Beware the Dangers of Success

The following advice on success, written by the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, is extremely different from what we are used to (at least in the West,) where success is often seen as an absolute good.

Merton on the other hand, provides a helpful corrective, using bombastic language to get the point across: beware the (spiritual) danger that often comes with success:

If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success…If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted.

Thomas Merton, Love and Living, ed. Naomi Burton Stone and Brother Patrick Hart, Mariner Books.

The Wake

One of my favorite things to do is to sit on the aft deck of a boat going across the ocean and just watch the wake. It is such a beautiful, ever-changing creation as the ship continues on its path. You can tell a lot about a ship as you look at its wake. If it is in a straight line, you get a feeling that the boat is steadily on course, and that the captain is not dozing at the wheel, or that an engine or a shaft is not somehow out of whack. But if it is wavering, you begin to wonder. Also, if it is smooth and flat, you know something about the speed of the boat, and if it is steep, you can tell something about its drag. In other words, what the wake looks like can tell you a lot about the boat itself.

With people, the same thing is true…And just as with a boat, there are always two sides to the wake that a leader or someone else leaves when moving through our lives or the life of an organization. The two sides of the wake are: The task & the relationships.

When a person travels through a few years with an organization, or with a partnership, or any other kind of working association, he leaves a “wake” behind in these two areas, task and relationship: What did he accomplish and how did he deal with people? And we can tell a lot about that person from the nature of the wake…The wake is the results we leave behind. And the wake doesn’t lie and it doesn’t care about excuses. It is what it is.

No matter what we try to do to explain why, or to justify what the wake is, it still remains…On the other side of the wake are the relationships. Just as we leave the effects of our work behind in results, we leave the effects of our interactions with people behind in their hearts, minds, and souls…So, we must look out over the transom (the flat surface forming the stern of a vessel) and ask ourselves, “What does that wake look like?”

Henry Cloud, Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality HarperCollins.

Donne, Undone

While movies and novels often present stories of a budding love interest willing to give up everything for “true love” (Romeo and Juliet, for example), the renowned poet, and later clergyman, John Donne really, actually did risk everything when he chose to secretly marry Ann Moore, daughter of Sir George Moore, at the time against the wishes of his father-in-law. 

Donne lost his position working in the office of the Great Seal, and the young couple had to flee their place in Sir Geroge’s home, taking refuge in a house in Pyrford, near his father-in-law. Upon arriving at his new home, the first thing the poet did was write on a pane of glass:

John Donne

An Donne

Undone.

Apparently, it stuck, for prior to this episode, Donne’s last name was actually spelled “Dun.”

Stuart Strachan Jr., Source Material from James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, 1860.

The Pride of the Titanic

I know most of us have probably heard enough stories about the Titanic, but it does stand as an amazing monument to the famous saying, slightly altered, “pride goes before the fall/destruction.” (Proverbs 16:18)

Did you know that the Titanic took 12,000 men two years to build? When it set sail from Belfast, North Ireland, it was the largest sailing vessel ever made. It was also, of course, considered unsinkable. The Captain of the ship even went on record as saying, “Even God himself cannot sink this ship.” 

Famous last words, wouldn’t you say? And that is of course because the Titanic did sink, because that very same captain would not change course as they crashed into icebergs in the Atlantic. So many lives lost simply because of pride. Think of all the other ways lives are lost, or damaged, because we are too proud to change our minds or our behaviors.

Stuart Strachan Jr.

When Vasili Arkhipov Saved the World

Everyone knows that during the Cuban Missile Crisis we were perilously close to WWIII and nuclear Armageddon. Most people don’t know how close we were. Or how much we owe to Vasili Arkhipov.

Arkhipov was second-in-command of the Soviet diesel-electric submarine B-59 during the Cuban Missile Crisis — one of four such subs sent into the waters near Cuba in 1962. He was a distinguished officer, having acquitted himself with great courage during the 1961 nuclear accident aboard the nuclear submarine K-19.

