#162 Three Lessons from Michel de Montaigne
What I learned from reading the book “Montaigne” by Stefan Zweig.
Today’s Chapter is based on the book “Montaigne” by Stefan Zweig.
Michel de Montaigne was a French Renaissance writer and philosopher whose Essais practically invented the modern essay form and offered an intimate self-portrait through skeptical, personal reflection on everyday life and human nature. A key figure of Renaissance humanism, he used candid autobiographical anecdotes and probing questions to explore themes like morality, education, and the limits of human knowledge, influencing later thinkers from Bacon and Pascal to Nietzsche.
Here’s what I learned:
Learn to Read
“Books are a uniquely portable magic.”
— Stephen King
How do we read? Do we read to impress others or to check books off a list? Do we suffer through dense texts because we feel like we ought to? Montaigne does not believe in the necessity to finish books. For him, books are not sacred tablets to be worshipped, but companions to be enjoyed. If a book bored him, he dropped it. If he didn’t like a philosopher, he would move on. He sought reading for pleasure and conversation, not labor.
Stefan Zweig highlights this delightful relationship that Montaigne has with literature. He explains that in Montaigne’s tower, he was surrounded by books he inherited from his friend Étienne de La Boétie. He writes, “For him books are not like men, who impose themselves and burden him with their chatter, and of whom it is hard to be rid. When you don’t call for them they stay put; you can just pick up this one or that, according to your whim: ‘Books are my kingdom. And here I seek to reign as absolute lord.’ Books offer him their opinion and he responds with his own.”
“He wants to read and learn, but only so far as he can savour the experience. As a young man he had read, he states “ostentatiously”, merely to show off his knowledge; later, to acquire a measure of wisdom, and now only for pleasure, never to gain an advantage. If a book bores him, he opens another, if a book seems heavy going: I don’t wear down my nails over some difficult passage in a book; I’ll make one or two forays, then if that fails I’ll give up. My mind is only really made for leapfrogging. What I don’t make out at the first attempt, I strain to see through an even deeper murk at every renewed effort.”
— Stefan Zweig
As such, it is fair to say that Montaigne argues that reading should not be a passive intake of information but an active dialogue with the author. Montaigne would scribble in the margins, argue with the authors and used their thoughts to spark his own. He did not read to become a walking encyclopedia, but to better understand himself. He looked to improve himself by reading the lives of the ancients, using their stories as lessons.
As Zweig wrote on Montaigne, “It was a beautiful thing to read books, to spend an idle hour in Greece with Plato, to savour an hour of Seneca’s wisdom, it was restful and calming to live alongside these companions from previous centuries, with the greatest minds of history. But one lives in one’s own century, for better or worse, and the air of the time penetrates into even the most cloistered space.”
“He explores ‘the rich souls of times past’ to correlate them with his own. He studies virtues, vices, flaws and merits, the wisdom and puerility of others. History is his great instruction manual, for, as he says, it is in his actions that man reveals himself.”
— Stefan Zweig
Montaigne’s approach is demonstration that it is okay to read for our own entertainment. It also encourages us to engage with texts personally, to take what resonates and leave the rest. Montaigne’s library was a place of comfort for him. Zweig reports that Montaigne personally valued poetry and especially history as it thought him the psychology behind human motives. He writes, “The great lesson Montaigne receives from books is that reading, in its rich diversity, sharpens his faculty of judgement. It impels him to respond, to lend his own counsel.”
This idea of reading the lives of the ancients in order to learn from them reminds me of what we have previously learned from Charlie Munger. Munger, like many great people before him, believed that the fastest way to earn wisdom is to learn from the success and failure of others. As a matter of fact, life is way too short to learn everything on your own, and that’s without saying how much pain we can avoid by learning from mistakes of others instead of committing them ourselves.
As Munger once said, “I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.”
In the case of Munger, he loved to read biographies as it is a great way to learn from the masters of each disciplines. Here’s how he explains it:
“I am a biography nut myself. And I think when you’re trying to teach the great concepts that work, it helps to tie them into the lives and personalities of the people who developed them. I think you learn economics better if you make Adam Smith your friend. That sounds funny, making friends among the “eminent dead,” but if you go through life making friends with the eminent dead who had the right ideas, I think it will work better for you in life and work better in education. It’s way better than just giving the basic concepts.”
