 There is a, you own rules for life. And rules for life are guided by one, you know, about one fundamental principle. And that is that the purpose of your life is your, the purpose, your moral purpose of your life is your happiness. And you should be selfish. You should be self-interested. You should pursue your values, rational values, values that will objectively enhance your life. And you have to make sure that they are values that are objective and that they will enhance your life. But pursue those values, be passionate about those values. Don't let anybody interfere in your ability to pursue your values. Choose carefully, because life is short and you don't get a do-over. Every second, every minute of every day is a second a minute that you will never have again. So really use your time rationally, smartly. Use your mind to choose the values that will secure the best life possible for you. And again, you know, life is precious, life is sacred, it is not to be wasted. And we've talked about this a lot on the show in the past and but it's, you know, and I repeat myself and that's I think good because, you know, this is a message that needs to be repeated. And that is in the pursuit of values and choosing your values and pursuing values, focus on the things that you can actually change. Now that doesn't mean you shouldn't go out and fight for really long-term values and maybe for values that you won't see actually attained, like cultural change. Although even there, fighting, you know, as I've described in the past, fighting for the future is that there's a sense in which you're living in it today and you're surrounding yourself with other people fighting which is part of living in that future today. But there's a lot you can't control. There's a lot that you're gonna have very little impact on and politics of course is the big one. Politics is a arena which is for the most part depressing and frustrating and brings us no joy and only frustration. It's rare that anything positive, anything positive, meaningful, anything positive that's sustainable ever happens in the realm of politics. And the news is primarily focused because this is how it markets itself. This is how it becomes populated. News is almost purely focused on the negative. There's a lot of positive news out there but you have to actually find it and I encourage you to do so but you actually have to devote time to finding it. But there are things that are in your control. Much of your life, your career, your relationships, your, some extent at least, your health and the environment in which you surround yourself. And today we wanna talk about the environment in which you surround yourself. This is an area where you have a huge impact. You get to choose where you live, you know, within your means, within the context of your life, within the means that you have at any given point in time. You have the ability to choose where to live. You have the ability to choose what kind of house, what kind of apartment, what kind of condo. You have the ability to choose your furniture, to choose what kind of decoration you have and to choose the art that you surround yourself with. Now we've talked in the past about going to museum and strategies around going to museum. We can talk about that some more, particularly if there are questions around that. But today I wanna focus on kind of your home around the things that you experience on a day to day basis and the importance of surrounding yourself with things that you love that are beautiful to you, that are meaningful, that inspire you, that inspire you. Life is challenging. You have many challenges on a day to day basis. You have many challenges in your world, in your life. And art and beauty provide you with the energy to face those challenges. They provide you with a place that is for you, and as we'll talk about, each one of us is gonna have a different aesthetic and differences in what gives him this feeling, but a certain sense of harmony, of belonging, of this is home. This is comfortable, but it's not just comfortable. Comfortable is too blah. It's too boring. It's too accepting of the status quo. What you want is a place that inspires you. What you want is a place that inspires you to be the best that you can be that reminds you what is possible in life, that reminds you what you can achieve, what you can be the kind of life that is possible to a human being. So when you think about the space in which you live, you wanna think about how do I provide myself with fuel? Not just a place where I can plop down in front of the television, not just a place where I can cozy up by the fireplace, not just a place that's gonna be comfortable, but a place that'll truly inspire me and give me the energy to do the things I need to do to live the best life that I can that reminds me every day of the human potential. Reminds me every day that life is indeed amazing, fun, beautiful, spectacular, stunning. Make the space in which you live stunning. Make it beautiful. Make it amazing. Make it the best that you can. Now, I'll show you some pictures of my home and granted, I'm 61 now. I've had a lifetime of accumulating stuff. And a certain amount of wealth associated with that. But at every point in my life, the principles that we'll talk about in my life at least have applied. And I think no matter what your income, no matter where you live, no matter how you live, you can always create a great space. You don't have to marry a designer. I mean, it's nice to marry somebody who has a great aesthetic. It's nice if they have the same aesthetic as you, that's one of the criterias to marry them, I think. I worked out great for me. But it's a few principles and a few things. And again, it has to be right for you. It's not about copying me. It's not about copying your neighbor. It's not about living up to your neighbor. It's not about keeping up with the Joneses. It's about within your scope of knowledge, within your aesthetics, within what you love, what you like, what inspires you doing the best that you can. You'll see, there's a lot of art on my