5 Classic Children’s Books with Timeless Philosophy for Grown-Ups

The yellow brick road to self-discovery, or what long words have to do with running in place.

The hallmark of superb writing lies in the ability to compress multiple layers of meaning into a single narrative. Today, we look at five works of literature intended for children but rich in insight and wisdom about our adult reality and the ways of the grown-up world.

THE LITTLE PRINCE

There’s hardly a more profound reflection on human truth than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, charmingly written and beautifully illustrated in a way that sweeps you into a whirlwind of childhood imagination and in the process gently lands you on the deepest truths of existential philosophy.

Here is my secret. It is very simple: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Published in 1943, translated into 180 languages since and adapted to just about every medium, Exupéry’s famous novella is one of the best-selling books of all time. More importantly, it’s one of the most important handbooks to being a thoughtful, introspective adult, disguised as a children’s book.

WINNIE THE POOH

It’s a rare talent to capture profound insight in linguistic minimalism and simplicity. And hardly any literary figure does it better than A. A. Milne does in the iconic Winnie-the-Pooh books.

It is more fun to talk with someone who doesn’t use long, difficult words but rather short, easy words like “What about lunch?” ~Pooh

You can’t stay in your corner of the forest, waiting for others to come to you; you have to go to them sometimes.” ~ Pooh

Beneath the cloak of innocuous irreverence lies an undercurrent of postmodern wisdom about the ways of the world that somehow sneaks up on you and catches you completely off-guard, only to deliver a powerful moment of reflection and illumination.

And don’t forget Pooh’s recent comeback, Return to the Hundred Acre Wood.

THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

It’s no secret we love all things Alice. But Lewis Carroll’s classic is much more than a whimsical imaginary world. Particularly in Through The Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, the sequel to the original Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland, a certain philosophical undercurrent runs beneath the seemingly nonsensical dialogue and situations, inviting the grown-up reader to extract his or her own conclusive existentialism.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!” ~ The Queen

A study in contrasts and opposites, the book is as much escapism from reality as it is a journey into our most authentic, uninhibited selves.

LITTLE WOMEN

Though written with young girls in mind and loosely inspired by the author’s own childhood growing up with her three sisters, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is very much a universal guide to and inspiration for overcoming character flaws and learning to love, not just others but oneself as well.

Someday you’ll find a man, a good man, and you’ll love him, and marry him, and live and die for him. And I’ll be hanged if I stand by and watch.” ~ Laurie

Laced with just the right amounts of humor and gravity to make it monumental yet digestible, the novel is as much a pinnacle of literary brilliance as it is a necessary coming-of-age landmark.

THE WIZARD OF OZ

Not unlike The Little Prince, L. Frank Baum’s 1900 classic, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is one of the most beloved cultural staples of our time, translated into countless languages and adapted to multiple media. And not unlike Little Women, it too is a personal growth handbook disguised as a children’s novel. A story of overcoming our greatest shortcomings by opening up to and becoming accepting of others, Baum’s book is very much a manifesto for self-improvement through compassion.

You have plenty of courage, I am sure,” answered Oz. “All you need is confidence in yourself. There is no living thing that is not afraid when it faces danger. The true courage is in facing danger when you are afraid, and that kind of courage you have in plenty.”

From moral imperatives to philosophical reflections to political plots, The Wizard of Oz offers a magic box of profound discoveries, buried in a playground of childhood whimsy.

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Ayn Rand on Love as a Business Deal: The 1959 Interview

Why state and economics should remain separate and what the true currency of love is.

In the history of modern rational thought, there’s hardly a creed more definitive than Objectivism, the philosophy movement created by Russian-American novelist and thinker Ayn Rand. Among the central tenets of Objectivism is the idea that we can gain objective knowledge through the processes of logic and that the pursuit of our own happiness, framed as rational self-interest, is the sole purpose of existence. While such moral code may seem overly cynical, especially in the age of the Charter for Compassion, it seems to be the silent underwriting of much of today’s modus operandi.

Today, we look at a three–part interview Rand gave in 1959, as part of Mike Wallace’s Gallery of Colorful People series on CBS. More than half a century later, Rand’s code of morality and her bold challenge to altruism theory is equally controversial and no less fascinating to study. Judgement of its moral righteousness aside, Objectivism is still one of the most important cultural conversations to engage, if only for the passionate consideration of all sides of the argument that it ignites.

What makes this particular interview noteworthy is that Wallace plays, with complete composure, the perfect devil’s advocate, eliciting a series of almost emotional retorts from the living epitome of emotionless rationalism. Watch, waver, and draw your own conclusions.

When you are asked to love everybody indiscriminately, that is to love people without any standard, to love them regardless of whether they have any value or virtue, you are asked to love nobody.” ~ Ayn Rand

Love should be treated like a business deal, but every business deal has its own terms and its own currency. And in love, the currency is virtue. You love people not for what you do for them or what they do for you. You love them for the values, the virtues, which they have achieved in their own character.” ~ Ayn Rand

For a deeper look at Rand’s philosophy and moral code, we highly recommend her iconic Atlas Shrugged, one of the most important written works of the 20th century. And we should also point out that you certainly don’t have to agree with Rand’s views in order to appreciate their cultural significance.

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Srikumar Rao on Hard-Wiring Happiness

Why success and failure are exactly the same, or how process supersedes perfection.

We’ve talked a lot about the origins of happiness and the various ways people go about pursuing it. And while all these lofty concepts and creative approaches have their place, it’s in the sore absence of happiness that we fully realize the importance of specific, powerful tools and steps to bringing all the theoretical stuff to life.

In this excellent talk at Columbia University, Srikumar Rao (of Are You Ready To Succeed? fame) offers precisely the kind of cognitive toolkit to combat our ingrained preoccupation with success/fail outcomes standing between us and our own happiness.

You have spent your entire life learning to be unhappy. And the way we learn to be unhappy is by buying into a particular mental models. […] The problem isn’t that we have mental models, the problem is that we don’t know we have mental models, we think that’s the way the world works.

Rao’s points about absolutism as the deadliest poison of emotional well-being poke brilliant holes in the very fabric of Western culture and its obsession with control, which yields only frustration and failed expectation.

We live in a world where what we think of, what we invest in, is the outcome. There is an alternative. You invest in the process.

Rao’s thinking reminds us of the slightly more life-coachish approach by Gay Hendricks in The Big Leap, a similar effort to dispell all the myths we keep perpetuating as we stand in the way of our own success and continue looking for happiness outside of ourselves.

Passion exists in you, not in the job.

Amen.

via TED Best of the Web

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Duelity: Earth’s Story, Split Down the Middle

Darwin vs. the General Organization of Development labs, or why truth comes in pairs.

Science and religion may be odd bedfellows, but they’ve always had a shared mechanism of propagation — both are simply the product of the stories we tell ourselves and each other to explain the world, be it rationally or emotionally or mystically. So what happens when these conflicting stories are pitted against each other? That’s exactly what Duelity does in a brilliant split-screen animation telling both sides of Earth’s story, winking at the evolution of human thought and language along the way.

Directed by filmmaker Ryan Uhrich and animator Marcos Ceravolo, Duelity is a curious hybrid of humor and philosophy, mythology and ideology, capturing the tensions and frictions inherent to our cultural storytelling.

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