Some of you may already know that I travel around the region pretty frequently, having to visit and conduct seminars at my offices in Malaysia , Indonesia , Thailand and Suzhou ( China ). I am in the airport almost every other week so I get to bump into many people who have attended my seminars or have read my books.
Recently, someone came up to me on a plane to KL and looked rather shocked. He asked, 'How come a millionaire like you is traveling economy?' My reply was, 'That's why I am a millionaire. ' He still looked pretty confused.
This again confirms that greatest lie ever told about wealth(which I wrote about in my latest book 'Secrets of Self-Made Millionaires' ). Many people have been brainwashed to think that millionaires have to wear Gucci, Hugo Boss, Rolex, and sit on first class in air travel. This is why so many people never become rich because the moment that they earn more money, they think that it is only natural that they spend more, putting them back to square one.
The truth is that most self-made millionaires are frugal and only spend on what is necessary and of value. That is why they are able to accumulate and multiply their wealth so much faster.
Over the last 7 years, I have saved about 80% of my income while today I save only about 60% (because I have my wife, mother in law, 2 maids, 2 kids, etc. to support). Still, it is way above most people who save 10% of their income (if they are lucky).
I refuse to buy a first class ticket or to buy a $300 shirt because I think that it is a complete waste of money. However, I happily pay $1,300 to send my 2-year old daughter to Julia Gabriel Speech and Drama without thinking twice.When I joined the YEO (Young Entrepreneur' s Orgn)a few years back (YEO) is an exclusive club open to those who are under 40 and make over $1m a year in their own business) I discovered that those who were self-made thought like me. Many of them with net worth well over $5m,travelled economy class and some even drove Toyota 's and Nissans,not Audis, Mercs, BMWs.
I noticed that it was only those who never had to work hard to build their own wealth (there were also a few ministers' and tycoons' sons in the club) who spent like there was no tomorrow. Somehow, when you did not have to build everything from scratch, you do not really value money. This is precisely the reason why a family's wealth (no matter how much) rarely lasts past the third generation
Thank God my rich dad foresaw this terrible possibility and refused to give me a cent to start my business.
Then some people ask me, 'What is the point in making so much money if you don't enjoy it?' The thing is that I don't really find happiness in buying branded clothes, jewellery or sitting first class. Even if buying something makes me happy it is only for a while, it does not last.
Material happiness never lasts, it just give you a quick fix. After a while you feel lousy again and have to buy the next thing which you think will make you happy. I always think that if you need material things to make you happy, then you live a pretty sad and unfulfilled life..
Instead, what makes me happy is when I see my children laughing and playing and learning so fast. What makes me happy is when I see my companies and trainers reaching more and more people every year in so many more countries.What makes me really happy is when I read all the emails about how my books and seminars have touched and inspired someone's life.
What makes me really happy is reading all your wonderful posts about how this blog is inspiring you. This happiness makes me feel really good for a long time, much much more than what a Rolex would do for me.
I think the point I want to put across is that happiness must come from doing your life's work (be it teaching, building homes, designing,trading, winning tournaments etc.) and the money that comes is only a by-product. If you hate what you are doing and rely on the money you earn to make you happy by buying stuff, then I think that you are living a life of meaninglessness. - Adam Khoo
Friday, April 2, 2010
My Father’s Son
It was one of those excruciatingly cold New England mornings in 1964. A four-day-old snow had turned to ice as it pressed against my bedroom window. In my twelve-year-old sleepiness, I staggered through the dark hallway into the bathroom, hearing the truck’s engine idling audibly outside.
Peering out, I saw his figure — a dark shadow moving against the white background, his breath clouding the air when he exhaled. I heard his work boots crunching the hard snow with his giant steps. I saw his dark face hidden beneath a knit cap, the upturned coat collar, the woolen scarf wrapped around his neck and chin. One gloved hand guided the ice scraper across the truck’s windshield; the other brushed the shavings like a crystal beard from the truck’s old weathered face.
Daddy. Moving with a quick purpose, driven by a commitment and a responsibility taught him thirty-five years earlier in Depression-era Georgia. Daddy. A silent gladiator who was stepping once more into the hostile arena of the day’s battle. Daddy. Awake while the rest of the world slept. And as he slid behind the steering wheel, driving carefully from the driveway onto the street, the truck was swallowed up by dawn’s dimness. As I returned to the warmth of my blankets — in my own bed, in my own room — I knew I could go back to sleep, to dream, because Daddy was outside facing the cold.
