Tag: Culture

The Trojan Horse: How Marketers, Retailers, and Artists Conceal Their True Intents

Reading Time: 11 minutes

A Trojan Horse is an innocuous appearing container for hiding something within to get past defenses or some other obstacle. Trojan Horses can be used for both good and evil. Here’s how to recognize and use them.

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The Basics

The story of the Trojan Horse is perhaps the most famous of all the Greek myths.

The Trojan War had been going on for a decade, with no end in sight and many Greek heroes dying, when Odysseus came up with an idea that won the war for the Greeks.

Because the Trojans considered horses to be sacred, the Greeks built a large, hollow wooden horse. To make it even more irresistible, they used wood from Cornel trees (also sacred) to construct it. Odysseus and a group of men hid inside while the rest of the Greek army pretended to leave the area, destroying their camp and boarding their ships.

After some debate as to whether the Greeks could be trusted, the Trojans dragged the giant horse inside the walls of the city. The end of the ten-year siege was a huge relief to the people of Troy, who spent the night celebrating.

By midnight, everyone was in a drunken stupor. Odysseus then acted, signaling to the Greek fleet to return and leading his men out of the Trojan Horse to kill the unsuspecting guards and open the doors. The Greeks then had access to the city. They massacred the Trojans, keeping a few alive as slaves. Some of the soldiers traveled further afield, forming settlements which are supposed to have led to the creation of Rome.

Ancient Greeks saw this myth as factual, with the events occurring between 1300–1200 BC in the area near Dardanelles.

There is some archeological evidence for the existence of Troy, although most historians now accept that the story is mythological. There is probably still some basis in actual events, as sieges were common during that era.

Myth or not, the fact that the story of the Trojan Horse has survived for over 3,000 years indicates its power and utility as a mental model.

Why, exactly, has this particular story retained its grip on our imagination for so long?

We can only speculate as to why. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the Trojan Horse is not just a story. It’s also a parable, a metaphor, an invitation to be ingenious, an example of out-of-the-box thinking.

Reading it has sparked so many ideas for so many people. It is at once practical and bizarre.

Using it as a mental model, we can apply the Trojan Horse story to an array of disciplines and situations. As a concept, it can be used for both good and evil.

The Trojan Horse in Marketing and Business

We live in an era when we are all besieged by marketing messages every moment of the day. Like the Trojans hiding in their city, we have learned to shut these messages out — we use advertisement blockers, throw away junk mail unopened, ignore billboards, and filter out spam emails.

In order to gain our attention, marketers often use a technique similar to the Trojan Horse. They offer people an apparent gift — a free ebook, a discount card, a sample. Only once this item has been enjoyed can its real purpose can be enacted.

A good heuristic when things seem too good to be true is to just forget about them.

Many marketing lessons can be found in the original myth.

The Greeks chose a form which appealed to their targets, using a sacred creature and type of wood. Likewise, marketers must fit their gift to the audience, making it appealing to their basic interests. The Greeks used innovative thinking, inventing a tactic which was new and therefore unexpected. If they had tried the same thing again, it would have had no effect.

Once a marketing technique is recognizable, its impact wanes. No one is going to click on a “5 ways to kill belly fat” pop-up anymore, or fall for an email from a Nigerian prince telling you just how much money you left there, or enjoy a free executable file that will clean your computer. These ruses are now well known and we ignore them. But when these techniques were new and unfamiliar, huge numbers of people were attracted by the offers.

Some examples of Trojan Horse marketing include:

  • Offering the first chapter of a book for free to people who join an email list — Having read the chapter and received more emails which connect them to the author, people are more likely to buy the full book than they would have been if they had only seen an advert.
  • Creating free high-quality blog content for an audience to enjoy — Once people are interested in the blogger’s voice and expertise, the marketing can begin. Many people will at some point want to support the person whose work they have been consuming for free. This support might include buying courses, books, or consulting services or donating to a Patreon page. We developed the learning community as not only a bunch of extras for people but also a means to support the free content we provide.
  • Writing a book detailing an expert’s specialized knowledge — While sales of the book are often not high, having it published benefits the expert’s business. For example, Ryan Holiday has stated that his books have led to more income from speaking and consulting than from actual book sales.
  • Making the most income from revenue streams which do not appear to be the main objective of a business — For example, high-fashion brands often make more money from perfume than from clothing, cinemas rely on sales of popcorn and drinks, and some restaurants profit predominantly from sales of alcohol.
  • Creating viral branded content which people share and engage with due to its being interesting and often amusing — For example, just try to watch the Android “Friends Furever” video without forwarding it to at least one person. The adorable video wraps up a marketing message, making people more likely to pay attention to it.

In his book Permission Marketing, Seth Godin discusses the idea under a different name. When you let people into your inbox, you’re letting people into your city. They might be there for good or bad reasons; it’s hard to know in advance. In a blog post, Godin explains how the concept works:

Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.

It recognizes the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention.

Pay attention is a key phrase here, because permission marketers understand that when someone chooses to pay attention they are actually paying you with something precious…

Real permission works like this: if you stop showing up, people complain, they ask where you went…

Permission is like dating. You do not start by asking for the sale at first impression. You earn the right, over time, bit by bit…

In order to get permission, you make a promise. You say, “I will do x, y and z, I hope you will give me permission by listening.” And then, this is the hard part, that’s all you do. You do not assume you can do more. You do not sell the list or rent the list or demand more attention…

In the book, Godin explains how Amazon has used permission marketing to build an empire:

Using permission, Amazon can fundamentally reconfigure the entire book industry, disintermediating and combining every step of the chain until there are only two: the writer and Amazon … Amazon appears to be building a permission asset, not a brand asset.

