Six Life Lessons from Leo Tolstoy

http://www.dailygood.org/story/632/six-life-lessons-from-leo-tolstoy-roman-krznaric/

"It's 150 years since Leo Tolstoy put pen to paper and began writing his epic War and Peace. While most people think of him as one of the 19th century's greatest novelists, few are aware that he was also one of its most radical social and political thinkers. During a long life from 1828 to 1910, Tolstoy gradually rejected the received beliefs of his aristocratic background and embraced a startlingly unconventional worldview that shocked his peers. Tracing his personal transformation offers some wise — and surprising — lessons for how we should approach the art of living today.

Tolstoy was born into the Russian nobility. His family had an estate and owned hundreds of serfs. The early life of the young count was raucous and debauched, and he gambled away a fortune through a reckless addiction to cards. As he acknowledged in A Confession:

I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labor of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder — there was no crime I did not commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man. So I lived for ten years.

So how did Tolstoy manage to wean himself off this rather racy, decadent lifestyle? And how might his journey help us rethink our own philosophies of life?
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...............Lesson 3: Make a Difference

For an upper-class literary gent, Tolstoy made a notable effort to take practical action to alleviate other people's suffering. His dedication to the peasantry was nowhere more evident than in his famine relief work. After the crop failure of 1873, Tolstoy decided to stop writing Anna Karenina for a year to organize aid for the starving, remarking to a relative, "I cannot tear myself away from living creatures to bother about imaginary ones." His friends and family thought it crazy that one of the finest novelists in the world would put one of his works of genius on the backburner. But Tolstoy was adamant. He did it again after the famine in 1891, and with other members of his family spent the next two years raising money from around the world and working in soup kitchens. Can you imagine a bestselling author today setting aside their latest book to do humanitarian relief work for two years?.....
.......(more at link)