walls. Almost all the art on my walls are posters you can buy for 20 bucks. Not everything is that way, but most of the stuff. And now the framing is expensive. Almost all the frames you'll see are quite expensive. But even simple frames, the framing just elevates it, but a simple frame would be great. So a simple, because the essence is the art itself. Now, I wanna say a few things about art and a few things about beauty. And then we'll kind of go through some of my photos and we'll do it relatively fast. And we'll talk a little bit about kind of some of the principles that I thought about, and well, my wife has thought about because she's more responsible for this than I am, in terms of creating a beautiful space. But so a few things about art. Art is not optional. Art is not optional. As I mentioned, it is a requirement for human survival. It's a requirement for human happiness. It's a requirement for human life. Because we are conceptual being, because we deal in abstractions and very, very abstract abstractions, particularly in the modern world in which we live, particularly in our work, much of our work ultimately become, is very abstract. The goals that we hold are very abstract. The moral concepts are abstractions. And by the way, this isn't just true of objective, it's just true of anybody. This is why, by the way, the Catholic Church spent so much effort, so many resources on art. It's because any abstraction like that, like religion presents or like morality presents or like philosophy presents or like just living in life presents requires a concretization. Requires a means by which we can observe it directly. The principle, the idea. Not a specific moral virtue, though in literature you can do that, and we'll see here that in visual arts, you can't really do that, but you can do some virtues and you can certainly do a kind of man, a kind of attitude to the world, a kind of attitude to reality. So it is possible and it is necessary. And I don't think it's enough to once in a while go to a museum, be inspired and walk away. It's something that has to become a routine in your life. It's something that has to become something regular. You know, something that you do on a regular basis that, you know, imagine living in a place that is constantly inspiring. That constantly is providing you with that feedback. So this is, again, not optional. You've got to find the art that you love. You've got to find the art that gives you that feedback. And the more you know about art, the more you investigate, the more your taste will change and the greater appreciation you will get for better and better art. My tastes today are not the same as they were 30, 40 years ago, although a lot of it is the same, but not everything. It's worth studying because you'll be refined. You'll get great appreciation and you'll get more out of the art. And we talked about going to museum and finding the pieces that you like, scanning a room, being attracted to some piece, maybe taking a class in the history of art, maybe just using a museum tour to discover the history of art. I think I did a show once from London just after I'd returned from the National Gallery. And it was a day where I literally did the national, the whole National Gallery from like medieval art all the way to late 19th century art. And it was great because you actually got the history of art. You could see it in concrete terms and it gave me an appreciation, a great appreciation for the art that I actually really love as compared to the art that I know is good but I don't love or the art that I don't think is that great. So all of this is really worth doing. So invest some time, invest some energy. I know it's hard. It's much easier to flip on the television or watch something. Not that that's bad. Some television is art as well but it's not enough. Art has so many dimensions. You've got music which is super abstract and directly impact your emotion. You got painting and sculpture to provide a certain value and a certain aesthetic appeal that movies don't. You've got movies and TV. What did I say? Oh, and then you've got literature and the most conceptual of all the art. You've got poetry that's somewhere in between and every one of them is going to give you something different. Every one of them is going to give you something, another dimension, more inspiration. My focus, painting, sculpture, music, TVs and movies, I love literature and poetry but I don't engage in it a lot. You might have a different focus and I'm certainly not saying you have to adopt my focus or my focus is right or not. It's just where my values orient me and where I can get that fuel quickly without reading, you know, although again, being absorbed in a book is such an amazing experience. So find what you love, find what inspires you but the thing about sculpture and painting which I particularly like is that you can actually surround yourself with it. You can at a glance get it. You can at a glance get a certain emotion, a certain inspiration, particularly pieces you're familiar with. You don't have to look at them carefully and then try to really understand them and really focus on them and all of that, which you would do in a museum. If you went to a museum, you tried it, particularly in a new piece. What do I like about this with the light, the theme, what is going on here? Because you know the pieces, you can get glanced and you can immediately get that fuel and indeed it just creates an atmosphere that you're living in something beautiful and inspiring and it adds tremendously to your sense of living on a day-to-day basis. And this partially leads me to... Thank you for listening or watching the Iran Book Show. If you'd like to support the show, we make it as easy as possible for you to trade with me. You get value from listening, you get value from watching. Show your appreciation. You can do that by going to iranbookshow.com slash support, by going to Patreon, subscribe star, locals, and just making a appropriate contribution on any one of those channels. 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