Amazon began by offering cheap books. Once people fell for that initial Trojan Horse, Amazon offered them other products and gradually captured more and more of their online spending. Services such as Prime, Echo, and Kindle are contained within the Trojan Horse — that first cheap purchase someone makes.

Just as the Greeks invested effort into building the horse, Amazon has invested millions in technology and infrastructure. This is the essence of Trojan Horse marketing: offering a gift (with Amazon, this includes free trials, discounts, and generally low costs for popular items) and then upselling and upselling and upselling.

On the topic of Amazon Prime, John Warrillow writes:

Like many subscription models, Amazon Prime is a Trojan horse that is expanding the list of products consumers are willing to buy from Amazon and giving the eggheads in Seattle a mountain of customer data to sift through.

The Trojan Horse and the Benjamin Franklin Effect

Let’s say there is a person who dislikes you — a lot. It’s fine; this happens to all of us.

But what if you need to form an allegiance with this person? Or maybe they don’t dislike you, they just don’t know you. Either way, you need to build a relationship with them.

What should you do? Ask them out for coffee, offer a gift, ask someone for an email introduction?

One solution is to utilize the Benjamin Franklin effect, essentially a sort of Trojan Horse approach to building relationships.

The Benjamin Franklin effect is a psychological phenomenon in which we begin to like people we have done favors for. Essentially, the initial favor is the Trojan Horse, containing within it a relationship. Franklin’s original story, told in his autobiography, details how he used this during his time as a legislator:

Having heard that he [a rival who disliked Franklin] had in his library a certain very scarce and curious book, I wrote a note to him, expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he would do me the favour of lending it to me for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I return’d it in about a week with another note, expressing strongly my sense of the favour.

When we next met in the House, he spoke to me (which he had never done before), and with great civility; and he ever after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions, so that we became great friends, and our friendship continued to his death.

We can use Franklin’s technique as a Trojan Horse to gain the respect, friendship, and cooperation of other people.

Asking someone for a favor indicates that we already respect them and consider them to have something we lack — a form of flattery which serves as the gift. Once they have accepted this and performed the favor, it can be leveraged.

Examples of the conjunction between the Benjamin Franklin effect and the Trojan Horse include:

  • Salesmen use the foot-in-the-door technique. This involves making a small request (for example, filling in a survey), then trying to sell you something.
  • If someone you know has a particular area of expertise, try texting or emailing them (rather than Googling it) whenever you have a related question. One Reddit user on r/LifeProTips recommends texting your mother simple questions on a regular basis to strengthen the relationship. Doing so indicates to people that we consider them knowledgeable, making them more likely to respond to larger requests.

Robert Greene also recommends a number of Trojan Horse–style tactics in The 48 Laws of Power, concealing true intentions within a facade and using specific behavior to achieve goals.

Use selective honesty and judgment to disarm … One sincere and honest move will cover over dozens of dishonest ones. Open-hearted gestures of honesty and generosity bring down the guard of even the most suspicious people. Once your selective honesty opens a hole in their armor, you can deceive and manipulate them at will. A timely gift—a Trojan horse—will serve the same purpose.

In The 33 Strategies of War, Greene returns to the same analogy:

[B]efriend your enemies, worming your way into their hearts and minds. As your targets’ friend, you will naturally learn their needs and insecurities, the soft interior they try so hard to hide. The guard will come down with a friend. And even later on, when you play out your treacherous intentions, the lingering resonance of your friendship will still confuse them, letting you keep on manipulating them by toying with their emotions or pushing them into overreactions. For a more immediate effect, you can try a sudden act of kindness and generosity that gets people to lower their defenses—the Trojan Horse strategy. …

When confronted by something difficult or thorny, do not be distracted or discouraged by its formidable outer appearance; think your way into the soft core, the center from which the problem blossoms… Knowing the problem’s core gives you great power to change it from the inside out. Your first thought must always be to infiltrate the center… never to whale away at the periphery or just pound at the walls.

How Artists Change Your Mind

Many artists (a term used here to denote anyone who creates something, not just those who paint canvases) have used their work to conceal important agendas.

The Beatles, Bob Dylan, and Conor Oberst wrap political and social messages within beautiful music.

Bloggers such as Seth Godin and James Altucher envelop key life lessons and paradigm-altering concepts within humorous anecdotes and metaphors. The women who embroidered the Bayeux Tapestry added their own subtle views to the panoramas of war and victory.

Companies such as Toms, Ben & Jerry, and Lush use the popularity of their products to fund real change. Johannes Vermeer’s most serene paintings tell complex, taboo narratives.

Botticelli’s La Primavera (above) is actually an exploration of his interest in horticulture, not a study of human figures.

Consider Gatsby, throwing lavish parties with the sole purpose of attracting Daisy back to him. This is the essence of much of art — an attractive and appealing exterior conceals the true purpose.

People use whatever means are available to them to express their views and attitudes. Sometimes this is intentional; sometimes the Trojan Horse is built unconsciously. The purpose is to get a message across in a form which is palatable to people.

