21 Awesome Things About The Holidays

Deck the halls with boughs of awesome.

Here are twenty-one awesome things about the holidays. Let's get into it:

  
Plugging in the Christmas lights from last year and having them all work 

Nope, not even a year twisted into a ball of knots in the basement could take the sparkle out of these bright little bulbs. So untie them slowly, hang them quickly, and help get the whole neighborhood shining.

AWESOME!


When the neighbor shovels that little patch of the sidewalk

Sidewalks bring us together.

Fences split yards, lawns divide homes, and invisible property lines are scribbled on dusty blueprints in city archives. But somehow those little strips of concrete tie us all together and connect the dots between our lives.

It’s a beautiful moment when a friendly neighbor shovels the snow off of your walk after a winter snowstorm. Swaddled in snow-packed mitts, sweaty scarves, and salty boots, they’re just lending a helping hand of kindness and some friendly season’s greetings.

AWESOME!


When construction cranes get Christmas lights on them

They’re not selling anything.

Nope, Christmas lights on construction cranes just smile down on the city and cover us all in a warm and festive light. Flickering in the sky, flashing way up high, they hug us all together in a friendly yellow glow.

On top of that, it’s sort of fun thinking about how they got there too. Doesn’t it seem kind of dangerous? It’s like someone risked their lives just putting up lights for the people.

Thanks Spiderman!

AWESOME!


The Holiday Party Save

Do we need all those parties?  

Sure, we all love catching up with close friends in Christmas sweaters, but sometimes the office party feels like a meeting with veggie trays, and clinking drinks with second cousins gets old. Face it—there are times when you need to be saved, my friends. Yes, the Holiday Party Save happens anytime a friend yanks you from a bad holiday party conversation by pulling off a thrilling and daring rescue mission.

Here’s how it all goes down:  

Step 1: The Plan. Say tonight you’re heading to your uncle’s annual Christmas party with your new boyfriend. As you both walk into Stranger Conversation Territory, it’s important to make that deal up front: You save them, they save you. Don’t forget to shake.

Step 2: The Signal. You’re trapped! When you find yourself listening to neverending vacation stories, getting detailed stock-picking advice, or hearing about someone’s thesis, it’s time to get out. Signal your friend with an eager Smile ’n’ Raised Eyebrows glance, casual Nodding Head-Tilt beckon, or if absolutely necessary, a booming bloodcurdling “Get over here!” scream, like Scorpion in Mortal Kombat.

Step 3: The Save. Here’s the tricky part. Your friend comes over and has two options. First, they can play False Emergency and drag you away while apologizing to the chatty strangers. This is risky because it could look forced and you’ll need to disappear rather than just talk to someone else. Instead, they can try The Natural, which is where they drop a nice, normal transition into the conversation. “Should we go grab some food?” “Linda just got here, let’s say hi,” or “Where’s the bathroom?” usually work well.  

Remember: When you’re stuck, when you’re stranded, when all you see is gloom, just yell for your brothers and sisters and let them pull you across the room.  

AWESOME!


When that kid crying at the mall isn’t your kid

There’s nothing like a good old-fashioned holiday hissy fit in an elbow-to-elbow packed mall to help soothe your fraying nerves.

Whether it’s the snotty-nosed toddler wailing on Santa’s lap, the sweaty snowsuit screamer on the floor of the toys section, or your everyday baby bawler yelling to the food court heavens, it doesn’t matter.

It’s just a migraine moment in the middle of mall mayhem.

And whether you’re taking care of your baby brother, babysitting the neighbors, or wheeling around your own mutant offspring, we’ve all been there. We all know the stress, we see the staring eyes, we all know the pain, and . . . we do sympathize.

But it’s still great when that kid crying in the mall just isn’t your kid.

Hark! The herald angels sing.

Glory to the kid free king.

AWESOME!


Pulling out that old box of Christmas ornaments from when you were a kid

Let’s go back.

Crack open that musty cardboard box from the basement storage space and get ready to brainwarp back to the big eyes and bright lights of your youth. Yes, yank out that twisted clump of yarn, ceramics, and construction paper and get ready for a sweet stroll down memory lane. Hopefully your old box features some of these classics:

1. A chipped ceramic you painted in elementary school. Maybe it’s the shiny Santa Claus that you doused in too much lacquer back in third grade. The brush strokes make his beard look gray, and one of his eyeballs has a blue smear that makes him cross-eyed. But his smile still holds and that little ribbon you knotted through his hat is perfect for hanging him back up on the tree.

2. Homemade ornaments featuring some combination of construction paper, popcorn, and glitter. When you were young you cleared off the kitchen table and set up a home workshop where you stitched popcorn, glued sparkles, and taped up little rolls of construction paper. And even though the reds have faded to orange and the glitter has cracked away, there’s something beautiful about pulling out those squashed rings, baby handprints, or crayon drawings and letting your brain slip back to simpler days.

3. The hundred-year-old hand-me-down. You’re lucky if you have one of these wood-carved gems bouncing around the bottom of the box. Someone’s Great-grandpa whittled a toy train engine or rosy-cheeked soldier from some softwood and delicately painted it to perfection. Maybe the tree it’s carved from is two or three hundred years old and fell from the woods of a distant forest. High fives if you agree this beats the neon plastic from the dollar store any day.

Yes, when you pull out that box of Christmas ornaments from when you were a kid, it’s like taking a magical mystery tour back to your childhood. It’s a brief headtrip out of your serious grown-up body into the Freaky Friday fun times of yesterday.

AWESOME!


When strangers wish you happy holidays

Holidays are stressful. Gift shopping, mall hopping, money dropping, and through it all you’re planning in-law sleepovers, giant family dinners, and complicated travel plans.

It’s nice in these roaring revved-up moments when a complete stranger catches your eye and wishes you a heartfelt happy holidays.

Whether it’s the cashier at the grocery store, the receptionist at your gym, or the lady getting a perm beside you at the salon, it’s nice scoring that warm little season’s greetings to remind us we’re all chasing the same ol’ thing.

That’s right: Love, big hugs, family time, and cozy company right when we need it most.

AWESOME!


That moment near the holidays when there’s suddenly cookies, chocolate, and candy everywhere

Let’s get fat together.

Roll those rum balls, sprinkle sparkles on the shortbread, and dump the bulk bag of candy canes in the crystal dish by the secretary’s desk.

AWESOME!


Flipping channels and stumbling on that one Christmas special you loved as a kid

It’s a wonderful life.

When you’re bunkering in the basement to get away from the holiday madness upstairs, it’s always nice when the channel flipping pops you onto your favorite old flashback.

Which classic gem burrows into your heart?

1. That Rudolph stop-motion special. Sam the Snowman (no relation to Frosty) narrates this epic tale of outcasts Rudolph and Hermey the Elf as they stumble through the North Pole meeting Yukon Cornelius and the Abominable Snowman before taking refuge on the Island of Misfit Toys. Never forget the moral of the story: Follow your heart and become a dentist.

2. A Charlie Brown Christmas. Like most Charlie Brown cartoons, this one features monotone voices, confusing plots, and dry humor. Thankfully, jazzy piano music and dancing kids make it all come together.

3. Any non-Christmas movie that takes place during Christmas. Sure, Bruce Willis crawling around office ducts in Die Hard might not seem festive, but listen closely to the background music and you’ll hear some Christmas tunes. Let’s throw in Lethal Weapon, Gremlins, and Batman Returns, too.

4. How The Grinch Stole Christmas. All the Whos living in Whoville have a serious problem in that there’s a freakish monster living in the cliffs above their romantic mountain town — dramatically reducing property values by the day. If you don’t love the big rhyming sing-a-long finish to this one, your heart is officially three sizes too small.

5. Frosty the Snowman. Poor Frosty just doesn’t have the personality of Sam from the Rudolph special. And since they always air this one with Rudolph, the inferiority of Frosty jumps out even more. Honestly, if Frosty is your favorite old Christmas special, then I feel sorry for you. You had a rough childhood.

6. Whatever special is on the same time as Frosty on the other channel. A Garfield Christmas, John Denver and the Muppets, or Will Vinton’s Claymation Christmas automatically win.

Finding your favorite holiday special from when you were a kid is like uncovering a hidden stash of buried treasure at the bottom of the sea. It doesn’t matter if you’ve seen it a hundred times, have it on your computer, or own the DVD, either. There’s just something sweet about feeling like it was waiting there at this very moment … and feeling like the stars all aligned to give you a brief little dose of

AWESOME!


The Super Present Power Shop

You’re running late.

When it’s almost Christmas and there’s nothing under the tree it’s time to furrow your brows, steady your glare, and clench those fists for a big Super Present Power Shop.

Yes, this is where you bust into the mall in a sweatshirt-and-running shoes tornado and spin around at high speeds until successfully finding something for everyone on your list.

Black Friday’s long gone, online delivery windows are closed, and now it’s crunch time. Here are some tips to pulling it off:

• Good parkin’ is good startin’. Circling the frozen tundra in lot WW is a fool’s game. No, you need to find the secret YMCA entrance, get a drop off and pick up, or arrive ten minutes before doors open to score a front spot. Don’t forget The PLPT.

• Skip the coat, grab the kicks. Leave your winter jacket in the trunk and sprint across the icy lot to the front door because thirty seconds of frozen lungs is worth avoiding three hours of overheating. Plus, those running shoes will help you run and dive for the last Baby Farts-A-Lot in the toy store.

• Plug in. Stuff some headphones in your ears and rock out to 2Unlimited or Technotronic to stay motivated. Remember: Nothing slows you down more than hearing Santa Baby for the third time in an hour so pump up the jam and let’s move this.

• Couples for couples. If you have couples on your list just divide the number of gifts by two. Beer mug for him, wine glasses for her? No, martini shaker for both. You get the idea.

• Close your list, open your mind. Focus is important so jot down your names and ideas before hitting the stores. Just make sure to leave your mind open for things to jump off the shelves. Breath mints,  People magazines, and IKEA golf pencils all make lovely stocking stuffers.

• Bag a Monster. It’s important to ask the first store you visit for the largest bags they have. They should go fishing for a couple minutes and pull out the king-sized ones normally reserved for toaster ovens and dehumidifiers. Use those monster to eat everything else you buy all day.

Okay, listen, listen — these are just a few tips to get you going. As you start perfecting your Power Shop you’ll grow more advanced techniques like stuffing your pockets with peanut butter sandwiches, phoning for inventory checks while waiting in lines, and buying someone a sled so you can drag all your presents from shop to shop.

But no matter what kind of Power Shop you pull off, one thing’s for sure: when you crash back into your couch surrounded by full bags and a crossed-off list well… it’s time to unclench your muscles, droop your eyes, and just smile back slowly at your mall-conquering moment of

AWESOME!


Putting a Santa hat on your pet or grandparent

It’s party time.

And those Christmas sweaters are just the beginning.

I mean sure, tossing on a thick woolly for the holiday party is a sure way to spread the cheer — especially if your sweater features hypnotic swirls of red and green, a giant floating snowman head, or an intense action sequence of Santa flying his reindeer through a blizzard.

But to really get that party going and that eggnog flowing you’ve got to crank it up a notch. Yes, we’re talking about tossing a Santa cap on your golden retriever or grandpa, we’re talking about tossing one on your labradoodle or grandma, and we’re talking about everyone donning their gay apparel to whip this holiday bash into a whole new level of

AWESOME!


Snow falling on Christmas eve

Jumbo snowflakes falling thick and heavy on Christmas Eve is a special sight. They blur the world for a moment and lay a fresh blank canvas over everything. So if you’re sitting inside listening to carols on the radio, munching Christmas cookies, or chatting with family and friends, take a moment to look out the window and just enjoy the scene.

AWESOME!


Ripping your present open like a wild animal

First, some apologies.

We’re sorry, Endurance Wrapper. You spent thirty minutes getting the present just right with your scissor-frilled ribbons, crisply folded corners, and those adorable little bows. You put time in and we didn’t respect that with our raccoon-with-rabies slaughtering of your gift.

We’re sorry, Auntie Paper Collector. We know you quietly keep all the discarded bows and paper to fold back into little piles for next year. Nobody minds the creased sun-faded reindeer wrapping paper because we know you’re saving money and the planet. But this time we didn’t leave you with much. Unless you’re collecting saliva-smeared scraps, squashed boxes, and torn bows.

We’re sorry, Garbage Collecting Dad. We see you trudging around the living room with the World’s Lightest Garbage Bag, scooping up all the tiny bits of tissue paper and sticky ripped price tags. We know your job would be a lot easier if all presents moved to a Gift Bag Only Policy.

We are very, very sorry to you all.

And now that we’ve apologized our conscience is clear.

Because the truth is we love ripping presents open like a drugged-up reindeer.

AWESOME!


Trying on your new clothes as soon as you unwrap them

Stiff creases, unhemmed pants, and itchy tags can’t dent your mood.

Now it’s time to change real fast, clear the kitchen runway, and strut your stuff in a private fashion show for your friends and family.

And dog.

AWESOME!


The In-law Nap  

The In-law Nap is any nap you manage to pull off at the in-law’s house. As long as it’s not during Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas present unwrapping, or while the birthday cake is served, it is a completely legal nap and fully counts as spending quality time visiting the in-laws.  

Whether you skip out on setting the table, ditch helping with the dishes, or just miss a couple hours playing cards with Grandma . . . it doesn’t matter.  

All that matters is you pulled it off.  

Yes, you answered a phony phone call in the other room for twenty minutes, you snuck into the kid’s fort and fell asleep in the cushion barracks, or you hid on a pile of jackets and scraggly blankets in the spare bedroom.  

All that matters is you pulled it off.  

All that matters is that you’re  

AWESOME!


Drinking with Grandma

It’s time for some intergenerational egg nogging.

Get ready to light the yule log, sail the gravy boat, and get your eighty-five pound grandmother a sloshy glass of rummy nog.

Now, whatever your age, whatever your tastes, whatever your pleasures, whatever your fates, let’s all agree on one thing today: grabbing an occasional festive drink with your mom’s mom or your son’s son bridges boundaries and crosses divides.

Once upon your time your grandma used to boogie. Once upon a time your grandma threw it down. I’m saying before you danced on tables, she danced on them, too. And before you learned to mix things, she was mixing two.

So when the holidays hit and the families combine it’s time to bring out the punch bowl and time to have a good time. Because we’re not here forever and we’re not here very long. We don’t get many chances so toss one back before granny’s gone.

I never knew my grandparents but I heard stories they were great… so I know if they were here now we’d party hard before it got too late.

AWESOME!


When your guests do the dishes even after you told them not to  

It’s time for Christmas dinner.  

Yes, sweaty and flushed, you run around baking bread and breaking eggs before that doorbell bing-bongs, the guests ping-pong, and everyone sits down to eat up your delicious holiday meal.  

Of course, you enjoy the dinner—you love it, it’s great—but you don’t really enjoy it. No, you’re running around refilling glasses, folding napkins, scooping seconds, warming pies. You’re cleaning crumbs, wiping babies, and keeping an eye on The Kids Table. While everyone sits and chats, you’re a Tasmanian devil of dining room insanity, whipping into a whirlwind and making sure everyone enjoys their meal.

By the end, you’re completely and utterly exhausted. Your bones are bleeding, your skin is stinging, and your body is aching for a tender hug from a cushy couch.  

That’s why it’s great when your guests offer to do the dishes after the meal.  

“No, no, no,” you say. “Sit down, sit down, sit down.”  

But they insist, but you insist, but they insist, but you insist, but they insist . . . and then finally you just stare back at them with hollow, broken eyes and give up.  

Now you crashland on the couch, listening to carols as your guests fill the sink and bubble up the suds. And what a beautiful moment of sweet relief it is when you walk back in there and see everything sparklingly clean.  

Plus, for the rest of the week you get to enjoy the Treasure Hunt that comes with finding your own dishes in all the wrong cupboards. But it’s no big deal, so just smile and enjoy those Gravy Boat Rescue Missions and Wooden Spoon Search Parties with a smile.  

Yes, this one goes out to guests who wash the dishes even after we told them not to. Today we say thanks for the love, thanks for the memories, and thanks for scrubbing the crusty stuffing dish.  

AWESOME!


When the Christmas tree gives the only light in the room

Turn out the lights.

Pull the curtains open and watch as jumbo snowflakes drift past the window, snow-covered kids walk by dragging sleds, and winter winds whisper through the evergreens. Smell the turkey crisping in the oven, listen to scratchy carols spinning in your head, and hear footsteps from the family slowly come together in front of the sparkling tree…

Swipe your daughter’s bangs as she lies in your lap, smile at grandpa sipping eggnog on the ottoman, or cuddle up with your cousins in a pile of cozy blankets and comfy sweats on the couch.

Sip that crystal glass of eggnog, sniff the pine of the tree, and relax and share a quiet moment of bliss with someone touching your hands … or your heart.

AWESOME!


Successfully regifting a present to someone who wants it  

What do cellophane-wrapped mugs of mini candy canes, Season 3 of Mr. Belvedere on DVD, and framed photos of someone else’s dog have in common?  

They’re just what we never wanted.  

But that’s okay, that’s okay—because someone else might! Yes, now it’s time for some Regifting Magic, people. It’s time to regift like you’ve never regifted before. You’re a regifting machine if you follow these three steps to freedom:  

1. Smile sweetly. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. Instead, look them in the eyes while saying thank you over and over. You may also find it helpful to practice these lines (for these items): “I’ve been meaning to try that place!” (gift card to Taco Bell), “How did you know I liked this shade of green?!” (puke green sweater), and “It’s perfect, it’s perfect—honestly, how have I even been wearing shoes all these years?!” (shoehorn).  

2. Add it to your gifts-to-give pile. When you get home, make sure to write a thank-you card promptly and then toss the gift in the closet with your motorized self-twirling spaghetti fork, Streetlamps of the World page-a-day calendar, and novelty light-up ceramic angel. Let your inventory bulk up a bit so you’ve got good regift variety, and be sure to hide the stash from future regiftees. Post-it Notes with the name of the person who gave it to you can also help prevent the dreaded Boomerang Gift. Don’t let it happen to you.  

3. Annnnnnd . . . regift! Remember that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. When you look at it this way, it feels like you’re doing very important gift-giving charity work. You’re a misfit present coordinator! Now, you need to be about 90 percent sure the regiftee will love the present. After all, there’s nothing wrong with gift cards to Taco Bell and light-up ceramic angels. It’s just that one goes to your backward-cap skateboarding rascal of a little cousin and the other goes to your Grandma who loves tacos.  

AWESOME!


Driving around town to see all the Christmas lights

Every city has a street.

It’s the quiet cul-de-sac where all the neighbors play it big for Christmas and decorate their homes with the greatest light show the world has ever seen. Word gets out through the local paper or radio station and soon everyone knows it’s just the place to go for a late night cruise down Neon Light Lane.

