“I used to cry because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.”
If you ask my mom, that’s a quote about being grateful for what you have. If you ask my grandpa, it’s politically correct bullcrap trying to shame people into accepting their lot in life. I like to think of it as a commentary on perspective.
The way you look at the world is always changing. And if it’s not, you’re doing something wrong.
“Only the wisest and stupidest of men never change.”
Confucius
It’s important to always keep an open mind and work to enrich your own perspective. There are two ways to do it and both of them are fabulous.
First, have experiences. Do things, try things, get out of your comfort zone.
That’s what traveling is for me. It’s going places I’ve never been, seeing things I’ve never seen, unexpected and unpredictable things, things that will forever change the way I look at the world.
I, for example, experienced starvation in the summer of 2017. I’m a middle-class American; in terms of human history, I’m not rich. I’m in the stratosphere of what’s technically possible. If I never took that trip to Morocco, I would never have gone more than a few hours hungry in my entire life.
But I did take that trip. And I didn’t bring enough cash. And so for two weeks, I was able to afford just one meal a day. Some days, that meal was just a yogurt. Sunrise to sunset, all I ate was one yogurt. I mean, I was never in danger of dying. But it was staggeringly miserable.
That experience opened my eyes to what it means to be without life’s basic necessities. Nothing else matters. Nothing can make you happy for more than a split second. I stopped caring about everything, I stopped caring about seeing and experiencing Morocco.
I stopped thinking about sex! I mean, talk about shattering my preconceptions. I haven’t stopped thinking about sex since I was 12 years old. But that time in Morocco, I pulled up porn out of habit and I just… didn’t care. All I cared about was running down the clock until my flight back to a country where credit cards buy food.
I found myself fantasizing over and over about a time in high school when I went to my grandparents’ house, turned on Mythbusters, and proceeded to put away an entire DiGiorno supreme pizza and two or three cans of Mountain Dew. That memory became my heaven. That was supreme (cheap, I know) happiness.
(Note: Since that experience, I learned about the 1944 Minnesota Starvation Experiment which showed that I likely would’ve been happier and healthier fasting for 2 weeks rather than eating one meal a day. Crazy, right?)
I’ve mentioned what I learned from that experience in previous essays. When I said that money doesn’t buy happiness but having none will make you miserable, when I talked about Maslow’s first tier of needs coming before higher aspirations, those messages were directly inspired by what happened to me in Morocco.
Now, back to my original message. The second way to enrich your perspective is to listen to people. Read. Everyone on Earth has had different experiences and has a unique perspective. By listening and reading, you can gain the benefit from that.
“Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.”
Socrates
Let me tell you, my reading life was revolutionized when I realized I can listen to audiobooks at accelerated speeds while doing other things. I like to listen at 2x speed while I hike or cook or work out. Since the beginning of this year, I’ve gone through almost 50 books ranging from philosophy to physics to history to economics. It’s fantastic! I finally read all three Lord of the Rings this year; that’s been on my to-do list since high school.
Hopefully, if you’re reading my stuff, you agree that listening to people is worthwhile and you’re using the things I write to enrich your own perspective.
And listening is another great thing to do when traveling. You get to meet people whose lives are indescribably different from yours. Because there are plenty of people like me who go out of our way share our perspectives and ideas, but there are billions of others out there that aren’t going to come to you, you have to go out and find them.
Of course, having said all that, I didn’t choose the moniker “A Man With No Shoes” because of that quote. It’s from what was, at the time, the most viewed video on my YouTube channel, “My Shoes Get Stolen,” which had racked up an impressive 147 views. And also I walk barefoot a lot.
Oh, and Hellen Keller popularized the quote in the simple form above but check out the original:
“I never complained of the vicissitudes of fortune, nor suffered my face to be overcast at the revolution of the heavens, except once, when my feet were bare and I had not the means of obtaining shoes. I came to the chief of Kfah in a state of much dejection, and saw there a man who had no feet. I returned thanks to God and acknowledged his mercies, and endured my want of shoes with patience…”
Shaikh Muslihu’d-din Sa’di of Shiraz, The Rose Garden (1258)
