YouSaid · the spoken record

Pico Iyer

lines on the record: 117
first: 2023-07-09
most recent: 2023-07-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Yes, and I think it's the core of Buddhism too. It's exactly what the Dalai Lama is saying. And what I like about that, again, is, as you said, because it's universal, it's not tethered to any single religion or ideology. And all those religions often add us up into us versus them. But this is something that, as you say, through 3,000 years, almost anybody To think about it, has come up with the same conclusion. I spend a lot of time still reading Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor who was there on the battlefield for however many years. And this is exactly what he was saying too. I mean, I think he might have learned it from Epictetus, but exactly the same thing from every direction that we're getting.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By concentrating on this little cat who was gasping for breath in my lap, I wasn't sitting there, thinking as otherwise I would have been done. Wow, you know, am I ever going to get out of this? So that flame came within two feet. And so just as a very practical thing, as well as perhaps a moral thing, I was so glad to hear that from. And I say all this because I know when I listen to you and Guy talk, you were talking really about this kind of stuff more than the stock market. And I think that's kind of at the heart of your work. But I think the investors you chose to spotlight are people. Who are thinking about these essential things? Well, like Howard Marx.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But the right thing to hear. And my Catholic friend from the monastery, also when the pandemic broke out, sent a message saying, remember the best cure for anxiety is taking care of others, which is such a simple thing, but so easy to forget when we're scared and lost and don't know what's going to happen tomorrow or the next many tomorrows. And just remembering that if you have somebody to look after, suddenly you're not caught up in that beehive of worries in your head. When I was fleeing the house that was on fire and stuck inside the flames for three hours, in retrospect, I think the thing that really helped me was I was trying to save my mother's cat. So all my concentration was making sure this cat doesn't stop breathing because if she did, my life would not be worth living, even if I escaped my fire. My mother would be so distraught.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think East Asia is specifically wise about this. And I think it might have been Confucius or one of those wise Chinese people who said something like, if you're really happy right now, don't get overexcited because it's not going to last. And if you're really stressed, don't get too down because that's not going to last either. And again, soon after the pandemic broke out, my Buddhist friends would send me a message just saying this too shall pass.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the outset, he cites how researchers have found that if somebody suddenly wins the lottery, when you go back to him a year later, his life is actually no better than before because he's moved into a neighborhood where he's not comfortable, he doesn't know who his friends are, he's spending all his time with lawyers. He's really beset by all these obligations. And if suddenly somebody is suddenly rendered paraplegic in a car accident and you go and see her a year later, she's actually no more depressed than she ever was. And in some cases, you know, realizing her potential and surrounded by friends and doing things she might never have done otherwise. And it goes to what we've been saying about this sort of external ledger by which the world sometimes measures these things and the inner account book by which we feel that there's a different set of values and we come to see how basically our peace of mind or our happiness or joy may not be related to the circumstances of our lives. And I think, you know, again, this is.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes it so. And just the sense that happiness is not dependent on circumstance. In other words, I've heard monks say that the definition of joy is a feeling of repletion and confidence that has nothing to do with your circumstances. You may be dying of cancer. Your house may have been burnt down. Putin may be attacking Ukraine, but you still have this sense that ultimately there's meaning and beauty in the world. And that's not the kind of happiness that comes from a sudden high or a moment of beauty. It's something that can endure through the flames. And you probably know, I remember a few years ago, I read this wonderful book by Matthew Ricard, another Buddhist.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Years on. I still remember I wrote a little book review, sent it off from here in Japan or I think London, where you were. And you brought a suggestion, you made a suggestion. Would you like to add to this piece a sentence from Milton? The mind is a place in itself can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell. And it's such a deep and beautiful sentence. And not only did I put it in that piece, it's really remained with me ever since as kind of a guide for life. It's the same thing you get, I remember, as a kid, I had to read Hamlet and you read, there's nothing good or bad but thinking.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The praise for the ability to be strong, even though there are no answers coming from the heavens. And I think what you wonderfully, you know, whenever I have a friend who's suffering, who's sick or who's depressed or worried or scared, the one medicine I will share with that friend is Zenmeind Beginner's Mind. I mean, because it's just full of that bottomless wisdom delivered with absolute clarity. It runs like a sort of mountain stream. And I think it's because that we hear sometimes in Japan this phrase that life is about joyful participation in a world of sorrows. So it's a very Buddhist idea, the notion that suffering is always going to be there, sickness, old age, and death are part of every life, but none of that precludes wonder, hope and joy. And that, you know, I must say I'll embarrass you here, William, because we've only met twice briefly, but we work together for a little while when you were my editor at time.