The Sovereign Artist—Episode #9
How to Measure Wealth & The Power of Silence and Boredom & Why We Read Books & The Courage to Live a Simple Life & more
Hello friends,
Vizi here. GM from Transylvania 🌅
Believe it or not—I’m launching my book next week. I’ve been working on this project—at a leisurely pace and only when I felt inspired—for seven years in total. I refused to consider this “work” and, as a result, everything felt like play.
The Sovereign Artist. Meditations on Lifestyle Design. June 12. Live on Amazon. Paperback & Hardcover.
This is the last episode where I’m writing this book in public. In the next episodes, I will market it in public. And after a few months, I’ll start writing my next book in public.
Here are 7 aphorisms and 1 essay from my upcoming book.
Aphorisms
You’re free if and only if you failed to make the transition from the playground to the workplace.
Love buys you time; reading helps you travel in time; play makes you forget about time; meditation teaches you to control time; and employment wastes your time.
A life of endless optionality is a life devoid of responsibility—precisely what enables freedom. Freedom starts with optionality and materializes with commitment.
You need silence to imagine a brighter future. Your mind requires boredom to carve out a destiny for yourself. In a world full of distractions, boredom is no longer a mere “productivity hack”—it’s one of the highest virtues.
Working less is not laziness. Doing less meaningful work is not laziness. Laziness is enduring an existence you dislike. Contrary to popular belief, working “hard” and being “busy” all the time is a form of laziness—lazy strategic thinking and management skills.
Measure wealth in love, freedom, and integrity rather than money, comfort, and material possessions. By thinking all the time about money, you lose all the spiritual advantages of self-sufficiency. Learn to be happy before you get rich.
We read books to find out what we already know but find it hard to express. The expression of ideas, not ideas per se, is what we seek when reading books.
The Courage to Live a Simple Life
Having analyzed a local shop owner, my mind got clear. She often wakes up around 5:00 AM, drinks a cup of coffee, prepares breakfast for her children, cleans up the house just enough to keep it in reasonable order, and goes to work around 7:30 AM.
She’s been doing her job responsibly and cheerfully since she was a very young lady; she managed to maintain a good-enough relationship with her husband over many years despite periods of extreme difficulty; and even though she doesn’t come from a rich and supportive family, she’s been keeping her small business alive for almost a decade, invariably defying the disgusting Romanian authorities that have tried to close it down multiple times.
Surveying my own life, I realized that I fall short of her, my power of handling daily life not being such. Although anyone has troubles—at home, at work, or inescapably existential—and she is no exception, she confronts them with great diligence and inner strength. The alchemy may lie in developing strong respect for the often unpleasant randomness of daily life. She’s a warrior invisible to the modern eye… She doesn’t fit the standard definition for what courage is supposed to look like. Courage for her is a habit, not a once-in-a-lifetime remarkable act. We are blind to the nuances of courage because we are brought up to only attribute it to the acts of a few historical figures.
Courage is much more about acting well in our daily challenges rather than extraordinary circumstances.
Many kings, queens, generals, and soldiers deserve merits for acting heroically throughout history. There’s a strong reason to admire their distinguished actions. Yet those who crafted the art of living—of coping with their daily challenges in a calm, sustained, and cheerful manner—deserve equal admiration, respect, and prestige.
There’s immense skill involved in doing a fair business, raising your children to be reasonable adults, taking care of your garden, or keeping your house clean and tidy—in doing all of these while staying sane, joyful, and healthy.
“Ordinary life is heroic in its own way,” Alain de Botton argues, “because ordinary things are far from easy to manage.” It’s true that not any ordinary act is courageous. But there are many which we tend to ignore that are so. These activities are impatiently waiting to be addressed and adopted in order to teach everyone what courage looks like on a daily basis.
There is much to learn from our lives if we decide to put on the right glasses and see that many of our ordinary activities hold, in fact, extraordinary qualities.
Wrapping up...
I’m looking forward to hearing your feedback about my book! Send me a message on Instagram or Twitter as soon as you have an opinion about it—I’ll follow you back. Or send me an email.
The Sovereign Artist. Meditations on Lifestyle Design. June 12. Live on Amazon. Paperback & Hardcover.
Thank you for your time,
Vizi Andrei