It’s hard to imagine the stress the crew was under. Submerged deep in the ocean, they were unable to receive any messages from home — or even the civilian American radio they had picked up earlier in their cruise. They could not know whether war had broken out or not above. Complicating matters, the sub was hot — really hot. Not only was the submarine not really designed to operate in warm waters like the Caribbean, but their extended time under the surface meant that batteries were running low, the air conditioning had failed (temperatures were in excess of 120 degrees Fahrenheit), and carbon dioxide was accumulating.

And then the American vessels on the surface decided to drop depth charges on them.  

During the Cold War, one of the tactics used by surface vessels when they detected a submarine was to drop signaling depth charges (practice depth charges) on the submarine. These low-powered charges aren’t dangerous, but they signaled to the submarine that “the game was up” and that they needed to surface.

So, with depth charges exploding in the water around them, the captain of the B-59 had to decide whether war had broken out on the surface and whether he was to carry out his orders in that event to launch nuclear torpedoes on American coastal cities.

The captain made the decision to launch and his political officer agreed. Had this order been carried out, thousands, maybe millions, of Americans would have instantly died in this first strike. Millions more, American and Soviet, would have died in the series of attacks and reprisals that would have followed.

Unusually, the agreement of the captain and political officer were not enough on the B-59. Arkhipov may have been second-in-command of the vessel, but he was also Commodore of the small fleet dispatched to Cuba. He had to agree, too. And he argued that they needed to wait for orders from Moscow.

The submarine surfaced and made contact with American destroyers and, receiving new orders from Moscow, returned home. His courageous dissent prevented nuclear disaster.

William Rowley

The Wake

One of my favorite things to do is to sit on the aft deck of a boat going across the ocean and just watch the wake. It is such a beautiful, ever-changing creation as the ship continues on its path. You can tell a lot about a ship as you look at its wake. If it is in a straight line, you get a feeling that the boat is steadily on course, and that the captain is not dozing at the wheel, or that an engine or a shaft is not somehow out of whack. But if it is wavering, you begin to wonder. Also, if it is smooth and flat, you know something about the speed of the boat, and if it is steep, you can tell something about its drag. In other words, what the wake looks like can tell you a lot about the boat itself.

With people, the same thing is true…And just as with a boat, there are always two sides to the wake that a leader or someone else leaves when moving through our lives or the life of an organization. The two sides of the wake are: The task & the relationships.

When a person travels through a few years with an organization, or with a partnership, or any other kind of working association, he leaves a “wake” behind in these two areas, task and relationship: What did he accomplish and how did he deal with people? And we can tell a lot about that person from the nature of the wake…The wake is the results we leave behind. And the wake doesn’t lie and it doesn’t care about excuses. It is what it is.

No matter what we try to do to explain why, or to justify what the wake is, it still remains…On the other side of the wake are the relationships. Just as we leave the effects of our work behind in results, we leave the effects of our interactions with people behind in their hearts, minds, and souls…So, we must look out over the transom (the flat surface forming the stern of a vessel) and ask ourselves, “What does that wake look like?”

Henry Cloud, Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality HarperCollins.

Donne, Undone

While movies and novels often present stories of a budding love interest willing to give up everything for “true love” (Romeo and Juliet, for example), the renowned poet, and later clergyman, John Donne really, actually did risk everything when he chose to secretly marry Ann Moore, daughter of Sir George Moore, at the time against the wishes of his father-in-law. 

Donne lost his position working in the office of the Great Seal, and the young couple had to flee their place in Sir Geroge’s home, taking refuge in a house in Pyrford, near his father-in-law. Upon arriving at his new home, the first thing the poet did was write on a pane of glass:

John Donne

An Donne

Undone.

Apparently, it stuck, for prior to this episode, Donne’s last name was actually spelled “Dun.”

Stuart Strachan Jr., Source Material from James Prior, Life of Edmond Malone, 1860.

Related Themes

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