It’s the one place everyone enjoys traffic jams.

Sitting bumper to bumper around the quiet crescent, you push your hat above your forehead, press your mittens to the window, and stare out at the twinkling scene. Reds and greens flicker and flash on your darkened face as snow reflects classy floodlights, roofs beam with strings of white, and inflatable Santas bob and wave from the middle of lawns.

And there’s always one house that is just a bit better than the rest. It’s probably the family that got the parade route started with the big splash every year. I like thinking the neighbors leaned on their shovels with furrowed brows when they first saw lights spelling Merry Christmas being draped across the roof, but over time their Grinchlike hearts melted and they felt the Christmas spirit themselves.

Somehow over time the street grew and grew and grew until it became the sparkly beauty we see today. There’s something fun and something sweet about bundling up and just driving down the street. Hear the carols softly on the radio, feel the smiles in the car, and just take a moment to relax and remember how lucky we are.

AWESOME!


The sound of snow crunching under your boots

Dim streetlights cast blurry shadows for your cold walk home.

Snow-packed mitts, floppy wool hat, and a drippy, sniffly nose cover your shuddery frame as you shuffle down empty side streets on your way to the cozy warmth of your waiting bed. Everything is an eerily pitch-perfect silence buried under a shadowy sheet of bright white. Pine trees sway softly, Christmas lights flicker, and the biting air ice-scrapes your frost-nipped nose.

Somehow the solid crunch of your winter boots against the packed road snow fills the night with a relaxing and familiar sound that marks tiny little progress towards cuddling up under warm blankets and falling deep asleep.

Like cracking frozen puddles, pushing soft drink lid buttons, or popping a spoon in a jar of peanut butter, the sound of snow crunching under your salty winter boots scratches a primal itch that just feels so satisfying.

So stuff your hands in your pockets, curl your head to your chest, and crunch loud and crunch proud deep into the dark, winter night.

AWESOME!

Earlier versions of some of these appeared in 1000 Awesome Things and The Book of (Holiday) Awesome

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Feeling anxious about the holidays? Check out this video on how to deal with social anxiety at family gatherings during the holidays:

The Very Best Books I Read In 2019

Welcome to my third annual list of “The Very Best Books I Read This Year.” (Here are my 2017 and 2018 lists.)

Now, books make great gifts but if you want some other intentional living gift ideas check out my Unconventional Christmas Gift Guide.

These are my favorite books I read this year. I hope you find one or two you like.

Happy holidays,

Neil

—

19. The Common Good by Robert B. Reich. Think of a beautifully safe small town where nobody locks their doors. Now imagine the first person who comes through breaking and entering. Pretty easy pickings! Nobody locks their doors. Trust plummets. Arms race erupts. Locks. Security systems. Video cameras. This type of trust evaporation and arms racing has happened everywhere and Robert Reich gives an incredibly lucid portrait of exactly what happened when to get us where we are now. I call it trust, he calls it the common good, but either way, this is a vital read to help understand the world we live in. (Sidenote: One of my highlights of 2019 was giving a SXSW talk with Frank Warren called “Building Trust In Distrustful Times”. I used this book to develop some ideas in that talk.)

18. Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I read this book as a child… and stopped. I didn’t like it. I read this book as a teen… and stopped. I didn’t like it. I read this book this year… and couldn’t stop. I loved it. Proof a book has to catch you at the right time. My whole life I thought Alice was a children’s book and … it’s not! The twisted references, complex mind games, and crazy absurdism are deliciously adult but baked into simplistic prose. But just because something looks like vanilla pudding doesn’t mean it’s not crème brûlée, you know what I mean? There is so much layered complexity here. Did you know Lewis Carroll was an Oxford-educated mathematician? Just read this section on Wikipedia about the style, themes, and allusions in this book. A hundred pages of bliss. Hope it catches you at the right time.

17. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. A picture-perfect family in Shaker Heights, Ohio is slowly peeled back to reveal all sorts of spaghetti-noodle machinations on the inside. You will feel love, you will feel pain, and (best of all) you feel yourself rubbing against bigger ethical questions that will make you wonder “What would I do in that situation?” A book that will bubble in your blood. (PS. Get it before they ruin the cover ... set to debut as a mini-series starring Reese Witherspoon in 2020!)

16. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor. Like Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder, this is an autobiographical scenescape book. It tells the story of a young black girl growing up in rural Mississippi in the 1930s and serves as a deeply immersive vitamin for growing empathy. Characters pop, dialogue crackles, and it reads like an action movie with the constant acceleration to the finish. I finished it in the middle of the night and then let out a huge deep breath. (Sidenote: This is one of The Hate U Give author Angie Thomas’s three most formative books.)

15. Savage Season by Joe R. Lansdale. This book felt like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Two loudmouth, straight-talking friends down in the Texas countryside get sucked into a bumbling plot to find some lost money and everything goes horribly wrong. Fast-paced action, snappy dialogue, and a constantly swerving plot. You’ll feel dizzy and satisfied at the end. And like a Quentin Tarantino movie, it’s definitely Rated R. A great book to escape into another world.

14. Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation by Kyo Maclear. A fragile, unique, small memoir of discovering urban bird watching while wrestling with middle age. On its surface, this book seems … strange. A memoir of urban bird watching? But there’s more here. Portlandia co-creator Carrie Brownstein says “We’re living on a million tiny stages. Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Facebook, YouTube. Dinner plates are showcases for our food, beds become venues for our slumber, selfies are curtain calls for our faces.” And as Kyo writes in this book “our economic growth model that assumes if you make something small (unless it is boutique and artisanal, and thus financially large or monumentally miniature), it is because you are somehow lacking and frail.” That is simply not true. We need to reject that idea as our world amplifies into 10x-ing everything, moonshots, and scale. This is a quiet, meditative book about life’s tiny beautiful things. A grounding perspective reset when the world feels too big.

13. P Is For Pteradactyl: The Worst Alphabet Book Ever by Lushlife aka Raj Haldar. A is for Aisle. E is for Ewe. T is for Tsunami. And below each beautifully illustrated drawing is a tricky, head-scratching sentence. Like for the letter T it says: “The charging tsunami washed away all of Tchaikovsky’s tchotchkes.” The world is never what it seems. This book pulls up that curtain nicely for children.

12. Totto-chan: The Little Girl at the Window by Tetsuko Kuroyanagi. This is a non-fiction book that feels like a fairy-tale. Originally published in 1981 in Japan (where it sold nearly 5 million copies in its first year) it was finally translated to English thirty years later. Kuroyanagi was one of Japan’s most popular TV personalities for decades and this is a memoir of her childhood of joining a completely unconventional school near Tokyo during World War II. If you believe that trust and control are inversely related (like I do) you will love this book. You can read it as an innocent story of an unconventional childhood or a prickly indictment of the entire factory-style education system.

11. The Person and the Situation: Perspectives of Social Psychology by Lee Ross and Richard E. Nisbett. Years ago I was watching an NFL playoff game when they flashed a graphic onscreen that stuck with me. They showed two quarterbacks, drafted the same year, with the same type of college cred. One of them had one head coach on one team over his entire career and had been a huge success and won a handful of Superbowls. The other had the pleasure of playing under something like a dozen coaches across half a dozen teams. And guess what? Pretty much zero success. And we all hail the first guy as a hero! Best quarterback of all time! But is he? Is it really the person that we can objectively see here? Or is it the situation? What if I told you that when you perceive the actions and intentions of others you are pretty much mostly wrong? You do what we all do! You overvalue the person. And you undervalue the situation. This is a Big Idea book that will reorder how you look at the world. It will lay out the fallacies, assumptions, and leaps of logic you are constantly making. And it will do so in a kind, warm-hearted, empathetic, grizzled old professor type of way. It feels like you are sitting in a great college class. (Sidenote: This is one of Malcolm Gladwell’s three most formative books. Our 3 Books chat is right here.)

10. Meanwhile: Pick Any Path by Jason Shiga. Did you like Choose Your Own Adventure books when you were a kid? If so, you’ll love this post-modern graphic novel with 3856 story possibilities (seriously!) all told through images and rampant flipping between pages. It’s head-twisting, it’s frenetic, it’s mad-scientist, but if you’re into puzzles or games (or your child is) then this is for you.

9. Comedy Sex God by Pete Holmes. I try to read across as many genres as I can but one genre that’s been largely missing is the Celebrity Memoir. It’s not that I don’t like celebrities. It’s not that I don’t like memoirs. It’s just that I don’t like the celebrity memoir. Why? I guess I’m cynical about them. The book often feels part of a larger marketing plan cooked up in a Hollywood boardroom. Somebody’s having a moment! And so there’s movie billboards, an 8-episode podcast, a Vanity Fair feature, and, yes, a crappy book. Why do I go on this rant? Because Pete Holmes (Crashing, Dirty Clean, You Made It Weird) is a celebrity. And this is a memoir. But it’s not a celebrity memoir. It’s an incredibly well-written and hilarious coming-of-age story from a comedian at the top of his game. This book comes at you fast with a lot of uncomfortable moments and Pete’s unflinching honesty. The book talks about (yes) comedy, sex, and God because everything Pete does is underpinned by this gigantic gnawing “What is this?” feeling that we should really have about the whole universe. What is the universe? Why is it expanding? Expanding into what? Why are we here? How did we get here? What happens next? These are huge questions most of us put out of our mind to get through the day but Pete keeps touching and tapping up against them in this beautiful book.

8. Less by Andrew Sean Greer. When writer Arthur Less gets an invitation to his ex-boyfriend’s wedding he decides to accept a slew of half-baked authorly invitations around the world rather than shamefacedly attend as the awkward dateless former lover. What follows is an incredibly hilarious and woven tale through distant countries. First off, it feels like you are visiting everywhere he goes. How does he pull this off so well? You’re in Morocco, you’re in India, you’re in Japan. You’re traveling. You’re right there. You feel it. Second, it’s hilarious and laugh-out-loud maybe sorta like Barney’s Version or A Fraction of the Whole or Catch-22. And, finally, the finishing move: the entire book is written by an eloquent first-person-floating-over-the-scene narrator whose identity isn’t revealed until the final pages.

7. The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell with Bill Moyers. In the mid-80s, near the end of his life, famed professor and mythologist Joseph Campbell (Hero With A Thousand Faces) sat down at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch to record a six-hour PBS special exploring his ideas on religion, spirituality, symbolism, our connection to the planet, our connection to our past, and our existence in the universe in one super long conversation with journalist Bill Moyers. This book is a transcript of that conversation. Hugely mind-expanding with ideas about how we make sense of our world and what’s really below the surface of everything we see.

6. The Night Riders by Matt Furie. This children’s book has zero words in it … and is probably the book I read most often to my kids all year. What’s it about? Well, uh, okay, there are these two friends, a frog and a mouse, and they wake up in the middle of the night, eat some bug cereal for breakfast, and then walk out of their mushroom house, click open their garage door opener, and then hop on their bikes to go on a wild, fantastical, totally absurd late-night adventure featuring scary-not-scary dragons, a secret underground computer lab, and some dolphin surfing… all before finding a cliff to watch a beautiful sunrise at the end of their all-nighter. A wild night out without going out. Completely provokes the imagination because there are no words so your kids make up all the dialogue and plot details.

5. Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein. I think one of the ugliest things in the world today is the polished resume. Polished LinkedIn profiles! Polished everything! Too much polish. I like blemishes. Blemishes are interesting. Weird jobs, strange hobbies, gap years. Have you read Jordan Peterson’s bio? Regardless of what you think of the dude, talk about an interesting resume. When I interviewed candidates at Walmart I was most interested in those gaps and rough edges and the stuff painted outside the lines. Because that’s where the person had come from, how they grew, how they developed. Crucible moments where their character was forged. I think the increasing specialization of our world, at younger and younger ages, results in far too much fragility. Cognitive entrenchment! Being really great at one thing often means you’re pretty bad at lots of things. The jack of all trades is the next king of the world. A powerful book for those feeling wobbly in their career, wondering what’s next, or for anyone thinking all the tiny things they’ve done don’t amount to much. Actually, they amount to a lot. This book shows you why.

4. Howard Stern Comes Again by Howard Stern. Howard Stern has essentially taken his forty years of hosting a daily morning show, chiseled away 99.99% of his interviews, and shaped the remaining few dozen into this exquisitely beautiful carving. Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Poehler, Ellen DeGeneres, Jon Stewart, Chris Rock, and so many others let their guard down, ditch the talking points, and let the conversation bloom into vulnerable, revealing, and hugely insightful discussions offering an endless platter of illuminating insights on motivation, artistry, habits, and relationships. And if you’re interested in learning how to be a better interviewer then you’ll gain a ton here, too. Howard sounds like a guy hanging on the barstool beside you but in this book he reveals his deep preparation method and you get to watch it in action.

3. Don’t Touch my Hair by Sharee Miller. How do you teach children about boundaries? Read them this book. A wonderful story about a girl named Aria who has big, bouncy, curly hair that everybody wants to touch. After she has a big scream one day (“Don’t touch my hair!”) she learns that people need to ask permission to touch her hair and that she can feel confident saying yes or saying no. Pairs well with C is for Consent by Eleanor Morrison, which I also loved.

2. Ernest Hemingway on Writing by Larry W. Phillips. I currently have this book in the gold medal spot on the writing book podium ahead On Writing by Stephen King (silver) or Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott (bronze). Ernest Hemingway thought it was bad luck to talk about writing. So he didn’t! Or he thought he didn’t. But twenty-five years after he died journalist Larry W. Phillips combed through Hemingway’s personal letters to friends, editors, fellow writers, and critics, as well as interviews he conducted over his career, and pulled out the many wise and remarkable thoughts Hemingway shared on writing over his life. He then sort of shaped and sculpted them together by theme (“Working Habits”, “The Writer’s Life”, “Characters”, etc.) to produce this slender 140-page volume of endless nuggets. I circled so many quotes and made so many notes in the margins that I just ended up leaving it on my bedside table when I was done in the hopes that it will slowly merge into my subconscious. A gem for anyone that writes and wants to write better.

1. Chasing The Scream: The First And Last Day of the War on Drugs by Johann Hari. I didn't put an official ranking beside my top books this year but if I was forced to then this would probably take top spot. An incredible book just stuffed to the brim with big ideas and big characters. Do you think drugs should be illegal? Which ones? Why? What happens when they’re not? What happened when they weren’t? Who made them illegal? Why? And what happened when they did? It turns out that precisely zero of the answers to these questions are obvious. This is a massively illuminating and mind expanding exploration of our relationship with drugs. Everyone should read it. It is at once a detailed history of the drug war, a buddy-beside-you-on-a-bus account of one man’s obsessive across-the-world dive into the abyss of the war on drugs, and a series of hopeful stories full of compassion and love that will honestly surprise you as you’re crying.

3 Ways To Increase Your Failure Rate To Help Spike Your Learning Rate

Fail more!

Fail fast!

Fail better!

These phrases are spouted endlessly these days but there’s one giant thing missing from the conversation: How. After all, we grew up thinking that less failure equals more success, right? And now here’s the world suddenly telling us to fail more.

In my research on resilience for my new #1 international bestseller You Are Awesome: How to Navigate Change, Wrestle With Failure, and Live an Intentional Life I came across three specific tactics to thoughtfully achieve the “fail fast!” mantra.

Today I’m going to lay out these three ways to help accelerate your failure rate and therefore quicken your ability to suss out when you’re on the right path, when you should turn the other way, and when you should double down.

1. Go to parties (where you don’t know anyone)

Success blocks future success.

Say you get good at one thing and your brain, like my brain, wants to keep chasing that bunny. You struck oil? Pay dirt! You’re onto something good. The problem is that when you start making it and raking it, you’re also missing out on all the other options, all the other efforts, all the other potential flops that might have led you to even greater success, however you define it.

Say you get into real estate in your twenties, you sell a few condos, you feel like you’re really onto something. Great! But that also means you’re going to play the real estate game and maybe never fully realize that had you not quit ballet in your twenties, you might be on Broadway right now.

Success blocks future success.

The issue here is that when you’re good at one thing, the world conspires to keep you there. To make you stay in your lane. To make you stick to your specialty. That’s nobody’s fault. To move through this volatile, chaotic, and ambiguous and complicated world, we all need mental labels to filter and sort all the people in our lives. “You’re my real estate agent friend!”, your friends think. So when you chat with them at birthday parties, it’s about the market and interest rates and when they should sell. All those endless conversations serve to deepen your knowledge in that one area, make you more successful in this one area, and then crystallize your identity even further, making it harder and harder and harder to mentally break out, explore new ground, and try new things. Some researchers call this 'cognitive entrenchment.'

What’s the solution?

Go to parties.

Where you don’t know anyone.

Accept an invite to an event far away, hit a reading by an author you’ve never heard of, grab a ticket to a concert in a genre you never listen to, grab a cocktail at the hotel bar after your flight, attend the online meetup for an old passion you forgot you had—and, of course, go to parties.

Will it be awkward? Uncomfortable? Sometimes. Sometimes, sure. You might not meet anyone. You could have three superficial chats and connect with precisely nobody. You may leave feeling as though you just wasted your time. That’s the risk. That’s the downside. That’s the potential for failure.

But what’s the potential gain?

The potential gain is that you’ll meet interesting people in interesting places.

The potential gain is that you’ll drift into other lanes, go down new thinking paths, and you’ll slowly unfurl yourself from whatever mental sleeping bags you’re rolled up in.

And maybe your experience will provoke and prompt new ideas, new efforts, new risks, and new ventures that you’ll fail at and learn from.

2. Have a failure budget

Set aside money for failure? Am I joking?

No, I’m not! Set aside money for failure. Maybe it sounds odd. But come up with a figure that you can use just to try random stuff. Assume it will fail! But try it anyway. Maybe $20 at an oyster bar, $200 for a boxing class, or $1,000 to go to a distant music festival.

If it works for you to use an absolute number, great. That’s perfect. But if you’re not exactly a budgeter, I also have a mental model I use in my life that can be a simple way to think about this.

It involves deciding what figure game you’re in.

Call it the Number of Figures Game.

Let me explain.

When I was a kid and I started my first few websites, I was in the two-figure game. Ten dollars to buy a URL? Well, that expense was approved. But nothing else was! I knew I was in the two-figure game because I had no money.

What was my failure budget? Anything that cost two figures.

When I started 1000 Awesome Things, I moved to the three-figure game. I was a grown-up now. I had a job. I figured that if I wanted to try something, try anything, and it cost three figures or less—I would do it.