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I mean, I think in your book or somewhere, Sir John Templeton talks about long-term thinking too, not being swayed by the winds of fashion and change if you're an investor, because the only way to come out ahead is to realize that everything's going to pass. And as you say, I think that's so true to every great tradition. I'm not a Zen student, unlike Howard Marks. But, you know, the image of the Buddha often is sitting absolutely calm in the midst of flames. I've heard that Pope Francis exactly the same thing, really. When he prays, He doesn't pray for an answer to life's many questions and problems. He prays for the strength and confidence to live in a world without answers.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His one obligation is to protect his brothers by ensuring there are no embers and sparks, but at the same time at an inner level, he knows his one obligation is to keep the fires alive inside himself. His job as a monk is only to be Flame, as it were, to be burning with devotion and obedience and surrender. So it's this fascinating thing whereby you're trying to deal with the impermanence in the world, but perhaps the only thing you have to bring into it is the fire within you, which is something that the Buddha too surely understood. But that's a long digression. But your questions are so rich that giving me lots of entry points.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm just sending to the publishers now more or less completed is entirely about my 100 retreats with the monks and fire, which has always encircling their monastery too. And the haunting thing about fire and Thomas Merton, whom you mentioned, he has this wonderful passage called Fire Watch at the end of his book, The Sign of Journalist, in which his duty one evening in the monastery of Gethsemane in Kentucky is to walk around in the dark while the monks are sleeping to make sure there's no fire because it's a wooden building and it's very susceptible to fire. So he's going from room to room to room with his flashlight in the absolute dark on the eve of Independence Day, July the 4th, through the room where all the banned books are kept, some of which he's probably written, certainly he's read, through the furnace room, through all the places.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they weren't shocked by real life, and they weren't thinking, whoa, what's happened? The beautiful lives we planned are suddenly being upended because they're used to wars and earthquakes. And as you said, fire and plague through many centuries now. And when I went back to California, there was a real sense of shock. What's happened? This isn't what we expected. And a lot of panic and a lot of rage. And flying from Osaka Airport to Los Angeles and only nine hours in air, but it was leaving a place of almost absolute calm to a place of absolute terror and despair and panic. And it really hit me that how we work with reality is going to, that's really how it's going to determine how we live our lives and that reality can't be taken as a shock or as an aberration. I will also say parenthetically, it's embarrassing how well you know my work because”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Beautiful, exactly. And you know, right all the way through the pandemic, I was going back and forth every few weeks between Japan and California. And I think what I was noticing as much as anything was the difference between a very old and seasoned culture that's been around 1400 years and a rather young one that's in some ways rooted in the future tense in possibility and what's going to happen but doesn't have a deep past because just as you said reality is not an aberration or an insult or an exception And so everything in Japan throughout the pandemic was continuing exactly as normal. Kids were going to school, people were going to the office, trains and elevators were as crowded as they always have been the government announced a state of emergency and yet everything was at normal as if to say life as it always is is a state of emergency. To this day probably 70% of the people around me in Japan are masked so they certainly taking all the precautions.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Earthquake, or it could just be a car coming at high speed towards you, the wrong side of the road, or a bad diagnosis. But one way or another, and maybe this is my age speaking a little, I think it's a useful exercise to think if suddenly I only had a little time, what would I want to do with it? Or if suddenly my life were upended, what is it that I would cherish? So I can't really answer your question so much as applaud it and say maybe I feel that that's the question we should all be asking ourselves.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Other people, I think my mother might have kept her photographs as well as her jewelry in the bank, which makes absolute sense to me. So again, I don't think there's a right answer, but I think it's a really useful question to ask, which is why I shared it with that little circle at Ted. And just, again, that sense that we know things intuitively, but unless we actually stop to ask ourselves that, we get caught up in the rush and then life catches us by surprise. Because it always will. You know, you've read my books more closely than anyone I can imagine. And I'm so touched because that's the ultimate sort of compliment and act of generosity. And the first person who's noticed that they all keep on coming back to that fire, which is partly a metaphor for a world on fire, where a lot of our certainties are being burnt up, but also a way of saying that whoever you are, you're going to face some of these challenges in life. It could be a typhoon or a flood or a...”