210202 What I learned in my studies this morning

Today's Tao:

Those who know do not talk. 

Those who talk do not know.

From The Daily Stoic: 

Ever notice how some older people are unflappable? This is because they've been there and done that. They act in situations rather than react. They are veterans of life. 

Approach each trial, bad and good, as though I have experienced this many times before and get to choose my actions. I don't have to be mad, sad, joyful, angry, or jealous. I have the ability to remain calm and dictate both my response and the degree to which i respond. 

I must choose wisely. 

“Frame your thoughts like this—you are an old person, you won’t let yourself be enslaved by this any longer, no longer pulled like a puppet by every impulse, and you’ll stop complaining about your present fortune or dreading the future.”—Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2.2

From Eric Hoffer, Part III, Unifying Agents:

Leadership 

Movements wither without leaders. Background circumstances alone are insufficient to create a movement. 

It needs the iron will, daring and vision of an exceptional leader to concert and mobilize existing attitudes and impulses into the collective drive of a mass movement. The leader personifies the certitude of the creed and the defiance and grandeur of power. He articulates and justifies the resentment dammed up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages the world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action. He evokes the enthusiasm of communion—the sense of liberation from a petty and meaningless individual existence.

... 

Exceptional intelligence, noble character and originality seem neither indispensable nor perhaps desirable. The main requirements seem to be: audacity and a joy in defiance; an iron will; a fanatical conviction that he is in possession of the one and only truth; faith in his destiny and luck; a capacity for passionate hatred; contempt for the present; a cunning estimate of human nature; a delight in symbols (spectacles and ceremonials); unbounded brazenness which finds expression in a disregard of consistency and fairness; a recognition that the innermost craving of a following is for communion and that there can never be too much of it; a capacity for winning and holding the utmost loyalty of a group of able lieutenants. This last faculty is one of the most essential and elusive.

... 

The most decisive for the effectiveness of a mass movement leader seem to be audacity, fanatical faith in a holy cause, an awareness of the importance of a close-knit collectivity, and, above all, the ability to evoke fervent devotion in a group of able lieutenants.

(The True Believer, XIV-90)