Few of us enjoy or engage with straightforward expressions of a particular agenda. But when it comes in an interesting form, we pull the wooden horse within the city walls with glee. Just as with marketing messages, we have become desensitized to these sorts of messages. Artists must now use ingenuity and creativity to spread their ideas.

As Walter Hamady writes:

The book as a structure is the Trojan horse of art — it is not feared by average people. It is a familiar form in the world, and average people will take it from you and examine it whereas a painting, poem, sculpture, or print they will not.

This concept of art as a Trojan Horse is extremely important.

Farnam Street itself serves as a Trojan Horse. Our intention is to spread an appreciation of the importance of clear thinking, lifelong learning, making good decisions and living a meaningful life.

If upon your first visit to this site, you had found nothing but a list of instructions, the chances are high that you would have ignored it and never returned. Through the use of stories, analogies and careful explorations of important ideas, this agenda has reached and inspired many people. When you read a post about a military tactic or the life of a historic figure, the purpose is not the narrative alone. It is about much more than that — a way of changing how people think.

In Contagious, Jonah Berger explains the power of stories as a Trojan Horse:

People don’t just share information, they tell stories. But just like the epic tale of the Trojan Horse, stories are vessels that carry things such as morals and lessons. Information travels under the guise of what seems like idle chatter. So, we need to build our own Trojan horses, embedding our products and ideas in stories that people want to tell… we need to make our message so integral to the narrative that people can’t tell the story without it.

Francis T. Marchese also advocates the Trojan Horse approach to art:

The Trojan Horse is an artifact that possesses a host of hidden agendas. Rather than presenting a one-off manifestation, the Trojan Horse offers many platoons, capable of strategically addressing the wider culture, pointing to replicable solutions through demonstration. Thus, an artwork acting like a Trojan Horse can contain the seeds of multiple strategic outcomes.

In short, when we want to spread an idea or spark change, we would do well to learn from the ancient Greeks.

People have strong defenses against anything which challenges their worldviews. By packaging it in a format which appeals to them, we can pass on meaning. Artists, marketers, and politicians (among others) have long realized the importance of this approach. It is a means of injecting our ideas, both good and bad, into people’s worlds through an apparent gift.

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How to Live on 24 Hours a Day: Arnold Bennett on Living a Meaningful Life Within the Constraints of Time

Reading Time: 8 minutes

“We shall never have more time.
We have, and have always had,
all the time there is.”

***

Despite having been published in 1910, Arnold Bennett’s book How to Live on 24 Hours a Day remains a valuable resource on living a meaningful life within the constraints of time. In the book, Bennett addresses one of our oldest questions: how can we make the best use of our lives? How can we make the best use of our time?

Bennett begins by reflecting on our counterintuitive tendency to value money over time. This is a topic which has been discussed as far back as the Stoics, and more recently by the financial independence movement. He writes:

Newspapers are full of articles explaining how to live on such-and-such a sum…but I have never seen an essay ‘how to live on 24 hours a day.’ Yet it has been said that time is money. That proverb understates the case. Time is a great deal more than money. If you have time, you can obtain money-usually. But…you cannot buy yourself a minute more time.

Next, he urges people to realize what a wonder it is that our daily allocation of time appears anew each time we wake:

The supply of time is truly a daily miracle. You wake up in the morning and lo! your purse is magically filled with 24 hours of the unmanufactured tissue of the universe of your life! It is yours.

Bennett’s original audience consisted of working people of slim means, used to structuring their lives around money. For this reason, he uses money as a metaphor for time, to make the abstract concepts seem more real:

You cannot draw on the future. Impossible to get into debt! You can only waste the passing moment. You cannot waste tomorrow, it is kept from you.

You have to live on this 24 hours of time. Out of it you have to spin health, pleasure, money, content, respect and the evolution of your immortal soul. It’s right use…is a matter of the highest urgency.

Perhaps one of the starkest and most memorable lines in the book is this:

We shall never have more time. We have, and have always had, all the time there is.

Bennett strongly encourages his readers to pursue their dreams, even if they fail. When we listen to the regrets of the elderly and dying, they invariably lament on what they neglected to do, not what they did. It is, however, the trying which matters, the journey which fulfills us:

A man may desire to go to Mecca… He fares forth…he may probably never reach Mecca; he may drown before he reaches Port Said; he may perish ingloriously on the cost of the Red Sea; his desire may remain eternally frustrated. Unfulfilled aspiration may always trouble him. But he will not be tormented in the same way as the man who…never leaves Brixton.

There is no magic bullet, no secret way to find more time. We see the desire to find one today, as people chase time management techniques which promise to free up more hours in the day:

I have found no such wonderful secret. Nor do I expect to find it, nor do I expect anyone else to find it. It is undiscovered… there is no easy way, no royal road. The path to Mecca is extremely hard and stony and the worst part is that you never get there after all.

This could be discouraging but it’s not. Bennett encourages us to focus on how we can use our time to improve ourselves, stating that it is never too late:

You can turn over a new leaf every hour if you choose.

The idea that you can reinvent yourself each hour of the day is liberating. We get stuck in ruts and tell ourselves that we cannot change because we are too old, too young, too poor, too tied down. These are only excuses. They absolve us from responsibility. Bennett reminds us that just as money can be spent on anything, so can time. And, as Seneca reminded us, most of us fail to understand time until it’s too late.