Throughout the many junior- and senior-high mornings I watched my father go to work, I never told him how that vision affected me. I simply wondered at his ability to do what he did: keeping the kitchen filled with food, making the payments on my music lessons, covering the car insurance so I could drive during my senior year, piling the Christmas gifts beneath the tree, taking me to Boston to buy new clothes, dragging me to church on Sundays, driving me to visit college campuses on his day off, kissing and teasing my mother in the living room, and nodding off in his easy chair in the middle of a sentence. Perhaps it was because these scenes seemed so ordinary that I never spoke of them, never weighed them beyond my own selfish adolescent needs.
And then at college, away from him — when his presence became merely the voice over the phone during weekend calls or the name scribbled at the bottom of the weekly letter stuffed with a ten — dollar bill — I thought other men were more significant than Daddy. Those men who taught my classes in polysyllabic words, wrote articles in journals and explained complex theorems and philosophies. Daddy never did any of that — he couldn’t with only a high school education. My hero worship made me a disciple to Ivy League scholars who ignited my dormant ideas and dead men whose names were printed on book covers, buildings and the currency I hungered to possess.
Then, as I traveled to Europe in my later college years, I realized I had seen more, had traveled farther and had achieved greater distinctions than Daddy ever had. I was filled with a sense of self-importance, puffed up with grad-school grants, deluded with degrees and accolades assigned to my name.
Then, I entered the formidable arena — the job, the relationships, the creditors, the pressures and the indignities of racial politics. As I reached my late twenties, I looked forward to returning home, talking with Daddy, sharing a ball game, watching an old Western on television, drinking a beer, listening to a story about his childhood days in Georgia and hearing his warm, fulfilling laughter. I rediscovered Daddy again — not as a boy in awe, but with respect as a man. And I realized a truth that I could not articulate as a child — Daddy was always there for me. Unlike the professors, the books, the celebrity heroes, the mentors, he was always there. He was my father, a man who committed himself to a thankless job in a society that had written him off with statistics and stereotypes.
When I reached my early thirties, when I became a father myself, I saw my own father with greater clarity. As I awoke in the early morning hours, compromised my wants, dealt with insults and worked overtime in order to give my son his own room — with his own bed and his own dreams — I realized I was able to do those things because my father had done them for me.
And now, at age forty-seven, when I spend precious moments with my own thirteen-year-old son, when we spend fleeting moments together at a movie, on a basketball court, in church or on the highway, I wonder what he thinks of me. At what point will I slip away from his world of important men, and will there be a point when he’ll return to me with a nod of understanding? How will he measure my weaknesses and strengths, my flaws and distinctions, my nightmares and dreams? Will he claim me in the name of love and respect?
Sometimes the simple lessons are the most difficult to teach. Sometimes the most essential truths are the most difficult to learn. I hope my son will one day cherish all the lessons and truths that have flowed to him, through me, from his grandfather. And as my son grows older, I believe that he, too, will measure his steps by the strides I have made for him, just as I have achieved my goals because of the strides my father has made for me. When my son does this, perhaps he will feel the same pride and fulfillment that I do when I say, “I am my father’s son.” - Mel Donalson
Monday, March 29, 2010
ROGER'S ROOST THE ONLY STAR WITH A SUITE NAMED FOR HIM AT THE CARLYLE? MR.15 HIMSELF
If you'd like to stay in an upscale suite during the Open, know that one of New York's swankiest won't be available. Since 2007, No. 1601 on the Carlyle, 35 E. 76th St., on New York's Upper East Side, has been Mr and Mrs Roger Federer's refuge when they breeze into town, usually so he can pick up more U.S. Open hardware.
The lavish 1,330-square-foot two-bedroom Art Deco suite even has the reigning U.S. Open champion's name on the door, along with a list of his five consecutive U.S. Open wins.
Though the Carlyle regularly hosts Hollywood hotshots, including Jack Nicholson and Tom Cruise, and British royalty, such as Prince Charles, Federer is the only celeb to have a suite named after him. So why Roger and not Jack or Charles? " Once you start doing that a lot everyone wants to know why they don't have a suite," says James McBride, tennis fan and MD of the Carlyle. " Roger is special status to us. We have a lot of movie stars, but not really another sports figure on a regular basism and Roger has spent months here. So it starts and ends with Roger."
