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He first defines our ultimate goal—the very purpose of being alive, the thing we’re shooting for—the same way a young swimmer might identify “Olympic gold medal” as a target that would mean “maximum success.” Aristotle says that thing is: happiness. That’s the telos,4 or goal, of being human. His argument for this is pretty solid, I think. There are things we do for some other reason—like, we work in order to earn money, or we exercise in order to get stronger. There are also good things we want, like health, honor, or friendships, because they make us happy. But happiness is the top dog on the list of “things we desire”—it has no aim other than itself. It’s the thing we want to be, just… to be it. Technically, in the original Greek, Aristotle actually uses the nebulous word “eudaimonia,” which sometimes gets translated as “happiness” and sometimes as “flourishing.”5 I prefer “flourishing,” because that feels like a bigger deal than “happiness.” We’re talking about the ultimate objective for humans here, and a flourishing person sounds like she’s more fulfilled, complete, and impressive than a “happy” person.
How to Be Perfect
Michael Schur
Figure out what you do, then do it. And do it better than anyone else. And then let everything else you do build around that; stay with what you know. Being great at one thing doesn’t mean you can also run a restaurant or a car dealership or a line of sportswear. Bill Gates is not going to launch a line of sportswear. Most likely, neither should you.
By then both sides had created seemingly unassailable extensive defensive lines. It was as if the Chinese, who had been so cavalier with their manpower in the earlier months of the war, had morphed their troops into a different kind of Army in the previous two years, skilled at this different kind of warfare. Given UN air and artillery supremacy, they had gradually adjusted their style of fighting. They had created quite exceptional tunnels, triumphs of raw, primitive engineering (and eventually to be copied and perhaps exceeded by the North Vietnamese, first in their assault on the French at Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and then in time in their war with the Americans). In Korea these tunnels went from Chinese positions relatively removed from the point of assault to the very mouth of an attack point. They allowed the Chinese relative immunity from UN firepower until the very last moment of an attack. In addition, the Chinese had their artillery pieces, usually ones captured during their civil war, hidden away, virtually invisible to detection even from the air. They were positioned on the back side of the mountains, often in caves laboriously carved out of the mountains themselves. A given artillery piece would be slipped out periodically, would fire about twenty rounds of frighteningly accurate fire at the American positions, and then be wheeled back into the cave. “By the time our counterfire guys could fix its location, their gun was safe and its crew was safely back in the cave too, sucking down their rice,” said Hal Moore, who had commanded a rifle company in those days. Their defensive positions were exceptional, “very tough to crack—they were hard-core, heavy duty, professional diggers,” Moore said. “Their lines were built around deep caves, catacombs with large underground rooms sometimes twelve or fifteen miles behind the front lines. Because of that our artillery, bombers, and close air support had little or no effect on them.” Their troops were much admired by the American commanders in the field for their discipline and tenacity. The Americans were rotating their frontline people more and more quickly because it was such an unpopular war, but the Chinese were more often than not keeping the same units and the same troops engaged on the line for extended periods,
The Coldest Winter
David Halberstam
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