Bennett foreshadows modern research on habit change and personal development, which urges people to start small:

Beware of undertaking too much at the start. Be content with quite a little. Allow for accidents. Allow for human nature, especially your own… a glorious failure is better than a petty success.

Having set the stage, Bennett begins to discuss exactly how much time his audience has available to them. It is a simple fact that most of us believe we work for far more hours than we do – the average person’s estimate of their work week is out by 20 hours. Most workers are only productive for 3 hours a day. (the rest is spent on social media, gossiping and so on.) You can indeed get more done by working less.

You say your day is already full to overflowing. How? You actually spend in earning your livelihood – how much? Seven hours on the average. And in sleep, seven? I will add another two to be generous. And I will defy you to account for me the other 8 hours on the spur of the moment.

We all know the odd feeling of time passing without us noticing. We have all looked up on a Sunday evening, baffled as to where the day went. We have all arrived home at 6 pm and found that by the time we make dinner and shower, it is suddenly midnight.

Looking at the example of the average office worker at the time, Bennett reflects on our skewed attitude to work. We view our hours at work as our day and the rest as a margin. (Another example of how we fail to understand time.)

He persists in looking at the hours from 10 to 6 as ‘the day’ to which the 10 hours proceeding and the 6 hours following are an epilogue and prologue … this general attitude is illogical and unhealthy.

Next, Bennett laments the practice, ubiquitous of the time, of spending the morning commute reading the newspaper. We can apply his statements to the newspapers modern equivalent: social media. No doubt you have seen pictures of the past where a train carriage is full of people reading newspapers. Today the buses and subways are full of people on their telephones.

You calmly and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry…your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are 124 hours in the day…I cannot possibly allow you to scatter such precious pearls of time with Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time.

If you have ever known someone who complains of being time poor, yet scrolls Facebook with all the ease of a cat watching dust particles, you can doubtless relate to Bennett’s frustration. The number one question I receive from readers is how can I find more time to read? There is a simple answer but it involves tradeoffs that most of us are unwilling to make. It means putting reading and learning and growing ahead of the immediate gratification of social media. To waste vast swathes of time mindlessly consuming the day’s information is a bizarre concept to anyone who shares his attitude. Depending on the activity, The Red Queen of time is indeed formidable.

(In case you’re wondering how I square this view of time squandering on newspapers with the fact you’re reading a wesbite right now, allow me to explain the difference. Newspapers are focused on things that change. You can’t run fast enough to keep up with this world and yet while you may think it’s valuable the information you receive is full of noise. Farnam Street focuses on helping you learn things that don’t change over time — It’s an investment. What you learn today becomes the scaffolding to solving tomorrow’s problem.)

Bennett describes the average person’s evening which has changed little in the last century.

You are pale and tired…in an hour or so you sit up and feel you could take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously, you see friends, you potter, you play cards, you flirt with a book, you take a stroll, you caress the piano…by jove! A quarter past eleven.

Replace seeing friends for texting them, cards for video games, a book for a movie, a stroll for a trip to the gym and that is how most of us spend our evenings. Worn out by work, we flirt between whichever diversion seems interesting, dumping it when it begins to require focus. Then, suddenly it is time to sleep. Another day is over. But tomorrow will be different, right? Not without a concentrated effort, it won’t.

Bennett remarks on how different our evenings are when we have something specific to do and urges us to find specific diversions more often:

When you arrange to go to the theatre (especially with a pretty woman), what happens? You rush…you go. Friends and fatigue have been equally forgotten and the evening has seemed so long…can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy – the thought of that something gives a glow and more intense energy to the whole day?

Next, come some specific instructions on how we should spend our evenings. Bennett, echoing Machiavelli’s ideas, suggests employing an hour and a half each evening for cultivating the mind, which still leaves 45 hours a week for errands, adventure, and seeing friends. This is a practice which we can all employ if only we’d stop the mindless diversions of Netflix and Snapchat and exchange the time for a concentrated effort on something meaningful.

My contention is that those 7 and a half hours will quicken the whole life of the week, add zest to it, and increase the interest which you feel in even the most banal occupations.

The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatsoever happens to us outside our brains, since nothing hurts us or give us pleasure except within our brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on inside the mysterious brain is patent… people complain of the lack of the power to concentrate, not witting that they may acquire the power if they chose…mind control is the first element of a full existence.

Bennett advocates an exercise which has much in common with mindfulness meditation, an idea which had yet to reach the country:

When you leave your house, concentrate your mind on a subject (no matter what to begin with.) You will not have gone ten paces before your mind has skipped away under your very eyes and is lurking around the corner with another subject. Bring it back by the scruff of the neck. Ere you have reached the station you will have brought it back 40 times. Do not despair. Keep it up. You will succeed.

As a subject to focus on, he recommends the works of the Stoics, which is still an ideal choice for personal study.

How can we, a century later in a somewhat different world, take Bennett’s advice?

It’s quite simple. His messages are uncomplicated, despite being wrapped up in his somewhat difficult to understand prose. For starters, we can stop viewing our work as our lives and learn to distinguish the two or intertwine them. We can plan specific pursuits for our spare time, rather than flitting it away. We can take stock of how much free time we actually have and where it is going. Then, we can structure those hours and minutes to ensure they are used for something meaningful. We can stop using all our spare time to consume stimulating information that changes quickly and focus on things that last. Instead, we can set aside blocks of time (guarded well) for working on our minds.

