spoiler visualizarAllan 23/09/2018
Review of 12 Rules For Life – An Antidote to Chaos
September, 23rd 2018 –
Reading more books was one of our family’s 2018 New Year’s resolution; having almost ¾ of 2018 behind I have finally completed my first book of the year… far, very far behind the little one who had planned to read 10 chapter books throughout the year, but so far have been doubling its target every time she reaches the former one and has now reached the astonishing mark of reading 43 chapter books with more than 100 pages over the past 9 months. As someone who loves books, as does her mom, I couldn’t be more proud of her achievement and interest in books – a habit that I truly hope she can maintain over the years. Positive incentive has also been playing its role with our agreement of $4 for each 100 pages she reads – just an extra bonus as she says, but sure enough I couldn’t find a better investment on the market.
Giving that this is a space on Skoob.com.br to share book’s reviews; these are my notes from reading 12 Rules For Life – An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson. Second book written by this Canadian physiologist who shares his wisdom based on social studies and his clinical practices. It’s interesting to notice that this 400-page book was based on a post he replied in Quora and has become a hit on social development discussions. Below you will find the key aspects that I’ve found on each of Peterson’s rules, a straight copy (with minor adjusts) from passages in the book:
RULE 1: STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK - accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eye wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality. It means withstanding the ensuing uncertainty, and establishing, in consequence, a better, more meaningful and more productive order. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had right to them – at least the same right as others.
RULE 2: TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING: consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want”. It is also not “what would make you happy”. Every time you give a child something sweet, you make that child happy. That does not mean that you should do nothing for children except feed them candy. You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity – able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it is acceptable to do anything less for yourself? You need to consider the future and think, “What might my life looks like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?” You need to know where you are, so you can start to chart your course. You need to know who you are, so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know where you are going, so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world. Define who you are, Refine your personality, and Choose your destination and Articulate your Being.
RULE 3: MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU: if you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not. This will help bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the most appropriate and careful manner. People who are not aiming up will do the opposite. They will offer a former smoker a cigarette and former alcoholic a beer. They will become jealous when you succeed, or do something pristine. They will withdraw their presence or support, or actively punish you for it. They will over-ride your accomplishment with a past action, real or imaginary, of their own. Maybe they are trying to test you, to see if your resolve is real, to see if you are genuine. But mostly they are dragging you down because your new improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light.
RULE 4: COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY: much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived. To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully. Pay attention. Focus on your surroundings, physical and psychological. Notice something that bothers you, that concerns you; aim lower, search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day.
Religious is about proper behavior; a genuine religious acolyte isn’t trying to formulate accurate ideas about the objective nature of the world. It may be the case that “good” means nothing but “obedient”- event blindly obedience. You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored. You will not know what to target, and you won’t fly straight, even if you somehow get your aim right. If there is nothing to aim for, you will be lost. Everything you value is a product of unimaginably lengthy developmental processes, personal, cultural, and biological.
RULE 5: DO NOT YOUR CHILDREN DO ANYTHING THAT MAKES YOU DISLIKE THEM: parents are arbiters of society, they teach children how to behave so that other people will be able to interact meaningfully and productively with them. It is an act of responsibility to discipline a child. Correction also helps the child learn that hitting others is a sub-optimal social strategy. Without correction, no child is going to undergo the effortful process of organizing and regulating their impulses, so that those impulses can coexist, without conflict, within the psyche of the child, and in the broader social world. When someone does something you are trying to get them to do, reward them. Negative emotions, like their positive counterparts, help us learn. We need to learn, because we are stupid, easily damaged, and we can die. In that manner, negative emotions, for all their unpleasantness, protect us. We feel hurt and scared and ashamed and disgusted so we can avoid damage. We feel more negative about a loss of a given size than we feel good about the same-sized gain. Pain is more potent than pleasure, and anxiety more than hope. Satisfaction (satiation) tells us what we did was good, while hope (incentive reward) indicates that something pleasurable is on the way. Pain hurts us, so we won’t repeat actions that produced personal damage or social isolation. Anxiety makes us stay away from hurtful people and bad places so we don’t have to feel pain. We therefore do our children a disservice by failing to use whatever is available to help them learn, including negative emotions, even though such use should occur in the most merciful possible manner. Act so that other people are happy you’re around, so that people will want you around. Raising young children is demanding and exhausting, because of this it’s easy for a parent to make a mistake. Disciplinary principle: 1) limit the rules; 2) use minimum necessary force; 3) parents should come in pair; 4) parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry, and deceitful.
