I love airport books, the kind you buy just before you get on a plane, that you read while looking out the window. Books you read out of the corner of your eye, but which imperceptibly change your way of seeing and behaving. Not quite philosophy, not quite journalism, nor personal development; more like a journalism of ideas, along the lines of Malcolm Gladwell. He gets interested in an idea, investigates it to see how it has changed people’s lives, and then writes an article or a book on it. If I had to write an airport book, I’d write one about ease. So you don’t begin an action because you’ve thought about it long enough to judge that it’s the best of all possible choices, but because indecision is the worst of all evils, and there just isn’t time to examine them all. Seen like this, beginning is the key to completing. It means forgetting about deliberation, hesitation, and calculation and just getting on with the job. Not tomorrow, not later: here and now. Don’t wait for the first of January to make your vows. Alain says: “Making a resolution means nothing; taking up a tool is what’s needed. The thought will follow. Consider that thought cannot guide an action that has not been embarked on.” So you don’t have to renounce all thought when you act, but you must think only inside the action, at its service, and only when necessary. Thought must be as light as possible, it must not trip you up. When it is regulated by action, thought is a powerful tool. Left to itself, and to doubt, it will be your scourge. Identifiers: LCCN 2020022658 (print) | LCCN 2020022659 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143135494 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525507161 (ebook) If you thought the book’s title was confusing then the chapter on “Hit the target without aiming” will throw you off. But there is a difference between trying too hard to hit a target and preparing well enough, physically and mentally, to hit

True courage, for him, turned out to be recognizing his limits and his humanity, and renouncing his desire to be all-powerful. He discovered the Stoics’ precept that if we want to be happy, we need to focus on the things we can control, and leave the rest to the gods. In this sense his experiment taught him something, and his failure is a success, because he became aware of his own physical reality, and of reality itself. One point in his favor: it took only 6,000 hours for him to realize this and to become an expert in stoicism; that’s 4,000 hours fewer than predicted. That’s not counting the two years of doubt and denial, which makes 365 a 2 × 24 (since depression is twenty-four hours a day), equaling the 17,500 hours of “purposeful depression” that it took him to realize that the rule of 10,000 hours perhaps didn’t exist or wasn’t valid for him. The rule of 10,000 hours flatters us because it allows us to think that with enough work, we can become whatever we want. That everything depends on individual will and a sense of effort. If performance was only about training, if 10,000 hours really were sufficient to compensate for natural differences, why continue to separate men and women in competitions? Because, as David Epstein shows, just because we want to doesn’t mean we can. To think you didn’t become a golf champion after 10,000 hours because you didn’t work hard enough is as misguided as to believe that a champion doesn’t need to train, that they just have to exist to win. The temptation of 10,000 hours, for all its whiff of egalitarianism, offers an even more dangerous illusion than the inverse temptation to just let it all hang out. You can’t afford to skimp on training, nor to underestimate your limits. We shouldn’t say “if you want to, you can” but “if you can, you’re right to want it.” Why ten years, when by working ten hours a day you’d get to 10,000 hours in a thousand days, which is less than three years? Because it’s not enough to accumulate hours of practice; the practice has to be deliberate, it has to represent an effort to achieve a specific goal, ability, or gesture that as yet eludes you. To put it another way, you need to feel the time passing, it needs to not be easy. This is quite different from the so-called ten hours a day spent by Zola or Flaubert, who seem like workaholics when in fact they spent most of their time dreaming of the right word, “fiddling around” with their sentences like Giacometti fiddling around with his clay; in short, doing what they liked best, which takes a lot of deliberately wasted time and a certain kind of nonchalance. Nothing to do with continuous effort, in any case. Three or four hours a day of deliberate practice, preferably spread out over several sessions, would therefore be a maximum, because the effort of all that attention is exhausting. The rest of the day should be spent resting, or in comparatively less intense activities: reading, reflection, strategy, associated leisure activities, and so on. Three to four hours a day with one day of rest a week, and two weeks of holiday a year, gets you to 1,000 hours a year, or 10,000 hours in ten years. Meanwhile, let us return to Philippe Petit, August 7, 1974—at the moment when the elevator wheel starts to turn, his friend Jean-François passes him his pole, and he has only a minute left in which to decide if—for all his tiredness and fear—he’s going to go for it, or not:those who, on finding themselves lost in a forest, don’t wander around in circles, this way and that, nor come to a halt in one particular spot, but just keep walking in the straightest line possible toward their given destination, refusing to change direction for unimportant reasons, particularly since it was only by chance they chose that destination in the first place: by this means, even if they don’t get to exactly the place they meant to, at least they will eventually get somewhere where the likelihood is they will be better off than in the middle of a forest. Through hard work, the pianist prepares for the moment of visitation. As I walk across the stage, I’m alone, and the moment I start playing, I cease to be. A presence is protecting me. Is it the presence of the music? Of the composers whose work I’m playing? It’s as though there are two of me and I can watch myself playing at the same time as continuing to play—sometimes I see a light come down that casts a halo around the piano and I know that that light is them.

