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"The Second Mountain" of Success
Matt Karamazov
February 06, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 17 minutes
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📚 Hey, I’m back with more books!
So I’m 33 years old and my dad is turning 86 this year.
And today I just watched an old, grainy, hard-to-see family video where he's laughing - in 1957!!
33 years before I was born, which is just…
Oh man, the red hair! (His hair is white now). The old cars! My grandparents - whom I've never met!
In the video, my hometown actually looks like that photo of Dubai you may have seen, with the 26-year difference side by side:
It’s just incredible how things have changed between 1957 and now, and it’s got me thinking that I should take a LOT more videos from now on.
I want to be able to remember my parents and the rest of my family 67 years from now...in 2,091! I'll be 101, and it will seem like yesterday.
I’d hate to miss it, you know?
And I’d especially hate to find out that I missed it because I spent my life chasing the kind of success you find at the top of “the first mountain,” which is what the author of today’s book calls the ladder of career success and achievement.
One of the worst things that can possibly happen to you in life is that you spend huge chunks of it climbing the ladder of success, only to find out that it’s leaning on the wrong building.
The Second Mountain, by David Brooks, is about consciously creating a life of deep commitment, fulfillment, and meaning, and it’s a great book that I highly recommend reading before it’s too late.
Below, I share a short summary of The Second Mountain, as well as my best book notes, along with some additional recommended reading.
If you’re looking for a book that will help you keep perspective in a world that so easily causes you to forget about what’s truly important in life, then you might want to read…
My summary of this book and all my notes are available on Patreon, as well as my personal notes from more than 1,250+ other books. Updated monthly.
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Now, let’s get back to today’s book!
What if you spent your whole life climbing the ladder to success, only to find that it was leaning against the wrong building?
In this spectacular and damn-near urgent book, political and cultural commentator David Brooks uses a different vertical metaphor - two mountains and a valley - to explore the devastating effects of our culture's unrestrained individualism, the dark night of the soul that's waiting for us when we discover that we've been sold a bill of goods, and what a full life of what he calls "moral joy" might look like.
The Second Mountain borders on urgent because right now we face an epidemic of hopelessness, addiction, and despair. The numbers bear this out.
For example:
*Chronic loneliness eats away at 35 percent of Americans over the age of 45.
*From 2012 to 2015, the percentage of young Americans with severe depression rose from 5.9 to 8.2 percent.
*From 2006 to 2016, the suicide rate rose by 70 percent among Americans aged 10 to 17.
Millions and millions of anxiety pill prescriptions are unable to stop any of this. If we ever really believed that we don't need each other, that belief has been absolutely shattered by David Brooks's argument in The Second Mountain.
As we'll discuss in the Key Ideas below, the "first mountain" represents the relentless pursuit of success and achievement that's possessed the mind of the Western world for so long.
When you climb the first mountain, what you're really cultivating are the "résumé virtues" - the skills and talents you bring to the marketplace. On the second mountain, it's all about the "eulogy virtues" - what they talk about at your funeral.
The Second Mountain is an intensely personal book, and one that will stop you cold in dozens of places as you pause to ponder the profundity of what others have discovered about the true aims of life. It can't just be about the self; that's what has led to the current rash of suicides and the epidemic of despair.
A real human life - a committed, relational life - is lived on the second mountain, with others. For others. Brooks explains how we got this all mixed up, and he also offers numerous practical and lofty ideas about how we can restore balance to our inner lives.
Nowhere does he say that the first mountain isn't an important part of life. It absolutely is. But it's not the whole of life, even though it seems as though the entire culture believes that it is.
There's more to life than anything that's dreamt of on the first mountain, and through personal stories, cold hard facts, and even an entire "Relationalist Manifesto," Brooks gives us a clear picture of what that might look like.