— Charlie Munger
Charlie Munger, who was Warren Buffett’s partner at Berkshire Hathaway, is considered one of the greatest investor of all-time. Buffett and Munger’s track record at Berkshire is exceptional, returning over 19.8% compounded annual gain from 1965 to 2022 compared to only 9.9% for the S&P 500 Index. What’s the secret to their success? Well, I believe that part of the reason is because both Munger and Buffett are compounding learning machine. As a matter of fact, Munger mentions that he doesn’t know any single successful investor who do not read voraciously.
“I constantly see people rise in life who are not the smartest, sometimes not even the most diligent, but they are learning machines. They go to bed every night a little wiser than they were when they got up and boy does that help, particularly when you have a long run ahead of you.”
— Charlie Munger
Learn to be Skeptical
“Skepticism is a virtue in history as well as in philosophy.”
— Napoleon Bonaparte
Michel de Montaine was known to be a skeptic and always refused to believe that he knew everything. He was also a man who abhorred all rigid thought and dogma and preferred discovering things on his own. His scepticism was a method for Montaigne to interrogate everything around him, refusing to make permanent any truth that his lived experience might later contradict. Zweig mentions that Montaigne cherished uncertainty and treated his life as an ongoing experiment. He writes, “Montaigne’s greatest pleasure is in the search, not the discovery. He is not one of those philosophers who seek the philosopher’s stone, the convenient formula. He cares not for dogma, precepts, and has a horror of definitive assertions: ‘Assert nothing audaciously, deny nothing frivolously.’”
While Montaigne’s habit to always changing his mind might seem like a weakness, Zweig argues that it is in fact his strength. He says, “An inability to remain fixed at a certain point allows him always to go further. With him nothing is ever set in stone.” As such, when Montaigne writes his essays, he does not intend to lecture us but uses it as a way to track his own difficulties and confusions.
In fact, Zweig explains that when Montaigne writes ”posed this question: “How should I live?” he did not insist on following it up with: “This is how you should live!” The man who had engraved on a medallion the chosen maxim “Que sais-je?” had always detested fixed assertions. He had never sought to counsel others on anything he did not know intimately himself. (…) If someone wants to draw advantage from this, then he has no objection. As he says, his folly and error can hardly damage anyone else. “If I make a fool of myself then it’s at my own expense and cannot prejudice others, because it is a folly that abides within me and cannot be followed.”
“This is not my doctrine; it is my study, and no one else’s lesson but my own.”
— Michel de Montaigne
By consequence, from Montaigne, we can learn how to practice sceptical self-inquiry and to keep a record of thoughts and experiences. The modern adaptation of Montaigne’s essays is straightforward: maintain a private journal, test cherished assumptions against new experiences, and allow your beliefs to evolve.
This method of learning from skepticism reminds me of the Socratic approach that we have learned from Don Valentine from Sequoia Capital who approached business and investing with an unwavering commitment to questioning everything, a habit that was rooted in his early education and experiences. By having a skeptical mindset, he was able to cut through noise, identify opportunities and avoid pitfalls. Valentine questioned everything in order to foster a deeper understanding through persistent inquiry.
As a matter of fact, Michael Moritz writes that Valentine “went on to study at Fordham University, where his professors were Jesuits and whose teaching approach was based on the restless, open-ended questioning style of Socrates. It was this style of inquiry, aimed at rooting out answers to intractable topics from a collection of people with different points of view and experiences that, more than the details of his studies, influenced Don throughout his life. It made him doubt everything—particularly conventional thinking—and was the source of some of his favorite, terse ways of ferreting out answers. ‘Why?’ ‘Who cares?’, ‘Who needs it?’ ‘Why does it matter?’, ‘What does it do?’, and ‘So what?’ were the plain verbal thrusts he came to employ to gauge whether prices could be raised, a product made sense, a new market should be attacked or the significance of a milestone.“
The Socratic method became one of Valentine’s core reasoning when evaluating ideas, markets, and people at Sequoia Capital. In fact, this constant approach of questioning everything made Valentine dislike any policies and procedures, as he believed that rigid structures stifled creativity. Moritz mentions that Valentine ”was no fan of policies or procedures since he was convinced that they stifled creativity and were promulgated by mediocrities.” An example to illustrate this was the fact that Valentine always used to wear his nametag on his right breast at functions while the convention was to wear it over the left.
This also reminds me of how Charlie Munger warned us to avoid intense ideologies:
“Another thing I think should be avoided is extremely intense ideology, because it cabbages up one’s mind. You’ve seen that. You see a lot of it on TV, you know preachers for instance, they’ve all got different ideas about theology and a lot of them have minds that are made of cabbage.