These days my podcast 3 Books is an example of me spending my failure budget. I really wanted to make a podcast that was ad free, sponsor free, commercial free, and just a piece of beautiful art. To me, anyway. So I spend around $5,000 a year making it. Flying to interview guests, production costs, recording equipment. It’s a four-figure “failure budget expense” that I love spending every year. Why? Because it’s vastly improved my learning rate, too.

Can you keep moving up? Sure. How high can you go? Well, if you’re a hip-hop star or tech billionaire, maybe you’re in the seven-figure game. The number depends on you. Your comfort level. Your risk tolerance.

My goal isn’t to tell you how many figures you should plan to spend on failures. It’s to give you a mental model you can apply in your life to accelerate your lose rate and therefore accelerate your win rate.

3. Count your losses

We always hear people say, “Count your blessings.”

But you know what we never count?

Our failures. Our losses. The times we hit the ground.

When we look at our flops, we’re really giving ourselves credit for all the learning and stamina and resilience baked into those moments when we made ourselves a little stronger.

One exercise we do in my family now is going around the dinner table playing a game called Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud. Roses are gratitudes or highlights, thorns are flops or failures, and buds are things we’re looking forward to. Even though the research on gratitude points to writing down five things you’re grateful for as a path to a healthier mind and body, what we find is that including the ‘thorn’ in the practice actually helps us even more.

Why?

Because it helps us slowly work against the natural muscle of “less failure equals more success” and train our brains to find the lessons and learnings that come from defeat or setbacks.

Counting up our losses and taking pride in our failures is really hard.

Really, really hard. We are taught to hide failure, feel ashamed of it. And here we are talking about wearing them as badges of honor.

What are some other ways to do it?

If you keep a journal, try writing down your successes and your flops. Be honest, and count your failures as they happen. Be kind to yourself by giving yourself credit for each one.

In a corporate setting, it means leaving the gaps on your resume or your LinkedIn profile. Even accentuating them by sharing your travels while you were between jobs or the six months you took off to be with your daughter after her second miscarriage. These failures, through the lens of a wise recruiter, actually strengthen who you are.

This is really hard for most people to do.

Because people can’t tiptoe around all their past failed relationships when they get into a new one. I’m not saying they should lay them out on the first date like a display case of painted ceramics. We don’t want to confuse counting failures with plain poor judgment! What I’m saying is that once you’ve built trust in a relationship, then lay them out. Be honest and share what you learned from each one.

This is really hard for people.

Because it means leaders can't pretend their resumes are an air-tight vacuum of perfection. "Here's the cherry-picked list of places I worked at with the cherry-picked results I delivered!" Bullllllllllshit. Nobody buys that. We know you're human. Do you know you're human? If you don't, then that's a bigger issue.

We don't trust people who haven't failed, and we really don't trust people who don't even know they haven't failed or like to pretend they haven't failed.

So, yes, indeed!

Fail more!

Fail faster!

Fail better!

Avoid cognitive entrenchment by increasing your failure rate to dramatically accelerate your learning rate.

Good luck!

I expand on these ideas above in my new book on resilience You Are Awesome: How To Navigate Change, Wrestle With Failure, and Live an Intentional Life

10 Small Habits To Get More Done Each Day

Do you feel like it’s getting harder to get stuff done?

It’s not just you. The distraction machine is cranked to 10. Endless apps and feeds and algorithms fight for our attention. They’re good at getting it, too! No wonder Reed Hastings, founder of Netflix, says their greatest competitor of all is sleep.

I find myself revisiting simple practices to help make sure I actually get anything done.

Here are ten daily habits I use to get more done each day:

1. Wake up and look at your ikigai

An ​ikigai​ is the ‘reason you get out of bed in the morning.’

Leslie and I take simple blank index cards, fold them in half, and set them up like tent cards on our bedside table.

I think of the ikigai I write on the card as “my morning message to myself” and find it helps provide a quick north star to my day.

I change what I write on the cards. Sometimes I’ll get lofty and purposeful (“Helping people live happy lives”), sometimes I’ll get focused (“Finish writing the next book”), and sometimes I’ll just use the card as a way to neutralize anxiety (“To remember I have enough.”)

I write more about ikigais in ​The Happiness Equation​ and, if you want to go deeper, I recommend ​Héctor Garcia’s book Ikigai​.

2. Two-Minute Mornings

You spent half a second staring at your ikigai card. Now what?

The next thing I do is grab my ​Two-Minute Mornings journal​ (or just any other index card is fine) and write my response to three prompts:

I will let go of…

I am grateful for…

I will focus on…

Research titled ​“Don’t look back in anger!”​ by Brassen, Gamer, Peters, Gluth, and Bluch in Science shows that minimizing regrets as we age creates greater contentment and happiness. I think there’s a big reason why ​confession​ and ​repentance​ show up across major world religions. Writing down and letting go of something feels like wiping a wet shammy across the blackboard of our minds. (I will let go of…)

​Research by Emmons and McCullough​ shows if you write down five gratitudes a week you’re measurably happier over a ten week period. The more specific the better! Don’t write “my dog” ten days in a row. Try “When the rescue puppy we got three months ago finally stopped peeing on my husband’s pillow,” etc. (I am grateful for…)

As Roy Baumeister and John Tierney say in ​Willpower​, “Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rust-proof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy.” We all have too many decisions to make! So the last prompt helps carve a “will do” from our endless “could do” and “should do” lists. (I will focus on…)

​Two-minute mornings​ helps prime your brain for positivity.

3. Lift something heavy

Every day I lift heavy weights I seem to buy myself the rest of the day without feeling stress. It’s like a magic pill. I don’t like lifting weights! But it’s worth it for that stress-free feeling for the next 24 hours.

What do I have at home? Not much! I have a yoga mat, a big inflatable yoga ball, a set of bands, and a set of adjustable dumbbells. That's it! I should probably get a bench since I'm doing most things on the floor. But whatever! With very few things I can follow a ​Push/Pull/Legs​ or ​5x5​ workout or I can type into an AI string a few data points like i) current status (i.e., "I weigh this much and have this body fat"), ii) goals (i.e., "I want to weigh this much and have this body fat"), iii) what my caloric and protein input is (I use ​MyFitnessPal​'s free version to check), iv) what equipment I have available, and v) how many workouts I want to do this week and ... voila.

I personally set my goal for four workouts a week and then if I “fail” and only get three in I still feel good. What about no workout days? I throw my kids in the air for a few minutes. I’m winded after! And we both feel great.

4. Walk 5km a day

Guess what average human walking speed is?

5km/hour.

So just moving one phone meeting to a “walk and talk” helps get that 5km of walking in. I personally find that I’m actually more focused on the phone call when I’m walking because I’m not surrounded by the endless distractions of screens. Plus, it’s good for your health, good for community connection (you actually ​talk to your neighbors​!), and walking tends to stoke your creativity, too. And, side benefit, it brings out your ​inner birder​.

For more on walking I recommend ​“Walking” by Henry David Thoreau​ (free out of copyright full version) or ​“Why I Do All This Walking” by Nassim Taleb​ (Scribd link, with full essay in ​The Black Swan​.)

5. Schedule one UNTOUCHABLE day a week

Okay, this isn’t a daily habit but a weekly one. I’m sneaking it in anyway because it’s so powerful.

A ​New Yorker feature by Alexandra Schwartz​ calls our focus on productivity and hustle “improving ourselves to death.” She writes, “It’s no longer enough to imagine our way to a better state of body or mind. We must now chart our progress, count our steps, log our sleep rhythms, tweak our diets, record our negative thoughts — then analyze the data, recalibrate, and repeat.”

What’s one solution? Untouchable Days. These are days where I am literally unreachable, by anyone, in any way — all day. My productivity is about 10 times higher on these days.

I know on the surface this idea sounds completely impractical and I mostly get scoffing and head shakes when I start talking about it. But, I also get more emails from people successfully using this concept across a vast array of ages and careers. If it sounds too hard, there’s nothing wrong with starting with an Untouchable Lunch. Leave your phone at your desk and get outside for an hour where nobody can reach you.

I go deeper on this concept in ​this viral HBR article​ and in ​my book on resilience​.

6. Read 20 (​or even 2​!) pages of fiction a day

The ​Annual Review of Psychology​ published a report that says books are medicine.

Books create empathy, intimacy, compassion, and understanding. Why? Our brain’s mirror neurons fire when we read about experiences we haven’t lived — when we’re another gender, in another country, in another time … our minds think we’re there.

It’s like that Game of Thones quote: “A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies … the man who never reads lives only one.”

Now, the troubling stat is that the ​American Time Use Survey says that 57% of Americans read zero books last year​. Zero! Meanwhile we’re spending over 5 hours a day on our phone.

But ​Science magazine published a formative study in 2013​ which showed that reading literary fiction improved test results measuring social perception and empathy. So if we can channel a few minutes of phone time each day to reading fiction, we’ll have a natural way to zoom out of our problems and feel more connected to the wider world.

7. “Wear one suit.”

It’s a principle.

I wear a blue suit jacket, white dress shirt, dark blue jeans, Nike running shoes, and my yellow watch … to every single speech and media interview I do. So I never think about what to wear for any of them. I just buy multiples of the same running shoes, shirts, socks, etc.

Same thing with my breakfast. “Drink one shake.” I’ve been drinking the same shake for fifteen years. Water, turmeric, cinnamon, half a frozen banana, powdered greens, frozen greens, protein, nut butter, nut milk, yogurt, avocado. Sure, maybe I change the protein flavor once in a while, but the point is that I can make it on auto-pilot.

What can you systemize to free up more brain space for everything else?

8. Write a “3 things” cue card

Every night before I go up to bed I write an index card with tomorrow’s day up top — THURSDAY — and a (maximum) 3-item checklist below. Beside each item I draw a square box to be checked off.

Why? Well, a laundry list of 20 things feels overwhelming and oppressive. (That can go on a weekly or monthly checklist.) But the nighttime forced prioritization helps me go to bed knowing I have my track set for the next day. And by making it only 3 I’ve done some of the hard work of simply choosing what not to do.

Also, one principle within the last? “Write first.” What I mean is that writing takes more of my energy than anything else I do so if the day includes writing I’ll put that first. (You may have heard a similar principle for going to the gym: “Squat first.” Just start with the hardest thing.)

9. Lock the phone up around sunset

University of Bologna professors published a report in ​Sloan Management Review​ which showed that ​anxiety spikes​ when students don’t have their cellphones for even a single day.

Everyone talks about intermittent fasting … with food. We should be talking about intermittent fasting … with phones.

When ​I interviewed Johann Hari​ (author of ​Stolen Focus​) he told me he drops his phone in a ​K-Safe​ every night. That’s a big square plastic box with a timer on the outside. Set the timer to 3 hours? It doesn’t open for 3 hours.

Now: Why do I say “around sunset”? Well, because I’m trying (trying!) to get my body more in line with natural light. When the sun dips down I want my brain to dip down, too. Dimmer lights. Candles at dinner. Less screens. More books.

Easing my body and mind into a darker, deeper sleep.

Also, if you don’t have a K-Safe or timed lockbox you can try my strategy of asking your partner to “Please hide my phone until tomorrow and don’t tell me where it is even if I ask.”

10. Have a “wind down” routine

One more study: ​Research from Australia​ shows that exposing our brains to bright screens before bed reduces melatonin production — the sleep hormone.

So screens mess up our sleep. Great! Now what do we do? Well, we’ve already talked about reading. But what I mean here is you need a nighttime ritual. Maybe it’s playing ​Rose Rose Thorn Bud​ with your boyfriend. Maybe it’s flossing and brushing your teeth with your wife. Maybe it’s reading books to your kids. Maybe it’s tidying up your dresser and setting out your clothes for the next morning. Maybe it’s having a warm shower and shaving.

We need to plug our phones in the basement. (I recommend the furnace room — darker and cobwebbier, the better!) And have a nighttime ritual that allows us the mental space to widen, reflect, and process the day in a slow and peaceful way.

Okay!

That’s it!

A long list, sure. And a lofty one! But, as always, as with anything I’m suggesting or trying myself, the goal is never to be perfect—it’s just to be a little better than before.

Figure out your dream job by asking yourself this question

In the late 1990s I began an undergrad business degree program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. After nearly flunking Economics 101 and striking out with a majority of sports and teams, I finally found my home among a group of interfaculty misfits at the Golden Words comedy newspaper.

Golden Words was the largest weekly humor newspaper in the country, an Onion-esque paper publishing 25 issues per year, with a new issue every Wednesday during the school year. For the next four years, I spent every Sunday hanging out with a group of people writing articles that made us all laugh. We got together around noon and wrote until the wee hours of Monday morning. I didn’t get paid a cent, but the thrill of creating, laughing, and seeing my work published gave me a great high.

I loved it so much that I took a job working at a New York City comedy writing startup during my last summer of college. I rented an apartment on the Lower East Side and started working in a Brooklyn loft with writers from The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live. “Wow,” I remember thinking, “I can’t believe I’m getting paid to do what I love.”

But it was the worst job of my life.

Why your dream job could be the worst job you ever have

Instead of having creative freedom to write whatever I wanted, I had to write, say, “800 words about getting dumped” for a client like Cosmopolitan. Instead of joking with friends naturally and finding chemistry writing with certain people, I was scheduled to write with others. Eventually my interest in comedy writing faded, and I decided I would never do it for money again.

When I started writing my blog 1000 Awesome Things in 2008, I said I’d never put ads on the website. I knew the ads would feel like work to me, and I worried that I might self-censor or try to appeal to advertisers. No income from the blog meant less time trying to manage the ads and more time focused on the writing, I figured.

I was smart about that… but not smart enough to ignore the other extrinsic motivators that kept showing up: stat counters, website awards, bestseller lists. It was all so visible, so measurable, and so tempting. Over time I found myself obsessing about stat counters breaking 1 million then 10 million then 50 million, about the book based on my blog staying on bestseller lists for 10 weeks then 100 weeks then 200 weeks, about book sales breaking five figures then six figures then seven figures. The extrinsic motivators never ended, and I was slow to realize that I was burning myself out. I was eating poorly, sleeping rarely, and obsessing about whatever next number there was to obsess about.

I started worrying that the cycle — set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal, set goal, achieve goal — would never end. And I started forgetting why I started writing my blog in the first place. I was shaken by how quickly I had gotten caught up in the achievement trap.

Studies show that when we begin to value the rewards we get for doing a task, we lose our inherent interest in doing the task. The interest we have becomes lost in our minds, hidden away from our own brains, as the shiny external reward sits front and center and becomes the new object of our desire.

Keep in mind that there are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic. Intrinsic is internal — you’re doing it because you want to. Extrinsic is external — you’re doing it because you get something for it. Teresa Amabile, a professor at Harvard Business School, has performed some experiments on intrinsic and extrinsic motivators with college students. She asked the students to make “silly collages” and invent stories for them. Some were told they were getting rewards for their work, and some were not. What happened? Based on scores from independent judges, the least creative projects by far were done by students who were promised rewards for their work. Amabile said, “It may be that commissioned work will, in general, be less creative than work that is done out of pure interest.”

And it’s not just getting rewards that hurts quality. In another study conducted by Amabile, 72 creative writers at Brandeis University and Boston University were split into three groups of 24 and asked to write poetry. The first group was given extrinsic reasons for doing so — impressing teachers, making money, getting into fancy grad schools. The second group was given a list of intrinsic reasons — enjoying the feeling of expressing themselves, the fun of playing with words. The third group wasn’t given any reason. On the sidelines, Amabile put together a group of a dozen poet-judges, mixed up all the poems, and had the judges evaluate the work. Far and away, the lowest-quality poems were from those who had the list of extrinsic motivators.

James Garbarino, former president of the Erikson Institute for Advanced Study in Child Development, was curious about this phenomenon. He conducted a study of fifth- and sixth-grade girls hired to tutor younger children. Some of the tutors were offered free movie tickets for doing a good job. What happened? The girls who were offered free movie tickets took longer to communicate ideas, got frustrated more easily, and did a worse job than the girls who were given nothing except the feeling of helping someone else.

The Garbarino study raises the question: Do extrinsic motivators affect us differently depending on age? Do we grow into this pattern — and can we grow out of it? According to a recent study by Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello, we may be hardwired to behave this way. Their work found that if infants as young as 20 months are extrinsically rewarded after helping another infant, they are less likely to help again than infants who received either no reward or simple social praise.

The secret to avoiding burnout

I was surprised by the studies, but they made sense to me. I loved writing for Golden Words. It was a joy, a thrill, a true love. With the paid writing startup in New York City, I lost all my energy and drive.

When you’re doing something for your own reasons, you do more, go further, and perform better. When you don’t feel like you’re competing with others, you compete only with yourself. For example, Professor Edward Deci of the University of Rochester conducted a study where he asked students to solve a puzzle. Some were told they were competing with other students and some were not. You can probably guess what happened. The students who were told they were competing with others simply stopped working once the other kids finished their puzzles, believing themselves to be out of the race. They ran out of reasons to do the puzzle. But those who weren’t told they were competing with others kept going once their peers finished.

Does all this mean you should just rip up your paycheck and work only on things you’re intrinsically motivated to do? No. But you should ask yourself, “Would I do this for free?” If your answer is yes, you’ve found something worth working on. If the answer is no, let paid work remain paid work and keep asking yourself what you would do simply for the pleasure you derive from doing it. Chances are, if you’re working solely for extrinsic reasons such as money, you’re bound to burn out sooner or later.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Harvard Business Review

The Most Surprising Advice On Success I Received From A Harvard Dean

Ever suck at what you’re doing?

Of course you do. We all do! We sign up for things we don’t start. We start things we don’t finish. We end up somewhere and look around with no idea how we got there.

Maybe you moved to a neighborhood where everybody is way richer than you and has a fancier car. You took a job at a company where everybody speaks in codes you don’t understand.

You got married and had a child with someone you’re not sure you like. We make mistakes. Part of living is putting ourselves in new situations but sometimes these situations are wildly uncomfortable or end badly. Sometimes you just want to press the eject button and blast off to Mars.

That’s how I felt for much of my time at Harvard. I respected the school, I was wowed by the professors, I loved my classmates, but I just didn’t relate to the careers I saw grads heading toward.

Why would I want to sit in a windowless boardroom helping a rich company get richer by telling them how to fire ten thousand people? Why would I want to help two companies merge just to satisfy some billionaire CEO’s ego? Why would I want to slave away on a marketing team desperate to sell the world more air fresheners?

These jobs made no sense!

But then again... they paid so much money. If the world is built on gears and cranks, a lot of these jobs were spinning them.

I felt I wanted the lifestyle the school was leading me toward but at the same time it didn’t make sense to me.

This is the context when I heard a story from Dean John McArthur that resonated deeply and which I think about every time I’m trying to get stronger.

Let me share it now.