When the Open is over and the Federer's head to the next tour stop, you, too, can reserve the Roger Federer's suite by calling (888) 767-3966. The cost for a one-night stay: $3,075.- B.G.
Friendship
"Friendship" is a type of companionship, that a human towards another human being or an organism can have. It's a bond in which one has a feeling towards another one. Friendship is the cooperative and supportive relationship between people, or animals. In this sense, the term connotes a relationship which involves mutual knowledge, esteem, affection, and respect along with a degree of rendering service to friends in times of need or crisis. Friends will welcome each other's company and exhibit loyalty towards each other, often to the point of altruism. Their tastes will usually be similar and may converge, and they will share enjoyable activities. They will also engage in mutually helping behavior, such as the exchange of advice and the sharing of hardship. A friend is someone who may often demonstrate reciprocating and reflective behaviors. Yet for some, the practical execution of friendship is little more than the trust that someone will not harm them.
Friendship essentially involves a distinctive kind of concern for your friend, a concern which might reasonably be understood as a kind of love. Philosophers from the ancient Greeks on have traditionally distinguished three notions that can properly be called love: agape, eros, and philia. Agape is a kind of love that does not respond to the antecedent value of its object but instead is thought to create value in the beloved; it has come through the Christian tradition to mean the sort of love God has for us persons as well as, by extension, our love for God and our love for humankind in general. By contrast, eros and philia are generally understood to be responsive to the merits of their objects—to the beloved's properties, especially his goodness or beauty. The difference is that eros is a kind of passionate desire for an object, typically sexual in nature, whereas ‘philia’ originally meant a kind of affectionate regard or friendly feeling towards not just one's friends but also possibly towards family members, business partners, and one's country at large (Liddell et al., 1940; Cooper, 1977a). Given this classification of kinds of love, philia seems to be that which is most clearly relevant to friendship (though just what philia amounts to needs to be clarified in more detail).
For this reason, love and friendship often get lumped together as a single topic; nonetheless, there are significant differences between them. As understood here, love is an evaluative attitude directed at particular persons as such, an attitude which we might take towards someone whether or not that love is reciprocated and whether or not we have an established relationship with her. Friendship, by contrast, is essentially a kind of relationship grounded in a particular kind of special concern each has for the other as the person she is; and whereas we must make conceptual room for the idea of unrequited love, unrequited friendship is senseless. Consequently, accounts of friendship tend to understand it not merely as a case of reciprocal love of some form (together with mutual acknowledgment of this love), but as essentially involving significant interactions between the friends—as being in this sense a certain kind of relationship.
Nonetheless, questions can be raised about precisely how to distinguish romantic relationships, grounded in eros, from relationships of friendship, grounded in philia, insofar as each involves significant interactions between the involved parties that stem from a kind of reciprocal love that is responsive to merit. Clearly the two differ insofar as romantic love normally has a kind of sexual involvement that friendship lacks; yet, as Thomas (1989) asks, is that enough to explain the real differences between them? Badhwar (2003, 65–66) seems to think so, claiming that the sexual involvement enters into romantic love in part through a passion and yearning for physical union, whereas friendship involves instead a desire for a more psychological identification. Yet it is not clear exactly how to understand this: precisely what kind of “psychological identification” or intimacy is characteristic of friendship? (For further discussion, see Section 1.2.)
In philosophical discussions of friendship, it is common to follow Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII) in distinguishing three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue. Although it is a bit unclear how to understand these distinctions, the basic idea seems to be that pleasure, utility, and virtue are the reasons we have in these various kinds of relationships for loving our friend. That is, I may love my friend because of the pleasure I get out of her, or because of the ways in which she is useful to me, or because I find her to have a virtuous character. Given the involvement of love in each case, all three kinds of friendship seem to involve a concern for your friend for his sake and not for your own.
There is an apparent tension here between the idea that friendship essentially involves being concerned for your friend for his sake and the idea of pleasure and utility friendships: how can you be concerned for him for his sake if you do that only because of the pleasure or utility you get out of it? If you benefit your friend because, ultimately, of the benefits you receive, it would seem that you do not properly love your friend for his sake, and so your relationship is not fully one of friendship after all. So it looks like pleasure and utility friendships are at best deficient modes of friendship; by contrast, virtue friendships, because they are motivated by the excellences of your friend's character, are genuine, non-deficient friendships. For this reason, most contemporary accounts, by focusing their attention on the non-deficient forms of friendship, ignore pleasure and utility friendships.
