I find that I can only fully appreciate the day when I lie in bed and read. I know the time is well-spent when I haven’t been traveling or participating in useless conversations or sorry debates on topics that I don’t care about. I wonder about the usefulness of knowledge. Much of the life lessons from history repeat themselves.

Nietzsche

As Nietzsche put it: A professional man becomes ill and bed-ridden, and during that time, he realizes that he has become sick of his career. It was a sickness he wasn’t aware of, until he became sick. Being perpetually busy is a sickness that infects most professional people.

Thoreau

Thoreau said: that a man puts his head down and goes about his work, and in his later years, he only realizes that he wasted his life. He should write poetry, if he wants to be a poet. There are many men who want to be poets or artists, but they save-up those desires for a later day that never arrives.

Ray Bradbury

There is a Twilight Zone episode about a man who loves to read, but never has enough time, and he gets locked in a library during an apocalyptic event, and steps on his glasses. We are all stepping on our metaphorical glasses when we don’t read. As Ray Bradbury put it: there are books out there, but do people read them? We have a command of the English language, but we don’t use it. What good are home libraries, if we don’t pull those books off the shelves and read them?

Hannibal

Great men, like Hannibal, exercised strategy, coupled with planning, and decisive quick action. He took his 37 war elephants, and roughly 60,000 infantry/cavalry through Gaul (which is modern-day France) and fought his way to the Alps. They were covered in snow and avalanches during the month of September, and he crossed anyway.

When he arrived in Rome, more than half of his forces had perished, and he went on to kill the Romans.

When Hannibal was a 9-year-old boy, his father was going-off to fight, and he wanted to come along. His father told him that he was too young, but Hannibal insisted. So, his father grabbed him and took him to the temple of Baal, and picked him up, as if to throw him into the flames as a human sacrifice.

“Do you really want to kill Romans?” He asked his son.

“Yes father, I do.”

“Then promise me that you will fight the Romans for the rest of your life.”

Hannibal promised, and his decision became his destiny.