The life-changing story from the dean

When I got into Harvard Business School they asked to see my tax returns from the past three years to assess me for financial aid. So I gathered all the paperwork. And my income added up to less than $50,000... total... for three years.

Why?

Well, I’d scored a doughnut three years earlier because I was still a college student. And I’d scored another doughnut when I was running my restaurant and couldn’t afford to take a salary.

And between those two goose eggs was my Procter & Gamble salary of $51,000 plus bonus. Or at least part of it, since I hadn’t made it through a full year there.

I was embarrassed sending in the numbers to Harvard but delighted a couple months later when I got a letter in the mail saying “Congratulations! You are so poor we are going to pay for you to come here!”

Finding out I suddenly didn’t need $70,000 of student loans felt like I’d just won the Powerball. But I’d received a lot of phone calls offering me free Caribbean cruises over the years so I read the letter again to make sure it was legit.

Turns out it was legit.

Turns out me and many other Canadian students were recipients of the John H. McArthur Canadian Fellowship.

John McArthur was the dean of Harvard Business School from 1980 to 1995 and, a Canadian himself, he established a fellowship to pay tuition for any Canadian who got into the school and wasn’t sitting on wads of cash.

I felt an incredible swell of love for this random old man who I had never met, so when I got to Harvard I spent an entire night writing a five page thank-you letter sharing my life story, my failures, everything that had led me to this point, and everything I wanted to do afterward.

Before I could second guess whether he wanted a super-long letter from a total stranger, I sealed it with a kiss and dropped it in a mailbox in Harvard Square.

A few weeks later I got a phone call from John McArthur’s office inviting me to lunch with the sugar daddy himself!

I must have sounded nervous on the phone because the assistant had to calm me down. “Don’t worry,” she said. “He’d just like to meet you.” Then she whispered, “We don’t get many five-page thank-you letters.”

So between classes a couple weeks later, I found John McArthur’s office behind tall oak trees in a vine-covered building in a corner of campus.

I was escorted in. He swiveled around on his desk chair, smiled, got up, and shook my hand.

“Neil, have a seat,” he said, and gestured toward the circular table in the middle of the room, where two boxed sandwiches were sitting.

“Hope you like tuna.”

He patiently waited for me to choose from the many chairs to sit on and then picked the chair right beside me. He was wearing a casual button-up cardigan and thick glasses that wobbled on his nose. And he smiled so warmly, like an old friend—humble, gracious, down to earth.

I found this especially amazing as there seemed to be an incredibly famous painting on the wall behind him. Was that a Picasso?

He caught me looking at it. “Oh, that,” he said. “Some foreign leader gave it to us as a present. We couldn’t put it up in the dean’s residence on account of the, uh...”

I stared at the picture as his voice trailed off and noticed it looked like a painting of a bull sporting a gigantic blue boner.

I laughed and we started chatting.

“So, how’s school going so far?” he asked.

“Oh, you know, stressful. We started classes a few weeks ago, and I’m up past midnight every night reading cases and preparing for them. And the companies have already started visiting campus. Everybody wants to work at the same five places, so we’re chugging beers with millionaire consultants and bankers with black bags under their eyes hoping we can become millionaire consultants and bankers with black bags under our eyes, too.”

He raised his eyebrows and laughed.

There was a pause.

And then he told me a story that changed my life and, looking back, was worth more to me than all the tuition he was so generously covering for me.

So get off the beach

“Neil, right now you’re just an eager guy standing outside the beach,” he began. “You’re standing at the fence looking in. The beach is closed, but it’s opening soon. You can see the sand, you can smell the ocean, you can see a half-dozen beautiful people sunbathing in bathing suits. But you know who’s beside you at the fence? A thousand other eager folks just like you. They’re all eager. They’re all gripping that fence. They all want on that beach. And when the door to the fence opens, they’re all running on to the hot sand and trying to seduce the same few sunbathers. Your odds of winning any of them over are so low.”

I nodded. I had been through campus recruiting at Queen’s.

It was painful. Hundreds of hours researching companies, tailoring resumes, writing cover letters, filling out online applications, doing practice interviews, buying clothes for interviews, researching all the interviewers before I met them, writing and sending thank-you notes, and then the giant stress of waiting weeks or months for replies.

“So get off the beach,” he said.

“Let the thousand other folks run in and fight each other. Let them bite and claw and scratch each other. And sure, let a few of them win over one of those few sunbathers. But it’s much better to get off the beach. Because even if you happen to win, do you know what you would be doing the whole time on that beach? Looking over your shoulder. Seeing who else is going to stake their claim and send you packing. You probably won’t win in any case. But if you do, you win a life full of stress.”

I was in a state of permanent anxiety on campus. I was anxious about classes because I was anxious about grades and I was anxious about grades because I was anxious about jobs and I was anxious about jobs because I was anxious about money.

And here was this man offering relief.

“But if I don’t land one of those jobs,” I said, “I’ll be broke. I got your fellowship because I didn’t have any money. I was hoping to correct that problem.”

He laughed.

“You’ll be fine. It’s simple economics. There are far more problems and opportunities in the world than there are talented and hard-working people to solve them. The world needs talent and hard work to solve its problems so people with talent who are hard workers will have endless opportunities.”

His words felt like calamine lotion rubbed on the bright red burn itching at the center of my soul. What he was saying was... different.

“So,” I asked him, cautiously furthering the metaphor, “if I leave the beach, where do I go?”

“What do you think you offer?” he asked. “You’re young. You have little experience. But you’re learning. You’re passionate. You give people energy and ideas. And who needs that? Not the fancy companies flying here in private jets. It’s the broken companies. The bankrupt companies. The ones losing money. The ones struggling. They need you. The last thing they’re doing is flying teams to Harvard recruiting sessions. But if you knock on their doors and if you get inside, then they will listen to your ideas, give you big jobs with lots of learning, and they’ll take you seriously. You’ll participate in meetings instead of just taking notes. You’ll learn faster, gain experience quicker, and make changes to help a place that actually needs help.”

There was a long pause as I digested what I was actually hearing.

Think about this for a second.

Harvard Business School had an army of people dedicated to planning, executing, and guiding students through campus recruiting. It was a giant department. Career visioning workshops. Job posting boards. Information sessions. Beer nights and company dinners. First, second, third round interviews on campus. And here I was sitting in front of the Dean who was telling me to set a match to it all. Ignore it completely and call up a pile of broken and bankrupt places. I left that lunch and never applied for another job through the school again. Not a single info session, not a single job posting, not a single interview. I just went back to my apartment and made an Excel spreadsheet. I filled it with a list of all the broken, beaten down companies I could think of. Places that were doing something interesting but had fallen on hard times. A big oil spill. A plummeting stock price. A massive layoff. A failed launch. A big PR problem.

Reputation in the toilet.

I came up with about a hundred company names. I then wrote up a 30-second cold call script saying I was a student studying leadership and would love to ask a couple questions to a leader in Human Resources. I cold called all hundred companies.

I got in the door with maybe half of them and then followed up with them to say thank you, share a couple articles, and ask to meet for coffee or lunch. About a dozen took me up on the offer.

And after those dozen conversations, I wrote thank you letters and followed up asking for a summer job.

I got five offers.

And all five were from companies off the beach.

I took a job at Walmart and found I was the only person with a master’s degree... in an office of over a thousand people.

Dean McArthur’s advice paid off. I was suddenly a big fish in a small pond. All my peers from Harvard were long gone. They were crunching Excel spreadsheets in glass towers. I was sitting on ripped chairs beside piles of old cardboard boxes in a low-rise building in the burbs.

But I loved it. I had work to do. I had real problems to solve.

At Walmart I found I was one of a handful of people quoting fresh research and case studies since I’d just read and reviewed so much at school. There was a ton I didn’t know. I had no retail experience! No store operations experience! No Walmart experience! But the things I did know were different from what my colleagues knew.

And different is better than better.

I spent the summer designing, planning, and running the first internal leadership conference at the company.

It was a hit.

Then, on my last day of the summer job, the head of HR handed me a full-time job offer with a primo starting salary pasted on top.

I was way off the beach.

And it felt great.

What’s wrong with the $5 million condo?

What did I learn from Dean McArthur’s beach story?

Find the small ponds so you can be the big fish. When I was at Harvard Business School I was below average in everything. Grades, class participation, whatever you were measuring, I was in the bottom half. I was a little fish in a big pond of high achievers from around the world. I never felt great about what I was accomplishing there. I was always on the low end of the totem pole. I think about this a lot when I see ads on the inside covers of fancy magazines advertising new Manhattan condos starting at $5 million. That’s a little fish in a big pond right there! $5 million means you have the worst condo in the entire building. No view, no prestige, no nothing. Who would drop money on that kind of pain when $5 million could buy you a penthouse suite almost anywhere else?

When I started at Walmart, I was different. And different really is better than better.

My degree wasn’t immediately neutralized by being rounded by tables of people with fancy degrees. At Walmart, I was worth something. So my confidence went up. My “I can do this!” feeling rose and rose and rose.

Don’t start swimming in the biggest pond you can find. Start in the smallest. Don’t chase the hot guy or hot girl at the beach. Find the nerd at the library. Find the broken company.

Find the place nobody wants to be.

And start there.

Dean McArthur’s advice worked so well for me I started using it in other areas of my life, too.

Sometimes it was conscious.

Sometimes it wasn’t.

But it always worked.

When I began doing paid keynote speeches, my speaking agency suggested a starting fee range that seemed super high to me.

“Summarize everything you’ve learned from your research and experiences in an hour, fly wherever people want you to be, deliver it all live in front of a thousand people, and make sure you’re entertaining, educational, and empowering. It’s a hard job! You should be paid well for it.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “That seems too high. Who else is in that range?”

They listed a slew of people. New York Times bestselling authors, gold medal–winning Olympians, rock star professors. I’d heard of them all.

“Hmm,” I said. “What about half that price?”

They listed a bunch of people I’d never heard of before.

“And what about half that?” I asked.

“There is no half that,” they said. “That’s the lowest range. It doesn’t make sense for us to work for months and spend hours on conference calls and manage all logistics for commissions on speeches below a certain level.”

“Okay,” I said. “Start me at your lowest range, please.”

The agency didn’t love it but by giving speeches at a lower price I got booked for smaller conferences and events. I was in local boardrooms with fifty people instead of Vegas casinos with a thousand. My confidence went up. And it stayed up as I moved onto bigger stages.

I looked into the research underpinning the small pond line of thinking, and it turns out it’s only thirty years old. Back in 1984 a study by Herb Marsh and John W. Parker appeared in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It asked a very simple and incisive question: “Is it better to be a relatively large fish in a small pond even if you don’t learn to swim as well?”

The research in the study provided the clear answer.

Yes.

It is.

That study was the lead domino in a slew of studies around the globe that confirmed the same incredible result.

Regardless of age, socioeconomic background, nationality, or cultural upbringing, when you’re in a smaller pond, your opinion of yourself what’s called “academic self-concept”—goes up. And importantly, it stays up even after you leave the pond. This is because two opposing forces present themselves: fitting into the group you’re with and a contrasting belief of feeling “better than this group.” Our brains like that second feeling, and it sticks with us as we realize “Hey, I can do this” or “Hey, I can maybe do better than this.”

What’s another way to think about it?

Ask yourself one key question.

Would you rather be a 5 in a group of 9s, a 9 in a group of 9s, or a 9 in a group of 5s?

The most impressive results of these studies say that being a 9 in a group of 5s increases your positive academic self-concept even ten years after you leave the group.

Put yourself in a situation where you think you’re a big deal.

Guess what? You’ll think you’re a big deal for a long, long time.

And the studies saw these results across a wide range of countries in both individual and collectivist cultures around the globe.

So I say there’s no shame putting yourself in situations where you feel really good about yourself. Should you downgrade yourself? No! Definitely no. But there’s nothing wrong with entering the marathon in the slowest category. Playing in the house league instead of the rep league. Teeing off from the tee closest to the pin.

You know what you’re doing?

Setting yourself up for success.

You’ll move up because you believe in yourself.

Now, is there a danger here? Can you think you’re such a big a deal that you damage relationships or hurt others? Yes! That’s the fire we’re playing with. Do you ever wonder why so many celebrities get divorced after they first become famous? Maybe it’s because their academic self-concept skyrocketed! They think they’re a huge fish! And suddenly the small pond marriage they’re in feels way too small. So they jump into a bigger pond and date a superstar.

Why do I mention this? Because it’s about self awareness.

We have to be aware of which pond we’re swimming in and be kind as we swim. Finding small ponds isn’t an excuse to act arrogantly and feel boastful. We’re not trying to spike volleyballs into kindergarten foreheads here.

We’re using a proven science-backed way to be kind to ourselves, swim in the shallows, and help ourselves slowly, slowly, slowly get all the way up to awesome.

Find small ponds.

This article is an excerpt from my new book You Are Awesome

Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud: The simple gratitude game my wife and I play before bed

THIS JUST IN! Leslie and I made a journal based on this viral article! Check it out here!

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Guess what?

If you can be happy with simple things then it will be simple to be happy.

Back in 2003, researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked groups of students to write down five gratitudes, five hassles or five events that happened over the past week for 10 straight weeks. What happened? The students who wrote five gratitudes were happier and physically healthier than the other two test groups.

I’ve given speeches sharing this research for a while but I was always left with a nagging question. What if you simply don’t have the willpower to write down five gratitudes? I hope you do. I hope I do! But what if you don’t? I mean, when was honestly the last time you did that?

Well, today I want to share a little game my wife Leslie and I play at the end of the night just before we turn off the lights that completely solves this problem.

It’s called Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud.

Rose

What was a highlight from the day? Leslie shares something she’s grateful for. A highlight. First thing that pops to mind! “When our son ran up to see me after preschool,” “the half hour of silence I got when both kids were napping,” “I found construction paper in the basement for a craft before dinner.” Can you tell she’s a busy mom? And then after she says a rose, I say one back to her from my day. “My new book is starting to get Goodreads reviews,” “I bumped into Marcel at the coffee shop,” or “I listened to a great episode of The Knowledge Project.” “Getting to write for smart and attractive readers through my blog and email list.” You get the idea.

Rose

Then what? We do it a second time. Another rose from her, another rose from me. For those doing the math at home that’s four gratitudes generally in less than a minute here. Remember: the research shows you only need five a week. What’s next?

Thorn

What didn’t go well today? Nobody is endlessly positive. It’s important to be heard. It’s important to be listened to. “Our son was sad and crying at dropoff,” “I had a stressful phone call with a relative,” “I didn’t get as much done as I wanted.” This is a chance to show empathy and compassion while letting your partner get something off their chest. Very important!

And then we close with a ...

Bud

A bud is something you’re looking forward to … tomorrow, next week, or 20 years down the road. “Brunch with my sister on Saturday,” “when that new Chipotle finally opens” or “the moment next summer when we’re able to canoe into perfectly silent water during sunrise.” The last thought is a little dream of something to come.

What does Rose, Rose, Thorn, Bud do in practice?

Well, as long as the Thorn doesn’t become a 45-minute argument about who didn’t do the dishes, it’s a perfect two-minute exercise to grab four gratitudes right before bed. Also works great at the dinner table or during the commute! Remember: you only need five a week. So playing this game even two or three times in your week helps you focus your mind.

As Charles Dickens said: “Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many, not your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”

Check out the video version of this article:

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THIS JUST IN! Leslie and I made a journal based on this viral article! Check it out here!

7 Leadership Lessons I’ve Learned From Mel Robbins

I met Mel Robbins at the Caesars Palace pool in Vegas.

It was a few years back and we were speaking at the same conference. I flew in the day before my speech and she was staying the day after hers so we had a bit of overlap.

I managed to catch the end of her speech and watched as she turned an entire audience just electric. People were laughing like they were at a standup show, crying like it was the end of The Shawshank Redemption, and you could just feel something special was bubbling up inside everyone. She did the hardest thing to do as a speaker – completely shift the energy in the room. At the end everybody rose up into one of the longest standing ovations I’d seen. I decided to join the scrum waiting to talk to Mel afterwards and then we exchanged phone numbers and vaguely agreed to meet by the pool later. I said I was going to the gym, she said they had dinner plans with a friend and their daughters, and the pool is like a thousand people anyway, so who knew if it would really happen.

But a few minutes later a picture of an icy pina colada with a chunk of pineapple in a plastic Caesars Palace cup arrived by text message saying “This is waiting for you.”

It was the first text I ever got from Mel. I learned pretty quickly she doesn’t do anything half-assed. Since then I’ve watched as Mel has become the most-booked female speaker in the world, sold more books through Audible’s self-publishing platform than anyone, and is now about to launch The Mel Robbins Show on daytime TV this September 16th.

But more than all the accolades is the person underneath. As I’ve gotten to know Mel I’ve found her so dynamic, magnetic, and endlessly captivating. She connects with people, very quickly, on their deepest level. When she starts talking you can’t stop listening because her words feels like a little hammer pinging at the nerves in your heart. She’s like a wise old Ivy League academic but gabbing with you like your mom at the kitchen table at two in the morning.

And since I don’t go very often from sipping pina coladas by a pool with someone to watching them launch their own national TV show I thought it would be worth looking back and reflecting on seven things I’ve learned from Mel Robbins over the past few years.

Here they are:

7. Don’t say you’re authentic. Be authentic.

A few times I’ve forwarded Mel’s weekly newsletter over to my wife Leslie. The first time I did so she wrote “Wow, she wrote you such a long note!” I said “No, that’s her newsletter. It goes out to like half a million people.” She couldn’t believe it because the writeup was so personal. She was talking about “leaking” after having three kids and recommending people check out pelvic physio and, larger scale, confront the little things they’ve been putting off because they’re too worried or embarrassed to address them. She was pinching her stomach fat rolls and making a hashtag for them while encouraging everyone to love their bodies and do the same.

I wrote a list of my favorite newsletters and for Mel’s I wrote that it feels like I’m hanging out behind the scenes with an A-list celebrity who’s somehow radically self-aware, authentic, and even self-critical.

A good example is how she’s been sharing the news about her new TV show. The common trope when something huge happens is to be all humble-braggy about it. You know, “I can’t believe this is even happening!!!”, “I am so surprised and humbled by this!!!”, and hashtag blessed and all.

Mel’s approach has been so different, so authentic.

She’s been talking about having dreams when you were a kid that are almost so ambitious you don’t want to admit them to yourself or others. Becoming an astronaut! Working for Disney! Headlining a concert! And then she shares that having a TV show has been one of those dreams for her and then she openly shares how she got there.

She never spoke about her TV show with lines like “OMG I GOT STRUCK BY LIGHTNING IT’S CRAY CRAY!” That angle has never resonated with me because we all know you killed for it so why not just tell us you killed for it?

It’s the truth. It’s refreshing. It’s authentic.

