Hello, and welcome to how to take over the world. This is Ben Wilson, and this week is a mini episode as I'm working on full length episodes for Catherine, the great and Alexander the great, but I wanted to share a quick thought, give you a mini episode between now and then, but first a word from our sponsors. So I've been thinking a little bit about my favorite poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins. And in this mini episode, I just want to bring up one small aspect of his life. Hopkins was born in Stratford, England in 1844. He studied at Oxford where he realized that he had an incredible gift for poetry. Hopkins was just this unbelievable poet.He had just an incredible command of the English language. And if you read his stuff, it's unlike the poetry of anyone else it's incredibly lyrical and fun to read. I thinkand he's not just one of my favorite poets. He's also considered by critics to be one of the great poets. He has a moral in Westminster, Abbey and poet's corner next to the likes of Shakespeare and Jane Austin and Ts Elliot. And if you read Hopkins' poetry, you would think that he only created masterpieces because truly, almost every single one of his poems is a true masterpiece. . And that's because of one simple reason. And that's that he burned all the rest of it.He was bipolar, uh, and he would have these just terrible depressive episodes. this depression was probably exacerbated by the fact that he was a gay man during a time when that was not tolerated in English society. And in one of those depressive episodes, He burned all of his poetry, all the poetry that he ever wrote, he burned all of it. And the only reason that we're able to read anything is that he had sent some of his very best stuff to some of his friends who were pellets.And they could tell that it was great and they published it after his death. , but we don't have, you know, who knows, we don't know how much he wrote, but in all likelihood, we don't have 80 to 90% of the poetry that he ever wrote. Now, if you're an aspiring poet, think of the impression that this gives you. If you don't know his backstory, you start reading this guy's stuff and you think my goodness, like this guy is a genius. He only wrote 10 out of 10 amazing life changing poems.And I know that I have written some stuff is not this good. I clearly don't have the talent this guys has, and I can, I can never approach it that you might be tempted to feel that way. You don't get to see all the mediocre and bad poetry that he wrote because it's lost the history. And I'm sure he did have some clunkers, but we'll just never know.And Hopkins is not alone. In this regard, Charles Dickens burned more than 20 years worth of letters, notes, and writing that didn't live up to his, you know, great standards, monet tore up and burned a number of his water.Lily paintings leaving only the best ones for posterity to enjoy and Marvel at. And again, this gives the wrong impression that they spent their careers laboring over a select few masterpieces. When the truth is the opposite, they were prolific artists who created volumes and volumes of work, much of it, fairly mediocre. But out of these volumes and volumes of work came a few masterpieces.and one of the things that reminded me of this was this week. I was reading a book called atomic habits by James clear, I recommend it. It's very good. And in it, he recounts the story of Jerry Yasmin, a famous photographer and professor of photography at the university of Florida. And at the beginning of one semester, professor Juelz men divided his class in half the left side of the class, he explained would be graded solely based on the number of photos they took. 100 photographs would rate an a 90 photographs would rate a B.And so on and so forth, . They would be graded solely on volume. And so they were dubbed the quantity group. the right side of the class would be graded differently.They would submit one single photo at the end of the semester and they could take it as long as they wanted. They could take as many or as few photographs as they wanted. But the important thing was. That they had to submit one, you know, masterpiece the very best work that they could manage and they would be graded based on the subjective rating of how great this photograph was.And so they were dubbed the quality group.  And at the end of the semester, professor, the man looked through the photographs and he did sort of a blind test and selected kind of a few of the photographs that he thought were exceptional that he thought were great. And when he did this and looked up, you know, who actually had taken these photos, it turned out that all of the best photographs had come, not from the quality group.But from the quantity group They had spent the semester experimenting, trying new techniques, figuring out things that worked and that didn't work and giving themselves more bites at the Apple of taking a truly great photograph. Meanwhile, the quality group had spent their time researching theories, thinking about what makes a great photo and agonizing and vain over what they hoped would be this masterpiece, but it turned out was not. He later expressed the lesson he learned from this when he said many vices emphasize theory, but I felt strongly that producing images was most important  and almost all greatness is like this. Whether it's an art war, business sports, or any other domain, , greatness belongs not to those who understand some abstract theory or who spend the most time tinkering on a single great work. But rather to those who make the most attempts, Thomas Edison was famous for saying, I have not failed 10,000 times.I have not failed once I have succeeded in proving that those 10,000 ways will not work  when I have eliminated the ways that do not work, I will find the way that does work.  So there you go. No person goes from unmitigated success to unmitigated success.  everyone experiences failures, the important thing is you keep trying enough and produce enough volume that some great things can come out of what you do.  So that's it for this week. Like I said, Catherine, the great Alexander, the great coming soon stay patient, who knows when. Until then. Thanks for listening.

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