As mentioned in the first paragraph of this section, philia seems to be the kind of concern for other persons that is most relevant to friendship, and the word, ‘philia,’ sometimes gets translated as friendship; yet philia is in some ways importantly different from what we ordinarily think of as friendship. Thus, ‘philia’ extends not just to friends but also to family members, business associates, and one's country at large. Contemporary accounts of friendship differ on whether family members, in particular one's children before they become adults, can be friends. Most philosophers think not, understanding friendship to be essentially a relationship among equals; yet some philosophers (such as Friedman 1989; Rorty 1986/1993; Badhwar 1987) explicitly intend their accounts of friendship to include parent-child relationships, perhaps through the influence of the historical notion of philia. Nonetheless, there do seem to be significant differences between, on the one hand, parental love and the relationships it generates and, on the other hand, the love of one's friends and the relationships it generates; the focus here will be on friendship more narrowly construed.
In philosophical accounts of friendship, several themes recur consistently, although various accounts differ in precisely how they spell these out. These themes are: mutual caring (or love), intimacy, and shared activity; these will be considered in turn.
A necessary condition of friendship, according to just about every view (Telfer 1970–71, Annas 1988; Annas 1977, Annis 1987, Badhwar 1987, Millgram 1987, Sherman 1987, Thomas 1989; Thomas 1993; Thomas 1987, Friedman 1993; Friedman 1989, Whiting 1991, Hoffman 1997, Cocking & Kennett 1998, and White 1999a; White 1999b; White 2001) is that the friends each care about the other, and do so for her sake; in effect, this is to say that the friends must each love the other. Although many accounts of friendship do not analyze such mutual caring any further, among those that do there is considerable variability as to how we should understand the kind of caring involved in friendship. Nonetheless, there is widespread agreement that caring about someone for his sake involves both sympathy and action on the friend's behalf. That is, friends must be moved by what happens to their friends to feel the appropriate emotions: joy in their friends’ successes, frustration and disappointment in their friends’ failures (as opposed to disappointment in the friends themselves), etc. Moreover, in part as an expression of their caring for each other, friends must normally be disposed to promote the other's good for her sake and not out of any ulterior motive. (However, see Velleman 1999 for a dissenting view.)
To care about something is generally to find it worthwhile or valuable in some way; caring about one's friend is no exception. A central difference among the various accounts of mutual caring is the way in which these accounts understand the kind of evaluation implicit therein. Most accounts understand that evaluation to be a matter of appraisal: we care about our friends at least in part because of the good qualities of their characters that we discover them to have (Annas 1977; Sherman 1987; Whiting 1991); this is in line with the understanding of love as philia or eros given in the first paragraph of Section 1 above. Other accounts, however, understand caring as in part a matter of bestowing value on your beloved: in caring about a friend, we thereby project a kind of intrinsic value onto him; this is in line with the understanding of love as agape given above.
Friedman (1989, 6) argues for bestowal, saying that if we were to base our friendship on positive appraisals of our friend's excellences, “to that extent our commitment to that person is subordinate to our commitment to the relevant [evaluative] standards and is not intrinsically a commitment to that person.” However, this is too quick, for to appeal to an appraisal of the good qualities of your friend's character in order to justify your friendship is not on its own to subordinate your friendship to that appraisal. Rather, through the friendship, and through changes in your friend over time, you may come to change your evaluative outlook, thereby in effect subordinating your commitment to certain values to your commitment to your friend. Of course, within friendship the influence need not go only one direction: friends influence each other's conceptions of value and how to live. Indeed, that friends have a reciprocal effect on each other is a part of the concern for equality many find essential to friendship, and it is central to the discussion of intimacy in Section 1.2.
A final common thread in philosophical accounts of friendship is shared activity. The background intuition is this: never to share activity with someone and in this way to interact with him is not to have the kind of relationship with him that could be called friendship, even if you each care for the other for his sake. Rather, friends engage in joint pursuits, in part motivated by the friendship itself. These joint pursuits can include not only such things as making something together, playing together, and talking together, but also pursuits that essentially involve shared experiences, such as going to the opera together. Yet for these pursuits to be properly shared in the relevant sense of “share,” they cannot involve activities motivated simply by self interest: by, for example, the thought that I’ll help you build your fence today if you later help me paint my house. Rather, the activity must be pursued in part for the purpose of doing it together with my friend, and this is the point of saying that the shared activity must be motivated, at least in part, by the friendship itself.