6. It’s okay to cry.

Have you ever cried at work?

Or seen someone cry at work?

What does almost everyone do when that happens?

Urgently grab for tissues. Shake their head and wipe them away. Say “Ugh, I’m so sorry.” Head to the bathroom. We try to cover it up. Of course we do. We have spent decades preaching stoic virtues of keeping it all together and even shaming our more natural human tendencies in professional settings. No intimacy! No hugs! No tears!

But not Mel! I have seen her crying a dozen times and her reaction always surprises me.

What does she do?

First, she doesn’t hold back the tears. They don’t come with that usual embarrassment or silly attempt to cover them up. They just come. And then, even more surprising, she announces it!

“I’m tearing up right now” or “Oh my gosh, I am crying” or something similar. It’s incredibly humanizing and gives permission to those around her who are also feeling big emotions … to feel it, too.

I have been in so many work meetings or company conferences over the years where something profound has been said, a really touching service story has been shared, or maybe an emotional video has just played. And whenever I look around the room in these moments most people are blinking really fast or quietly dabbing the corners of their eyes. A normal reaction! We try to cover it up.

But lately when these moments have happened and I have found myself on stage or with the mic I have tried channeling Mel and simply saying “That was beautiful … I’m tearing up.” And then what happens? You can feel the giant emotion in the room just release. Everyone blossoms. People smile, let tears flow, and ditch the embarrassment.

In many ways Mel taught me how to give space for deep emotions in group settings.

In a world where “holding it together” is more typically praised, but where we all feel things all the time, this is a huge gift.

It’s okay to cry.

5. Screw the script.

Mel has sold more books off Audible’s self-publishing platform than anyone. (I just checked and she has over 50,000 reviews on there across her books.) The book that launched her on the platform was The 5-Second Rule.

But here’s the funny thing.

If you download and listen to The 5-Second Rule it doesn’t sound like an audiobook. You hear papers ruffling, you hear her messing up and swearing afterwards, you hear her going on wild tangents way off script.

When I asked her about it she said “We hired a producer off Craigslist and he had never submitted a recording to Audible before. I don’t think we paid him for post-production. We didn’t think to. He didn’t think to. So he just uploaded the whole file without taking out all the mistakes. Like he didn’t edit it at all.”

Well, turns out the “mistakes” are what’s popular. From a few of the top reviews:

• I felt like she was in the car with me. I appreciated the mistakes that were left in, rather than edited out.

• It's refreshing how Mel Robbins doesn't sugar coat anything. She says it exactly how it is, no BS. On a side note, there are parts of the recording where Mel obviously screws up and has to repeat herself and start sentences over. She could've edited that out but she didn't and I feel there is something so raw and authentic about that.

• I felt more like I was speaking with Mel as opposed to her speaking at me… fantastic, transformational wisdom…

Audiobooks sound so polished and professional. Big name actors! Perfect voices. But is that what we want? Think of the feeling you get when you pick up an expensive and fancy real estate agent brochure in your mailbox with a glossy sheen and full color pictures on cardstock … compared to the little handwritten note. Think of the big chain with a thirty-foot tall neon sign out front, uniformed teenage employees, and scripted questions… compared to the mom and pop shop on the side of the road.

Which do you prefer?

I gave a speech called “Building Trust in Distrustful Times” at SXSW this year and one of my arguments was that “In an era of bots we trust brains.”

The world we are designing for ourselves is so… perfect now. We actually crave more human experiences. With flaws. And mistakes. And no makeup. (As a side note, Mel once told me the most common note she gets on her YouTube videos is “I’m glad you don’t wear makeup in them”)

There’s a huge lesson here.

Mel has sold thousands of books on Audible. This is a book that was self-published. No publisher! No one who knew what was going on was involved! She booked a booth. She hired a producer. Entrepreneurial, sure! But then when you listen you hear her ruffling the papers, getting lost in the script and saying “Oh, fuck”, her laughing at herself when she screws up. And all these other million tiny pieces of humanity.

What’s the lesson? Have a script. Then screw the script.

4. Shout your flaws.

Mel has ADD.

No, not in the way people say it when they lose their keys or while giggling at a party after forgetting the name of the person they just met. I mean Mel has clinical ADD and takes medication for it.

She can’t remember chunks of her twenties because her severe anxiety at that age was so debilitating.

She also spent a lot of years on Zoloft.

How do I know all this?

Because she talks about it openly. And by sharing the challenges she’s faced, and is facing, she makes it easy for people to open up to her.

I think that’s part of the reason why podcasts are growing so rapidly. The big name podcast hosts sound so human. They shout their flaws! Rich Roll talking about his alcoholism, Pete Holmes talking about his sex life. What used to be TMI can now be the most vulnerable and human way to connect.

What’s another benefit of shouting your flaws? I interviewed famed restaurateur Jen Agg on my podcast 3 Books and asked her why she posted on Instagram a long and radically self-aware list of her flaws. What did she say? “In a weird way, it’s a defense strategy. Because it’s like ‘here they all are.’ Now what are you going to say about me? Or do to me? You got nothing. I already said them for you.”

Shout your flaws.

Disempower your flaws.

3. Don’t pay for accolades.

Did you know accolades are for sale?

They absolutely are.

For example, if you have $50,000 you can get an accolade which says you went to Stanford and brandish it all over your resume and LinkedIn profile … even though you really just bought a 5-day executive session they sell to anyone who can write the check. Do you want to be a New York Times bestseller? It’s for sale. According to Wikipedia, it costs about $200,000. Do you want your YouTube video to have a million views? Need your podcast to have a million downloads? It’s for sale. Absolutely for sale. As long as you don’t mind blasting people with ads and have a few hundred thousand dollars handy you can have it all!

Everyone knows money talks in our world today.

And if you want it, they’ll sell it to you.

Demand creates supply.

But here’s the thing about Mel: even though she has a crapload of videos that have gone viral with millions of views … she’s never paid for it. I can’t think of many others who can say this. She doesn’t feed Google or YouTube with endless thousands of dollars to prop up her ego and view counts.

Oh, and the New York Times bestseller tag? She doesn’t have it. Maybe she never will! But she doesn’t care. She’s too busy changing the world with her ideas to spend time and energy caring about whoever is busy counting how many books she sold in certain bookstores or whatever. She can’t be bothered.

In his 1974 Caltech Commencement speech Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman said: “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool.”

One problem with paying for accolades, of course, is you always know you paid for them. So if you embed a tiny little lie inside you that means you’re going to have to spit gloss that turd forever as you show it off to people or your cover’s completely blown.

You can do it if you want to, of course.

It’s just not a pleasant way to live.

What’s one solution?

Don’t pay for accolades.

2. Ambition is beautiful

Are you ambitious?

If so, do you admit it to yourself? Do you declare it about yourself or share it with others? Or is it one of those rougher-edged aspects of your personality that you sort of cover up or feel a bit embarrassed about … like I did for years?

One part of my story very quickly: My wife told me she didn’t love me anymore when I was 28 years old. We had been married two years. We had just bought a house. It broke my heart. I moved into a small downtown apartment. I was blogging till 3:00am every night. I had huge bags under my eyes. I had pounding headaches every day.

My worried mom suggested a therapist and helped me find one. When I met him we connected right away. I really liked the idea of spending an hour focused entirely on moving my thoughts forward. I had never done that! And one of the exercises my therapist had me do was begin to slowly articulate a series of words that I was looking for in platonic and romantic relationships. It took me the better part of a year to do it. With a lot of thought I found my four words: curious, creative, romantic, optimistic. I dated for a year but never quite clicked with anyone. And then I realized! There was a word missing. A word I had never even admitted to myself. What was it? Ambitious.

I was ambitious.

In my case, it would be a better fit if I was with someone ambitious. And today I am.

I’m not sure if growing up in the suburbs and going to a great public school with great teachers just meant that my ambition was never stoked. Nobody blew billows on it telling me I need to go to enrichment camps and write standardized tests to study internationally or whatever.

But ambition, if you got it, isn’t ugly. It’s beautiful. Finding a great partner is ambition. Raising wonderful children is ambition. Doing passionate work is ambition. Ambition helps us live our deepest and most intentional lives.

Mel Robbins may be the most ambitious person I know. There’s a reason she flew around giving 500 speeches in the past three years, is managing a team of 75 people, and is shooting a full new hour of television every single day.

She isn’t afraid of her ambition. She doesn’t hide it. She doesn’t apologize for it. She rides it, she corrals it, she wields it.

And the world benefits.

1. People want to hear what they don’t want to hear

We want to be our best.

We want to live our best lives.

But it’s hard to change. Very hard. Incredibly hard. We want to, though! It’s why Self-Help is the largest section in the bookstore and why straight-talking tough love books are at the top of the charts. It’s why /getmotivated is one of the world’s largest subreddits with over 15,000,000 members. It’s why I spend my time thinking and writing about how to improve my own life and why (I think) you spend time reading them.

We want to get better.

We want to live our best lives.

But to do that we often need to hear what we don’t want to hear. We have to be told to cut ties with the relative who’s negatively affected our family for years. We need to be pushed to quit the job with the abusive boss. We have to make a giant leap to leave the romantic relationship that’s making us feel worse about ourselves.

Why are there so few signals in this world helping us make those big decisions? Well, many reasons, but a big one is because most of our friends don’t have the courage to give us the tough love. There’s so much downside. They could hurt their relationship with us. We may reject them or get into a fight. Honesty and blunt feedback are in short supply.

Enter Mel Robbins.

She plays the role of the friend who loves you but who also will smack you over the head with what you should do. Time and time again, in the most velvet-hammery way possible, I’ve witnessed Mel give tough love to people who just need that push. Like here. Or here. Or here.

She’s done it for me, too.

When I’m sweating some random numbers (“number of followers”, “bestseller list rankings”, etc) she gives me a big verbal slap telling me I’m an artist who shouldn’t care. I should just make art. And that resonates with me … because she’s right, of course. And I move forward in my thinking.

The truth is people want to hear what they don’t want to hear.

Mel is just one of the bravest people telling us the truth.

I’m so proud of Mel.

We need her voice in the world right now.

And I can’t wait to hear it every single day.

Click “Find Your Station” on MelRobbinsShow.com to find her show in your city…

7 Ways To Reduce Cell Phone Addiction (With Step-By-Step Photos And Instructions)

I got an iPhone in 2009. It made my life better. Richer! More fulfilled. I was able to connect with friends outside of my house. I was able to read an article while waiting in line. I was able to answer questions from my restaurant chair.

Ten years later I’m a full fledged cell phone addict.

My thumbs hurt, my eyes are strained, and the hunch in my back is getting pointier. It’s gotten so bad I now ask my wife to hide my cell phone from me for evenings, days, or sometimes weeks at a time. (I did a two week stretch last summer and after a day of anxiety it was supreme bliss.)

Let me be as clear as I can.

Cell phone addiction is lowering resilience, increasing anxiety, and adding to our stress levels.

I have already written articles on 6 Ways To Reduce Cell Phone Addiction and 3 Ways To Fight Cellphone Addiction In Schools.

Today I’m going to get into brass tacks.

Here are seven tactical ways you can make your phone less addictive with the exact step-by-step photo-guided tour of doing each one. I made these for an iPhone because that’s what I have but most of these can be done on other phones as well.

7. Delete a social media app

Step 1: Gently push the button on a social media app (like Instagram) till it starts shaking in its boots

Step 2: Click the little x in the top left corner

6. Set up text replacement shortcuts

What’s one way to get off your cell phone? Spend less time texting on your cell phone. Text replacement shortcuts are tiny phrases you create which then pop into longer phrases that you use often.

Step 1: Click Settings

Step 2: Click General

Step 3: Click Keyboard

Step 4: Click Text Replacement

Step 5: Create Text Replacements. Samples include ad (insert your full mailing address), em (insert your email address), and even something specific to your job or industry such as dec (insert your standard paragraph to respectfully decline an invitation).

5. Turn your phone to black and white

According to National Eye Institute, when we turn our phones from color to black and white we make them less addictive. They look less like slot machines! And more like low-fi functional devices.

Step 1: Click Settings

Step 2: Click General

Step 3: Click Accessibility

Step 4: Click Display Accommodations

Step 5: Click Color Filters

Step 6: Turn Color Filters On and click Grayscale

PS. Too hardcore? If you like the idea of going black and white, but want to keep color handy for occasional use, then here’s a setting to help. Go Settings — Accessibility — Accessibility Shortcut — Color Filters. What’s that do? It lets you triple-click the side button on your phone to swap between settings. Pa-zam!

4. Download the Forest app

One of my favorite apps to help with cell phone addiction is Forest because it essentially closes down your phone whenever you want to create a nice block of productivity. It’s called Forest because a tiny seed growing into a sapling grows into a tree while you’re using the app. And if you start using your phone again? You kill the tree. This tiny bit of visual damage prevents you from cheating. And studies such as this one show alerts are impairing attention and even causing hyperactivity.

Step 1: Click App store

Step 2: Search for and download Forest App (it’s worth the $2.79)

Step 3: Open the Forest App

Step 4: Watch your forest grow!

3. Empty your tray

At the bottom of your cell phone screen there is a little tray of icons that stays there. For most people it’s probably their phone, email, browser, and messages. But when those icons are visible, on every screen, at all times, you’re more inclined to click them. And, of course, email and texts will wave at you with little number flags to grab your attention. So don’t let them!

Step 1: Hold down any apps you have in your tray

Step 2: Move those apps and empty your tray

[Pro-Tip: It’s also worth scrambling your phone icons around frequently to avoid automatic behaviors to open apps without thinking about them.]

2. Put your phone into “Do Not Disturb” mode

Our cell phones are designed to be push devices. They push alerts at us! Push texts at us! Push notifications at us! Push, push, push. And we’re the catcher at the backstop just taking all those hits. So flip the switch and turn your phone into a pull device. Keep your phone on Do Not Disturb (or Airplane Mode – the only difference is that you still receive alerts on Do Not Disturb, your phone just doesn't light up or make noise) and then flip off Do Not Disturb mode to momentarily handle your emails / messages.

Step 1: Swipe up on your iPhone and press that tiny “Moon” button.

1. Get a landline

Don’t laugh! I am serious. Think of a landline as a ticket away from your cellphone. Want to talk to someone far away? Landline does the job nicely. And since so few people have landlines the price has plummeted. Ours is less than $20 a month! Now we don’t feel pressure to sleep near our cell phones since family can call the landline in emergencies. (By the way, for an emergency inside your house the landline is hardwired to your address for 9-1-1 calls, speeding up emergency responses, unlike your cell phone.)

Step 1: Call your phone company
Step 2: Ask for a landline
Step 3: Tell them Neil sent you

So, that’s it! 7 tools in my attempt to beat the addiction.

What helps you?

Send me a note at neil@globalhappiness.org

You Need To Take More Vacation … And Here’s How To Do It

Mandatory vacation is the way of the future

Have you ever felt burned out after a vacation?

I’m not talking about being exhausted from fighting with your family at Disney World all week. I’m talking about how you knew, the whole time walking around Epcot, that a world of work was waiting for you upon your return.

Our vacation systems are completely broken.

They don’t work.

The classic corporate vacation system goes something like this: You get a set number of vacation days a year (often only two to three weeks), you fill out some 1996-era form to apply for time off, you get your boss’s signature, and then you file it with a team assistant or log it in some terrible database. It’s an admin headache. Then most people have to frantically cram extra work into the weeks before they leave for vacation in order to actually extract themselves from the office. By the time we finally turn on our out-of-office messages, we’re beyond stressed, and we know that we’ll have an even bigger pile of work waiting for us when we return.

What a nightmare.

For most of us, it’s hard to actually use vacation time to recharge.

So it’s no wonder that absenteeism remains a massive problem for most companies, with payrolls dotted with sick leaves, disability leaves, and stress leaves.

In the UK, the Department for Work and Pensions says that absenteeism costs the country’s economy more than £100 billion per year. A white paper published by the Workforce Institute and produced by Circadian, a workforce solutions company, calls absenteeism a bottom-line killer that costs employers $3,600 per hourly employee and $2,650 per salaried employee per year. It doesn’t help that, according to the Center for Economic and Policy Research, the United States is the only country out of 21 wealthy countries that doesn’t require employers to offer paid vacation time. (Check out this world map on Wikipedia to see where your country stacks up. We love you, Enlightened Swedes!)

Now.

Let’s solve this problem.

First question is this big one.

Would it help if we got more paid vacation?

No, not necessarily.

According to a study from the U.S. Travel Association and GfK, a market research firm, just over 40% of Americans plan not to use all their paid time off anyway. It’s not the amount we’re given then, it’s the amount we’re taking, or feel able to take.

So what’s the progressive approach?

Is it the Netflix or Twitter policies that say take as much vacation as you want, whenever you want it? Open-ended, unlimited vacation sounds great on paper, doesn’t it? Very progressive, right? No, that approach is broken too.

What happens in practice with unlimited vacation time? Warrior mentality. Peer pressure. Social signals that say you’re a slacker if you’re not in the office. Mathias Meyer, the CEO of German tech company Travis CI, wrote a blog post about his company abandoning its unlimited vacation policy:

“When people are uncertain about how many days it’s okay to take off, you’ll see curious things happen. People will hesitate to take a vacation as they don’t want to seem like that person who’s taking the most vacation days. It’s a race to the bottom instead of a race towards a well rested and happy team.”

The point is that in unlimited vacation time systems, you probably won’t actually take a few weeks to travel through South America after your wedding, because there’s too much social pressure against going away for so long. Work objectives, goals, and deadlines are demanding. You look at your peers and see that nobody is backpacking through China this summer, so you don’t go either. You don’t want to let your team down, so your dream of visiting Machu Picchu sits on the shelf forever.

What’s the solution?

Recurring, scheduled mandatory vacation.

Yes, that’s right — an entirely new approach to managing vacation. And one that preliminary research shows works much more effectively.

Designer Stefan Sagmeister said in his TED talk, “The Power of Time Off,” that every seven years he takes one year off. He said:

“In that year, we are not available for any of our clients. We are totally closed. And as you can imagine, it is a lovely and very energetic time.”

He does warn that the sabbaticals take a lot of planning, and that you get the most benefit from them after you’ve worked for a significant amount of time.

Why does he do this? He says:

“Right now we spend about the first 25 years of our lives learning, then there are another 40 years that are really reserved for working. And then tacked on at the end of it are about 15 years for retirement. And I thought it might be helpful to basically cut off five of those retirement years and intersperse them in between those working years.”

As he says, that one year is the source of his creativity, inspiration, and ideas for the next seven years.

I wanted to test this theory so I collaborated with Shashank Nigam, the CEO of SimpliFlying, a global aviation strategy firm of about 10 people, to ask a simple question:

“What if we force people to take a scheduled week off every seven weeks?”

