Coffee With Arianna Huffington
Arianna Huffington sure knows how to destroy a good aphorism. As part of its “The Way I See It” campaign, a Starbucks coffee cup hosted this quote from Huffington’s book Fearlessness: “Fearlessness is not the absence of fear; it is the mastery of fear.” Two things wrong here. First, fear-less-ness is quite literally the less-ness (i.e., the absence) of fear. Profundity failed.
Perhaps Huffington meant that courage is the “mastery of fear—not absence of fear.” That would’ve been more intelligent. But that would’ve also been Mark Twain.
I love this, Garin. You are so right. Just read the entire book, actually, and was appalled by most of it. It’s full of things like that..