This raises the following questions: in what sense can such activity be said to be “shared,” and what is it about friendship that makes shared activity so central to it? The common answer to this second question (which helps pin down an answer to the first) is that shared activity is important because friends normally have shared interests as a part of the intimacy that is characteristic of friendship as such, and the “shared” pursuit of such shared interests is therefore an important part of friendship. Consequently, the account of shared activity within a particular theory ought to depend at least in part on that theory's understanding of the kind of intimacy relevant to friendship. And this generally seems to be the case: for example, Thomas (1987, 1989, 1993), who argues for a weak conception of intimacy in terms of mutual self-disclosure, has little place for shared activity in his account of friendship, whereas Sherman (1987), who argues for a strong conception of intimacy in terms of shared values, deliberation, and thought, provides within friendship a central place not just to isolated shared activities but, more significantly, to a shared life.
Nonetheless, within the literature on friendship the notion of shared or joint activity is taken for granted: not much thought has been given to articulating clearly the sense in which friends share their activity. This is surprising and unfortunate, especially insofar as the understanding of the sense in which such activities are “shared” is closely related to the understanding of intimacy that is so central to any account of friendship; indeed, a clear account of the sort of shared activity characteristic of friendship may in turn shed light on the sort of intimacy it involves. This means in part that a particular theory of friendship might be criticized in terms of the way in which its account of the intimacy of friendship yields a poor account of the sense in which activity is shared. For example, one might think that we must distinguish between activity we engage in together in part out of my concern for someone I love, and activity we share insofar as we engage in it at least partly for the sake of sharing it; only the latter, it might be argued, is the sort of shared activity constitutive of the relationship of friendship as opposed to that constitutive merely of my concern for him (see Nozick 1989). Consequently, according to this line of thought, any account of the intimacy of friendship that fails to understand the sharing of interests in such a way as to make sense of this distinction ought to be rejected.
Helm (2008) develops an account of shared activity and shared valuing at least partly with an eye to understanding friendship. He argues that the sense in which friends share activity is not the sort of shared intention and plural subjecthood discussed in literature on shared intention within social philosophy (on which, see Tuomela 1995, 2007; Gilbert 1996, 2000, 2006; Searle 1990; and Bratman 1999), for such sharing of intentions does not involve the requisite intimacy of friendship. Rather, the intimacy of friendship should be understood partly in terms of the friends forming a “plural agent”: a group of people who have joint cares—a joint evaluative perspective—which he analyzes primarily in terms of a pattern of interpersonally connected emotions, desires, judgments, and (shared) actions. Friendships emerge, Helm claims, when the friends form a plural agent that cares positively about their relationship, and the variety of kinds of friendships there can be, including friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue, are to be understood in terms of the particular way in which they jointly understand their relationship to be something they care about—as tennis buddies or as life partners, for example.
A final common thread in philosophical accounts of friendship is shared activity. The background intuition is this: never to share activity with someone and in this way to interact with him is not to have the kind of relationship with him that could be called friendship, even if you each care for the other for his sake. Rather, friends engage in joint pursuits, in part motivated by the friendship itself. These joint pursuits can include not only such things as making something together, playing together, and talking together, but also pursuits that essentially involve shared experiences, such as going to the opera together. Yet for these pursuits to be properly shared in the relevant sense of “share,” they cannot involve activities motivated simply by self interest: by, for example, the thought that I’ll help you build your fence today if you later help me paint my house. Rather, the activity must be pursued in part for the purpose of doing it together with my friend, and this is the point of saying that the shared activity must be motivated, at least in part, by the friendship itself.
This raises the following questions: in what sense can such activity be said to be “shared,” and what is it about friendship that makes shared activity so central to it? The common answer to this second question (which helps pin down an answer to the first) is that shared activity is important because friends normally have shared interests as a part of the intimacy that is characteristic of friendship as such, and the “shared” pursuit of such shared interests is therefore an important part of friendship. Consequently, the account of shared activity within a particular theory ought to depend at least in part on that theory's understanding of the kind of intimacy relevant to friendship. And this generally seems to be the case: for example, Thomas (1987, 1989, 1993), who argues for a weak conception of intimacy in terms of mutual self-disclosure, has little place for shared activity in his account of friendship, whereas Sherman (1987), who argues for a strong conception of intimacy in terms of shared values, deliberation, and thought, provides within friendship a central place not just to isolated shared activities but, more significantly, to a shared life.
