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As human beings, in other words, we can only handle so much information at once. Once we pass a certain boundary, we become overwhelmed. What I’m describing here is an intellectual capacity—our ability to process raw information. But if you think about it, we clearly have a channel capacity for feelings as well. Take a minute, for example, to make a list of all the people you know whose death would leave you truly devastated. Chances are you will come up with around 12 names. That, at least, is the average answer that most people give to that question. Those names make up what psychologists call our sympathy group. Why aren’t groups any larger? Partly it’s a question of time. If you look at the names on your sympathy list, they are probably the people whom you devote the most attention to—either on the telephone, in person, or thinking and worrying about.
The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell
We must illuminate the ego’s ruses and see how it sabotages our progress. I think that everyone would agree with this concept of practicing and playing, so why won’t we do it? As I said before, it is because we are in a hurry - we need to sound good today, in our quest for a good self-image. We aren’t in touch with our own inner beauty and so we seek it in our level of play. Self-centeredness, which some musicians suffer from in the extreme, is the wall between us and mastery.
Effortless Mastery
Kenny Werner
There was a certain inevitability to the darkness that existed between the two superpowers in the years immediately after World War II—two essentially isolationist countries propelled involuntarily to great power status, with vastly differing political and economic systems, each with its own historical strain of paranoia and each now living in a nuclear world. But no small additional part of the tension was the fact that the Soviet leader was Stalin, and he made everything in the Cold War seem infinitely more dangerous and more threatening, so marginal was his innate humanity, and so cruel a man was he. What he ran was a terror machine. It did not matter if you had committed a crime; a suitable crime could always be found for you. It did not matter if you were a completely loyal Communist and a completely faithful Stalinist, a true believer in the cult of his personality. Someone was always listening, ready to betray you, if only to save himself. It was government run by fear and, finally, madness. In the late 1930s, with a Slavophobic Hitler on the rise, Stalin had purged and virtually destroyed the officer corps and leadership of the Red Army, getting rid of 3 of 5 marshals, 15 of 16 army commanders, 60 of 67 corps commanders, 136 of 199 division commanders. Essentially he stripped his country’s defenses and prepared the way for the German invasion to come in 1941. His crimes against his own people were so great as to be essentially beyond measurement. How many people had actually died? Was it a few million, 10 million, perhaps even 40 million? “He was one of those rare terrible dogmatists capable of destroying nine tenths of the human race to ‘make happy’ the one tenth,” wrote Milovan Djilas, the former Communist vice president of Yugoslavia, and heir apparent to Tito, who broke with the Communists, spent time in prison, and eventually wrote one of the most penetrating early insider portraits of Stalin. Djilas saw him as the greatest criminal of all time: “Every crime was possible to Stalin for there was not one he had not committed. Whatever standards we use to take his measure…to him will fall the glory the greatest criminal in history. For in him were joined the criminal senselessness of a Caligula with the refinement of a Borgia and the brutality of a Tsar Ivan the Terrible.”
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
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