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the only way I live differently since the far than before, and this is a bit embarrassing, is I keep all my notes in a safety deposit box in the bank, because they're still handwritten, and they seem to me the one indispensable thing. So it's not because I make my living by being a writer, but more because I feel that's my life.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Picked up in Japan because I had begun spending time there from the 17th century at Haiku, which just said, my house burnt down, I can now see better the rising moon. So the very night when I lost everything in the world, something in me, probably wiser than I am, realized not everything was lost, certain things would be gained, and actually the main thing I would gain was a sense of priority. Literally that night I thought about that poem. I've lost everything I can now really see what's important”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you know, I stuck there for three hours and smoke was so intense that no fire truck could come up and make contact with me. And I could hear helicopters above, but they couldn't see me and I couldn't see them. Finally, after three hours of firetruck came up and told me it was safe to drive down. So I drove down through what looked like what I associated with scenes from the Vietnam War, you know, houses exploding all over the place, cars smoldering, fires on every side. I mean, I went downtown and I bought a toothbrush, which was the only thing I had in the world at that point. And then I went to sleep on a friend's floor. But before I went to sleep because my job then was partly working for Time magazine, I asked if my friend, if I could use his computer. And I filed a report. So three hours after escaping the fire, I filed a report on this major news event for which I'd had a front seat view. And I ended my little piece with a poem that I'd”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's a wise man, he said, actually, you know, not having notes may liberate you. So writing much more deeply from your heart and from your memory, from imagination. And then lacking a physical home in California, I suddenly began to think, well, maybe I should spend more time in the place that really feels like my true home, which is Japan. And now I'm pretty much here all the time. And so in so many ways, that seeming catastrophe opened doors and windows that might otherwise have been closed for a long time, perhaps forever. And I was thinking about it a lot during the pandemic because the pandemic was closing so many doors and so many lives, but at the same time it was opening little windows for possibility, at least for me, that otherwise I might never have glimpsed and moving me to live in better ways than I had been beforehand. And I suppose the one other interesting thing about the fire, especially given our connection, is that soon”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“California history at the time, and it's broken about just up the road from us. So, of course, it was a shock. And so we lost every last thing in the world, in my case, all my handwritten notes for my next eight years of writing, probably my next three books. In my parents' case, all the photos, their mementos, their keepsakes from 60 years. But the interesting thing, looking back on it, was that months later, after adjusting to circumstances, when the insurance company came along and said, well, we have some money and you can replace your goods. Of course, that really did make me understand. I didn't need 90% of the books and clothes and furniture I'd accumulated. I could live much more likely, which is really the way I'd always wanted to live. I called up my editor in New York or in London, actually, at the time, and I said, you know, all those books I was promising you, I can't offer them to you because all my notes are gone. And because he's a kind man, he commiserated for a while.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't have a huge interest in the world of investment, but I have a huge interest in the world of investors because they're wise people. Figured out how to live, not just in a monetary sense, but they got to where they are, not by chance and not by foolishness. And I think they have a lot to offer. And that's what your book is about. So yeah, in terms of the fire, I was sitting in my family house in the hills of California, and I saw this distant knife of orange cutting through a hillside. So I went downstairs to call the fire department. And then when I came upstairs again, five minutes later, literally our house was encircled by 70 foot flames, five stories high on all sides. So I grabbed my mother's cat, jumped into a car to try to escape, and then I was stuck on the mountain road for three hours underneath our house, saved only by a good Samaritan who had driven up with a water truck to be of assistance and then found himself stuck and saved us all by pointing with a little hose water at every roar of that approached us. It was the worst fire in...”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, again and again, William, you've asked exactly the question that's been coming up in my mind. It's as if we're sort of absolutely working in sync or telepathically. And just before I address the two things, designing a life is such a beautiful phrase. And it reminds me we put so much attention into how we'll furnish a house and how we'll make a house, which is we need to do, but even more essential is how will we furnish and make our lives. And when Guy Spear hosted you on his podcast, was one of the most lovely because humane conversations I've ever had. And I learned so much about investing from it. But I learned even more about friendship and generosity. So anyone who's listening to who hasn't heard you be a guest on his podcast”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm really in trouble. If my body is weak and my mind is strong, that's still not ideal. But at least the most important part there is functioning. So I suddenly realized, like many of us perhaps, I got myself into this silly double standard, whereas paying attention to what I put in my stomach and not in what I put into my soul. And I was making sure that my body parts were working well and not really thinking about my emotional and inner parts. And it speaks to the externalism that we were speaking about. It's so easy to turn to the exiles, which we need to do. But in the process to forget what really is essential. So I'm basically just saying the same thing about repainting the car instead of fixing the engine. But I think in a practical everyday sense, most of us can and probably do remake our habits accordingly to make sure we're not missing out on the most important stuff.