how to change your life, part 2: agnes callard's aspiration

So much of getting good at anything is just pure labor: figuring out how to try and then offering up the hours...

...Pleople always assume I'm interested in the end result-the wonderful thing they've made-when what I'm really interested in is the process. How did you get this way and why? I'm curious about the ugliness of trying, the years and years... See more

Yes, philosophy is a serious, rigorous academic discipline, with a lot of people reading Wittgenstein in the original German and pontificating away in a paywalled journal article. But it’s also, I think, a discipline that is meant to resonate with our ordinary lives, our real lives outside the ivory tower. In our real lives, we’re falling in love a... See more

There's something uncomfortable about people who are trying too hard. We judge them for their pretensions; we feel embarrassed at the nakedness of their effort. The embarrassment is often a projection of our own insecurities about striving. If we managed, with heroic unselfconsciousness, to really commit to becoming a writer, an artist, a better pe... See more

The work is visible in her struggles to sustain interest in the hobby or relationship or career or religion or aesthetic experience that will later become second nature; in her repeated attempts to "get it right," attempts that must be performed without the benefit of knowing exactly what rightness consists in; and, most generally, in the fact that... See more

Suppose that you sign up for a classical-music-appreciation class, in which your first assignment is to listen to a symphony. You put on headphones, press Play-and fall asleep. The problem is that you don't actually want to listen to classical music; you just want to want to. Aspiring, Callard thinks, is a common human activity: there are aspiring ... See more