THINGS I'VE LEARNED

52 Lessons in Love, Pain, Style, Confidence, Womanhood & more

A portrait from my 30th anniversary, Bucharest, Romania

On Womanhood

1. To find meaning in the intensely feminine nature of life –in cooking a soufflé or ironing a collar– is not incompatible with finding meaning in Susan Sontag and writing an essay.

2. A laundry basket will not threaten your emancipation as long as you are confident in your skin, or fluent in Aristotle.

3. There are three ways to be equal or superior to men. One is beating them in a street fight. The second is beating them in intellectual reason. The third is beating them in virtue. Take your pick. No human being is equal to another, and any sort of distinction is earned.

4. No army of men can make you feel inferior, as long as you display a bit of spunk, a stellar character, and the Classics in your arsenal.

5. To recognise, appreciate, and apply the privileges of femininity is what separates a wholesome human woman from a corporate employee.

6. Mastering the dark arts of the kitchen mustn’t always be about politics and gender roles. It can sometimes be about stirring envy in your relatives.

7. White table cloths, white bed sheets, nice dinnerware and knowing how to set a table, say more about your style, as a woman, than all your fashion choices.

On Love

8. Unrequited love is the extremely difficult realisation that something out there is much more real and endless than you. Use it to kill your egoism, and other versatile beasts.

9. Sometimes others don’t love you because your actions aren’t loveable.

10. Love and desire are cause-effect phenomena. Tactics and a general understanding of psychology will help you succeed in your romantic life. “Wearing your heart on your sleeve” and “being yourself” are poor excuses for being passive, impatient and romantically incompetent.

11. How he treats people he doesn’t need is how he’ll treat you after he’s tired of your looks. Pay particular attention to waiters and clerks.

12. Add “a fine character” to your ideal partner criteria. A man of character will save you much displeasure, as well as the future embarrassment of your own, low criteria.

13. Everything eventually leads to sex. The ability to disguise this, however, with rituals, formalities, ambiguity, and anticipation is what separates a human from a goat.

14. Falling out of love is purely a matter of forgetting someone’s charm.

On Pain

15. Normalising your pain — your trials, hardships, and heartaches — will save you a great deal of pain.

16. Growing into yourself is a matter of getting over yourself. The more obsessed with your experience, the more vulnerable you will be to all kinds of suffering, exaggerations and ridicule.

17. The antidotes to all your special pains are responsibility and compassion. Understanding your part. Understanding your tormentors.

18. To forgive is potentially to be immune to all wounds. Only Gods and Kings can grant forgiveness. A slave is never the forgiver of anyone.

19. Full responsibility for one’s circumstances is what separates a student of life from a natural-born victim.

On Style

20. Good behaviour, timeless style, eloquence and table manners are the first and foremost distinguishers of class. The second is not being impressed by restaurants.

21. Style is instant language. It is art in social intercourse. It is born from knowing who you are, and what you like, and what you don’t.

22. Excellent style, then, is a matter of being awfully discriminative.

23. Your activities, rituals, and principles betray your style. You cannot out-dress a cheap life.

24. Style is born in privacy. There is no style without an evening robe and matching slippers.

25. To have a sense of one’s intrinsic worth is to have everything. To lack it is to be vulnerable to all kinds of bad taste and leftist propaganda.

On Character

26. Character begins when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself.

27. Irony, particularly the self-reflective kind, will save you, time and again, from making a fool of yourself.

28. There is an immense difference between high-minded kindness (born of principle) and complacent kindness (born of insecurity). It is the sort of difference that separates a virtuous person from a weak person, and a good man from a doormat.

29. Moral fiber is the ability to be bad, but the choice, repeatedly, to be good. Anything less is ignorance, convention, or weakness.

30. The most elegant form of intelligence is tact. The highest is self-possession.

On Confidence

31. Assigning a light-hearted weight to rejection — not being crushed by a “no” — is the greatest mark of confidence.

32. Learning how to speak, how to think, how to behave, and how to observe — things you contain permanently and internally — will give you a private, profound self-reliance that you can’t rub off on a baby wipe.

33. True confidence takes time. It is built on experience, mistakes, and tireless self-perfection. It is not a siren, but quiet, nuanced, dynamic and ever-evolving.

34. Don’t overdo your entrances, your dancing, and your make-up. It almost never looks as sexy as you think.

35. No one and nothing will give you what you, yourself, do not contain. And what you do contain, no one will deprive you of. Spend more time alone. Expand your mind. Sharpen your character.

36. The ability to be happy alone is what makes monks and psychopaths so charming.

On Friendship

37. A long friendship with someone who knows more than you will make you smarter. A long friendship with someone who knows less than you will make you ethical.

38. Friendship between a man and a woman is possible if they are both intelligent and well-versed in the art of conversation.

39. Being a real person is about drawing limits and saying no. Vague sympathies with everyone cuts off the ability to have authentic sympathy with anyone.

40. Three long-lasting friendships will add more fulfillment to your life than seasonal entourages. A chaotic, indiscriminate social life adds unnecessary noise, is often born of insecurity, and fear of your own boring selfhood.

On Learning

41. The first step in becoming more intelligent is realising you’re dumb.

42. Real education is possible either with a very expensive tutor, or a simple, diligent habit of underlining books.

43. Reading is a form of education that can cure all your natural determinations. It expands your social mobility. It frees you so that you can move in a larger world of ideas and attitudes. It teaches you better ways of being and living.

44. The ability to think depends upon one’s mastery of language. You can only think as far as your vocabulary. Develop it.

45. History, philosophy, and literature will make you infinitely more well-travelled than 126 passport stamps.

46. Questioning all things by analogy, not accepting them by convention, is the sign of an intelligent mind.

On Health

47. Breakfast is a marketing creation. You don’t need it.

48. Eat less often. Eat small portions. Water fast on Sundays. The less food passes through your body in your lifetime, the finer you will age.

49. Cold showers and calorie restriction are anti-aging miracles.

50. Fitness is running a 5K in thirty minutes, holding an extended quad, doing 20 pushups, and a split. Cardio. Mobility. Unassisted strength. Anything less is butt filler, sexual insecurity and a very primal form of narcissism.

51. How you eat and exercise after you turn 25 will determine — with each passing day — how you look when you’re 40, how you feel when you’re 50, how you die when you’re 80.

52. Three litres of water, no alcohol, no smoking, SPF religiously, limiting meats, daily cardio, along with hot saunas, cold showers, and no added salt/dairy/sugars will tighten, brighten, and clear up your face more than all expensive facials.