The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

       The War of Art was the first secular mussar (ethic teaching?) book that I have ever seen. It goes through many traits that one can hope to achieve in life. Specifically, it focuses on the artist, a person who creatively advances something in the world, as the person who can overcome his vices and create. If you are someone who is working on a creative art now but are having trouble getting it done, I would highly advise looking into this. As I am in the middle of writing my own book now, I found that this book gave me a lot of motivation into understanding how to actually write it. The most important tip for me was that the hardest step is usually sitting down to write. Once you sit down and start working, ideas come and much will come out of it. So far I have found this to be very true. Rather than figuring everything out and then starting to write, when I have forced myself to just start things flowed. At the same time, I felt that much of the book was somewhat misplaced. Pressfield focuses much of the book (its only 160 pages total) on what he calls as Resistance and ways to combat it. Resistance is a vague idea that Pressfield never fully explains, but essentially it rules over all other vices that gets artists to stop working. While I found this simplistic, it was still powerful, as if you can beat Resistance you can do anything.

        One way Pressfield talks about defeating Resistance is how you define your art. Resistance makes the artist worry that no one will like what he creates, that it wont be good enough, that he will fail. Pressfield has a way to combat it, which I found to be so thoughtful and true. Pressfield describes two ways of defining identity: hierarchical and territorial.  When we are defining ourselves in a hierarchical fashion, we define ourselves based on where we fall in a group. High school is notoriously like this. People are sharply defined by how cool or smart they are. Wehn we define ourselves territorially we are doing something entirely different. It does not matter where we are in the pack, what matters is our territory. Defining yourself as a Jew, American, or artist accomplishes this. It doesn't matter what other people think, this is who you are. Pressfield argues that one can only achieve true greatness if his work is done territorially. You do it because you want to be the best you can be, because you value your work and define yourself by it. This idea has left an impact on me. We all find ourselves thinking about how well we are doing based on how others are doing, but that really should not be our thinking. We can look up to people to try and achieve more, but by only truly caring about doing the best work you can do allows you to be free of worry. I have found myself in numerous conversations over the years, where this has been the conversation. Complaints about others thinking they are better religiously because they do this or that happens every so often. If these complaints truly are the case then it is sad because a relationship with G-d is something each of us can own. We should not define our relationship with Him based on how other people are doing, but by how we are doing. This idea goes into every facet of our lives. To politics, where parties think they are better than others rather than just making the best platform that they can, to sports where players are defined not by how they played but by whether they beat the other team, and to jobs where you define yourself on your paycheck instead of how much you help society. When I look at myself now after reading this book I now have this new framework to work within. Am I doing things because they are good for me, or because I want to be better than someone else. I hope the answer is always the former. 

The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls

        The Glass Castle is a wrenching memoir of Jeannette's childhood. Jeannette's father Rex is a bright man and teaches an abundance of knowledge to his kids, and constantly talks about the importance of learning. Even with this, Rex is probably the worst father I have ever read about. He is a raging alcoholic and would use the messily earnings that he procured from various odd jobs for his alcoholism instead of putting food on the table for his four children.  The Walls family has to move from place to place trying to find some type of accommodations that they can afford to live in. Rose Mary is a hopeless artist that loves the adventure of the life that she has with Rex. She tries to give this over to her children, but as they grow older they understand more and more how their parents are not providing for them. Their High School experience seems to be the last straw, when Jeannette is fondled by multiple men including her uncle, and is forced to eat leftover food out of the trash to become satiated. When Jeannette's older sister Lori decides to move herself to NY, and Jeannette decides to follow her a year later, the reader is pulling for them, hoping that they can procure a future in which they can provide for themselves. And as we are reading her book, we know that they will.   

            Rex and Rose are fascinating. They lead awfully hard lives, but don’t want help when it is possible. They don’t want to accept things like welfare and will also not take help from their children. Rose is always able to look at the best of the situation when the situation really is dire. Everything is an adventure, and not a problem. I think this shows how the human spirit can really overtake the situation it is in. While this is positive in many aspects, it has negative consequences as well. Rose sees no reason to get out of the situation that she is in because there is no reason to. While living homeless on the streets of NY, she even remarks that if the government didn’t want them to live on the streets, then it wouldn’t be so easy. This type of thinking concerns me. Of course we want to help people that need help, and G-d forbid it for me to be chastising those that argue to help people that are in need. At the same time, to what extent are some of the social reforms merely helping those that would have to get their lives together if they did not have the welfare. My mother is a substance abuse counselor for hardcore heroin addicts, and she observes her patients being content with their lives, which they live purely off welfare. They never bother finding better jobs because they are happy the way things are. I hope that soon someone will be able to figure out how to resolve this issue.

            Next to one of the abandoned houses that the Walls live in is a tree called the Joshua tree that due to wind, has a distinct curve. Jeanette “told Mom that I would protect it from the wind and water it every day so that it could grow nice and tall and straight.” Her mother responds “Mom frowned at me. ‘You’d be destroying what makes it special,” she said. ‘it’s the Joshua tree’s struggle that gives it its beauty.” Parents always want the best for their kids and want to separate them from harm.  At the same time it is all that Jeanette went through that made her so successful. Hard work and some pain are what makes people great, but certainly there is a limit to what we would be willing to take.