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Minute he said that, of course, I signed up at the local health club, and really pretty much every day I can remember since I've put in my 30 minutes of exercise. And later I was back here in Japan and I was talking to a very wise, calm friend. And he said, look, you spend all your time answering emails and traveling around and doing your job. Have you never thought of just sitting quietly for 20 minutes every day in your room without your devices? And I said, no way, I can't. I don't have time. And later I realized what a silly and short-sighted answer that was because it was really like my saying, I don't have time to take my medicine. I don't have time to see the doctor. And I don't have time to be happy. And if I can make the time, 30 minutes or really, it's an hour in all to go to the health club every day, surely I can make enough time for the emotional health club or the mental health club, which is much more essential. Because if my body is strong, but my mind is weak,”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interaction that maybe I shouldn't just sleep past. So I do love the fact that as you perfectly put it, travel instantly puts the setting on all my senses to on. And really to function in the regular world the rest of the time, they often have to be off or on mute. But suddenly I'm wide open to the world and therefore getting much more out of the world. And I hope a more attentive person than I would be otherwise. And I was just thinking, I mean, just to go back to something I forgot to say a minute ago before we get on to travel, in terms of how one spends one's day and how one invests one's time, which is the perfect verb. I remember some years ago, I went for my yearly checkup with my doctor and he looked at my blood test results and he said, you seem fine in most ways, but you're not getting any younger. So you have to do 30 minutes of intense cardiovascular activity every day.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, well, I feel in the normal course of life, I'm sleepwalking through life. And as you can tell when I describe my routine, I wake up and I pretty much know or hope and think I know how the day is going to be, which I need to be productive, but which is keeping me blinded and screened from the world in all kinds of ways. And the sad truth is that if I'm visiting my mother in California and I walk down the street when I'm in my regular life and a homeless person extends his hand towards me, I'll hurry past because I have somewhere I have to be at three o'clock and I can't daily dally. As soon as I'm on the streets of Haiti or India, so to speak, on holiday traveling, I have no commitments, is a feeling, I have no schedule, and I walk along that road and somebody comes up to me with a hand extended. Now I'll try to attend to that person. I'll try to engage with him in conversation. I'll actually stop to think, you know, what can I do? What's going on in his life?”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Younger brother who is quite an exalted Rinpoche Lama also was having dinner with him. And the Dalai Lama's brother said, look, every day you take Asha for 10 minutes. You can use that shower just for idly thinking about what happened to the Nicks last night or whether Taylor Swift's about to bring out a new record or not. Or you can think about what you're going to do in that day or what you really care about or whatever. But there are 10 blank minutes in a day and you can use them for good or you can just frit them in the way, but it's up to you. So it's the opposite of formal meditation, but it's a tiny example of a way in which we can really set the tone for everything that follows.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, that's being very generous, William. I would say one big advantage I have is that as a writer, my job is to sit at my desk without moving hour after hour and trying to see what lies on the far side of my projections and my chatter. And so my wife would say, oh yeah, Pika's never meditated, but all he does is sit still at his desk for hours each day. But yeah, and I think the other part of it is that there's no religious component. And I think maybe one reason that Ted asked me to write that book on stillness was precisely the fact that I don't have a religious background or orientation. I've never meditated in my life. And I know that meditation is a formal discipline can seem scary or imposing or uncomfortable to people. But just the equivalent, whatever it might be, which is often taken around or taking a walk or spending 20 minutes at the beginning every day just without your devices thinking about the day to come makes a world of difference. I remember once I was traveling with the Dalai Lama and his young”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In order to make their lives both happy and productive. So I wouldn't be surprised if at the TED conference where I last saw you among 1,800 people, mindfulness would certainly be a big item, which is why Ted asked me to write a book on stillness. But probably the majority of those people were doing something or other to open space in their heads and in their days.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I would say that also it's a result of having that very high pressure, high profile job that has moved him to see the necessity of meditation. They go hand in hand. And I think I heard Rupert Murdoch meditate, but certainly in a younger generation, I think almost all the leaders have, you know, Steve Jobs would take walks. And of course, he was deeply formed by his time practicing meditation in Japan and India. I once did a little lunch conversation at TED with Evan Williams, who co-founded Twitter. I was really moved because I seldom met anybody who seemed so thoughtful, so deliberate, so centered as he. And I think he actually had his whole company meditate for 30 minutes every morning at the beginning of the day as an investment, essentially, the most useful investment they could make.