Why You Should Tilt at Windmills (and Other Quixotic Reflections) (excerpt)

No ideal will remain long enough to be realized, or even partly realized. The modern young man will never change his environment; for he will always change his mind.

Activism requires a kind of willed hopefulness, a readiness to bash your head against a wall so that it may crumble or crack, even if you know all the arguments about why what you’re doing is probably doomed and all the reasons the wall is unlikely to budge.

foolish idealists don’t look for the easiest way, we vote with our hearts. We have a sense of what’s sporting, which makes it sound like we might end up in a duel at dawn on the town green. But it’s not that. Rather, it’s trying to use a set of skills which, when mastered (or at least improved upon), heighten an experience.

Such thinking assumes that you must be constantly victorious—not only against your peers, but also against an earlier version of your own poor self. Most dangerously of all, such thinking assumes that if you cannot win, then you must not continue to play. But what does any of that have to do with vocation? What does any of that have to do with the