Derek Thompson

My favorite poem of all time is Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses.

And most people who know that poem know the final iambic pentameter line of Ulysses, which is this king.

It's a brilliant poem where essentially Tennyson is imagining the experience of Odysseus or Ulysses after he returns home, after he's a winner.

from the story of the Odyssey.

And the whole idea is he is bored as hell.

He is so bored and cannot wait to get back on the open sea because that's what life was all about.

And most people know the poem from the very last stanza, which is to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield, which is this rapturous call for successful principles.

But the best line of the poem is,

is in the middle of the poem where they say, all experience is an arc where through gleams that untraveled world whose margin fades forever and forever as we move.

Everything that we do inevitably serves as a frame for the things we haven't done.

That is the arrival fallacy.

There's no getting around the fact that everything that you do will eventually become not the thing that you're reaching for, but the thing that frames everything you reach for starting now.

And I love that idea that in a poem that's basically about an old crotchety man, you still have Tennyson, like the late 19th century,

just essentially putting his fingers so beautifully on this idea that whether you're the most successful person in the world, the Ray Allens, the Kevin Garnetzer, Kevin Durant's of the world, the people who have won and have famously not been made immediately and forever happy by their winning, or someone who doesn't succeed,

Experience shapes attitudes, and it always will.

And you have to maybe remember that.

Remember that the peak of the mountain is so, so tiny, and the second you succeed, you're going to be back to a climb.

But that's okay.

You should still try to climb.

What are the ingredients of excellence?