RULE 6: SET YOUR HOUSE IN PERFECT ORDER BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE THE WORLD: we build structures to live in; we build families, and states, and countries; we abstract the principles upon which those structures are founded and formulate systems of belief. But success makes us complacent; we forget to pay attention. We take what we have for granted. We turn a blind eye; we fail to notice that things are changing, or that corruption is taking root. And everything falls apart. Is that the fault of reality – of God? Or do things fall apart because we have not paid sufficient attention? A natural disaster may be an act of God, but failure to prepare when the necessity for preparation is well known – that’s a sin. The ancient Jews always blamed themselves when things fell apart. They acted as if God’s goodness – the goodness of reality – was axiomatic, and took responsibility for their own failure. That’s insanely responsible. But the alternative is to judge reality as insufficient, to criticize Being itself, and to sink into resentment and the desire for revenge. If you are suffering – well, that’s the norm. People are limited and life is tragic. Consider your circumstances. Start small. Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you? Are you working hard on your career, or even your job, or are you letting bitterness and resentment hold you back and drag you down? Have you made peace with your brother? Are you treating your spouse and your children with dignity and respect? Do you have habits that are destroying your health and well-being? Are you truly shouldering your responsibilities? Have you said what you need to say to your friends and family members? Are there things that you could do, that you know you could do, that would make things around you better? If the answer is no, for any one of these questions, start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know that what you are doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is. Inopportune questions can confuse, without enlightening, as well as deflecting you from action. Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only things that you could speak of with honor. Let your own soul guide you. Who knows what existence might be like if we all decided to strive for the best?
RULE 7: PURSUE WHAT IS MEANINGFUL (NOT WHAT IS EXPENDIIENT) – meaning is the ultimate balance between, on the one hand, the chaos of transformation and possibility and on the other, the discipline of pristine order, whose purpose is to produce out of the attendant chaos a new order that will be even more immaculate, and capable of bringing forth a still more balanced and produce chaos and order. Meaning is the Way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by Love and speaking Truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that. If you cease to utter falsehoods and live according to the dictates of your conscience, you can maintain your nobility, even when facing the ultimate threat; if you abide, truthfully and courageously, by the highest of ideals, you will be provided with more security and strength than will be offered by any short-sighted concentration on your own safety; if you live properly, fully, you can discover meaning so profound that it protects you even from the fear of death. “No tree can grow to Heaven, unless its roots reach down to Hell” – Carl Gustav Jung, psychoanalyst. Christ responds to the first temptation by saying, “One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God.”- it means that even under conditions of extreme privation there are more important things than food; bread is of little use to the man who has betrayed his soul, even if he is currently starving. Christ aims at something higher, at the description of a mode of Being that would finally and forever solve the problem of hunger. That would require each and every person to live, and produce, and sacrifice, and speak, and share in a manner that would permanently render the privation of hunger a thing of the past. Christianity achieved the well-night impossible; the Christian doctrine elevated the individual soul, placing slave and master and commoner and nobleman alike on the same metaphysical footing, rendering them equal before God and the law. Christianity insisted that even the king was only one among many. It is in fact nothing short of a miracle (and we should keep this fact firmly before our eyes) that the hierarchical slave-based societies of our ancestors reorganized themselves, under the sway of an ethical/religious revelation, such that the ownership and absolute domination of another person came to be viewed as wrong. It would do us well to remember that the immediate utility of slavery is obvious, and that the argument that the strong should dominate the weak is compelling, convenient and eminently practical (at least for the strong). This means that a revolutionary critique of everything slave-owning societies valued was necessary before the practice could be even questioned, let alone halted. Christianity made explicit the surprising claim that even the lowliest person had rights, genuine rights – ant that sovereign and state were morally charged, at a fundamental level, to recognize those rights. We fail to understand how difficult such an idea is to grasp; we forget that the opposite was self-evident throughout most of human history. We think that it is the desire to enslave and dominate that requires explanation; we have it backwards, yet again. This is not to say that Christianity was without its problems, but it is more appropriate to note that they were the sort of problems that emerge only after an entirely different set of more serious problems been solved. The society produced by Christianity was far less barbaric than the pagan – even the Roman ones it replaced. It demanded that even a society’s enemies be regarded as human, and separated church from state, so that all-too-human emperors could no longer claim the veneration due to gods. All of this was asking the impossible: but it happened. At the Christian revolution progressed, however, the impossible problems it had solved disappeared from view. That’s