Ollivier Pourriol is a philosopher, writer, and novelist. He lives in Paris, where his lectures mixing philosophy and cinema are widely attended, and where he puts his ideas into practice over aperitifs with friends. The main error is to wait around doing nothing, holding your pen, or with your life on hold. Patience is a virtue, but there is a negative form of expectation—namely, expecting too much of yourself. Nothing grows through that kind of waiting. If you don’t know how you can get out of this kind of stagnation, do what Stendhal did: borrow your first sentence or your first action from someone else, and continue it. Continuing allows you to ride on other people’s momentum instead of having to use your own. In cycling they talk about “drafting,” or, more commonly, “slipstreaming.” In life, as in writing, you first need to get into the wake of someone or something else. We start off learning a language by imitating others, learning by rote. Bit by bit, without realizing it, we end up creating our own slipstream and speaking the language. We write, we pedal, we gallop. We’re off! We never actually had to start and now that all we have to do is keep on going, it’s a whole lot easier. A sculptor needs clay or stone to model or sculpt; he can’t do it out of thin air, from nothing, ex nihilo. Perhaps when Giacometti gives himself over to what he calls an obsession, content just to fiddle around with clay without actually achieving anything, he hasn’t really begun yet, but that doesn’t stop him from carrying on. He may always feel he’s failed to do what he was trying to, but his work gives him great pleasure. Here, in an interview given at one of his exhibitions to the insightful documentary maker Jean-Marie Drot, he has the final word: We can see it in their laissez-faireparenting, chicstyle, haute cuisine,and enviable home cooking: They barely seem to be trying, yet the results are world-famous--thanks to a certain je ne sais quoithat is the key to a more creative, fulfilling, and productive life.Enumeration - An overview. A naming of parts. A panorama. Regularly widen your gaze so that you do not miss the big picture, the grand scheme. Keep a macro and micro view all at once. Make sure that everything is included. PDF / EPUB File Name: The_French_Art_of_Not_Trying_Too_Hard_-_Ollivier_Pourriol.pdf, The_French_Art_of_Not_Trying_Too_Hard_-_Ollivier_Pourriol.epub When the Chinese painter Zao Wou-Ki first set foot in Paris in 1948, he knew only one word of French, one open-sesame that he gave to the taxi driver: "Montparnasse." He didn't mean the train station, he meant the mythical place that all aspiring painters dream of. He spent the rest of his life there in a studio very close to Giacometti's. Chinese by chance, but French by the dictate of his heart. Grace is also a state of flow. It is a complete merge of the self with action, without the interference of intellect or other factors. The body is barely embodied by knowing and not by thinking. There is no self correction, judgement, or anything else. There is just pure action and the fluid movements of the body doing what it was meant to do. It is effortless and the result of not thinking or trying to escape from the physical state of being into a mental or emotional state of judgement or control. Noah is lost in the deliciousness of the memory too, and his conclusion is the same as Zidane’s: there just aren’t any words; “those moments really are rare.”