But that can happen with political ideology. And if you’re young it’s easy to drift into loyalties and when you announce that you’re a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out what you’re doing is pounding it in, pounding it in, and you’re gradually ruining your mind. So you want to be very careful with this ideology. It’s a big danger.
In my mind I have a little example I use whenever I think about ideology, and it’s these Scandinavian canoeists who succeeded in taming all the rapids of Scandinavia and they thought they would tackle the whirlpools in the Grand Rapids here in the United States. The death rate was 100%. A big whirlpool is not something you want to go into and I think the same is true about a really deep ideology.
I have what I call an iron prescription that helps me keep sane when I naturally drift toward preferring one ideology over another. And that is I say “I’m not entitled to have an opinion on this subject unless I can state the arguments against my position better than the people do who are supporting it. I think that only when I reach that stage am I qualified to speak.” Now you can say that’s too much of an iron discipline..it’s not too much of an iron discipline. It’s not even that hard to do.”
— Charlie Munger
Learn to be Yourself
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.”
— Oscar Wilde
One of the biggest lessons we can learn from Montaigne, according to Stefan Zweig is to be oneself. Zweig mentions that Montaigne dedicated his life and his strength to the question of remaining free. As he explains, “It is to this question and this question alone that Montaigne dedicated his life and his strength. It is for this love of liberty that he observes himself, watches over, experiences and criticizes every movement and every sensation.”
As such, when Montaigne withdrew from political spectacle and public vanity to remain in his tower to read, Zweig argues that he does it purely to cultivate a disciplined internal freedom. Montaigne’s withdrawal is a deliberate principled stance: a conscious discipline of solitude and self-mastery, a refusal to be persuaded by external factors. In his tower, he set himself to the quest of preserving himself and to ask himself, “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?).
“The outside world can take nothing from you and cannot unhinge you, as long as you do not allow yourself to be disturbed. The events of your time remain impotent before you, as long as you refuse to take part in them, and the madness of the epoch does not constitute a real danger, as long as you conserve in yourself a purity of spirit.”
— Stefan Zweig
This lesson from Montaigne is quite fitting in today’s world. As we live in an era of constant connectivity due to the internet. We are expected to have an opinion on everything, to be constantly available and to define ourselves with our external affiliations. Montaigne, who lived through the social unrest in France, chose not to participate but to retreat into his own citadel. As he once said, “La plus grande chose du monde c’est de savoir être à soi.” (The most important thing in the world is to know how to be yourself.)
This reminds me of what we have learned from Michael Jordan who believed that one of the most important things he learned at an early age is to follow his own instincts. As such, he was the one creating his own standard and never tried to be like somebody else or to live up to the expectations of others. ****In fact, Jordan is a true believer that part of his success comes from his authenticity. He explains that “Authenticity is about being true to who you are, even when everyone else wants you to be someone else.”
“I’ve never been worried about anyone’s perception one way or another. I’ve never allowed anyone’s opinion to define me. I’m comfortable with who I am. I trust myself.”
— Michael Jordan
As a matter of fact, Jordan believes that it is difficult to become the best you can be when you are focused on trying to be the best version of someone else. Without authenticity, you are not going to last long. He explains that “the products, companies and people who stay true to who they are usually end up being around for a long time.” Furthermore, he elaborates that companies that jump into trends or try to be something other than what or who they are, generally, don’t last very long.
He writes, “If you are trying to make your way through a maze, and your decisions come from the inside, from your gut, nine times out of ten you won’t find yourself running into a wall. But if you rush into something, make decisions to appease somebody else, or chase the easy dollar, then you are going to find that wall.” Following one’s instinct may seems scary at first, but if you follow your instincts and put in the work necessary, you are bound to encounter success. It is only a a question of when. As Naval Ravikant would say, “great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient.”
“All you should do is what you want to do. If you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them, then you get to listen to that little voice inside of your head that wants to do things a certain way and then you get to be you.
No one in the world is going to beat you at being you. You’re never going to be as good at being me as I am. I’m never going to be as good at being you as you are.”
— Naval Ravikant
Beyond the Book
Read "Why Read? Advice From Harold Bloom" by Farnam Street
Read "Use These Simple Strategies to Retain Everything You Read" by Farnam Street
Read "The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works" by Farnam Street
If you are interested in having conversations with the eminent dead, consider trying my AI Chatbox prompted with highlights from over 100+ biographies I have read. Try it here.
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