Nonetheless, within the literature on friendship the notion of shared or joint activity is taken for granted: not much thought has been given to articulating clearly the sense in which friends share their activity. This is surprising and unfortunate, especially insofar as the understanding of the sense in which such activities are “shared” is closely related to the understanding of intimacy that is so central to any account of friendship; indeed, a clear account of the sort of shared activity characteristic of friendship may in turn shed light on the sort of intimacy it involves. This means in part that a particular theory of friendship might be criticized in terms of the way in which its account of the intimacy of friendship yields a poor account of the sense in which activity is shared. For example, one might think that we must distinguish between activity we engage in together in part out of my concern for someone I love, and activity we share insofar as we engage in it at least partly for the sake of sharing it; only the latter, it might be argued, is the sort of shared activity constitutive of the relationship of friendship as opposed to that constitutive merely of my concern for him (see Nozick 1989). Consequently, according to this line of thought, any account of the intimacy of friendship that fails to understand the sharing of interests in such a way as to make sense of this distinction ought to be rejected.
Helm (2008) develops an account of shared activity and shared valuing at least partly with an eye to understanding friendship. He argues that the sense in which friends share activity is not the sort of shared intention and plural subjecthood discussed in literature on shared intention within social philosophy (on which, see Tuomela 1995, 2007; Gilbert 1996, 2000, 2006; Searle 1990; and Bratman 1999), for such sharing of intentions does not involve the requisite intimacy of friendship. Rather, the intimacy of friendship should be understood partly in terms of the friends forming a “plural agent”: a group of people who have joint cares—a joint evaluative perspective—which he analyzes primarily in terms of a pattern of interpersonally connected emotions, desires, judgments, and (shared) actions. Friendships emerge, Helm claims, when the friends form a plural agent that cares positively about their relationship, and the variety of kinds of friendships there can be, including friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue, are to be understood in terms of the particular way in which they jointly understand their relationship to be something they care about—as tennis buddies or as life partners, for example.
A final common thread in philosophical accounts of friendship is shared activity. The background intuition is this: never to share activity with someone and in this way to interact with him is not to have the kind of relationship with him that could be called friendship, even if you each care for the other for his sake. Rather, friends engage in joint pursuits, in part motivated by the friendship itself. These joint pursuits can include not only such things as making something together, playing together, and talking together, but also pursuits that essentially involve shared experiences, such as going to the opera together. Yet for these pursuits to be properly shared in the relevant sense of “share,” they cannot involve activities motivated simply by self interest: by, for example, the thought that I’ll help you build your fence today if you later help me paint my house. Rather, the activity must be pursued in part for the purpose of doing it together with my friend, and this is the point of saying that the shared activity must be motivated, at least in part, by the friendship itself.
This raises the following questions: in what sense can such activity be said to be “shared,” and what is it about friendship that makes shared activity so central to it? The common answer to this second question (which helps pin down an answer to the first) is that shared activity is important because friends normally have shared interests as a part of the intimacy that is characteristic of friendship as such, and the “shared” pursuit of such shared interests is therefore an important part of friendship. Consequently, the account of shared activity within a particular theory ought to depend at least in part on that theory's understanding of the kind of intimacy relevant to friendship. And this generally seems to be the case: for example, Thomas (1987, 1989, 1993), who argues for a weak conception of intimacy in terms of mutual self-disclosure, has little place for shared activity in his account of friendship, whereas Sherman (1987), who argues for a strong conception of intimacy in terms of shared values, deliberation, and thought, provides within friendship a central place not just to isolated shared activities but, more significantly, to a shared life.
Nonetheless, within the literature on friendship the notion of shared or joint activity is taken for granted: not much thought has been given to articulating clearly the sense in which friends share their activity. This is surprising and unfortunate, especially insofar as the understanding of the sense in which such activities are “shared” is closely related to the understanding of intimacy that is so central to any account of friendship; indeed, a clear account of the sort of shared activity characteristic of friendship may in turn shed light on the sort of intimacy it involves. This means in part that a particular theory of friendship might be criticized in terms of the way in which its account of the intimacy of friendship yields a poor account of the sense in which activity is shared. For example, one might think that we must distinguish between activity we engage in together in part out of my concern for someone I love, and activity we share insofar as we engage in it at least partly for the sake of sharing it; only the latter, it might be argued, is the sort of shared activity constitutive of the relationship of friendship as opposed to that constitutive merely of my concern for him (see Nozick 1989). Consequently, according to this line of thought, any account of the intimacy of friendship that fails to understand the sharing of interests in such a way as to make sense of this distinction ought to be rejected.