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To offer, but somehow she'd got into the cycle of thinking that by being with her obligations 24 hours a day, she was doing greatest justice to them, which perhaps she wasn't.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So perhaps we need even more of those breaks. You know, you read in my book There's a famous story of how Gandhi once woke up and he said, today's really, really busy. I'm not going to be able to meditate for a day. And his friends and followers were really shocked. Wait, what's going on? Said, no, this is a really busy day. I've got to meditate for two hours instead of one hour. And I remember I cited that once on a radio program and a woman called in and I could hear the anger and frustration in her voice. And she said, all very well for you, travel writers sitting off in Japan saying that I'm a young mother and I got two kids. I'm trying to start a business. How can I do that? And when I heard her voice, I could hear so much aggression in it that I thought that being with her kid, she wasn't necessarily giving them the best of her, and if only she could take 30 minutes off and ask a friend or her mother or her husband to look after the kids, she would come back to her family and to her small business.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think corporations are very open to that in a way that poets might not be. Poets are hustling so much to try to make a living, which is very difficult. They can't afford to look away from the bottom line. But it's like me in Time magazine, because I had quite a comfortable form of living, I was able to think about what life do I really want to construct. And I think that's my sense of the corporate world. I like being in touch with it, partly because I think if I visit a corporation to speak about these things, My sense is that almost everybody there has come up with her own solution. She cooks every day or she sails or she plays golf or he goes for a long run. But one way or another, they found intuitively that they need a break from the overpowering demands of their work. And they've actually already come to their own equivalence of what I do, which are just as valuable. And the only thing I would add to them and to that is that the world keeps accelerating.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To suggestions and elsewhere. I mean, I wouldn't talk about this stuff in the academy, and I think people's ears there are very closed. And people, whether it's Coca-Cola or Fox TV or whoever it is that I'm talking to, I'm really moved and humbled by how eager they are to respond to anything. And I know that part of your podcast, the beauty of it and the beauty of your book is you're really addressing not the issue of how to invest, but how to live and how to live well. And I think most of the investors that you talk to move and impress you because of their life work balance and because of their generosity and because of the way that they move through the world as much as they move through the stock market.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Outset, I think the external is so much with us and so overwhelming that we forget the internal even though the internal is the only place where peace and clarity can really come from. It's like it's the engine without which nothing really works. 700 years ago, I think the wise German mystic Meister Eckhart said, as long as the inner work is good, the outer will never be puny. Referring to our jobs, our relationships, our lives. Take care of what's inside you and the rest will take care of itself. But if you're only taking care of what's external, you're like somebody whose cars is broken and you keep repainting it. It's great to keep painting it, but you're not actually addressing the problem or the place where the real power lies. And once you address that, then really you don't have to worry so much about the other things. So my sense, you know, I have found that people in corporations, being practical people, are much more open.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was as if I couldn't breathe, and a second day was the second worst day of my life. I mean, I didn't know how any human could live without this machine. And that week was the best week of my life. In other words, once you've done cold turkey or through circumstances adjusted to suddenly living in a different way, of course the adjustment takes a while, but then suddenly you realize, wait a minute, actually there is something here that I was missing out on before. And I think people are busy people in corporations probably have their equivalent. All of them have to use a cell phone all the time for their jobs and rightly so. But it's interesting that Google, for example, is filled with, you know, I think there are more than a thousand people who actually teach yoga there quite apart from all that meditation spaces and whatever that they have. And that's one of the biggest things in Silicon Valley these last few years. And it speaks to the sense that maybe our lives are getting out of balance. And as you said at the”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think two things. I think their first impulse is easy for him to say. He's not in a busy corporation. He doesn't have colleagues. And he's prepared to live simply, which is not what most people necessarily want. But I think the second impulse is that it does touch some intimation or longing in many people where they've gone on a hike for three days or they've been sick and laid up at some point. And they've come back realizing what they've been missing the rest of the time and realizing they've been moving so quickly along the grooves that they've already established that they haven't noticed how another part of them is starving. Now I sometimes will run into kids, for example, who I'm lucky to have grown up in the generation before cell phones were common. And they'll say to me, no, my parents took us on a cruise and we couldn't get online. And that first day was just the worst day of my life. I just didn't know what to do. I couldn't access my friends. I couldn't, I was part.