I’m increasingly interested in the techniques that highly-public individuals use to maintain their sanity without compromising their intellectual rigor. Most people don’t think about this. Imagine if you had 1000x more correspondence, notifications, etc than you currently do
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Some of the very most successful (for multiple values of 'successful') people to ever live had stable cores of friends from adolescence.
Since relationships like that have a tendency to get set internal dynamics fairly early, that change only slowly, that must be grounding.
From European antiquity:
Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and their friends.
Augustus' circle of friends, including some of Rome's most famous poets, his chief general...
Alexander the Great's Diadochi, but he famously got estranged from them later on (and died soon after!)
Etc.
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An interesting thing is that you have some really amazing standout individuals who were poor at making friends (or unlucky!)
Those got sidelined eventually, despite (or because of) their talents:
Hannibal and Scipio Africanus.
Mithridates.
Pyrrhus.
Diogenes.
Pericles.
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