Helm (2008) develops an account of shared activity and shared valuing at least partly with an eye to understanding friendship. He argues that the sense in which friends share activity is not the sort of shared intention and plural subjecthood discussed in literature on shared intention within social philosophy (on which, see Tuomela 1995, 2007; Gilbert 1996, 2000, 2006; Searle 1990; and Bratman 1999), for such sharing of intentions does not involve the requisite intimacy of friendship. Rather, the intimacy of friendship should be understood partly in terms of the friends forming a “plural agent”: a group of people who have joint cares—a joint evaluative perspective—which he analyzes primarily in terms of a pattern of interpersonally connected emotions, desires, judgments, and (shared) actions. Friendships emerge, Helm claims, when the friends form a plural agent that cares positively about their relationship, and the variety of kinds of friendships there can be, including friendships of pleasure, utility, and virtue, are to be understood in terms of the particular way in which they jointly understand their relationship to be something they care about—as tennis buddies or as life partners, for example.
Sunday, March 28, 2010
Can we now say that Roger Federer is the Greatest Player of All Time?
There are those-the curmudgeons, the logicians, the irritatingly level-headed - who will tell you that we "can't compare tennis players from different eras." In their minds, the sport has been so thoroughly transformed over the decades that each generation's greatest champion lives alone on his own island of excellence. To which the majority of sports fans, whose heads are rarely level about anything, might come back with a two-part retort. First, tennis is still tennis; whatever athletic and cosmetic changes it has undergone, you still use a racquet to hit a ball over a net. Second, and maybe more important, we have no choice in the matter. even if the logical half of our minds were to grant that the game Bill Tilden played in the 1920s is not precisely the game that Roger Federer plays today, the fanatical half will go ahead and pit their careers against each other anyway. We're sports fans because we want to know who's going to win, even if the matches play out only in our daydreams. Why should we rob ourselves of that pleasure?Logical or not, "Greatest Ever' parlor games are an enduring staple of all sports. But this summer in particular was a boom season for them. That's because Federer, after 5 years of near-total domination and peerless consistency, made a double-barreled assault on the record books by winning his 1st French Open and his 6th Wimbledon. In a month and a half, he passed two landmarks on the road to tennis immortality: In Paris, he became the 3rd man in the Open era, after Rod Laver and Andre Agassi, to win all four Grand Slams; and at Wimbledon, he broke Pete Sampras' record for most major titles among men by taking home his 15th.
With irrefutable proof of both his versatility on all surfaces and unmatched proficiency at the biggest events, the question can now be asked: Is this 28-year old Swiss with the goofy smile and penchant for cheesy fashion gimmicks the greatest player in history?
The conflicting responses to this question start right at the top, among the three men who are most often mentioned alongside Federer in this debate. Sampras conceded that after Federer's victory at the French Open-the one major the American failed to win-he deserved to be called the greatest in history. But when asked to make a similar pronouncement at Wimbledon, Laver and Bjorn Borg demurred, saying there could be no definitive answer.
The argument for Federer rests first and foremost on his 15th Grand Slam titles. It has long been agreed that these events are the truest tests of tennis supremacy, and Federer owns more of them than anyone else. Who can argue with that? Many have, of course, from cantankerous traditionalists to cultists of Laver, Borg, Sampras and Rafael Nadal. Whatever their agenda, their arguments against Federer coalesce around four issues. Anyone hoping to make a case for him as the greatest in history needs to counter all four.
1. Federer hasn't wont a calendar-year Grand Slam, the ultimate achievement in tennis. Don Budge won one, and Laver won two. There's no denying that winning all four Slams in one year is the sport's Holy Grail, and that Federer came up one match short of it in both 2006 and 2007. Nevertheless, this is a single season achievement rather than a career achievement, and we're measuring lifetime accomplishments. If you believe that Laver's two Slams-he won the first as an amateur in 1962 without having to face professionals like Lew Hoad, Pancho Gonzalez and Ken Rosewall, who were banned from the majors-alone make him untouchable, you must ask yourself this: If Laver hadn't won a single match in any other season, would his career still be greater than Federer's? The answer, obviously, is no.