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who would say it goes back to something you asked a few minutes ago, William, which is just to ask yourself what really stimulates you? What is going to make you happy, productive, and replete, and what is not? And each person will have her own answer to that. But as you said some time ago, that's the key thing. Not taking any formula from anybody else, but taking the time to work out what is a formula for you. And as you mentioned, I worked out at some point, or I'm always most alert at 10 morning, 11 in the morning. I'm most groggy at 3 in the afternoon and shaped my life around it as I'm able to do working from home and self-employed and other people are most productive at midnight. But I think it's important to work out as precisely as you can the way an athlete or a musician might what routine works for you. When is the best time to have your cup of tea? When's the best time to put some sugar in your system or take a break or take a run or whatever it might be?”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Spending an hour in conversation with a book. And only then, for the first time in the day, do I go online? And then I take care of all my emails for the day, thanks in part to the time difference between the US and Japan in one go, which will take me maybe an hour and a half. And then it's two in the afternoon and I'm completely free. So I go to the health club, I play ping pong, I hang out with my wife, we go to the movies, we walk around Japan and have a great time. So again, by no means made for everybody, but I realized even when I was working at Time magazine that I would be happier making and more productive making my own schedule than tethered to that of the magazine.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm fanatically obsessive and unchanging in my ways. And my poor wife would roll her eyes if she were asked about my schedule. So I wake up very early every morning and essentially spend my first eight hours at my desk. The first five hours I'm literally writing. So I don't even, I saw right by hand, so I don't even have a computer in the room to distract me. And I'm just there. And of course, many days, I'm flat, I'm tired, I'm distracted. I can't get anything done. But I make sure I don't do anything else. I sit there bored or I lie down or maybe I will take a walk, but I make sure not to get caught up in any side topic. And then after my first five hours, I probably take another walk. And then I sit out on Arteris and I read a book, usually fiction or serious reportage for about an hour. And when I come in from the terrace after that hour, I can feel I'm more intimate, more attentive, more nuanced. I'm a better version of myself as a result of...”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think one advantage in this maybe goes back to when you were asking what first planted the seed of monasticism in me. One advantage I have is I've been only child. So I've always loved being by myself. I don't get bored. And I think that's one reason I left New York City because I knew I'd be happier by myself in the middle of nowhere than even surrounded by the most stimulating people. And it's also a reason why I left my job because I realized many of our friends would leave a busy office job to be become writers and then find it was very hard to get writing done without an external boss or an external deadline. And I knew that because I'm sort of off on my own planet as my wife would say, I'd be happy to be my own boss, even if that means I'm never away from my boss. I'm with the boss 24 hours a day and I'm in the office 24 hours a day as a self-employed writer. So I think being an only child helped me make that transition. Yeah, in terms of my...”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Terms if you want to get something done in life, take a pause, take a breath and take a walk. As a writer, it took me a long time to realize the key part of my writing is taking a walk twice a day. And it's only when I'm away from my notes, in some ways I can make macro changes, I can see the larger picture. And as long as I'm sitting at my desk cuddled over my notes. And I need to get away from all that to break through the envelope and actually see how better to make the whole project. And I think that applies to whatever you're doing in life. Step away from it and you'll be able to see it better.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody knows that to some extent the more knowledge you accumulate, the less space there is for wisdom. The more you're looking at a small screen, the less easy it is to see the larger picture. So, I mean, I really go on retreat for the most selfish reasons, which is to catch my breath, to clear my mind, and to remember what I care about. And I think without that, I would just get lost in the swell racing. And I think all of us know the fruits of it from the people that we work with. If somebody comes into your room right now and he's just been multitasking while driving down the freeway, I don't think he's really good for anything. And there may be three hours later, somebody else comes into your room and she spent the previous 20 minutes just sitting quietly in her office collecting her thoughts. She'll probably bring such a calm and clarity to your interaction that you feel better and much more gets done. So even in the most sort of craven.