On Account of Relationships
On December 15, 2022, I spoke to George Raveling on the phone for the first time. This past Tuesday, when I heard the sad news of George’s passing at the age of 88, I thought about that call and could only remember two things about it. First, he began by telling me that since discovering his books in 2015, “Ryan Holiday has been my greatest teacher,” which set up his urging me to not take it for granted that I get to work with and learn from Ryan. Second, the purpose of the call had been to discuss a project I was potentially going to help George with, but after twenty minutes or so, when he had to hang up, we hadn’t discussed the project at all. Looking back through emails with George, I found the thread beginning on the day of that first call. I told him that I really enjoyed the conversation and apologized that we got a little sidetracked from the original purpose of the call. He replied, “People ask me how I account for the great things that have happened in my life. Relationships. My most fervent wish is that our initial conversation will signal the start of a long and lasting friendship. I anxiously look forward to working with you on this ‘project.’ Please be advised that you have secured a Lifetime Friend in George Raveling.” (Much more on George’s remarkable life here and in his book What You’re Made For).
Great things that have happened on account of relationships—that’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
Tell Them About The Dream, Martin!
As a young man in 1963, George was on the grounds of the Lincoln Memorial the day before the March on Washington. He was stopped and asked if he’d be willing to volunteer as a security guard during the speeches the following day. When Martin Luther King Jr. When Martin Luther King Jr. walked away from the lectern after delivering his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, folding up his pages, George asked if could have the pages, and King handed them over. George owned the historic speech until 2021, when he donated it to his alma mater, Villanova. (It is currently on loan to the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington). One of the interesting things about those historic pages is that the phrase “I have a dream” doesn’t appear anywhere on them. Shortly after meeting her at the National Baptist Convention in 1956, Dr. King became good friends with the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson. King confided his hopes and dreams in Jackson, and when he felt down, he would call her and say, “Mahalia, I’m having a rough day. Sing for me.” “Mahalia would sing to him in the phone,” one of King’s biographers, Clarence B. Jones, writes. “He would listen to her voice, and sometimes tears would come down his face…She was not just his favorite gospel singer, she was practically his muse.” On August 28, 1963, before King spoke at the March on Washington, he asked Jackson to sing to the crowd of some 250,000 people. So when King began to give his prepared speech, she was on the podium too, and at one point, she shouted to him, “Tell them about the dream, Martin! Tell them about the dream!” Only because it came from Jackson, Jones writes, “could he instantly understand the value of the suggestion and run with it. In an instant, Martin saw the opportunity in front of him. He saw it through Mahalia’s eyes.” On account of his friendship with Jackson, against the advice of his advisors (the night before, one advisor explicitly told King, “Don’t use the lines about ‘I have a dream.’ It’s trite, it’s cliche.”), King went off-script and began to improvise some of the most famous lines in history, “I have a dream that one day…”
No One Will Expect That. Keep Doing That.
Shortly after Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In The Heights” ran on Broadway and won four Tony Awards, Lin-Manuel was with one of his mentors, the composer Stephen Sondheim. Sondheim asked Miranda what he was going to do next, how he was going to follow up the success of “In The Heights.” Miranda told him, “I’m working on this hip-hop album, like a ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ concept album about Alexander Hamilton.” Sondheim, Lin-Manuel said, “threw back his head and guffawed, and he said, ‘No one will expect that from you. That’s amazing. Keep writing that.’” At a time when just about everyone else was telling him that anything to do with Alexander Hamilton was a terrible idea, Miranda said, “That laugh was enough to power three years of writing.”
There Is Something That Only A Friend Can Bring Out Of Us
The writers C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams were part of an informal literary club known as The Inklings. Shortly after Williams unexpectedly died, Lewis realized he stopped hearing the way Tolkien specifically laughed at a specifically Williams joke. Which made him realize: “In each of my friends,” Lewis wrote, “there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets.” It was Lewis who brought out of Tolkien something he said he wouldn’t have otherwise been capable of. In the 1920s, Tolkien was a professor at the University of Oxford. And at the time, Colin Duriez explains in Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of Friendship, “there was no adult readership for fantasy, or literature in which the story element was predominant.” Though Tolkien had dreams of writing fantasy, fantasy, or literature in which the story element was predominant, wasn’t considered “serious.” It wasn’t worthy of an Oxford professor. Like the way Sondheim’s encouragement powered Miranda’s persistence, Tolkien showed Lewis very early drafts of what would become The Lord of the Rings, and said it was his friend’s encouragement that powered him to keep writing. “The unpayable debt that I owe to him was not ‘influence’ as it is ordinarily understood,” Tolkien wrote of Lewis, “but sheer encouragement. He was for long my only audience. Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more, I should never have brought The L. of the R. to a conclusion.” After bringing to a conclusion his works of fantasy, in which the story element is predominant, they went on to sell more than 600 million copies, making Tolkien widely acclaimed as the “Father of High Fantasy.”
Sometimes It Takes Another Person’s Belief
When Steven Pressfield first submitted his 800-page manuscript for his now classic epic novel Gates of Fire, his agent told him, “Steve, I can’t sell this. You have to cut three hundred pages.” Three hundred pages? “I was shell-shocked,” Pressfield writes in Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be. How could he possibly cut almost half the book? “I fell into depression and despair.” But then he got a hand-written note in the mail from Tom Guinzburg, then the president of Viking Press, one of New York’s most prestigious publishing houses. Guinzburg had read the Gates of Fire manuscript. “There is a first-rate novel in here,” the note said. “I am confident you will pull this off.” “Sometimes it takes another person to believe in us,” Pressfield writes. “That note changed my life. I taped it to the screen of my [computer] and took courage from it every day of the six months it took me to get three hundred pages out of that manuscript.”
Alone In Paradise
Writing to a friend who was experiencing a period of relational difficulties, Louisa May Alcott urged him not to let these momentary disappointments harden him to the point of completely closing himself off from others. “Remember,” Alcott added, “Adam wasn’t happy alone, even in paradise.”