What I learned from reading The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant.
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 100 pages of hazardous conclusions.
Yet we proceed.
That was an excerpt and one of my favorite paragraphs in the first chapter of the book that I'm going to 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 area Durant, because they spent 40 years, from 1935 to 1975, writing this eleven 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 lesson 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 tangentially 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 bunch 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.