what happens to problems that are solved. And after the solution was implemented, even the fact that such problems had ever existed disappeared from view. Then and only then could the problems that remained, less amenable to quick solution by Christian doctrine, come to occupy a central place in the consciousness of the West. The dogmatic structure of the Church was a necessary disciplinary structure; a long period of unfreedom – adherence to a singular interpretive structure – is necessary for the development of a free mind. It was in the aftermath of God’s death that the great collective horrors of Communism and Fascism sprang forth – we cannot invent our own values, because we cannot merely impose what we believe on our souls. An idea that grips a person is alive; an idea has an aim, it wants something, it posits a value structure; an idea believes that what it is aiming for is better than what it has now. It reduces the world to those things that aid or impede its realization, and it reduces everything else to irrelevance. An idea is a personality, not a fact. Aim up, pay attention, fix what you can fix, don’t be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency – your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred. Consider the murderousness of your own spirit before you dare accuse others, and before you attempt to repair the fabric of the world. Maybe it’s not the world that’s at fault. Maybe it’s you. You’ve failed to make the mark. You’ve missed the target. You have fallen short of the glory of God. You’ve sinned. And all of that is your contribution to the insufficiency and evil of the world. And, above all, don’t lie. Don’t lie about anything, ever. Lying leads to Hell. It was the great and the small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.
RULE 8: TELL THE TRUTH – OR, AT LEAST, DON’T LIE: For the big lie, you first need the little lie. if you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hid, but there will be no place left to hide. Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known. “For what shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?” Lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other. We must make decisions, here and now, even though the best means and the best goals can never be discerned with certainty. An aim, an ambition, provides the structure necessary for action. An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present, and a framework, within which all things can be evaluated. An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit. Thus, we have to think, and plan, and limit, and posit, in order to live at all. How then to envision the future, and establish our direction, without falling prey to the temptation of totalitarian certainty? It is reasonable to do what other people have always done, unless we have a very good reason not to. That is how culture maintains itself. But culture is always in a near-dead state, even though it was established by the spirit of great people in the past. But the present is not the past, the wisdom of the past thus deteriorates, or becomes outdated, in proportion to the genuine difference between the conditions of the present and the past. Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. If you pay attention, when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. If you tell the truth, your values transform as you progress, your soul will reject the tyranny of your will. Everyone needs a concrete, specific goals – an ambition, and a purpose – to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. Make your criteria for failure and success timely and clear. Without attention, culture degenerates and dies, and evil prevails. Hell comes when lies have destroyed the relationship between individuals or state and reality itself. Thing fall apart. Life degenerates. Everything becomes frustration and disappointment. Hope consistently betrays. Tortured by constant failure, the individual becomes bitter. Disappointment and failure amalgamate, and produce a fantasy: the world is bent on my personal suffering, my particular undoing, my destruction. I need, I deserve, I must have – my revenge. That is the gateway to Hell. To tell the truth is to bring the most habitable reality into Being. Truth makes the past tryly past, and makes the best use of the future’s possibilities. It’s the light in the darkness. If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth; that is what makes it Paradise.
RULE 9: ASSUME THAT THE PERSON YOU ARE LISTENING TO MIGHT KNOW SOMETHING YOU DON’T: people are often willing to produce a lot of collateral damage if they can retain their theory. Memory is not a description of the objective past. Memory is a tool, is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That is the purpose of memory – it’s not “to remember the past”; it is to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over. Thinking is listening to yourself, it is an internal dialogue between two or more views of the world. When people think, they simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. If they do a good job of simulating, they can figure out what stupid things they shouldn’t do. Then they cannot do them. Then they don’t have to suffer the consequences. That is the purpose of thinking. A listening person is your collaborator and your opponent, a listening person test your talking. When a genuine listening conversation is taking place, one person at a time has the floor, and everyone else is listening. People organize their brains with conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. The input of the community is required for the integrity of the individual psyche (soul). It takes a village to organize a mind. Much of what we consider healthy mental function is the result of our ability to use the reactions of others to keep our complex selves functional. We outsource the problem of our sanity. A good lecturer is not only delivering facts, but also telling stories about those facts, pitching them precisely to the level of the audience’s comprehension, gauging that by the interest they are showing. Listen to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.
RULE 10: BE PRECISE IN YOUR SPEECH: when things fall apart, and chaos re-emerges, we can give structure to it, and re-establish order, through our speech. If we speak carefully and precisely, we can sort things out, and put them in their proper place, and set a new goal, and navigate to it – often communally. If we speak carelessly and imprecisely, however, things remain vague. The destination remains unproclaimed. The fog of uncertainty does not lift, and there is no negotiating through the world. When we look at the world, we perceive only what is enough for our plans and actions to work and for us to get by. What we inhabit, then, is this “enough”. That is a radical, functional, unconscious simplification of the world – and it’s almost impossible for us not to mistake it for the world itself. The objects we see exist in a complex, multi-dimensional relationship to one another, not as self-evidently separate, bounded, independent objects. We perceive not the objects, but their functional utility and, in doing so, we make them sufficiently simple for sufficient understanding. It is for this reason that we must be precise in our aim. Absent that, we drown in the complexity of the world. Our capacity for identification is something that manifests itself at every level of our Being; fans take the victories and defeats of their teams very personally, even wearing the jerseys of their heroes, often celebrating their wins and losses more than any such events that “actually” occur in their day-to-day lives. To the degree that we are patriotic, similarly, our country is not just important to us. It is us. We might even sacrifice our entire smaller individual selves, in battle, to maintain the integrity of our country. For much of history, such willingness to die has been regarded as something admirable and courageous, as part of human duty. Paradoxically, that is a direct consequence not of our aggression but of our extreme sociability and willingness to cooperate. Strangely enough, despite our belief in the permanent immutability of the past, the past is not necessarily what it was, even though it has already been. The present is chaotic and indeterminate. The grounds shifts continually around our feet. Equally, the future, not yet here, changes into something it was not supposed to be. Everything is intricate beyond imagining. Everything is affected by everything else. We perceive a very narrow slide of a causally interconnected matrix, although we strive with all our might to avoid being confronted by knowledge of that narrowness. Chaos emerges in a household, bit by bit. Mutual unhappiness and resentment pile up. Everything untidy is swept under the rug, where the dragon feasts on the crumbs. But no one says anything, as the shared society and negotiated order of the household reveals itself as inadequate, or disintegrates, in the face of the unexpected and threatening. Everybody whistles in the dark, instead. Communication would require admission of terrible emotions: resentment, terror, loneliness, despair, jealousy, frustration, hatred, boredom. Moment by moment, it’s easier to keep the peace, but in the background the dragon grows. It lifts the very household from its foundations. When things collapse around us our perception disappears, and we act. Don’t even underestimate the destructive power of sins of omissions. Maybe the physical intimacy a couple undoubtedly shared should have been matched, as if often is not, by a corresponding psychological intimacy. The escape from tyranny is often followed not by Paradise, but by a sojourn in the desert, aimless, confused and deprived. Living things die, after all, without attention. Life is indistinguishable from effortful maintenance. No one finds a match so perfect that the need for continued attention and work vanishes. In truth, what you need after all is someone exactly as imperfect as you. Ignored reality transforms itself (reverts back) into the great Goddess of Chaos, the great reptilian Monster of the Unknown. Be careful with what you tell yourself and others about what you have done, what you are doing, and where you are doing. Search for the correct words. Organize those words into the correct sentences, and those sentences into the correct paragraphs. If you leave things vague, then you will never know what is one thing and what is another. Everything will bleed into everything else. This makes the world too complex to be managed. You have to consciously define the topic of a conversation, particularly when it is difficult – or it becomes about everything and everything is too much. No one can have a discussion about “everything”. You must determine where you have been in your life, so that you can know where you are now. If you don’t know where you are, precisely, then you could be anywhere. Anywhere is too many places to be, and some of those places are very bad. You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that directions. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with. Pay attention. Note your errors. Articulate them. Strive to correct them. That is how you discover the meaning of your life. That will protect you from the tragedy of your life. Confront the chaos of Being. Take aim against a sea of troubles. Specify your destination, and chart your course. Admit to what you want. Tell those around you who you are. Narrow, and gaze attentively, and move forward, forthrightly.