2. Speaking of the Rochet, Laver won 11 majors, but as a pro he wasn't allowed to play them from 1963 to '67, the prime of his career. He almost certainly would have ended up with more than 15 if he hadn't missed those five seasons. It is more than reasonable to think so. Laver won four straight majors before his ban, and five of the first seven that he entered upon being reinstated in 1968. But remember again that the first four came against amateurs only, and that if he had been allowed to play the majors throughout the '60s, his rivals on the pro tour would have been battling him all the way. More important, however, is the "if" in the question above. No one knows what would have happened to Laver in those events. That's a topic for another parlor game, "What If." In the greatest-ever debate, the only thing we have to go on are the statistics in front of us. Once we allow for an if, where do we stop? Do we have to consider the fact that Borg, who also finished with 11 Slam titles, only played the Australian Open one time?
3. That brings up another point: In the past, top players didn't sit around counting their Grand Slam trophies. Borg played the Australian Open once, Jimmy Connors played it twice. Why are majors the be-all and end-all in this debate? True, the Slams have gained significance in the last 20 years. Sampras elevated them to their current Olympian status by saying they were essentially all that mattered. Still, from Tilden on down, players have always focused their efforts on the Big 4. More to the point, the Slam-title record is hardly Federer's only claim on history. Here's a short list of others: From 2004 to '08 he was ranked No 1 for 237 straight weeks, a record; in 2006, he recorded a season for the ages, finishing 92-5 reaching 16 finals in 17 events, and winning 12 titles; he's tha all-time prize-money leader, having earned nearly $50 million by age 27; from 2005 to '07 he reached a record 10 straight Slam finals (Laver's best was six, Sampras' three); and coming into the U.S. Open, he had reached 21 straight Slam semifinals, a men's record that will likely stand longer than Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak in baseball.
4. Ok, forget the past: How can we call Federer the best ever when he has a 7-13 record against his primary rival, Rafael Nadal, and has won only two of their seven major finals? You might say every Superman has his kryptonite. While Nadal has owned the Swiss for long periods-he beat him five straight times from the spring of 2008 to the spring of '09-their head-to-head record seems more damning to Federer than it really is. In one sense, he's been punished for doing better on Nadal's favourite surface, clay, than Nadal has done on Federer's best surface, hard courts. Federer is 2-5 against Nadal in Slam finals because he has lost to him in the championship round in Paris, on clay, three times. Nadal has never reached the final on hard courts at the U.S. Open, and thus never faced Federer where he's the five-time defending champion. While the 23-year-old Nadal leads their head-to-head and is ahead of Federer's Slam-title pace, all this proves is that in five or 10 years we may be talking about a new greatest of all time. But not yet. The best players compete to win prestigious tournaments, not to beat certain opponents, and that's how they should be judged.
The curmudgeons and logicians have it right in one way: The only method for ranking players from different eras is to compare the coldm hard stats. There's nothing to be gained from looking at old clips of Tilden and Budge and thinking that Federer would wipe the court with them. All you can ask is that a player beat the guy across the net, not a theoretical opponent of the future. Still, the particular brilliance of a champion can't be fully captured by numbers. From Tilden's theatrical authority to Laver's razor-sharp explosiveness to Borg's icy calm to Sampras' ruthless pragmatism, each maps out a unique path to mastering the sport.
Is this also true for Federer? A few years ago he recalled his reaction to a bad loss early in his career. He was outraged because he had been beaten by a player who couldn't approach his "beautiful technique." Federer linked the aesthetic quality of tennis technique with results, something rarely done in the power era. He was onto something about himself.
Watch him watch the ball so carefully onto his strings. Watch him extend his backhand swing without letting his body come out of its stance. Watch him transition forward without stopping to set up for the ball, yet without running through it. More than any other player in history, Federer makes elegance, which in tennis means playing with stylish correctness, a formula for dominance. At a time when the law of raw force seemed undeniable, he has reconnected tennis with its origins in aristocratic gracefulness and made power tennis safe for traditionalists. Call it a new ideal for the sport: Federer has shown us that the most beautiful technique can create the most explosive, the most effective, and, yes, the greatest player that tennis has ever seen.-STEPHEN TIGNOR
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