Unsurprisingly, the best way to improve ourselves is by reading. Books enable us to add the lives of other people onto our own. They are the most effective means humanity has found of making our lives meaningful, no matter how little time is available.

If you’re looking to expand on these ideas, other books on the same topic which compliment this one include On the Shortness of Life by Seneca and Martin Eden by Jack London.

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Philosopher Kahlil Gibran on The Tension Between Reason and the Silence Required for Thinking

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) published his masterpiece, The Prophet, in 1923. The work endures as a timeless meditation on the art of living. Gibran’s thoughts on love and giving offer a glimpse into his genius.

Reminding one of the struggle most of us have with the three marriages, Gibran illuminates the beautiful struggle that exists within all of us between reason and passion.

Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.
Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody.
But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements.

Your reason and your passion are the rudder and the sails of your seafaring soul.
If either your sails or your rudder be broken, you can but toss and drift, or else be held at a standstill in mid-seas.
For reason, ruling alone, is a force confirming; and passion, unattended, is a flame that burns to its own destruction.
Therefore let your soul exalt your reason to the height of passion, that it my sing.
And let it direct your passion with reason, that your passion may live through its own daily resurrection, and like the phoenix rise above its own ashes.

As for his final piece of advice, on the tension between reason and passion, Gibran suggests something we should all take to heart, “rest in reason and move in passion.”

Just as there is a required solitude in leadership, there is a silence required for thinking. Increasingly, however, we use devices from iPhones and Echo’s to entertain and reduce our ability to be present with ourselves. When it comes to Speaking and Talking, Gibran offers:

You talk when you cease to be at peace with your thoughts;
And when you can no longer dwell in the solitude of your heart you live in your lips, and sound is a diversion and a pastime.
And in much of your talking, your thinking is half murdered.
For thought is a bird of space, that in a case of words may indeed unfold its wings but cannot fly.

There are those among you who seek the talkative through fear of being alone.
The silence of aloneness reveals to their eyes their naked selves and they would escape.
And there are those who talk, and without knowledge or forethought reveal a truth which they themselves do not understand.
And there are those who have the truth within them, but they tell it not in words.

The Prophet goes on to explore love, marriage, children, crime and punishment and so much more. Complement with German Philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer on the Dangers of Clickbait.

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Seduced by Logic: Émilie du Châtelet and the Struggles to create the Newtonian Revolution

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Against great odds, Émilie du Châtelet (1706–1749) taught herself mathematics and became a world authority on Newtonian mathematical physics.

I say against great odds because being a woman at the time meant she was ineligible for the same formal and informal opportunities available to others. Seduced by Logic, by Robyn Arianrhod tells her story with captivating color.

Émilie and her lover and collaborator Voltaire realized that Newton’s Principia not only changed our view of the world but also the way we do science.

“Newton,” writes Arianrhod, “had created a method for constructing and then testing theories, so the Principia provided the first truly modern blueprint for theoretical science as both a predictive, quantitative discipline—Newton eschewed qualitative, unproven, metaphysical speculations—and a secular discipline, separate from religion, although by no means inherently opposed to it.”

This, of course, has impacted the way we live and see ourselves. While Newton is relatively well known today, his theories were not easily accepted at the time. Émilie was one of the first to realize his impact and promote his thinking. In the late 1740s, she created what is, still to this day, the authoritative French translation, which includes detailed commentary, on Newton’s masterpiece. Voltaire considered du Châtelet “a genius worthy of Horace and Newton.”

Émilie du Châtelet didn’t limit herself to only commenting on Newton. The reason the book still stands today is that she added a lot of original thought.

***

How did Émilie du Châtelet come to learn so much in a world that overtly limited her opportunities? This is where her character shines.

While her brothers were sent to the most prestigious Jesuit secondary schools; Émilie was left to fend for herself and acquired much of her knowledge through reading. While her brothers could attend university, “such a thing was unthinkable for a girl.”

Luckily her family environment was conducive to self-education. Émilie’s parents “were rather unorthodox in the intellectual freedom they allowed in their children: both parents allowed Émilie to argue with them and express opinions, and from the time they were about ten years old, the children had permission to browse freely through the library.”

 

***

Émilie would grow and enter an arranged marriage at eighteen with thirty-year-old Florent-Claude, marquis du Chatelet and count of Lomont. Less than a year later she gave birth to their first child, Gabrielle-Pauline, which was followed seventeen months later by their son, Floren-Louis. Another child, a boy, would come six years later only to pass within two years. His death caused her to remark on her grief that the ‘sentiments of nature must exist in us without us suspecting.’

“Sometime around 1732, she experienced a true intellectual epiphany,” Arianrhod writes. As a result, Émilie would come to see herself as a ‘thinking creature.’

“At first, she only caught a glimpse of this new possibility, and she continued to allow her time to be wasted by superficial society life and its dissipation, ‘which was all I had felt myself born for.’ Fortunately, her ongoing friendship with these ‘people who think’—including another mathematically inclined woman, Marie de Thil, who would remain her lifelong friend—led Émilie to the liberating realisation that it was not too late to begin cultivating her mind seriously.”

It would be a difficult journey. “I feel,” Émilie wrote, “all the weight of the prejudice that universally excludes [women] from the sciences. It is one of the contradictions of this world that has always astonished me, that there are great countries whose destiny the law permits us to rule, and yet there is no place where we are taught to think.”