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than having one person read a deep and dense one. But I think more than that, they sensed this universal longing. And I think in the course of my writing life, the world has moved from when I began writing, I felt there was a longing for information. People wanted to know about Cuba and Tibet and the other places I was visiting. I sent reports back from them. And now I think we're longing for freedom from information. We have much too much information in our lives and not enough time and space to make sense of it. And so what we're really craving is the chance to step away from this bombardment, the better to see the larger proportions. I mean, there were so many statistics, and you probably know more of them than I do, but I've heard that anybody listening to this conversation will take in more information today alone than Shakespeare did in his entire lifetime. Now, does that mean we know more than Shakespeare? I'm not sure. I think it actually might mean less.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and it's interesting that we talk so much about the attention economy, which is a way of saying that attention is the most prized quality we have. That's what Google and Facebook and Netflix, they're all trying to get because they know that is the treasure that we have to give to them. And they know that attention leads to money and time and other things. But the heart of it is, how am I going to get the attention of your listeners as we say this? How is a writer am I going to win the attention of busy people who really have time for books? Attention is the core of almost everything. And it must be said that the idea for that book, the book in that case preceded the TED talk, but the book, the idea did come from Ted. And I'm embarrassed not necessarily by the success, but by the shortness of the book. They asked me to write a book that was the length of a regular feature article because they're wise about detention spans now and they realize that to have 100 people reading a short book is much better.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is already one of the most radiant and transporting places around, but I'm not a Christian. And the monks there, broad minded and generous enough to open their doors to everybody in the great Benedictine tradition of hospitality and to be confident that whoever you are, whether you're a Sufi or a Buddhist or a Jewish or nothing at all, you will find what's most essential to you. You'll find the light or the core of your life. By just having three days in silence. So there are no rules there, and I don't really attend any of the services. I just read and write and take walks. But at the end of three days, it feels as if I've had three months away from my regular life. And when I drive down to the highway, as I say, I know exactly where I want to go and what I want to spend my time with.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Than 10 wells at a six foot deep each. And my tendency is sort of to race from thing to thing. And that's all at the level of surface. And I think just stepping back for a minute reminds me, goes back to what we were talking about regarding attention. Give myself entirely to one thing and the results are going to be so much richer in the same way that I'd much rather have a two-hour conversation with you than a series of two-minute conversations with 60 other people. And I'm sure that the results would be incalculably greater. And so it's got to do, as you said before, really about subtraction, taking things out of your life. And I learned that by going on retreat now more than a hundred times, but probably I sensed it even before, and that's why I wanted to go to that place and what always strikes me about those retreats is that I go to a Benedictine hermitage in Big Sur, California.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're in, and we need to do something to find the courage to cut through that. And the minute we step away from the world, even for a weekend, I would say, we come back to it refreshed and reoriented in a much better sense of what we need to do. And it's interesting, my sense is that so many people during the pandemic that enforced retreat suddenly came to their senses and suddenly remembered this is what I love. This is what I should be doing with my life. And this is how I can cut through both the cacophony and the clutter and find out exactly what I want to be doing with my life. So some of us found that during the pandemic, but because I was enjoying this fast-paced life traveling around a lot in my 20s, realized that I needed to step back now and then. And I think the other principle, which again, anybody in business knows is I remember the Tibetans say it's much better to dig one well that's 60 foot deep.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, the analogy I often use, as you probably know, is that when you walk into a museum and you're faced with a very, very complicated canvas and you're two inches away from it, you just can't begin to see what's going on. You have to step back and further back. And finally, maybe when you're about 20 feet away, it clicks into focus and you can see the larger picture in every sense. And you can see what that painting is trying to say to you. And so for me, that painting is an emblem of my life and of the world. If I'm right up in the midst of it, if I mean Times Square, I really can't see the proportions. I can't remember what I care about and what's essential. And I can't see what to do with it. And it's only by stepping away from things that I have a better sense of how to go back to them. And I think so many of us, you know, like you, I mean, to some extent, I'm still a journalist who's moving around much too much and much too quickly. And so it's easy to get caught up in this vicious cycle where we're in such a hurry, we can't see what a hurry.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A little bit apart of my thinking. I mean, you know you're working even harder than I at Time magazine, but we were putting in those 18 hour days. And I wasn't sure how much I was getting out of them. And I thought if I just do an 8-hour day by myself and then have 10 hours free, I'll probably be leading a more productive as well as a richer life. And I'm so glad that the rest of the world has come to that same realization. I was working from home from 1986, but now more and more people are seeing what a useful thing it is to do.”
2023-07-09 · We Study Billionaires · RWH029: Beyond Rich w/ Pico Iyer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT