#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Everybody tells you to live for a cause larger than yourself, but how exactly do you do it? The author of The Road to Character explores what it takes to lead a meaningful life in a self-centered world.“Deeply moving, frequently eloquent and extraordinarily incisive.”—The Washington Post Every so often, you meet people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were … people who radiate joy—who seem to know why they were put on this earth, who glow with a kind of inner light. Life, for these people, has often followed what we might think of as a two-mountain shape. They get out of school, they start a career, and they begin climbing the mountain they thought they were meant to climb. Their goals on this first mountain are the ones our culture endorses: to be a success, to make your mark, to experience personal happiness. But when they get to the top of that mountain, something happens. They look around and find the view . . . unsatisfying. They realize: This wasn’t my mountain after all. There’s another, bigger mountain out there that is actually my mountain.
And so they embark on a new journey. On the second mountain, life moves from self-centered to other-centered. They want the things that are truly worth wanting, not the things other people tell them to want. They embrace a life of interdependence, not independence. They surrender to a life of commitment.
In The Second Mountain, David Brooks explores the four commitments that define a life of meaning and purpose: to a spouse and family, to a vocation, to a philosophy or faith, and to a community. Our personal fulfillment depends on how well we choose and execute these commitments. Brooks looks at a range of people who have lived joyous, committed lives, and who have embraced the necessity and beauty of dependence. He gathers their wisdom on how to choose a partner, how to pick a vocation, how to live out a philosophy, and how we can begin to integrate our commitments into one overriding purpose.
In short, this book is meant to help us all lead more meaningful lives. But it’s also a provocative social commentary. We live in a society, Brooks argues, that celebrates freedom, that tells us to be true to ourselves, at the expense of surrendering to a cause, rooting ourselves in a neighborhood, binding ourselves to others by social solidarity and love. We have taken individualism to the extreme—and in the process we have torn the social fabric in a thousand different ways. The path to repair is through making deeper commitments. In The Second Mountain, Brooks shows what can happen when we put commitment-making at the center of our lives.
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David Brooks is a Journalist for the New York Times. He is a fabulous writer, and speaks in this book of the power of the 2nd Mountain…you just must read it…it is an amazing book!!
David Brooks is always worth watching in his Friday segment on the PSB Newshour. (He and liberal columnist Mark Shields discuss current politics, and their shared wisdom is edifying.) But THE SECOND MOUNTAIN is a meandering yet utterly brilliant collection of his best wisdom, honed through his own arduous decades-long journey, on how you and I can live a much better life. Basically: be passionate, serve others, make a lasting difference, know God.
He has an interesting way of writing; Brooks collects tidbits from books and articles and then stacks them up on the floor of his study. He then literally crawls around among the stacks until he has compiled his 850-word weekly column. It’s also how this book came into being. That gives it an eclectic here-a-chunk-there-a-chunk feel, but he has stitched his mountain of sources into such a tower of wisdom, it’s worth the sometimes haphazard moments.
He shares an abundance of wisdom about marriage, and also about our current toxic political morass. I personally highlighted endless soundbites throughout his testimony; to include them all would run 25 pages or more. Here’s just one: “These days, partisanship for many people is not about which political party has the better policies. It’s a conflict between the saved and the damned. Once politics becomes your identity, then every electoral contest is a struggle for existential survival, and everything is permitted. Tribalism threatens to take the detached individual and turn him into a monster.”
As a Christian, I especially appreciate how he chronicles his own journey of faith. Brooks was raised as a Jew but experienced immersion into a culture of Christianity by attending religious summer camps, where he was indoctrinated (as many of us are) in the dreaded “Arky Arky” song. (No kidding! Rise, shine, give God the glory glory.) He will get no argument from me or my pastor when he asserts that if Protestants had a pope, it would surely be the late John Stott. People with simple, unswerving faith in Jesus Christ may be frustrated by Brooks’ spotty steps toward Calvary; to this day, his innate brilliance and recurring questions lead him to equivocate regarding a full confession of Jesus as Savior. I’ll pass that by, but share this poignant tidbit: as friends and fans became aware that, hey, David Brooks was considering becoming a Christian, three hundred people went down to the post office and mailed him books. One hundred of those 300 books were “Mere Christianity” by C. S. Lewis!
The Second Mountain shows us how to move beyond the first mountain of trying to achieve success to the second mountain of service to others. Rather than a society of tribes (us versus them) we can become a community that builds upon the diversity of people. Well written and thought provoking.
David Brooks has presented us with a lovely remedy for our broken world through his own examination of his life and others lives the last few sentences of his book describe his feelings perfectly When the wounds of life have been absorbed and the wrongs forgiven people bend toward each other intertwine with one another and some mystical combustion happens Love emerges between people out of nothing as a pure flame