Drive: Ideas for sustained work. - Page 25

Editor’s note

Drive

Selected for practical perspectives on effort, recovery and sustained work.

DriveLiterature

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to gather wood — teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.

Saint-Exupéry never wrote this sentence. Its earliest known appearance in print is a 1995 American diet book, where it is offered as an anonymous proverb, and his name was attached to it around 2007 by way of management seminars. The idea does echo a passage in 'Citadelle', the sprawling book found unfinished after his plane disappeared over the Mediterranean in 1944. A good line, then, with a slightly embarrassing passport.

Widely attributed to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry; a later paraphraseRead card

Q2121

WonderHistory

The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.

Humboldt scholars cannot find it anywhere in his enormous output, and they have searched. The earliest match is a short verse by Moritz Goldschmidt in a Munich arts paper in 1895, thirty-six years after Humboldt died; his name was attached in the 1980s. The irony is that the sentiment fits. Humboldt climbed Chimborazo, crawled through Amazon tributaries, and came home arguing that nature is one connected whole — an idea he could only have reached by going and looking.

Widely attributed to Alexander von Humboldt; traced to an 1895 German verseRead card

Q2123

DriveHistory

In 1090 Hassan-i Sabbah took the mountain fortress of Alamut without a battle — Persian chronicles say he handed its owner a draft for 3,000 gold dinars.

Alamut stands on a rock ridge in the Elburz mountains of northern Persia, approachable by one narrow path. Hassan had spent years quietly winning over the people of the surrounding valleys before he ever addressed the castle itself, so by the time he arrived the garrison was already half his. A state that would outlast him by well over a century began as a property transaction. Patience had already done the work a siege could not.

Alamut, 1090Read card

Q2124

DriveHistory

The Nizaris carved lined cisterns into the mountain, channelled water from distant springs and terraced the valley below, so Alamut could simply ignore a blockade.

Cutting a cistern into limestone and lining it is slow, unglamorous work that pays off only in a crisis that may never come. The Nizaris did it anyway, across a network of mountain strongholds, alongside underground channels from springs and terraced fields of wheat and barley. Their castles were designed around the assumption of being cut off. It is a strange kind of confidence: to build as though the worst will happen, so that when it does, very little changes.

Alamut CastleRead card

Q2126

DriveHistory

Nizam al-Mulk served as vizier of the Seljuk empire from 1064 and was its effective ruler for two decades, until he was assassinated on a Ramadan night in 1092.

He served two sultans, Alp Arslan and Malik Shah, and after Alp Arslan's death he held the real power for twenty years. He built a network of state-funded colleges and appointed scholars of the calibre of al-Ghazali to teach in them. Then he fell out of favour, and a single assassin ended him — and the empire he had held together began to come apart within months. Institutions outlast men, but only if the man remembered to build them.

Nizam al-MulkRead card

Q2127

StillnessLiterature

Nizam al-Mulk's Siyasatnama, the Book of Government, sets out in fifty chapters how a ruler should handle religion, soldiers, money, courtiers and informers.

It was written late, by a man who had already done the job, and it reads that way: less theory than accumulated practice, illustrated with stories of rulers who got it right or badly wrong. It is unsentimental about power — the ruler's authority should be absolute, the informants should be good, the treasury should be watched. Written nine centuries ago about a vanished empire, it survives because most of what it describes is not medieval at all.

SiyasatnamaRead card

Q2131

DriveScience

The astronomer Nasir al-Din al-Tusi spent years working at Alamut, and when the Mongols took the fortress he entered their service and won backing for a great observatory at Maragha.

He wrote at Alamut for years under a regime the whole region feared, and some of his treatises are among the few things that escaped the library's burning. When the fortress fell he did not vanish with it — he went to work for the conquerors and persuaded them to fund an observatory whose instruments and star tables shaped astronomy for centuries afterwards. Careers are usually told as straight lines. His ran through the worst thing that could happen to it.

Nasir al-Din al-TusiRead card

Next reading modeStillnessIdeas for rest and attention.