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30 Rules for Mindful Leaders

1. Take time to meditate, reflect, and study.
 
2. Cultivate a household that appreciates the training of a mindful leader.
 
3. Create moments of silence: retreat to be alone on occasion.
 
4. Contemplate the impermanent nature of wealth and career.
 
5. Show respect to those who teach you how to become a mindful leader.
 
6. On occasion, meditate and study with others who aspire to become mindful
leaders.
 
7. Work hard to open to life’s circumstances; step beyond resistance.
 
8. Permit life to reveal its fundamental nature: free, vast, and confident.
 
9. Put others ahead of your self; focus on promoting their welfare.
 
10. Carefully examine all insults; quietly wish the best to those who are
rude.
 
11. Clean up messes and difficulties, even if they are not of your making.
 
12. Treat adverse circumstances as your teacher.
 
13. When hurt by those you trust and love, show kindness.
 
14. Never lose courage in the face of physical pain and difficult
circumstances.
 
15. When praised, carefully examine your tendency toward pride and
arrogance.
 
16. Take full responsibility for your anger; lay it down gently but quickly.
 
17. Abandon addiction and compulsive attractions; savor pleasures with
dignity.
 
18. Dispel the blinding effects of making “me” the center of everything.
 
19. When grieving, contemplate the passing nature of everything.
 
20. Enjoy bestowing gifts on others.
 
21. Cultivate your natural tendency to be decent toward others.
 
22. Patiently invite all that arises-good, bad, happy, sad.
 
23. Never give up inspiring others and contributing to the world.
 
24. Rest in the ease of synchronized mind.
 
25. Recognize that the world is free of your story lines. Notice the
situation directly.
 
26. Reflect on your mistakes, make them friends, not enemies.
 
27. Create a household environment that is uplifted and wise.
 
28. Abandon harsh language.
 
29. Be sharp and quick to cut the root of arrogance and stupidity.
 
30. Dedicate all success to the benefit of others.

20 April 2010 • philosophy wisdom

Kant’s Philosophy of Excellent Dinner Parties

Immanuel Kant was apparently famous for his dinner-parties. In his Anthropology Kant gives explicit advice for a dinner-party (and claims that it’s a bad idea for philosophers always to eat alone):

There should be no more than nine and no less than three guests, and the dinner-party should go through exactly three stages, in exactly this order:

  1. Narration, in which you talk about the news of the day (he gives a set of rules to follow for deciding the topics to discuss);
  2. Argument, in which people begin to argue their different views about the news, which stirs up the appetite for food and drink; and
  3. Humor, because people begin to get tired of arguing, you should end with jesting and wit, which should preferably lead to loud, good-natured laughter, because that’s good for the digestion. Unfortunately, the German philosopher does not give us examples of the sort of jokes you should be telling at a dinner-party.

11 January 2010 • philosophy