To become a person who thinks she became a person who reads.

“Presumably,” Arianrhod writes, “she studied Descartes, Newton, and the great English philosopher of liberty, John Locke, because when she met Voltaire a year after her epiphany, he was immediately captivated by her mind as well as her other charms.”

In an early love letter, Voltaire would write to her “Ah! What happiness to see you, to hear you … and what pleasures I taste in your arms! I am so fortunate to love the one I admire … you are the idol of my heart, you make all my happiness.”

“When Émilie and Voltaire because their courtship in 1733,” Arianhod writes, “she was twenty-six, and he was thirty-eight (the same as-as her husband, with whom Voltaire would eventually become good friends, thanks to Émilie’s encouragement and her efforts as a diplomatic go-between.)”

***

Arianrhod writes of Émilie’s struggles to learn:

Émilie’s plan to become a mathematician would require all her courage and determination. Firstly, envious acquaintances like Madame du Deffand would try to cast her as a dry and ugly ‘learned woman’ or femme savante, despite the fact that she had such appeal and charisma that the handsome duc de Richelieu, one of the most sought-after men in Paris, was rumoured to have once been her lover, while the celebrated Voltaire adored her. Of course, some of her female contemporaries admired her scholarship: Madame de Graffigny would later say, ‘Our sex ought to erect altars to her!’ But many were irritated by, or envious of, her liberated commitment to an intellectual life, because Émilie was very different from the glamorous women who ran many of Paris’s legendary literary salons. It was acceptable, even admirable, for such women to know enough of languages and philosophy to be good conversationalists with the learned men who dominated salon gatherings, but it was expected that women be modest about their knowledge. By contrast, Émilie would become famous as a scholar in her own right, thus angering the likes of Madame du Deffand, a powerful salonnière who claimed Émilie’s interest in science was all for show.

There were few truly learned women of the time, the belief being they were “either pretentious or ugly,” something that lingered “for the next three centuries.”

If you’re going to blaze the trail, you really have to blaze it.

At thirty-five, (Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis) Maupertuis was both ambitious and charming. When he agreed to tutor Émilie, he probably expected her to be a dilettante like his other female students: he had quite a following among society ladies. But her first known letter to him, written in January 1734, is both deferential and eager: ‘I spent all yesterday evening working on your lessons. I would like to make myself worthy of them. I fear, I confess to you, losing the good opinion you have of me.’ Perhaps he still doubted her commitment, because a week or two later she wrote, ‘I spent the evening with binomials and trinomials, [but] I am no longer able to study if you do not give me a task, and I have an extreme desire for one.’ Over the next few months, she sent him a stream of notes, trying to arrange lessons, asking him to come to her house for a couple of hours, or offering to meet him outside the Academy of Sciences – women were allowed inside only for the twice-yearly public lectures – or outside Gradot’s, one of the favourite cafés of the intellectual set.

[…]

It was this kind of intensity – as expressed in this multitude of requests for rendezvous – that fuelled gossip among her peers, and jealousy from Voltaire. Until the late twentieth century, most historians, too, seemed unable to imagine a woman like Émilie could be seduced only by mathematics – after all, until then, few women had actually become mathematicians. But it is true that many of Émilie’s letters to Maupertuis have a very flirtatious style – it was, after all, an era that revelled in the game of seduction. There is no evidence to prove whether or not they ever became lovers in those early months, before she and Voltaire had fully committed themselves to each other, but her letters certainly prove that all her life she would continue to hold a deep affection and respect for Maupertuis. In late April 1734, Émilie wrote to Maupertuis: ‘I hope I will render myself less unworthy of your lessons by telling you that it is not for myself that I want to become a mathematician, but because I am ashamed of making such mediocre progress under such a master as you.’ It was, indeed, an era of flattery! (Voltaire was quite adept at it – as a mere bourgeois, he often needed to flatter important people to help advance his literary career.) Although this letter suggests Émilie was simply using flattery to extract more lessons from her mathematical ‘master’, she always did have genuine doubts about her ability, which is not surprising given her lack of formal education and the assumed intellectual inferiority of her gender. She would later write, ‘If I were king … I would reform an abuse which cuts back, as it were, half of humanity. I would have women participate in all human rights, and above all those of the mind.’

***

In the translator’s preface to her late 1730s edition of Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, Du Châtelet highlights a few of the traits that helped her overcome so much.

You must know what you want:

(Knowledge) can never be acquired unless one has chosen a goal for one’s studies. One must conduct oneself as in everyday life; one must know what one wants to be. In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.

She considered herself a member of the ordinary class, and she wrote about how regular people can come to acquire talent.

It sometimes happens that work and study force genius to declare itself, like the fruits that art produces in a soil where nature did not intend it, but these efforts of art are nearly as rare as natural genius itself. The vast majority of thinking men — the others, the geniuses, are in a class of their own — need to search within themselves for their talent. They know the difficulties of each art, and the mistakes of those who engage in each one, but they lack the courage that is not disheartened by such reflections, and the superiority that would enable them to overcome such difficulties. Mediocrity is, even among the elect, the lot of the greatest number.

Seduced by Logic is worth reading in its entirety. Du Châtelet’s story is as fascinating as informative.

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Get More Done By Working Less

Reading Time: 2 minutes

In Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang argues that work and rest are not opposed but rather complementary to each other.

