he is not thinking about it is thinking about it harder than anyone. Overdoing carelessness spoils grace the same way overdoing care does.

  From The Book of the Courtier by Baldassare Castiglione

• If a move fails twice, don’t try it a third time. Change to something completely different. If the other side is expecting mountains, come at them like the sea.

  From The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi

• Caught in a sudden shower, you run along the road and duck under the eaves, and you still get wet. “When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking.” That holds for everything.

  From Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo

• One gentleman got through all the Latin poets in the bathroom. He tore a couple of pages at a time from a cheap Horace, read them there, and threw them away. Spare minutes of that kind add up quickly.

  From Letters to His Son by Lord Chesterfield

• You pack a trunk for Naples to escape your sadness and wake up there beside the same sad self. “My giant goes with me wherever I go.” Copying other people is travel of the mind, and it fails the same way. “Insist on yourself; never imitate.”

  From Self-Reliance and Other Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson