The founder of Methodism, John Wesley, clearly understood the link between the parable of the talents and value creation back in the 1700s. He explicitly linked the parable to finance in a sermon titled “The Use of Money.” The latter two parts of the sermon are summarized as “Do not throw the precious talent into the sea” and “Having, First, gained all you can, and, Secondly saved all you can, Then give all you can.” This quote is in fact the origin of the more popular framing of Wesley’s logic: “Do all the good you can. By all the means you can. In all the ways you can. In all the places you can. At all the times you can. To all the people you can. As long as ever you can.”
Our lives as a constant series of such crossroads—and why the path of “should” is alluring but unfulfilling: “Should is how others want us to show up in the world — how we’re supposed to think, what we ought to say, what we should or shouldn’t do. It’s the vast array of expectations that others layer upon us.” That is the safe choice most of us make, and that Luna was making, without even thinking about it. It was also what Lucy Honeychurch was about to do: become an agent of societal expectations.
For Luna, the path of “should” must be rejected in order to pursue the path of “must”: “Must is who we are, what we believe, and what we do when we are alone with our truest, most authentic self. It’s our instincts, our cravings and longings, the things and places and ideas we burn for, the intuition that swells up from somewhere deep inside of us. Must is what happens when we stop conforming to other people’s ideals and start connecting to our own.” In other words, “Lucy, go for George”—stop being the agent of social expectations and be your own principal.
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The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller. In this short book, Miller describes what happens when intuitive and sensitive children are coupled with a demanding parent. These children become extremely well attuned to the signals and needs of those around them, as it has historically been the key for them to receive love. But they grow up unable to project their own desires and agendas onto the world because they have become so accustomed to fulfilling the needs of others. These children grow up to be exemplary agents, engines of achievement as they seek to be admired. But they can’t figure out how to be principals when they are adults. Never having had to formulate their own agenda, they find themselves deeply unsatisfied and frustrated as they only know how to fulfill the needs and dreams of others. They are trapped in the role of agents who don’t know how to become principals.
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George Vaillant, a research psychiatrist, helped conduct the longest longitudinal study of emotional and physical development by continuing the so-called Grant Study of Harvard undergraduates in the late 1930s. By tracking physiological and emotional data over more than seventy years, Vaillant and his colleagues provide some of the best evidence on what matters for longevity and happiness. And the answer he arrived at, as described by Joshua Wolf Shenk, is deceptively simple.
Vaillant’s other main interest is the power of relationships. “It is social aptitude,” he writes, “not intellectual brilliance or parental social class, that leads to successful aging.” Warm connections are necessary—and if not found in a mother or father, they can come from siblings, uncles, friends, mentors.
In an interview in the March 2008 newsletter to the Grant Study subjects, Vaillant was asked, “What have you learned from the Grant Study men?” Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”