The idea was that this would be a microcosm of the Sagmeister principle of one year off every seven years. And it was entirely mandatory. In fact, we designed it so that if you contacted the office while you were on vacation — whether through email, WhatsApp, Slack, or anything else — you didn’t get paid for that vacation week. We tried to build in a financial punishment for working when you aren’t supposed to be working, in order to establish a norm about disconnecting from the office.

The system is designed so that you don’t get a say in when you go. Some may say that’s a downside, but for this experiment, we believed that putting a structure in place would be a significant benefit. The team and clients would know well ahead of time when someone would be taking a week off. And the point is you actually go. And everybody goes. So there are no questions, paperwork, or guilt involved with not being at the office.

With this 12 week experiment we had managers rate employee productivity, creativity, and happiness levels before and after the mandatory time off. (We used a five-point Likert scale, using simple statements such as “Ravi is demonstrating creativity in his work,” with the options ranging from one, Strongly Disagree, to five, Strongly Agree.)

And what did we find out?

Creativity went up 33%, happiness levels rose 25%, and productivity increased 13%. It’s a small sample, sure, but there’s a meaningful story here. When we dive deeper on creativity, the average employee score was 3.0 before time off and 4.0 after time off. For happiness, the average employee score was 3.2 before time off and 4.0 afterward. And for productivity, the average employee score was 3.2 before and rose to 3.6.

This complements the feedback we got from employees who, upon their return, wrote blog posts about their experiences with the process and what they did with their time. Many talked about how people finally found time to cross things off of their bucket lists — finally holding an art exhibition, learning a new language, or traveling somewhere they’d never been before.

Now, this is a small company, and we haven’t tested the results in a large organization. But the question is: Could something this simple work in your workplace? Are you the leader in charge of a team who could try this? Do you run a company where you want to give it a shot?

Let me share two pieces of constructive feedback that came back:

• Frequency was too high. Employees found that once every seven weeks (while beautiful on paper) was just too frequent for a small company like SimpliFlying. Its competitive advantage is agility, and having staff take time off too often upset the work rhythm. Nigam proposed adjusting it to every twelve weeks. But with employee input, we redesigned it to once every eight weeks.

• Staggering was important. Let’s say that two or three people work together on a project team. We found that it didn’t make sense for these people to take time off back-to-back. Batons get dropped if there are consecutive absences. We revised the arrangement so that no one can take a week off right after someone has just come back from one. The high-level design is important and needs to work for the business.

This is early research, but it confirms something we said at the beginning: Vacation systems are broken and aren’t actually doing what they’re advertised to do. If you show up drained after your vacation, that means you didn’t get the benefit of creating space.

Why is creating space so important?

Consider this quote from Tim Kreider, who wrote “The ‘Busy’ Trap” for the New York Times:

Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body, and deprived of it we suffer a mental affliction as disfiguring as rickets. The space and quiet that idleness provides is a necessary condition for standing back from life and seeing it whole, for making unexpected connections and waiting for the wild summer lightning strikes of inspiration — it is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done.

Vacations systems are broken.

But early results say that mandatory vacation could fix them.

Life is short so the earlier we get cracking the more time we’ll be spending doing better and more important work.

Check out the video version of this article below:

An earlier version of this article appeared in Harvard Business Review

The Single Principle You Must Practice When Feeling Overwhelmed or Burned Out

Years ago I got divorced and went from married suburbanite to urban bachelor in the span of a few weeks. Talk about a bumpy landing. I didn’t have any friends, family, or social support downtown, so it took me time to develop a new two-word philosophy to rattle myself out of the wallowing.

What was the two-word philosophy?

Say yes.

To anything, anytime, with anyone. Say yes. Simple as that.

I don’t regret that philosophy. It brought me opportunities and human connections that I would have never had otherwise. But for everything I gained, I also paid the price on productivity. The more you’re given a chance to do, and then actually do, of course the less time you have to do it all.

So this article shares how I knew it was time to rein it in and the method I use to keep everything in balance today. It’s a great principle if you’re struggling with any form of overwhelm, burnout, or just feeling like there’s always too much to do.

THE (LIMITED) VIRTUES OF “YES”

Defaulting to yes actually worked well for me in those first few years.

I went to charity events for organizations I’d never heard of before, I was the guy at the concert who doesn’t know the songs but buys the album anyway, and I often had some random internet friend crashing on my couch.

Of course, I also had lots of nights that didn’t end well. Stutter stops, terrible blind dates, cold lonely walks home from some get-together that didn’t go anywhere. But I also said yes to doing a TED Talk that became one of the world’s most inspiring and said yes to writing a bunch of short blog posts for myself which ultimately turned into The Book of Awesome and sold a million copies.

And then, over time, I suddenly had more options, more choices, and more invitations than I could possibly accept. This transition happens to many of us. You go from parent of one kid to parent of three. You say yes to the community board and suddenly three more boards ask you to join. You score a promotion at work and then inherit a big team of 10 people to manage.

You look back and realize that you said yes to more—more meetings, more opportunities, more challenges. Your life accelerated. But then you hit a point where you suddenly have too much to do.

Welcome to the World of Overwhelm.

Now what?

“HELL YEAH!” VERSUS EVERYTHING ELSE

My friend Derek Sivers has a great philosophy that I’ve adopted and want to share with you. It’s called, “No or hell yeah!” and it’s really quite simple. Here’s how it works: You receive an invitation to do something (a date, a job, a social event, whatever), then take a minute to observe your authentic reaction—which is invariably either one of two things:

1. A super emphatic, fist-pumping, “Hell yeah!” where you’re just shaking with excitement to do it—in which case you do it, or

2. Literally anything else at all—in which case you don’t.

The beauty of this model is that it filters every other positive reaction into a no: “Um, sounds good!”, “Lemme check my calendar, I think I’m open,” or the dreaded, “Can I get back to you?”

No, no, all no!

Those are lukewarm reactions that remain positive until just before you get to the commitment and realize you wish you’d said no instead. Maybe you even bail last-minute, which destroys trust and hurts your reputation. It’s much easier to simply filter your options through the “No or Hell Yeah” model up front, to make sure you’re only committing to things you really want to do.

GREAT IS THE ENEMY OF LIFE CHANGING

What’s the benefit?

You don’t kill those invisible opportunities you haven’t dreamt up yet—those big projects you need time to dive into, and all the downtime your mind needs to create space for what matters.

I knew it was time to switch from “say yes” to “no or hell yeah!” when I looked at my calendar and realized I was swamped, morning to night, on things I really enjoyed doing but—and here’s the crucial part—only some of which I loved so much as to call life changing. If “good” is the enemy of great, then “great” is the enemy of “life changing.”

Why does it need to be life changing? Simple. Life is short. We have on average 30,000 days here total. It’s over in a blink! There are already loads of options and obligations you simply can’t say no to because they’re part of your work or family responsibilities. And that’s fine. But that often leaves precious little room for your personal and social commitments, which makes it all the more important to set a really high bar for those. When you do, you’ll free up time to focus on what you care deeply about. And the benefit of doing that will start leaking into your work and family life, too.

Now, I’ll be honest. Though it sounds great on paper, making this transition wasn’t easy for me. It was actually downright painful. And it continues to be. It’s not just saying no to a lunch meeting so you can write a book chapter. That’s the easy stuff! It also includes missing a family dinner because I’m off interviewing David Sedaris for my podcast. These hurt—deeply. It’s incredibly hard saying no to friends, fun projects, and fly-away ideas. Plus, sometimes you find yourself just staring in horror as a brand-new relationship you know would take off if you had time to put into it just sputters and dies because of zero water or sunlight.

No need to pretend that’s easy. It’s frankly a horrible feeling.

But the alternative?

Well, those giant regrets haunting you later in life—that maybe you could’ve tackled your dream job, that perhaps you should’ve done something that felt more meaningful—those are harder to brush away than any obligations cluttering your calendar next week or next month. Because plotted on a long enough timeline saying yes to everything doesn’t just tank your productivity, it also eats away at your sense of purpose.

And that’s actually pretty easy to say no to, don’t you think?

An earlier version of this article appeared in Fast Company

Here's Why You Need A 'Day of Yes'

We’re experiencing a loneliness epidemic.

More of us live alone now compared to ever before, and a New York Times article says the percentage of American adults who report they’re lonely has doubled since the 1980s. Now it’s sky-high at 40 per cent.

And it gets worse. A recent meta-analysis titled “Social Relationships and Mortality Risk” shows loneliness creates double the mortality risk of obesity and is actually even greater than the risk of smoking.

Suddenly it feels like many of us are facing a particularly bleak future.

Do you ever feel lonely? Or know others who do? I certainly felt devastatingly lonely when I crash-landed downtown after my divorce years ago. Suddenly I had no friends, no family, and no social structure around me. It took me time to invent a two-word philosophy to kick myself out of the gloom and doom.

What was it?

Say Yes.

I know it’s not revolutionary but it changed my behaviour so much.

Suddenly with my new philosophy I was saying yes to anything I was asked to do. I found myself volunteering for charity functions, going to the play with six people in the audience, and saying yes to any event, literally any event, anybody asked me to attend.

Shonda Rhimes, creator and producer of shows like Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, delivered a 4-million-plus viewed TED Talk called “My year of saying yes to everything.” In it she says:

“So a while ago, I tried an experiment. For one year, I would say yes to all the things that scared me. Anything that made me nervous, took me out of my comfort zone, I forced myself to say yes to. Did I want to speak in public? No, but yes. Did I want to be on live TV? No, but yes . . . And a crazy thing happened: the very act of doing the thing that scared me undid the fear, made it not scary. My fear of public speaking, my social anxiety, poof, gone . . . ‘Yes’ changed my life. ‘Yes’ changed me.”

Yes puts you in situations you’re not comfortable with.

Yes helps you get out there.

Oh, and how big is the relationship between social ties and happiness?

It’s not big.

It’s gigantic.

According to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert, who wrote popular bestseller Stumbling on Happiness:

“If I wanted to predict your happiness, and I could know only one thing about you, I wouldn’t want to know your gender, religion, health, or income. I’d want to know about your social network — about your friends and family and the strength of the bonds with them.”

So say yes. Say yes! Get out there. When you sign up for things you’re scared to do, go on trips you never thought you’d go on, and sign up for activities you have no business doing, guess what happens?

You meet new people, you create new relationships, you combat loneliness head-on . . . and you become happier.

And if a Year of Yes sounds too intimidating, no problem.

Just start with a Day of Yes first.

How about today?

An earlier version of this article appeared in The Toronto Star

How To Make More Money Than A Harvard MBA

Harvard makes you feel rich.

I walked through campus for two years feeling like I’d been cast in the lead role of Moneybags McGee in a movie about ruling the world and having it all.

On Harvard’s campus, tall twisting oak trees blow softly in the wind, casting polka-dot shadows over beautiful red-brick buildings, manicured ivy, and rolling lawns. Students ease open thirty-foot-tall carved wooden doors to grab made-to-order sushi from the cafeteria before eating with friends on brown leather couches against walls covered with expensive original art.

The students at Harvard Business School feel rich because they either are rich… or they’re about to get rich.

The average graduating salary is $140,000! To put that in perspective, the average American makes $905 a week or $47,060 a year. That means a fresh-faced, dewy-eyed twenty-six-year-old with two years of business school under his or her belt makes three times what the average American citizen makes. I know my salary almost tripled after I graduated from Harvard.

Yes, Harvard makes you feel rich because it actually makes you rich.

Or does it?

I was sad when I graduated, because all my friends were scattering in different directions. After a big road trip, it was suddenly all over and then:

• Mark and his wife moved to Houston, and he got a job with a high-end consulting company. A full 25% of Harvard Business School grads go work for consulting firms, and the hours are notoriously tough. Unless they land a local assignment, most consultants fly out Monday mornings and fly home Thursday nights, every single week, every single month, forever.

• Chris went to Washington, DC to be assistant principal at a big charter school. We kept in touch, but he was always at work when I called. We talked about our road trip and I’d ask him, “Are you getting any sleep these days?” He’d say, “Well, I get to work every morning around 7:00 a.m. and get home around 9:00 p.m. I usually go in for a few hours on the weekend, too. So yeah, enough sleep, but not much else.”

• Ryan went into private equity in New York. 29% of Harvard Business School grads get finance jobs in sub-industries like investment banking, private equity, or hedge funds. They help big companies buy each other, invest in illiquid assets, create complicated investments. But Ryan told me he started work around 10:00 a.m. and worked till 11:00 p.m., seven days a week.

• Sonia went to work in Silicon Valley at a big tech company. The tech giants hire 19% of the graduates from our class and had great reputations for gourmet meals, dry-cleaning, and Ping-Pong tables at the office. When I reached out to Sonia a year after graduation she told me she loved her job and was working about eighty hours a week.

It seemed crazy to me, but all my friends were working like 80 to 100 hours a week. And a week only has 168 hours in it! I remember thinking, “Is everyone nuts?”

I thought back to Harvard and remembered going out for dinner with a group of McKinsey consultants during a recruiting event. They flew to Boston and wined and dined us at a ritzy joint. We drank expensive wines, ate delicious food, and talked about world issues into the wee hours. My brain was overheating because of the stimulating conversation. These folks were warm, friendly, and killer smart. It was a great night.

But the thing I remember most is that when we were finally finishing up around two in the morning, all the McKinsey consultants were… going back to work! I’m not joking. They were jumping on conference calls with teams in Shanghai, opening laptops to do emails, or getting together to finalize presentations for the next day. At two in the morning!

Consultants and finance folks make up most of Harvard Business School grads and they work approximately 80 to 100 hours a week.

Are they really making $140,000 a year?

Do you remember fractions? I learned them back in fourth grade in a moldy classroom with flickering florescent lights in my elementary school. Pink chalk dust scrawled across blackboards showing us how one-half can be written as ½ or three-quarters can be written as ¾… with 3 being the numerator and 4 being the denominator. As in “I sat on the couch in sweatpants watching Netflix all night and ate 3⁄4 of a sausage pizza.”

Well, the Harvard salary of $140,000 is a fraction, too.

Every single job is paid by the hour.

Harvard Business School grads make double or triple the money a lot of people make, but they often work double or triple the hours, too. When you work that much, it’s harder to find time to shovel the driveway, play with your kids, or plant your garden, so maybe you hire people on the cheap to do those things for you. You will still have fun! Frankly, the money you’re making can afford luxury vacations and expensive restaurants. You may have even more fun. But there’s less time for fun.

Think about whether it’s important to you to feel the pride of a freshly shoveled driveway, the joy of watching your kids discover a new word, or see the tulips you planted in the fall finally bloom in the spring.

There’s nothing wrong with either life.

But think about the life you want.

Here’s how much a Harvard MBA makes compared to two very common jobs: an assistant manager at a retail store and an elementary school teacher.

They all make $28/hour.

Where did I get the numbers from?

Well, teachers are scheduled for seven-hour school days (usually 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m.) with typically an hour off for lunch. Let’s round that up to thirty working hours a week. But we all know how hard teachers work. We know it’s way more than that! My dad is a teacher, my wife Leslie is a teacher, and they bring work home. The average teacher does an hour or two of work every single night! Marking, prepping, coaching a team. So I added ten hours a week for that.

Retail store assistant managers are typically scheduled for forty-hour work-weeks, but it’s a tough job. They end up working before or after shifts sometimes. There are questions, issues pop up, people call them at home. So I added ten hours a week for that.

And the eighty-five hours for Harvard MBAs? It’s a ballpark average figure based on my data, research, and personal experience. Working on consulting gigs in a Chicago hotel room or slaving away on an investment banking deal doesn’t exactly give you free evenings or weekends.

Although these numbers are generally accurate, of course there are exceptions. Are you the outlier teacher working eighty-five hours a week or the outlier Harvard MBA working forty? Maybe! But stick with me, because there’s still value in the higher level point here.

What’s the bottom line?

They all make $28/hour!

So how do you make more money than a Harvard MBA?

Work way less hours than they do … and make more dollars per hour.

But wait: Am I telling you to work less? No, that’s not the final takeaway. My point here isn’t that you should suddenly dial down your interests, passion, or career. My point is to calculate how much you make per hour and know this number. Remember this number. Have this number in your head. I have friends who work around the clock as downtown lawyers and they joke, “When I do the math I actually make less than minimum wage.” They’re right! And, frankly, I don’t understand them. Do not make less than minimum wage!

The way to make more money than a Harvard MBA isn’t to get your annual salary over $120,000 or $150,000 or $500,000. It’s to measure how much you make per hour and overvalue your time so you’re spending time working only on things you enjoy.

The average life expectancy is around 30,000 days and we sleep for a third of that.

That means you have less than 20,000 days in your life total.

Understand how much a Harvard MBA really makes and then overvalue you, and overvalue your time, so every single hour of your working life is spent doing something you love.

Check out the video version of this article below:

An earlier version of this article appeared in my

#1 international bestseller The Happiness Equation

Here's Why You Need A Family Contract (And What To Put In It)

“Congratulations, Neil!”

I was sitting across from the SVP of HR at Walmart when he offered me his hand and a sheet of paper with all the terms of my new promotion spelled out. I shook his hand and left his office doing mental cartwheels down the hall.

This was it!

The dream job.

More money, bigger team, fancier title, more interesting work.

And more actual work, too.

Because isn’t that how promotions usually work?

A few more meetings. A few more hours. A few more business trips. A bigger job isn’t just a bigger paycheck. It’s got more responsibility, too.

With the job offer in hand I popped my head into the office of one of my mentors at the company and said:

“Guess what! I got the big promotion.”

“Congratulations!” he said. “Are you going to accept it?”

His simple question caught me off guard.

“Well, it feels like a slam dunk,” I replied, with a bit of a confused look in my eyes, wondering what he was getting at. “Everything improves here — salary, benefits, title. Great for future employability, too. If I get turfed I have a nice ‘top line’ on my resumé. A good benchmark for going somewhere else. I feel like I should sign this right now and head straight back to the SVP’s office.”

“Go ahead and sign it,” he said with smile. “But it’s a big job! You’ll be leading a large team and on the road a lot. So, before you hand it back in, make sure you take the contract home, share it with your wife, and write up another contract, too. A family contract. One between you and your partner. The company is changing all your terms, aren’t they? So make sure you revisit all your home terms, too.”

His message rang a bell.

All of us have contracts with our employers.

Very few of us have contracts with our families.

We have detailed sheets of paper spelling out exactly what we’re supposed to do on the job. But we have no similar piece of paper for our families, do we?

That night I went home and sat down with my wife Leslie and we thought writing up a family contract was a good idea. We spent a long time that night discussing and writing out the terms of the contract and it has four bullet points that we still use today.