He's also fond of quoting George Eliot, author of Middlemarch, although my favorite quote of hers doesn't appear in The Second Mountain. It, however, nicely summarizes Brooks's central idea, and it goes something like this:
"What are we here for if not to make life a little less difficult for one another?"
“The lesson is that the things we had thought were most important - achievement, affirmation, intelligence - are actually less important, and the things we had undervalued - heart and soul - are actually most important."
“People on the second mountain have made strong commitments to one or all of these four things:
*A vocation
*A spouse and family
*A philosophy or faith
*A community
A commitment is making a promise to something without expecting a reward. A commitment is falling in love with something and then building a structure of behavior around it for those moments when love falters."
“If you aren’t saying a permanent no to anything, giving anything up, then you probably aren't diving into anything fully. A life of commitment means saying a thousand noes for the sake of a few precious yeses."
“When you actually look around the world - parents looking after their kids, neighbors forming associations, colleagues helping one another, people meeting and encountering each other in coffee shops - you see that loving care is not on the fringe of society. It's the foundation of society."
“What you end up with is this grand sense of connection, the sense of metaphysical singleness. There is no such thing as an egoistic self that is separated from everyone and everything else."
“A life of deep commitments is possible. When we fall short, it will be because of our own limitations, not because we had an inadequate ideal.”
“What does it profit a man to sell his own soul if others are selling theirs and getting more for it?”
“When I look back on my past and think how much time I wasted on nothing, how much time has been lost in utilities, errors, laziness, incapacity to live; how little I appreciated it, how many times I sinned against my heart and soul - then my heart bleeds."
“A lot of what mentors do is to teach us what excellence looks like, day by day.”
“The paradox of life is that people seem to deliberate more carefully over the little choices than the big ones.
Before buying a car, they read all the ratings, check out resale values on the internet, and so on. But when it comes to choosing a vocation, they just sort of slide rather than decide. They slide incrementally into a career because someone gave them a job. They marry the person whom they happen to be living with.
For many, the big choices in life often aren't really choices; they are quicksand. You just sink into the place you happen to be standing."
“Find that place in the self that is driven to connect with others, that spot where, as the novelist Frederick Buechner famously put it, your deep gladness meets the world's deep hunger."
“Politeness is at the core of morality.”
“My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem, but they don't really know me."
“When J.F. Roxburgh, the headmaster of the Stowe School in Vermont, was asked in the 1920s about the purpose of his institution, he said it was to turn out young men who were 'acceptable at a dance, invaluable in a shipwreck.' It did that by exposing students to excellence."
Here’s the complete breakdown of The Second Mountain, by David Brooks, and below I’ve listed some similar breakdowns that you may enjoy as well.
When you become a member of the Stairway to Wisdom, you’ll gain access to more than 100+ book breakdowns like these ones here, as well as a premium weekly newsletter that will help you build the kind of life for yourself that you’ll love living.
From a jail cell at age 19, charged with felony grand theft, to running the largest personal development website in the world (with more than 2 million monthly visitors), Steve Pavlina has come a long way. This book contains the collected wisdom of a lifetime of exponential growth - and it's yours.
If you've ever wondered whether there is more to life than what most people naturally assume there is, or if you are perpetually unsatisfied with the easy answers that society often offers you and with the rules that cannot be questioned, then this entrancing philosophy book is for you.
Who controls your desires? In this book, you will learn how we can transform our relationship with desire in order to step into our full humanity, relate to each other more harmoniously, and intelligently select our desires in such a way that we enlarge ourselves, rather than diminish ourselves.
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That’s it! I hope you found these book recommendations helpful, and I’ll be back with even more books for you very soon!
Mere “information” is everywhere today, but what’s going to separate you (and give you the life you desire) is consistent, meaningful action, backed up with the most powerful ideas from the greatest books ever written.
That’s what I always aim to provide you with.
With that said, I hope you enjoyed this edition of The Reading Life, and enjoy the rest of your day!
Until next time…happy reading!
All the best,
Matt Karamazov
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