“When we define ourselves by our work, by our dedication and effectiveness and willingness to go the extra mile,” he writes, “then it’s easy to see rest as the negation of all those things.”

Thus our cultural view of rest influences our relationship to rest, creating an aversion—the mistaken belief that rest is for the weak. Because we mistake rest as the opposite of work, we avoid it. This view, however, is flawed.

“Work and rest are not polar opposites,” Pang writes. Rather they complete each other. Some of history’s most famous people from Charles Darwin and Bill Gates to Winston Churchill, took rest very seriously. Rather than prevent them from accomplishing things this was the very thing that enabled them.

Our aversion to rest is rather new. Almost every ancient society shared the view that work and rest were complements to one another. The Greeks saw rest as the pinnacle of civilized life.

Rest is not something given to you to fill in the cracks between work. “If you want rest, you have to take it” Pang writes. “You have to resist the lure of busyness, make time for rest, take is seriously, and protect it from a world that is intent on stealing it.”

What is rest?

We think of rest as binge watching Netflix and drinking wine but, while that’s a form of rest, it’s a flawed view that prevents us from resting more. “Physical activity is more restful than we expect, and mental rest is more active than we realize.”

In an interview with Scientific America Pang hits on what the brain is doing when we’re resting:

The critical thing to recognize is that when we are letting our minds wander, when our minds don’t have any particular thing they have to focus on, our brains are pretty darn active. When you do things like go for a long walk, your subconscious mind keeps working on problems. The experience of having the mind slightly relaxed allows it to explore different combinations of ideas, to test out different solutions. And then once it has arrived at one that looks promising—that is what pops into your head as an aha! moment. The people I looked at are able to construct daily schedules that allow them to draw on that process in little increments.

For creative people—or anyone who deals with complexity, long walks or even strenuous physical activity is an essential part of their routine. Just take a look at Thoreau, Nietzsche and Kant’s views on walking.

Pang argues that a four hour “creative work day” is optimal for producing.

While we work 8 or more hours a day, most of that is just busywork. Effectiveness and total hours worked are two different things. Learn what moves the needle and focus your work efforts on that, ignoring or getting rid of busywork.

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The Science of Sleep: Regulating Emotions and the 24 Hour Mind

Reading Time: 8 minutes

Even if we often think of sleeping as ‘switching off’, it’s a complex state during which a lot of important things occur in our bodies. In particular, dreams are vital for helping our brains to process emotions and encode new learning.

***

“Memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation..”

— Rosalind Cartwright

Rosalind Cartwright is one of the leading sleep researchers in the world. Her unofficial title is Queen of Dreams.

In The Twenty-four Hour Mind: The Role of Sleep and Dreaming in Our Emotional Lives, she looks back on the progress of sleep research and reminds us there is much left in the black box of sleep that we have yet to shine light on.

In the introduction she underscores the elusive nature of sleep:

The idea that sleep is good for us, beneficial to both mind and body, lies behind the classic advice from the busy physician: “Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.” But the meaning of this message is somewhat ambiguous. Will a night’s sleep plus the aspirin be of help no matter what ails us, or does the doctor himself need a night’s sleep before he is able to dispense more specific advice? In either case, the presumption is that there is some healing power in sleep for the patient or better insight into the diagnosis for the doctor, and that the overnight delay allows time for one or both of these natural processes to take place. Sometimes this happens, but unfortunately sometimes it does not. Sometimes it is sleep itself that is the problem.

Cartwright underscores that our brains like to run on “automatic pilot” mode, which is one of the reasons that getting better at things requires concentrated and focused effort. She explains:

We do not always use our highest mental abilities, but instead run on what we could call “automatic pilot”; once learned, many of our daily cognitive behaviors are directed by habit, those already-formed points of view, attitudes, and schemas that in part make us who we are. The formation of these habits frees us to use our highest mental processes for those special instances when a prepared response will not do, when circumstances change and attention must be paid, choices made or a new response developed. The result is that much of our baseline thoughts and behavior operate unconsciously.

Relating this back to dreams, and one of the more fascinating parts of Cartwright’s research, is the role sleep and dreams play in regulating emotions. She explains:

When emotions evoked by a waking experience are strong, or more often were under-attended at the time they occurred, they may not be fully resolved by nighttime. In other words, it may take us a while to come to terms with strong or neglected emotions. If, during the day, some event challenges a basic, habitual way in which we think about ourselves (such as the comment from a friend, “Aren’t you putting on weight?”) it may be a threat to our self-concepts. It will probably be brushed off at the time, but that question, along with its emotional baggage, will be carried forward in our minds into sleep. Nowadays, researchers do not stop our investigations at the border of sleep but continue to trace mental activity from the beginning of sleep on into dreaming. All day, the conscious mind goes about its work planning, remembering, and choosing, or just keeping the shop running as usual. On balance, we humans are more action oriented by day. We stay busy doing, but in the inaction of sleep we turn inward to review and evaluate the implications of our day, and the input of those new perceptions, learnings, and—most important—emotions about what we have experienced.

What we experience as a dream is the result of our brain’s effort to match recent, emotion-evoking events to other similar experiences already stored in long-term memory. One purpose of this sleep-related matching process, this putting of similar memory experiences together, is to defuse the impact of those feelings that might otherwise linger and disrupt our moods and behaviors the next day. The various ways in which this extraordinary mind of ours works—the top-level rational thinking and executive deciding functions, the middle management of routine habits of thought, and the emotional relating and updating of the organized schemas of our self-concept—are not isolated from each other. They interact. The emotional aspect, which is often not consciously recognized, drives the not-conscious mental activity of sleep.