RULE 11: DO NOT BOTHER CHILDREN WHEN THEY ARE SKATEBOARDING: kids need playgrounds dangerous enough to remain challenging. People, including children don’t seek to minimize risk. They seek to optimize it. If things are made too safe, people start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again. We’re hard-wired to enjoy risk (some of us more than others). We feel invigorated and excited when we work to optimize our future performance, while playing in the present. Overprotected, we will fail when something dangerous, unexpected and full of opportunity suddenly makes its appearance, as it inevitably will. When someone claims to be acting from the highest principles, for the good of others, there is no reason to assume that the person’s motives are genuine. People motivated to make things better usually aren’t concerned with changing other people – or, if they are, they take responsibility for making the same changes to themselves (and first). (pg. 302) Culture is an oppressive structure. It’s always been that way. It’s a fundamental, universal existential reality, but to think about culture only as oppressive is ignorant and ungrateful, as well as dangerous. Any hierarchy creates winners and losers. The winners are, of course, more likely to justify the hierarchy and the losers to criticize it. But (1) the collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy (as some will be better and some worse at that pursuit not matter what it is) and (2) it is the pursuit of goals that in large part lends life its sustaining meaning. We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued. The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is difference in outcome. Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself – and then there would be nothing worth living for. We might instead note with gratitude that a complex, sophisticated culture allows for many games and many successful players, and that a well-structured culture allows the individuals that compose it to play and to win, in many different fashions. Power is a fundamental motivational force; people compete to rise to the top, and they care where they are in dominance hierarchies. But the fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role. The tendency for valuable goods to distribute themselves with pronounced inequality constitutes an ever-present threat to the stability of society. We don’t know how to redistribute wealth without introducing a whole host of other problems. It certainly is the case that forced redistribution, in the name of utopian equality, is a cure to shame the disease. In societies that are well-functioning, competence not power, is a prime determiner of status. Competence. Ability. Skill. Not power. Excessively agreeable people should note the emergence of resentment, a very toxic emotion. There are only two major reasons for resentment: being taken advantage of , or whiny refusal to adopt responsibility and grow up. It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would like them to do instead of what they have done or currently are doing – assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs – not even you. If they’re healthy, women don’t want boys. They want men; they want someone to contend with, someone to grapple with. If they are tough, they want someone tougher. If they are smart, they want someone smarter. They desire someone who brings to the table something they can’t already provide. This often makes it hard for tough, smart, attractive women to find mates: there just aren’t that many men around who can outclass them enough to be considered desirable. If you think tough men are dangerous, wait until you see what weak men are capable of.
RULE 12: PET A CAT WHEN YOU ENCOUNTER ONE ON THE STREET: Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent. What does such a Being lack? The answer? Limitation. If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has. And it is for this reason, so the story goes, that God created man. No limitation, no story. No story, no Being. When dealing with problems, set aside some time to talk and to think about the illness or other crisis and how it should be managed every day. Do not talk or think about it otherwise. If you do not limit its effect, you will become exhausted, and everything will spiral into the ground. Conserve your strength, you are in a war, not a battle, and a war is composed of many battles. Put the things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good better. It’s much easier to turn your attention away from the truth and remain willfully blind. But it’s at such a point that you must decide whether you want to be right or you want to have peace. You must decide whether to insist upon the absolute correctness of your view, or to listen and negotiate. You don’t get peace by being right. You just get to be right, while your partner gets to be wrong – defeated and wrong. Do that then thousand times and your marriage will be over (or you will wish it was). Orient yourself properly, then – and only then – concentrate on the day. Set your sights at the Good, the Beautiful, and the True, and then focus pointedly and carefully on the concerns of each moment. Aim continually at Heaven while you work diligently on Earth. Attend fully to the future, in that manner, while attending fully to the present. Then you have the best chance of perfecting both.