Number of nights away

It breaks my heart to miss bath time. Combing my son’s wet hair. Reading books under the covers. Goodnight kisses. There are a finite number of these nights in our lives so it should hurt to miss them. The biggest thing for Leslie and I to discuss was how many nights I was going to be away per year. We came up with a number that worked for us and began tracking it. As my work migrated from Walmart over the years into travelling to give speeches we held onto this number. (The number itself is up to you but for us it was 4 overnights per month during the school year and 0 during the summer which also held with it the sum total of 40 nights away per year. Still a lot! And painful in many ways. But, to our mind, about 10% of the total year.) What’s important I think is choosing a number that’s relatively easy to break down per month so if you have a really busy month (say, a big conference out of town or across-the-world trip or something) then you know you have to say no to a business trip next month to make up for it. Can doing this hamper your career? Sure. But can trips away hamper your family? Absolutely. Let’s not pretend you can have everything. Come up with a number that works for your family and stick with it.

Family Day

We decided it was important for us to have one Family Day every week. Normally these are on the weekend but if I’m away during the weekend we’ll get a ‘make up date’ during the week. Anyway: what’s a Family Day? A full day with no cellphones, no extended family, no friends, nothing. Just me, my wife, our little kids and zero interruptions all day. We had so many weekends blurring by in a smear of gymnastics, birthday parties, and extended family dinners. Fun weekends! But no deep family time. Is this tough to do? Of course! Think about how many days you have with a sports practice or somebody’s big birthday. Those are beautiful things. But prioritizing one Family Day a week creates energy, helps you be choosy about what activities you’re signing up for, and helps avoid saying a passive yes to every invitation.

NNO/LNO

This is a fun one. Once a week I get an NNO. Neil’s Night Out. Watch out, town! Seriously though, whatever I want to do that night, I do it. Dinner with a friend, live music by myself, spinning in circles in empty parking lots. It’s my night off. I can do whatever I want. What’s an LNO? That would be Leslie’s Night Out. She gets one a week, too. Energy is the priceless commodity here. It’s too easy to crash into Netflix comas on the couch once the kids are in bed. “Oh, look, we have only three Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts left!” NNO/LNO helps us plan and prioritize ourselves and our other relationships, too. I feel like a great father and husband before and after I go away because I get energy from those nights. Plus, I get my own stories and experiences to bring back into the home while continuing to develop my life as an individual. The best part is there’s no guilt, since my wife has a night off, too. So in a way these two nights “pay for” each other. She can go to a yoga class, work on her pictures in a coffee shop, try my spinning parking lot thing, whatever. The two nights end up feeling like a gift to each other, which helps, though sometimes we do find we need to push each other to take them.

Special time

As our family expanded the number of relationship permutations expanded exponentially. With one partner there were two possible relationship permutations (me solo, me and Leslie), with one kid there were four (me solo, me and Leslie, me and my kid, all of us), with two kids there were suddenly eight (me solo, me and Leslie, me and kid one, me and kid two, me and both kids, me with Leslie and kid one, me with Leslie and kid two, all of us). You get the idea. The point here isn’t to fastidiously ensure we have time with every combination but we do think about every 1 on 1 combination having some ‘special time’ each week. And yes, this includes me and Leslie. Getting a weekly date night in as our family has expanded has been vital to showing up as the partners and parents we want to be.

So: That’s the contract I have with my partner.

We printed it up, signed it (actually signed it!), and keep it in a file.

The goal is to have a contract in a desk at home that creates a healthy tension with the contract you have in a desk at work.

Everybody will have different terms, of course. Maybe you include points about school drop-off and pickup, whether or not you work from home on weekends, or who does the garbage. Again, it’s whatever works for you.

And I will add: I didn’t tell my employer I had this contract. I didn’t wave it in their face and say, “Sorry, I can’t travel next week.” But the home contract helped me articulate my values, which enabled speedier decision-making, and a better acceptance of the decisions I did make later on in my new role. I didn’t sweat every business trip. I simply counted them towards an annual number. Plus, if I cheated on one of the bullet points, I knew I had to make it up. Missed Family Day one week because I was in China? Well that means two the next week.

Now, as you think about a contract that works with you and your partner, let’s make sure we remember that the goal is never to be perfect.

It’s simply to be a little better than before.

I’d love to see your contract if you’re willing to share at neil@globalhappiness.org 

Too hardcore? Check out this video on the power of the ‘quarterly relationship meeting’ instead:

An earlier version of this article appeared in Fast Company

19 Great Summer Beach Reads (For People Who Don’t Want To Turn Their Brain Off)

Does your brain turn off in the summer?

Mine doesn’t. Yours doesn’t. Everbody’s doesn’t!

Yet many of us still hold the assumption that summer beach reads are supposed to be airy-fairy steamy romance tales or paint-by-numbers Pattersons.

To that I say a big loud: No!

Now, don’t worry, I’m not going the other way and recommending you check out the latest 600-page examination of the Boer War. But I do think we should swing the pendulum back a bit.

So here are nineteen summer beach reads that I feel are fun and fast-paced enough to fit into your popping-into-the-pool plans and yet also will leave your brain with new perspectives and fresh ideas:

1. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

When I was a kid my older cousin handed me this book and said “Read it now and when you’re older it’ll mean something completely different.” Well, I finally reread this book. There’s a reason it’s sold 80 million copies. Really profound commentary on the busyness of society, what love really means, and the value of friendship.

2. Tetris: The Games People Play by Box Brown

A completely hypnotic 250-page graphic novel sharing the bizarre true story behind Tetris. Yes, Tetris. Full of Russian KGB agents, the centuries-long Nintendo history, giant lawsuits, and screaming fans. If you liked the fast-pace plot of movies like American Hustle, you will love this. The time and love Box Brown put into this book is astounding.

3. Behold The Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue

Jende Jonga is a Cameroonian immigrant living with his wife and 6-year-old son in Harlem. The book tells the story of him getting a job as a chauffeur for a Lehman Brothers executive just before the financial crisis hits. A behind-the-curtains tale of an immigrant experience we don’t hear about as often and (yes indeed) an Oprah’s Book Club pick to boot.

4. Wishful Drinking by Carrie Fisher

This is perhaps my most beachy book on the list. I had no idea Carrie Fisher (of Princess Leia fame) was born to Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds who were basically the Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie of the late 1950s. Here she tells a rollicking, radically self-aware story of the absurdist upbringing she had inside a world of Hollywood elite … while struggling with bipolar disorder and addiction.

5. The Moth or All These Wonders by The Moth Podcast

Picture your closest friends going around the red-and-white checkered tablecloth sharing their best true stories over late-night chicken wings. That’s The Moth. (Not to be confused with a moth.) There’s one from the woman who became David Bowie’s hair stylist. Another from an African child soldier asked to go to a paintball birthday party with his new classmates in New York. And another from an Indian guy standing at his white prom date’s door and being told by her parents they don’t want him in their family photos. The stories are insightful, addictive, and end without any smarm … but rather with an honest emotional candid of what life felt like, for that person, at that time. If you remember the Degrassi Junior High “freeze-frame” ending… that’s what they feel like to me. I feel a little moved by each one.

6. “Commencement speech books”

The benefit of reading commencement speech books is that you get them done in half an hour yet leave with a sense of perspective far beyond. Great for remembering bigger principles. Three favorites: Congratulations, By The Way by George Saunders, This Is Water by David Foster Wallace, and Make Good Art by Neil Gaiman. (Do you have a favorite commencement speech I’m missing? Email me at neil@globalhappiness.org and let me know. I’m always looking for good ones.)

7. A Hologram for the King by Dave Eggers

A super quick, tightly written, emotionally suspenseful parable of modern day family tensions against the backdrop of a globalizing world. First person narrative as struggling businessman Alan Clay travels to Saudi Arabia for “the one big sale” and revisits his life up to that point. One of the fastest Dave Eggers reads for sure.

8. So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson

Did you ever listen to Serial? I only caught a couple episodes but Ronson’s writing style reminds me of the show. You hear his voice from above as he experiences something, goes on a journey to dig in, and then tries to make sense of it all. This book explores the history of public shaming and its re-emergence on a mass scale with the Internet. A great exploration of shaming history and wades confidently into the complex emotional issues surrounding how we think about power to the people.

9. Point Your Face At This by Demetri Martin

A perfect book for people who love the intelligent absurdity of The Far Side cartoons. Demetri Martin is a stand-up comedian and former correspondent for The Daily Show whose tiny cerebral drawings make you laugh and think at the same time. Here are one, two, three, and four examples of his work.

10. Black Swan Green by David Mitchell

I’m a sucker for coming of age stories. The Fault In Our Stars? The Perks of Being A Wallflower? Sign me up. I think because those years are so formative I just feel the need to relive them over and over in different ways. Well, Black Swan Green is my current favorite coming-of-age story. David Mitchell had me at Cloud Atlas and this novel is blissfully beautiful while being a lot more beachy. We follow 13-year-old anxiety-prone stutterer Jason through a single up and down year in rural England in 1982. Unlike most of his other books Mitchell doesn’t shapeshift voice and characters in this one and I think the narrative voice is (somehow) even stronger as a result.

11. Both Flesh and Not by David Foster Wallace

This is a collection of non-fiction essays Wallace wrote for outlets like The New York Times Magazine and they are flabbergasting. The title essay is about Roger Federer at the beginning of his tennis career. It’s like nothing I’ve read before on sports. He has an essay on the seminal importance of Terminator 2. A collection of “word notes” on commonly misused words. And my favorite is his essay called The Nature Of The Fun which is about the emotional roller coaster of the creative process after having success in the creative process. (Brainpickings does a nice overview of it and this essay was almost singlehandedly responsible for the creation of my podcast 3 Books as you'll hear in Chapter 1 with my wife.) Any of those essays are worth the price of admission alone. Truly original, high-flying, mind-bogglingly good writing.

12. East of Eden by John Steinbeck

Thickest book in my beach pile. Gotta have one brick in there. I have to tell you how I found this book. A few years ago I was chatting with a guy next to me at a bar. The conversation turned to books and I asked “So, what’s your favorite novel of all time?” and he suddenly peeled back the top of his shirt and revealed a gigantic tattoo of a tree branch. “What’s that?” I asked. And he said “East of Eden. John Steinbeck. This is a tattoo of the cover of the book.” I didn’t have a moment to really gather the fact that he had a book cover tattooed on his body before the bartender shouted “No way!” She came up to us and pulled up her shirt sleeve and revealed some indecipherable quote. “From East of Eden!” she said excitedly. “I got it on my arm.” My reaction was something like “If two random strangers who don’t know each other both have a book permanently tattooed on their body, then I really have to read that book.” Sure enough, it blew me away and I was sobbing by the time I read the last page. Long, fast-paced biographical type narration that twists and ties together with giant themes of fatalism versus free will sitting on top.

13. The Iron Man by Ted Hughes

We need a comedown after that behemoth. This isn’t that Iron Man! It’s the original. An award-winning kid’s chapter book published in 1968 about a misunderstood giant iron man who arrives out of nowhere, tumbles down a cliff, gets buried by fearful townspeople, rescued by a little boy, and then ultimately rescues the planet. Phew! Wonderful book on so many levels. Thrilling storyline, beautiful writing, wondrous imagery. Sure, it’s for kids, but we’re all kids. If you liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, you’ll like this.

14. Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

Fantastic love story told about refugees migrating from violence in a slightly futuristic world. The thesis is that we’re all migrants, either from place to place, or by standing still through time itself. Really fun quick read which pairs well with his other beachy-to-me reads The Reluctant Fundamentalist and How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia. (If you haven't read any of his stuff, I think I'd suggest starting with Reluctant Fundamentalist.)

15. All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai

The lone sci-fi on our countdown. And it’s a doozy. Elan Mastai is a writer and producer on This Is Us and this is his debut novel. It’s a fast-paced, mindbending time-travel book that reminded me of The Martian and Dark Matter. (Also great beach reads.) The pace of this one seemingly goes faster and faster the deeper you go with a few epic themes uncovered by the end. I can’t recommend it enough. Listen to Elan Mastai on my podcast 3 Books here, too.

16. Your Favorite Band Is Killing Me: What Pop Music Rivalries Reveal About The Meaning Of Life by Steven Hyden

Pearl Jam versus Nirvana, Biggie versus TuPac, Smashing Pumpkins versus Pavement. This could have been a Wikipedia style summary of musical feuds but it goes so much deeper. Written for music lovers so some details are skimmed in favor of trying to reflect the rivalry back on our own psychology and the sentiments of the moment.

17. A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan

Imagine I was going to explain to you how baseball was played and I did it by describing how a tree gets carved into a baseball bat, giving you the biography of the guy who built the Green Monster, showed you a black and white reel of a radio announcer singing the national anthem, and then took you to an art gallery featuring close ups of dugout floors after a doubleheader. What the? Yeah, exactly. And that’s how this fascinating novel goes about describing the lives of its two central characters over the decades. A giant anecdote about one of their best friends over here, a little window into a date they once had over there. It feels kind of like watching Mulholland Drive. Won the Pulitzer Prize in 2011.

18. Will you please be quiet, please? Stories by Raymond Carver

If the world feels too full of words and you crave short stories that get right to it – try this one. Efficiency. Economy! Saying more with less. Have you heard that famous quote attributed to everyone from Blaise Pascal to Mark Twain: “Sorry my letter was so long. I didn’t have time to make it short.” (Actual history of the quote here.) If you’ve ever slaved away at a tweet – reading and re-reading, writing and re-writing – just to get it to fit into the tiny little box, then you know what I’m talking about. Why do I mention all this? Because this group of short stories has to be the most efficient writing I’ve ever read. Hemingway is an airbag next to this guy. Some of the stories are two or three pages and yet pack deep emotional intensity. (As a sidenote: This is one of David Sedaris's three most formative books.)  

19. The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Sometimes I need my beach read to help me pause and recharge. I'm on vacation. And that means I'm between things. And that means I need to go deeper into myself to figure out which way to go next. This book helps. A simple guide to battling “Resistance” – the single word Pressfield uses to describe the set of emotions and barriers preventing you from doing work you love. Within pages you’ll want to drop everything and tackle a creative project you’ve been thinking about starting.

And ... there you have it!

My laundry list of fast-paced books to keep your mind stimulated and be pop-in-and-pop-outtable enough to actually read this summer.

Enjoy!

6 Ways To Reduce Cell Phone Addiction

A few weeks ago I woke up in the middle of the night to go pee and subconsciously grabbed my leg looking for my cellphone.

And that’s when I knew.

It’s getting worse.

But it’s not just me.

It’s us.

Three University of Bologna professors published a report in the Sloan Management Review which showed that anxiety spikes when students don’t have their cellphones for even a single day. Another study found when cellphone users couldn’t answer their phones while those phones were ringing, they experienced increased heart rate, blood pressure and anxiety. And adolescents who spend more time on phones are more likely to report mental health issues.

Can you relate to these feelings?

I absolutely can.

So what do we do about it?

Here are six ways we need to start fighting the fight:

1. Download the Forest app 

Peter Drucker famously said, “What gets measured gets managed.” You know what we need to start measuring? Not time on our cell phones, but time off them. You click open Forest, enter 15 minutes (or the amount of time you want to stay off your phone for) and then hit the button. What happens? A tiny little seed starts to grow. Oh, look, it’s a sapling now! And here come cute little branches! What happens if you use your phone before the 15 minutes run out? Simple: You kill the tree. You’re an axe-wielding murderer. You feel bad! And that’s the point. In order to grow a forest you need to practice growing the muscle of staying off your phone. It hurts. It’s painful. But it’s important. Give it a shot. (Note: Yes, it costs $1.99. But I feel it’s worth it. And no, I get nothing for telling you about it. This page is, and always will be, no ads all the way.)

2. Add extra swipes before work 

So many of us are merging our lives into one phone. Do you have your work email on the same phone you want to take out on Friday night? If so, my suggestion is to first separate the accounts (i.e., use the built-in Mail app for your personal email and download the Gmail app for work, etc.) and then move the work app a few screens away. Maybe with a few empty screens with just one dusty app in the middle. What do the extra three or four thumb swipes do? They give your brain an important one-second pause to ask yourself “Do I want to do this?” before checking work email on your ride home from the bars.

3. Go black and white

Have you ever walked into a casino and been dazzled into a jaw-dropping stupor from all the whizzing colours, flashing slots and ringing bells? Does that remind you of anything rectangular in your pocket, by chance? Casinos know bright colours and flashing lights attract your eyes. Same with phones. So, turn your phone to black and white. All functionality is still there! You just aren’t attracted to it anymore. If you have an iPhone, go to Settings – General – Accessibility — Display Accommodations — Colour Filters — Grayscale. Yes, conveniently buried under six menu options! But you can do it.

PS. Too hardcore? If you like the idea of going black and white, but want to keep color handy for occasional use, then here’s a setting to help. Go Settings — Accessibility — Accessibility Shortcut — Color Filters. What’s that do? It lets you triple-click the side button on your phone to swap between settings. Pa-zam!

4. Night Shift mode

Recent research from Australia shows that exposing our brains to bright screens before bed reduces melatonin production — the sleep hormone. Bummer! What helps? Well, if you can’t stay off your phone then at least enable Night Shift mode. Mine is on from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. It dims the screen and reduces that blinding brightness which makes your evolutionarily slow brain think it’s morning time. If you’re on an iPhone, go to Settings – Display & Brightness – Night Shift.

5. Buy an alarm clock

Old school, I know. Why is this important? Because we are sleeping with our phones these days. And we need to stop. Get them out of the bed… and the bedroom. Of course, when I tell people this they usually say “Oh, but my phone’s my alarm clock! I will hibernate like a grizzly if nothing wakes me up.” So what’s the solution? Drive to Giga-Mart and fork over ten dollars for a cheapo clock. Then plug your phone in the basement.

6. Disable notifications

What’s the first thing every app asks you when you download it? “EatMoreDonuts would like to send you Notifications. OK?” And you click OK because, well, you would like to eat more donuts. And you just downloaded it. And the app never lets you forget it. So, get intentional. If you’re on an iPhone, go to Settings – Notifications and scroll down your list of apps. Start by turning them all off and then cruise the list again combing for anything that might be crucial.

Those six things will get you going.

And this cuss-filled page (NSFW) will give you buckets more.

The issue is that when everybody has an addiction it sort of looks like nobody has one. We get in line for coffee … so it looks kind of normal. We keep our heads locked on our cellphones … so it looks kind of normal.

But is it?

Adam Alter, New York University business professor and author of Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, explained: “You only develop an addiction when there is some psychological motive that hasn’t been fulfilled for you: loneliness, that you’ve been bullied, or you can’t make good things happen in your life. It doesn’t actually matter what you use to soothe that addiction, whether it’s playing a particular game that lulls you into a distracted state or whether it’s taking a drug. In terms of soothing those psychological ills, behaviour and substance addictions are very, very similar.”