            Seeing as the Walls children rarely are in a place long enough to go to the schools, yet they come out knowledgeable and have an exceptional relationship with learning, reading and creativity. Even though they didn’t get it at school, their parents do show them the importance of these fields. Rex is always teaching his kids facts, reads with them and teaches them skills. Rose is acts as a personal always wanting to create more and values high level thought. The Glass Castle proves something that I always knew to be true. While the garnering of knowledge can be left to school, it is incumbent on the parents to cultivate a relationship with learning for their children. I find this becoming an ever more important issue in the Orthodox community. We are expecting school to display to children how to love Torah and how to be a religious Jew. What I find that if children learn with their parents, they are far more likely to have a positive relationship with learning then if they go to a school that teaches more Torah. Seeing our parents day in and day out performing their religious duties cannot be replicated in any other fashion.

            The Glass Castle was a thought provoking and exciting memoir. It is definitely worth a read. 

Book #100 - My Own

           I'm still in somewhat disbelief that I am approaching book #100 (I am at reading 97 now). When I realized that I was approaching this milestone, I tried to think of something special to do, like I had for book #52. After some thinking, I realized that I have been spending a lot of time reading other people's works, why couldn't I try to read my own. How better to do this then to write my own book. The problem was that I had few ideas and have no experience writing beyond this blog and school essays. Then I saw this ted talk (its 4 mins), and then that this was more than one guy that wrote a novel in a month, it is an entire organization! So in the month of February (and a little more) I am going to try to write a novel as my 100th book. But what to write it on? After much deliberation I finally came up with an idea for my book. I am going to write a novel cataloging our forefather Yaakov's life. The Biblical text leaves so much for interpretation and the Yaakov stories are ripe with interesting ideas that can be brought out. Yaakov can become alive and personable in a way that he is not usually seen. While I will be working with the pshat and probably some midrashim, I hope to broaden the discussion.   This book in many ways is in the spirit of As a Driven Leaf. I hope to bring out modern issues in the novel, specifically Modern Orthodox ones. This is where you guys come in. While I know many of the issues that someone growing up MO goes through, I only have one perspective, and a somewhat bubbled one at that. Any added perspective on any issue that exists in the MO community would be welcome. Feel free to send messages through this, facebook me, email me at samlreinstein1@gmail.com, or call me. All insights would help me out significantly. 

      While i'm here I would also like to thank everyone that has supported me throughout this entire endeavor. Whether it be my family, friends who either comment about the project or  have given me advice about how to do the blog, I really appreciate all the support. I hope to hear from people about this next project as well! Thanks everyone!

The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver

      What do baseball, weather, politics, hurricanes, and poker all have in common? If you predicted the answer was the need for predictions you would be right. In every field, we are constantly trying to predict what will happen next. These predictions can have major consequences, as they determine what we will do now. In baseball, this means millions of dollars, in hurricanes this means hundreds of lives. Nate Silver proves worthy to speak about prediction as he most recently predicted all 50 states in the national election. The funny thing is, he will tell you that part of what makes him good at predictions is the fact that he knows that was luck. The need to think probabilistically is a major theme in the book. We should always understand that we can only know what will happen to a certain extent. Even when we are sure, this may mean 90 or 95 percent, but not all the time. I have always seen the opposite type of thinking in sports. Analysts are trying to predict games at a time or even predict the champion before the year begins. This is foolish in so many ways, but perhaps most importantly it lacks the understanding of uncertainty. Another major issue with predictions given in the media is that the people that are good for TV are hedgehogs, people with one vision and fit everything into it, instead of being foxes, who take everything into account. This leaves out valuable information, so its no wonder that political pundits are more often than not so very off the mark. Silver advocates the use of  Bayesian statistics. This essentially means that as we gain more information, our predictions should constantly by moving. This enables us to consistently be making better predictions and getting closer to the real occurrences. Doing this will also help us get to see the signal from the noise, or find the causation in the correlation. When our predictions fail, our probabilities need to change, and as the foxes we should not be stubborn with them. It is these problems and many others that he outlines to be the problems with prediction today. In his many years as a prognosticator, Silver analyzes a diverse array of topics, some of which are in the first sentence of this post. At times I found a lot of the examples to be unnecessary, as he had made his point long ago, but to those interested in the specific topics they may have been enlightening.

      For the past six months, I have been working for an insurance firm doing business modeling which involves making predictions. Also, graduating with a math degree and taking the first actuary exam gives me a good background in this specific field. While reading this book, I was happy to say that I was already using many of the theories in the book. The difference is that I had no language to use for these methods. Silver gave me that language, which concretized the ideas for me. Anyone not in this type of field would probably be able to get even more out of this fantastic book. It's somewhat long, but for those worried about it being too mathy, it isn't.