Lessons from Francis Bacon's Of Great Place

Francis Bacon's essay, Of Great Place, provides a tight and fitting set of lessons for development into a strong and well-thought-of worker in any area of endeavor. Here is a link to the text of the essay, along with a set of lessons I derive from this work:

https://www.authorama.com/essays-of-francis-bacon-12.html

And here are my lessons, taken from Bacon:

1. As Bob Dylan so correctly exclaimed, “You’re gonna have to serve somebody.” As we achieve great stations in life, we appear to rise, but we also become beholden to our position, serving those above us (for there is always someone above us, whether in nominal position or influence), serving our institution, serving the requirements of our own exalted position, and serving the challenges of our enterprise.

2. We become slaves to our situations, even our situations of great accomplishment and accompanying wealth and greatness. As we rise to great position, we become fully absorbed in that position and don’t see to our own person.

3. With great power, comes great responsibility. (from the pens of Voltaire and Spider-Man). With responsibility, freedom of action is limited. Thus with power, we lose freedom.

4. We strive through challenges to achieve a position where we are blessed with new and greater challenges.

5. Our fault is we cannot be content and happy with our own thoughts and opinions. We desire affirmation by borrowing the opinions of others.

6. We rush to harp on what we dislike and loath about the world around us. We are slow to look inside and discover our own failings.

7. To think good thoughts, for ourselves and others, is but idle fancy, for these thoughts and intentions stay only within the mind. We must have place and position to turn those good dreams, thoughts of goodness and thoughts of good actions, into actual action. To do actual good, rather than to think or dream of it, is the goal of our good thoughts and desires.

8. Make a list: take the people you admire and the people you don’t. Make a list of their good traits and bad traits. Now, make a list of your own good traits and bad traits. What you do well, what you do poorly. What you have mastered and what you have to work on (some things seriously work on). The most important thing about these lists is to be brutally honest with yourself. Do you write well? Do you write poorly? Why? Do you speak well? Do you speak poorly? Why? Only with an honest assessment can you turn this list into a tool to drive improvement. And you use the list of others’ strengths/weaknesses as a guide for your own.

9. Be consistent. People should be able to expect good things from you, on a consistent basis.

10. Don’t be demanding.

11. Be honest when you err.

12. Assume and be confident in your rights, your rights to your position and your actions. Be confident in your right to be in your place, to be doing what you are doing. Assume your rights, do not demand them.

13. Welcome advice, support, and counsel from others. It is overconfident and arrogant to shun advisors.

14. Be punctual, be available to others, do what must be done in a timely fashion.

15. Do not only avoid corruption in yourself but shun bribery from others. Avoid not only corruption, but any actions that could lead to the suspicion of corruption. For what others think of your conduct may be as important as your conduct itself. Be honest and forthright when declaring your actions, do not hide your intentions or moves. For this leads to suspicion of corruption.

16. Be severe, but not rough.

17. Ambition produces aggression. Authority produces a settled, calm demeanor.

18. Respect and honor those who came before you, for if you do not, you will not be respected and honored by those who follow you.

19. Call upon your colleagues when they do not look to be called, rather than ignore them when they want to be called.

Our desires shaped by society

  It’s remarkable that we can be so convinced that we like something, enjoy something, want to do something, that we disregard the clear truth that we don’t really like it at all. In my own life, I have personally seen – way too clearly and for way too long – how what we like as adolescents, in particular, is often rooted in what we think and expect other people to want us to like.

In my own career path, I initially followed a journey that did not at all fit with my true interests, passions, and abilities. I was convinced that I should like this career path since that was a field that appeared to be popular and prestigious, even a sexy option (I laugh at myself now for saying). When I later left that path – after a long period of futility and hardship – I came to see it as a stark lesson in the external influences on our desires and passions. We imagine our affinities and yearnings to accord with the generally-held opinions around us, rather than our own true inclinations.

And those external influences themselves can often be imaginary as well. As a teenager and young adult, in high school and college, I felt I had a deep understanding of what the outside world of family and friends and the greater public would perceive of my chosen profession. I was sure that this was the only path to pursue because it was “the best.”

