What Kissenger said

Several months ago Nassim Taleb commented on a statement made by a Jewish banker shortly before his death. The banker, aware of the little time he had left, stated that the best work he had ever done was the charitable work he did in Israel as a young man. After that work he proceeded to go into finance and during his long career executed some of the biggest and most successful real estate deals that the city of New York has seen to date. The point that Nassim Taleb makes is that it is more painful to see a person, such as this particular banker, who has succeeded in a life that is fundamentally misguided, than it is to see a person that has simply not achieved any success at all (has failed, that is). Taleb’s point is debatable, but the interesting thing that I’d like to examine is the statement of the banker. The banker was well known for his immense business acumen, which he exercised over several decades. I find it very hard to believe that a person, who is so skilled in a particular field and practices it over a very long career, does not hold his own work in the absolutely highest regard. It’s almost a necessary condition to love what you do in order to be great at it, as that banker undoubtedly was. If that is true, the bankers life can be interpreted as empirical evidence for a love of his work. So, why does such a person defy his own preferences and his work? Why did he not proudly state that the thrill of deal making was what he liked most of all, what he lived for? To me this instance seems like a moment of sentiment and intellectual failure in the face of the grim reaper. He caved, gave in to a pressure of what he „should like, rather than proudly standing by what he actually liked, based on a rational examination of his own experience. I think it is important to understand that we are all vulnerable to this kind to sentiment, the risk of which is that we delude ourselves into thinking that we like a particular thing or are a particular kind of person, although we don’t and aren’t. We have the capacity to lie to ourselves about ourselves, and that is a dangerous capacity to leave unchecked. So overall I’d like to conclude with something that Henry Kissenger once said: “Accept everything about yourself — I mean everything, you are you and that is the beginning and the end — no apologies, no regrets.“