Later in the book, she writes more about how dreams regulate emotions:

Despite differences in terminology, all the contemporary theories of dreaming have a common thread — they all emphasize that dreams are not about prosaic themes, not about reading, writing, and arithmetic, but about emotion, or what psychologists refer to as affect. What is carried forward from waking hours into sleep are recent experiences that have an emotional component, often those that were negative in tone but not noticed at the time or not fully resolved. One proposed purpose of dreaming, of what dreaming accomplishes (known as the mood regulatory function of dreams theory) is that dreaming modulates disturbances in emotion, regulating those that are troublesome. My research, as well as that of other investigators in this country and abroad, supports this theory. Studies show that negative mood is down-regulated overnight. How this is accomplished has had less attention.

I propose that when some disturbing waking experience is reactivated in sleep and carried forward into REM, where it is matched by similarity in feeling to earlier memories, a network of older associations is stimulated and is displayed as a sequence of compound images that we experience as dreams. This melding of new and old memory fragments modifies the network of emotional self-defining memories, and thus updates the organizational picture we hold of “who I am and what is good for me and what is not.” In this way, dreaming diffuses the emotional charge of the event and so prepares the sleeper to wake ready to see things in a more positive light, to make a fresh start. This does not always happen over a single night; sometimes a big reorganization of the emotional perspective of our self-concept must be made—from wife to widow or married to single, say, and this may take many nights. We must look for dream changes within the night and over time across nights to detect whether a productive change is under way. In very broad strokes, this is the definition of the mood-regulatory function of dreaming, one basic to the new model of the twenty-four hour mind I am proposing.

In another fascinating part of her research, Cartwright outlines the role of sleep in skill enhancement. In short, “sleeping on it” is wise advice.

Think back to “take two aspirins and call me in the morning.” Want to improve your golf stroke? Concentrate on it before sleeping. An interval of sleep has been proven to bestow a real benefit for both laboratory animals and humans when they are tested on many different types of newly learned tasks. You will remember more items or make fewer mistakes if you have had a period of sleep between learning something new and the test of your ability to recall it later than you would if you spent the same amount of time awake.

Most researchers agree “with the overall conclusion that one of the ways sleep works is by enhancing the memory of important bits of new information and clearing out unnecessary or competing bits, and then passing the good bits on to be integrated into existing memory circuits.” This happens in two steps.

The first is in early NREM sleep when the brain circuits that were active while we were learning something new, a motor skill, say, or a new language, are reactivated and stay active until REM sleep occurs. In REM sleep, these new bits of information are then matched to older related memories already stored in long-term memory networks. This causes the new learning to stick (to be consolidated) and to remain accessible for when we need it later in waking.

As for the effect of alcohol has before sleep, Carlyle Smith, a Canadian Psychologist, found that it reduces memory formation, “reducing the number of rapid eye movements” in REM sleep. The eye movements, similar to the ones we make while reading, are how we do scanning of visual information.

The mind is active 24 hours a day:

If the mind is truly working continuously, during all 24 hours of the day, it is not in its conscious mode during the time spent asleep. That time belongs to the unconscious. In waking, the two types of cognition, conscious and unconscious, are working sometimes in parallel, but also often interacting. They may alternate, depending on our focus of attention and the presence of an explicit goal. If we get bored or sleepy, we can slip into a third mode of thought, daydreaming. These thoughts can be recalled when we return to conscious thinking, which is not generally true of unconscious cognition unless we are caught in the act in the sleep lab. This third in-between state is variously called the preconscious or subconscious, and has been studied in a few investigations of what is going on in the mind during the transition before sleep onset.

Toward the end, Cartwright explores the role of sleep.

[I]n good sleepers, the mind is continuously active, reviewing experience from yesterday, sorting which new information is relevant and important to save due to its emotional saliency. Dreams are not without sense, nor are they best understood to be expressions of infantile wishes. They are the result of the interconnectedness of new experience with that already stored in memory networks. But memory is never a precise duplicate of the original; instead, it is a continuing act of creation. Dream images are the product of that creation. They are formed by pattern recognition between some current emotionally valued experience matching the condensed representation of similarly toned memories. Networks of these become our familiar style of thinking, which gives our behavior continuity and us a coherent sense of who we are. Thus, dream dimensions are elements of the schemas, and both represent accumulated experience and serve to filter and evaluate the new day’s input.

Sleep is a busy time, interweaving streams of thought with emotional values attached, as they fit or challenge the organizational structure that represents our identity. One function of all this action, I believe, is to regulate disturbing emotion in order to keep it from disrupting our sleep and subsequent waking functioning. In this book, I have offered some tests of that hypothesis by considering what happens to this process of down-regulation within the night when sleep is disordered in various ways.

Cartwright develops several themes throughout The Twenty-four Hour Mind. First is that the mind is continuously active. Second is the role of emotion in “carrying out the collaboration of the waking and sleeping mind.” This includes exploring whether the sleeping mind “contributes to resolving emotional turmoil stirred up by some real anxiety inducing circumstance.” Third is how sleeping contributes to how new learning is retained. Accumulated experiences serve to filter and evaluate the new day’s input.

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