We learn from our mistakes, of course, and those lessons are often the hardest and the most important. When we enter into a pursuit following the imagined desires of others – they will think I’m smart! They will think I’m strong! They will think I’m the cool guy walking down the hall! – we sometimes find that these desires do not at all reflect our true desires - our personal desires, which should, we later realize, have been our driving force all along.

We are slaves to society. And that slavery brainwashes us. While we are citizens of the world, while we explore and seek to fit within the world around us, we must never forget who we really are inside. 

In infinity, is repetition inevitable?

      Of course, the concepts of infinite space and time are rooted in the observations and calculations of cosmologists, and I will leave those discussions to them. My question is more of what a possible infinite extension of space and time, as in an ever-inflationary/expanding universe, would imply about repetition.

     When we say "infinite," we of course know what we mean. But to really think that space and time is never, never, never ending .... leads to a conundrum in the back of my mind when I read all these discussions of cosmology. 

     Does infinity imply that structures we see, ideas we see - planets, moons, suns, life, people - have to, at least in some way, repeat themselves? If there truly is no end to the extent of the universe, if time really has no end (and I'm not at all saying this is the case, of course), but if it were, would these entities have to arise again? Not, of course, simultaneously, but at some time in that infinite, never-ending timescale?

     Millions, billions, trillions of years in the never-ending future or past, would another Earth have to exist? Another moon? Another Earth on which life, just like ours, arises? Infinite - there is no limit, there is no end. 

     Fundamentally, I believe the answer is no. We are each unique. We - you and I - cannot be repeated. No other human that looks exactly like me and thinks exactly like me could ever arise, even if time is never-ending. No, the same Earth would not arise again. But, mathematically, it seems to me, never-ending implies all these things have to occur again. 

     It's scary when imagination collides - or works together with! - thoughts of infinity. 

Will my readers know me and remember me?

          I’ve often felt a desire (maybe not a need, but more just something I would want and value) to be remembered by those who come after me. My own descendants as well as, hopefully, a larger set of future individuals. One of my biggest anxieties about my mortality is to be forgotten. Not only to be remembered by my name, but to be somehow remembered as me!

     I know I cannot directly speak with those who come after me, but I hope that in my work, both professional and creative work, I can in some way “speak” to those who come after me. Thus, when I write (or draw or paint), I always have this sense in the back of my head that I am in some way communicating with not only my current readers (whoever they may be?!) but with readers from the near and distant future.

     But, my question is, no matter how clearly I write, no matter how personally-felt my message is – do those readers of the future really KNOW me? Is it as if they sat down and spoke with me. I’m not sure.

     But is that what we really want when we write or paint or compose music? Is our goal to have ourselves known, or should we be satisfied with the thought that our work, our creative endeavor itself, survives, in some way.

     If you think about all the creative outpouring of humankind over millennia, how much of that enormous extent of creative and technological and scientific work can be ascribed to a known, named person? I can bet that most of that work was written by now-anonymous authors.       

     In my novel, Signs on a Page, I also discuss this somewhat sad fact – so many of the contributors to humankind’s ancient intellectual discourse are anonymous. Whether by their own design or by merely being forgotten. I’m sure that maybe the engineers who designed the pyramids in Egypt were known, at least by some people, at the time they lived and worked. But within 50-100 years after they had died, I imagine they were forgotten. For every Shakespeare or Melville or Fielding or King, there must be many more who wrote works that were lost or were combined into larger works without their names being recorded. How many actors had an influence on Shakespeare as he crafted his plays, whose names are forgotten or at least their role has been rendered unknown by time? For those of us who feel our creative pursuits are stranded in the enormous outpouring of humankind’s endeavors and we are merely ghosts in that incredible sea of creativity, we can at least feel proud to be a part of that ancient intellectual discourse.

     To what extent, however, do we “know” these people, even if we don’t know their names or faces? Is my desire to communicate with my followers through my work, the products of my endeavors, only fanciful or, in some way, realistic? Wonder the ideas of other creatives on this point?