Nostos : Fri Jul 26 2024

Studying vs Living

Dear Friends,

It is one thing to study philosophy and another to live the philosopher’s life. I was a professor of classics for 15 years (when I stepped away to launch my financial planning firm), and I have been a business owner for five and a half.

There’s simply no comparison on the levels of mental strain between the two: owning a business punches your mind in the face every day while being a professor holds you sweetly forever. One is ideas in isolation. The other is ideas in action. One is show up and think. The other is show up and do. Words vs deeds.

When I present it to you that way, however, I am giving you a false dilemma. As if the life of thinking and the life of doing must always be mutually exclusive. What an amateur way to think. Yet, as a professor, I simply had no idea about how much deep thinking it took to run a business: “Hey, so what’s your vision, mission, ethics, and standards of communication in a nutshell?” Boom. Not as a neat theory for this weekend’s academic colloquium but as a firm foundation for earning more cash than you consume (the final best definition of a good business, cf. The Intelligent Investor).

Edit: One is show up and think for the semester then take the summer off. The other is show up and think and do without any break whatsoever seven days a week 365 days a year and there’s no guarantee that if you keep doing this it will even work.

There’s a secret that true philosophers know that wannabe philosophers don’t. Contemplation and action are spouses in humanity’s most erotically charged marriage. Ideas in action = hot, monogamous sex nightly. Plus, don’t you remember what Phoenix says to Achilles in Book 9 of Iliad? “Your dad sent me here with you, Achilles, to teach you all these things — to be a speaker of words and a doer of deeds.”

Achilles’ dad and Phoenix and Homer all know: the most complete human is a thinker and a doer.

Here is another thing: as a professor I just showed up and thought all day in a house built by someone else. I didn’t have to find my students, I didn’t have to train my colleagues, or manage the website, or fire a team member, or update the quickbooks, or renegotiate the lease, or unclog the toilets. As a business owner the house doesn’t even exist unless I build it. And rebuild it every day.

Since we are — indeed always have been and always will be — in a war of ideas, from the vantage point of a professor-turned-business-owner, I now marvel at the influence that the idea-talkers have while the idea-thinker-doers quietly put their heads down and relentlessly show up every day to add value to their communities. I am by no means expressing an anti-intellectual stance (seriously, I have a PhD in classics). I am making a point about the mental strain of the two, the marriage of thinking & doing, and the relative influence that professors versus business owners have on our collective conscious.

Example: Who more informs the intellectual frameworks from which our nation’s school teachers teach: college professors or small business owners? Ideas in isolation or ideas in action?

Cheers — Here’s to the quiet collection of Homerically thoughtful doers whose contribution to a free and virtuous society basically goes unnoticed.

In Ocean Grove, the teens performed this year’s Teen Show, Newsies, last night in the Youth Temple. They will do it again tonight. It’s probably sold out, but my 13 year old son, Hayden, says it was “amazing,” so it’s also worth checking for tickets. My oldest son, Isaac, plays a thug.

Mrs. J. A., beloved wife, grandmother, mother, and sister, rented a condo on Ocean Pathway this summer for the entire month of July, at $25,000, in order to give her ailing husband some final joyful moments in Ocean Grove. He died in June, before every sunrise of July.

Across town there stands empty a beautiful, iconic Victorian home, palette of pinks and greens, four epic stories, valued at well over $1 million, silent and paint now peeling, stuck in a divorce. Five enchanting children, none of whose wispy voices echo on the stairwells or in the hallways. 

It is one thing to study philosophy and another to live the philosopher’s life. That life might be aided by the external beauty of a city by the sea — such as our Ocean Grove — but what happens when a beloved husband dies before the July sunrise or a nasty divorce rips the paint off a once vibrant Victorian gem?

Here is what happens: we stop studying philosophy and start living it. We learn that the philosopher’s life is an internal life, first and foremost. It happens in the human mind. Thus Socrates speaks of the soul (ψυχή, psyche) in Plato’s Apology and Jesus speaks of the heart (καρδία, kardia) in Matthew’s Gospel.

When was the last time you read those two works? What if we read them again this summer — they can be read in one sitting each — noticing Socrates on the psyche and Jesus on the kardia?

The purpose of a university is to nurture citizens by curating a place for teaching and learning. The purpose of a business is to earn money for its owners by doing good for its customers. The purpose of a coffeehouse is to do both.

To that end we work. Til next week,

~ Joey