About Aurelius and Huizong

I had no time for this, but I was intrigued.  A friend from a tech accelerator asked me to speak: “It’s only eight minutes.”  It’s a good pitch.  Who could say “no.” to that?  When I teach, I’m on for hours, at a time.  I should be able to handle eight minutes.  And the minute I’d confirmed it was in Beijing and that I was willing to do it, I was told I ought to put together a deck.  “Oh, I don’t need a deck.”  I said.  And these guys, who do this all the time, made it clear I did. 

So this morning I tried to put something together.  Something that had more to do with everything besides building a startup.  “Five Meditations” I decided to call the topic.  And after I did I thought of old Marcus Aurelius. and the book that has come down to us from the Second Century as “The Meditations.”   I thought of the philosopher emperor and how reluctantly ruled.  And I thought of Huizong about one-thousand years, the Northern Song artist emperor, who also didn’t really want to rule.  Ask yourself why you are doing what you’re doing and be sure your goal is in fact what you really want to achieve.  And soon, I had a simple framework for how I figured I’d orchestrate things.

There were six or so presentation before me.  Everyone, of course, wanted to talk to people about everything else besides their core business effort.  Everyone, or so it felt, wanted to remind people about life beyond business, and the importance of people and keeping a balanced life.  And were I to do it again, I’d certainly do something very different.  But I’d keep up the talk about Aurelius and Huizong, as they were the pieces, one for the westerners and the other for the Chinese, that people most wanted to chat about over beer and hotdogs after the show. 

My wife, who was very patient as I fielded all these historical discussions, was not in the mood for beer and hotdogs.  It was already 10:00PM, but there was a Hunan restaurant opened across the street.  It was crowded which suggested something that might prove worthy.  They cleaned off a dirty table and we ordered a few plates dishes.  The other tables were mostly drunken twenty somethings.  One kid kept knocking the empty bottles over at the table beside us.  I didn’t mean to, but I somehow felt sorry for the scrawny kid with the narrow face in the booth to the other side, as he gesticulated over and over to his chum who’s back was to me. We tried to enjoy our food but finished up quickly and headed back out.  We didn’t discuss it but for the second time in the evening we both felt much older than anyone else around.  

Saturday 3/16/19