I’m partway through reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, and I came across a couple paragraphs in particular that I wanted to share. In this section (Chapter Nine – “Zebras, unhappy marriages, and the Anna Karenina principle”; page 157), he discusses the first sentence of Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Here is what Diamond has to say about it:
By that sentence, Tolstoy meant that, in order to be happy, a marriage must succeed in many different respects: sexual attraction, agreement about money, child discipline, religion, in-laws, and other vital issues. Failure in any one of those essential respects can doom a marriage even if it has all the other ingredients needed for happiness.
This principle can be extended to understanding much else about life besides marriage. We tend to seek easy, single-factor explanations of success. For most important things, though, success actually requires avoiding many separate possible causes of failure.
Diamond puts it so elegantly; I enjoy much of what he has to say, but I found the above few lines to be especially relevant to this blog. It’s an interesting concept to take with us as we go through our lives. Keeping this principle in mind, we can use it to increase our own awareness so as to set ourselves up for success in all of our endeavors.
How would you interpret the principle and apply it to your own way of living?
I agree. Great book!
It is! I have to admit I was a bit intimidated by the book at first, but it’s so accessible. Much more so than I expected. I’m really enjoying it.