#342 The Lessons of History (Will & Ariel Durant)

**David Senra** (0:00)
Since man is a moment in time, a transient guest of the earth, a spore of his species, a scion of his race, a composite of body, character and mind, a member of a family and a community, a believer or doubter of a faith, a unit in an economy, perhaps a citizen in a state or a soldier in an army, we may ask under the corresponding heads, astronomy, geology, geography, biology, biography, ethnology, psychology, morality, religion, economics, politics and war, what history has to say about the nature, conduct and prospects of man.
It is a precarious enterprise and only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions.
Yet we proceed.
That was an excerpt in one of my favorite paragraphs in the first chapter of the book that I'm gonna talk to you about today, which is The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant.
You and I normally get together and speak about a biography of a person. The way to think about the book that I'm holding my hand is this is a hundred page biography on the human species.
And I can't think of more qualified authors to write something like this in Will and Ariel Durant because they spent 40 years from 1935 to 1975 writing this 11 volume set called The Story of Civilization. If you read a bunch of biographies of entrepreneurs, Will and Ariel Durant's The Story of Civilization will pop up over and over again in their biographies because these entrepreneurs are reading it. People like Larry Ellison and Elon Musk come to mind. And part of what makes this book so special is they wrote The Lessons of History after they finished The Story of Civilization. So you could think of this as like a hundred page synopsis or summary of their 40 year, that four decade long journey in trying to catalog the human existence. And so let's jump right in. The first lesson of history is to be modest. Let us define history as the events or records of the past. Human history is a brief spot in space and its first lesson is modesty. At any moment, a comet may come too close to the earth and set our little globe turning topsy turvy in a hectic course, or choke its men and fleas with fumes or heat, or a fragment of the smiling sun may slip off tangently and gently and fall upon us in a wild embrace, ending all grief and pain.
And then this line hits you right in the chest. They have a punch of lines like this throughout the book. Generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil. And so I've read and reread this book three, four times, not including the times I listened to it on Audible as well. And so I have a bunch of notes from the last time I read it. But what came to mind this time, when I read that sentence, I thought about what Charlie Munger said, that what you and I are doing here is when we're reading biographies of great people, we're becoming friends with the eminent dead. And because most of the people that I read about are dead, when I get to the end of the book, I'm not just getting to the end of the book, I'm getting to the end of somebody's life. So I am constantly, and you are as a byproduct of listening, you are constantly reminded of the finiteness of life, that generations of men establish a growing mastery over the earth, but they are destined to become fossils in its soil. So what I think about this is it's ruthless, it forces ruthless prioritization about how I'm spending my time and what I choose to focus on. And it comes down to three F's for me, founders, family and friends. And that's all I'm focused on. Everything else has to round to zero.
That is one of the main benefits of this relentless pursuit of studying history. You understand that you are destined to become fossils in its soil. The last time I read the book, when I got to this part, this is what I wrote, it reminds me of why Nolan Bushnell said he was Steve Jobs' mentor. He said Steve Jobs only had one speed, go. And he said that about a 19-year-old Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs did not know how limited his time on earth would be, right? And so he says, you don't get much time, don't waste it, go.
Ruthless prioritization of how we spend our time is I think super important. Now there's gonna be a bunch of just, they're obviously incredible writers, and they have the ability to distill an entire story into one sentence.