I’ve listed six tactical ideas above that are slowly helping me, but the longer-term solution may be latching our minds onto something else.

Like what?

Buy some hiking boots and commit to a new uphill hobby. Check out my 3 Books podcast to get back into reading. Grab fresh trunks and sign up for swimming.

I don’t have all the answers, but I know it’s time for an intervention.

What helps you fight back?

Drop me a line and let me know.

Power to the people!

An earlier version of this article appeared in the Toronto Star.

7 Science-Backed Ways To Be Happy Right Now

Let’s start with some bad news.

The happiness model we’re taught from a young age is actually completely backward. We think we work hard in order to achieve big success and then we’re happy. That’s how I grew up! That’s what my parents taught me.

We think the scribble goes like this:

Study hard! → Straight A’s! → Be happy!

Interview lots! → Great job! → Be happy!

Work overtime! → Get promoted! → Be happy!

But it doesn’t work like that in real life. That model is broken.

We do great work, have a big success, but instead of being happy, we just set new goals. Now we study for the next job, the next degree, the next promotion. Why stop at a college degree when you can get a master’s? Why stop at Director when you can be VP? Why stop at one house when you can have two? We never get to happiness. We just always push it further and further away.

Now what happens when we snap “Be happy” off the end of this scribble and stick it on the beginning? Then these important six words look like this:

Now everything changes. Everything changes. If we start with being happy, then we feel great. We look great. We exercise. We connect. What happens? We end up doing great work because we feel great doing it. What does great work lead to? Big success. Massive feelings of accomplishment and the resulting degrees, promotions, and phone calls from your mom telling you she’s proud of you.

The research shows that shows happy people are 31% more productive, have 37% higher sales, and are three times more creative than their counterparts.

So what’s the first thing you must do before you can be happy?

Be happy.

Be happy first.

Being happy opens up your learning centers. Your brain will light up like Manhattan skyscrapers at dusk, sparkle like diamonds under jewelry store lights, glow like the stars in the black sky above a farmer’s field.

American philosopher William James says, “The greatest discovery of any generation is that a human being can alter his life by altering his attitude.”

The Happiness Advantage author Shawn Achor says, “It’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.”

William Shakespeare says, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Now, it’s one thing to say “Be happy, everybody!” and leave it there.

But we all know it’s not that easy.

Why not? Because our brains get focused on negative things. We can’t stop! I do this all the time. And you know what? Everybody does. Every single person gets stuck focusing on the negative sometimes. I’ve spoken on stages with the best-known motivational speakers, Fortune 500 CEOs, and political leaders from around the world. Do you know what they’re all doing backstage? Freaking out. Sweating. Thinking something might go wrong.

The problem isn’t that we get stuck focused on the negative sometimes.

The problem is that we think we shouldn’t.

And that prevents us from taking action.

Action? That’s right. I’m talking about intentional activities. Studies show these happiness hits work like little happiness hacks that slowly shift our brain to being more positive focused.

I’ve sifted through positive psychology studies to find what I call The Big 7 ways to train your brain to be happy. Many of these studies have been discussed in journals, conference keynotes, and research reports, but I’ve brought them together here. These activities all meet my “3 S” criteria of being simple enough that I can do it, shareable enough that we can do it together, and short enough that they can be done in less than half an hour in middle of a busy day.

So what are The Big 7?

Let’s break it down:

3 Nature Walks

Do you suffer from Nature Deficit Disorder (NDD)?

I do. I am developing a hunchback. My thumbs occasionally get fried from too much texting. We are all becoming addicted to our cell phones.

We need to take more breaks and get outside.

Pennsylvania State researchers reported in the Journal of Sport & Exercise Psychology that the more physically active people are, the greater their general feelings of excitement and enthusiasm. The American Psychosomatic Societypublished a study showing how Michael Babyak and a team of researchers found three thirty-minute brisk walks or jogs even improve recovery from clinical depression. Yes, clinical depression. Results were stronger than those from studies using medication or studies using exercise and medication combined.

And why nature? Less keyboards. Less screens. More fresh air. More perspective. More reflection. And, as if that wasn’t enough, it turns out trees release a chemical called phytoncides which are actually shown to help reduce cortisol levels. Other benefits? Lower blood pressure, greater activity of parasympathetic nerves that promote relaxation, and a reduced activity of sympathetic nerves associated with “fight or flight” reactions to stress.

The 20-Minute Replay

Writing for twenty minutes about a positive experience dramatically improves happiness. Why? Because you actually relive the experience as you’re writing it and then relive it every time you read it. Your brain sends you back. In a University of Texas study called “How Do I Love Thee? Let Me Count the Words,” researchers Richard Slatcher and James Pennebaker had one member of a couple write about their relationship for twenty minutes three times a day. Compared to the test group, the couple was more likely to engage in intimate dialogue afterward, and the relationship was more likely to last.

Seriously? Journaling? Aren’t journals just a pile of blank paper stapled together with a picture of a cat on the front of them for twenty bucks? Yes! Yes, they are. Total ripoff, right? But they work. Turns out an area of your brain called your visual cortex has an area within it called area 17 which actually replays the highlights of your day as you recall and write them down. (This is partly why I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit The Journal of Awesome has outsold most of my books. Yes, a book I’ve written with no words in it has outsold many books I’ve written with words in them.)

5 Conscious Acts

Carrying out five conscious acts of kindness a week dramatically improves your happiness. Depending on your personality it’s not always natural to think about holding the door open for a couple minutes as a room exits, shovelling our neighbor’s sidewalk and walkway, or writing a Christmas card to the apartment building security guard we see every morning. But Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness, did a study asking Stanford students to perform five acts of kindness over a week. Not surprisingly, they reported much higher happiness levels than the test group. Why? They felt good about themselves! People appreciated them.

In his book Flourish, Professor Martin Seligman says that “we scientists have found that doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.”

High-Challenge, High-Skill Tasks

Get into a groove. Be in the zone. Find your flow. However you characterize it, when you’re completely absorbed with what you’re doing, it means you’re being challenged and demonstrating skill at the same time. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes this moment as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.”

Do you get that feeling from painting in the basement? Leaving your cell phone and watch at home and going for a long run before everyone wakes up? Taking nature pictures? Hitting the batting cage? In his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Csikszentmihalyi describes it using a wonderful image which I’ve redrawn below:

Ten Long Deep Breaths

A research team from Massachusetts General Hospital looked at brain scans of people before and after they participated in a course on mindfulness meditation and published the results in Psychiatry Research. What happened? After the course, parts of the brain associated with compassion and self-awareness grew while parts associated with stress shrank.

Studies report that meditation can “permanently rewire” your brain to raise levels of happiness. If you’re having trouble getting started, try an app like Calm or Ten Percent Happier.

Five Gratitudes

If you can be happy with simple things, then it will be simple to be happy.

Find a book or a journal, or start a website, and write down five things you’re grateful for from the past week. More if you have them! Once you get going it will become easier. But the key here is actually writing them down. I wrote five gratitudes a week for four years on my blog 1000 Awesome Things. Some people write in a notebook by their bedside.

Back in 2003, researchers Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked groups of students to write down five gratitudes, hassles, or events over the past week for ten weeks. Guess what happened? The students who wrote five gratitudes were happier and physically healthier. Charles Dickens puts this well: “Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many, not your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”

20 Pages Of Fiction

There’s a Game of Thrones quote I love that says:

“The man who reads lives a thousand lives before he dies … the man who never reads lives only one.”

We need to read books — real books on real paper — more than ever before. We spent over four hours a day on our cellphones right now. In a world of endless dings and pings we need to get back to single-tasking.

A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology showed that reading triggers our mirror neurons and opens up the parts of our brain responsible for developing empathy, compassion and understanding. What does EQ help with? Becoming a better leader, teacher, parent and sibling. Another study from Science Magazine in 2013 showed that reading literary fiction helps improve empathy and social functioning. And, finally, a 2013 study at Emory University showed MRIs taken the morning after test subjects were asked to read sections of a novel showed an increase in connectivity in the left temporal cortex. What’s that? The area of the brain associated with receptivity for language. The MRIs were done the next day. Just imagine the long-term benefits of cracking open a book every day.

So those are The Big 7.

We know it’s important to be happy first, and these are the seven ways to get there.

Remember: Just like riding a bike, doing a somersault, or juggling — you can learn to be happier.

Happy people don’t have the best of everything.

They make the best of everything.

Be happy first.

An earlier version of this article originally appeared in Quiet Revolution and Thought Catalog.

9 of the World's Best Email Newsletters (Actually Worth Clogging Your Inbox For)

Your attention is for sale.

Detergent jingles blare before YouTube videos, podcast hosts can’t stop yapping about sweat-whisking undies, and spammers are even weaselling their way into our text messages.

I feel like these days we need to make sure our personal email inboxes become even more of a safe haven. Bunkers! Last vestiges of quiet in this loud, loud, loud world. You open it up and you want substance. Value. Gold. And if you don’t get it? Vamoose!

So protect your digital home.

Dig a moat around it. Ready the archers. Fill the cauldrons with boiling oil. And then, just before you raise the drawbridge, make sure you invite only your most interesting friends — the fascinating, provocative, enlightening ones — to join you for a celebratory feast in The Great Hall.

Below are the nine people I’d invite to my Great Hall feast.

And all nine pass my 3 key principles of:

• Real Human: The email must come from a real human with a real name and a real face who I can actually reply to and (ideally) get a response back. (Sidenote: If you want to see why I think “humans over algorithms” is crucial, check out my SXSW Speech “Building Trust In Distrustful Times”)

• Super Value: Time is precious so the emails I’ve recommended need to offer a depth and richness that jars my brain with incongruent ideas I can thoughtfully apply to ultimately living a more intentional life.

• No Ads: “I feel monetized” is the new “I need a shower.” I’m not recommending any clothing companies with pics of sexy people wearing $800 rainboots traipsing through orchid swamps. And if any real human delivering super value is insidiously dropping in ads (and tons of the big ones do), they’re out on my list. Man’s gotta have a code.

And now: onto the list!

9. Barking Up The Wrong Tree by Eric Barker

I’m not sure how he does it but Eric Barker seems to suck up business and self-help books like a vacuum cleaner. A turbo-powered vacuum cleaner. But then, unlike the rest of it, who sort of leave it at that, Eric Barker does not leave it at that. He pulls off a magic trick something akin to opening up the dusty vacuum cleaner bag, sneezing a ton while wading through dust balls and cat hair, and then pulling out three valuable things sucked up in there — a tiny doll’s comb, the back of an earring, a couple of coins — and then tells us all about those three valuable things in a warm and witty way. And the best part? We don’t have to vacuum!

• Frequency: Sporadic (approx. 1–2x / month)

• Perfect for: Business and self-help book lovers looking to inject more into their brain and anyone looking to stay on top of “thinking trends”

• Number of subscribers: >320,000

• Signup Form: https://www.bakadesuyo.com/ (Wait for the pop-up)

8. Austin Kleon’s Newsletter 

I like the idea that success blocks future success. Are you killing it as a real estate agent? Great. But… what if you hadn’t quit ballet when you were twenty-two? Would you be on Broadway right now? Hard to know because you’re selling so many condos. Are you a great Vice President Of Something at your company? Fantastic. But what artistic itches remain inside you’re always thinking about scratching? Austin Kleon’s newsletter helps me scratch those itches. He’s a former reference librarian turned bestselling author (Steal Like An Artist, How To Keep Going) who points my brain at all kinds visual art, “ear candy,” quotes, and artistic ideas every Friday morning. A great way to keep challenging my own ideas and helps me explore lots of little “what if I dids.”

• Frequency: Weekly (Fridays)

• Perfect for: People who want to rock themselves out of stasis, those who like getting their brain poked with art, and those who feel a bit uncultured (like me) in big broad areas like music and painting and film

• Number of Subscribers: > 60,000

• Signup Form: https://austinkleon.com/newsletter/

7. Aha Parenting by Dr. Laura Markham

I am trying to be a better dad. Sometimes I yell at my kids and then feel a huge wave of shame. I get frustrated when it’s taking fifteen minutes to put on rainboots because we’re late and it’s not raining, even though my kids aren’t doing anything wrong. They’re kids. So often I find what I’m lacking are the words. The phrases. The child logic brain to know what to say and how to say it in a way that’s meaningful to them. And that’s exactly what Dr. Laura helps with. Her emails are simple, clear, and, I like to remind myself, aspirational. So, what do we do now to get ready? Make it a game. “You can’t put your boots on! No way, nooooooo wayy!” And my wife Leslie’s new technique of playing a song as a countdown to get going. (“Bust A Move” by Young MC works great. Yes, I put that link to their live 1989 Arsenio Hall performance, just because.) Plus, lots of other things. Some days are frustrating. But Dr. Laura’s email is helping me (slowly) become a better dad.

• Frequency: You choose between weekly or weekly + two blog posts

• Perfect for: Parents who want to be better parents, those fascinated by language and communication, and (for the same reason) managers and leaders of teams

• Number of Subscribers: > 130,000

• Signup Form: At the bottom of https://www.ahaparenting.com/

6. Granted by Adam Grant 

Adam Grant is the nerd’s Superman. Youngest tenured faculty in history of Wharton. (I was still in school when he got tenure.) Writes a New York Times column. Gives TED Talks. Drops an award-winning podcast. And, you know, debates Malcolm Gladwell in his spare time. I think it’s safe to say he’s at the top of the social sciences Pyramid of Influence. Every month his Granted newsletter gives me a little peek at the world through his eyes. I always find at least one article to share with friends and family. (I really liked this profile on Adam from Philly Mag.)

• Frequency: Monthly

• Perfect for: Business book junkies, leaders looking to become better leaders, those looking for new ways of thinking about same old things …

• Number of Subscribers: >100,000

• Signup Form: https://www.adamgrant.net/newsletter

*** Ahhlife.com 

This one isn’t a newsletter so I gave it three asterisks instead. But it’s gold. And it’s one of my faves. Let’s start with this: Do you journal? You should! It’s good for your brain. Good for your body. Research shows it makes you happy. I talk about journaling, I make YouTube videos about journaling, I even make actual physical journals, but guess what? I suck at journaling. That’s why I’m always preaching about it. I’m preaching to myself. Here’s what happens: I snap myself into the journaling habit! I get there! I’m there! I’m doing it, I’m journaling, for a day, a few days, for maybe a week. And then I fall off. Bam. Right to the ground. So now I’ve come up with a patchwork journaling system that has been working for a while. How does it work? Well, first, I surround myself with journals. Two-Minute Mornings in the morning. A longform journal of blank pages on my bedstand to squeeze out late-night anxieties. And… what else? This puppy. Ahhlife.com. What is it? A great little free email journaling subscription that helps me supplement my constantly floundering home journaling efforts. A little plug for the drug. They send me an email on the dates and time I picked and I just reply back with my entry … and I’m done. Super quick. Super easy.

• Frequency: You pick your own date / time frequency. (I do Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays at 9pm.)

• Perfect for: People who already know the benefits of journaling but are having trouble getting into the routine…

• Number of Subscribers: (Not listed)

• Signup Form: https://ahhlife.com/ (Click “Start your journal now”)

5. Seth Godin’s Blog Posts

Seth is best known as a marketing guru who’s written 19 (!) bestselling books. But I think of him as this deeply enlightened Yoda spouting pithy and almost coded bits of wisdom that sometimes fly way over my head and other times hit me with a ton of bricks and help me completely re-orient myself in the machine. I absolutely love listening to him.

• Frequency: Daily (!?!?)

• Perfect for: Anyone interested in human nature, entrepreneurs and those working without a safety net, and, of course, marketing folks…

• Number of Subscribers: (Not listed)

• Signup Form: https://seths.blog/subscribe/

4. The Ryan Holiday Reading Recommendation Email

Do you remember when you were a kid and your parents harped on you to read all the time? They got you a bookshelf. They read to you at night. Do you still live with them? If not, who harps on you to read now? Well, Ryan Holiday will. He’s happy to! Every month he sends out a list of the 5–10 books he’s consumed together with the not-so-subtle plotline to “Read more books, dummy!” He preaches about how it’s work, your job, your education. His tastes veer towards classics, Stoic philosophy, biographies, translations. “Smart books for smart people.” Yes, I feel really dumb reading his list sometimes. But it always, always gives me a good push. (By the way, I liked Ryan’s email list so much I completely copied it, with his permission, and started my own Monthly Reading Email)

• Frequency: Monthly

• Perfect for: Readers looking for the next great book, booksellers and librarians and book industry folks, anyone aspiring to be a better writer or reader…

• Number of Subscribers: > 100,000

• Signup Form: https://ryanholiday.net/reading-newsletter/

3. Brain Food by Shane Parrish

Shane Parrish is a former Canadian spy whose weekly Brain Food email aims to break through the “fast food noise” of the world with a grounded, thoughtful reflection of how we’re seeing the world right back to us. Super high level. Way above the fray. Thinking about thinking. A fantastic zoom-out and perfect way to start your week. He’s a kindred spirit on reading more books, too. (Note: Although Shane’s email is the only one on this list with a sponsor, I’ve chosen to include it because of the Ethics he shares on his About page.)

• Frequency: Weekly (Sundays)

• Number of Subscribers: > 200,000

• Perfect for: Anyone who feels too micro wanting to get more macro, people looking for an edge, and I know this will sound like a contradiction, but those also looking to slow down their thinking and mentally chill more …

• Signup Form: https://fs.blog/newsletter/

2. Take 5 with Mel Robbins

Whenever I open up Mel’s email I feel like I’m hanging out behind the scenes with an A-list celebrity who’s somehow radically self-aware, authentic, and even self-critical. Her weekly email sounds like a long email from a friend who shares the shame she felt visiting her grandmother after not visiting for years, the pain of her son being bullied at school, and even being a mom of three deciding she needed pelvic physio and encouraging everyone to look into it. I love Mel’s sharp, insightful, empathetic tone on how to build your best life. Makes sense she’s one of the world’s most booked female speakers, has sold more books on Audible’s self-publishing platform than anybody, and why one day last year every single recommended video on my YouTube sidebar featured Mel Robbins. YouTube knows something. And TV execs watch YouTube! Makes sense she’s hosting a national talk show debuting this fall. I’ve already heard people calling Mel the White Oprah. She is three big flame emojis.

• Frequency: Weekly (Thursdays)

• Number of Subscribers: > 350,000

• Perfect for: Anyone looking for post-modern self-help, a no-BS kick in the pants, and a strong passionate friendly voice whispering in their ear once a week…

• Signup Form: https://melrobbins.com/

1. Raptitude: Getting Better At Being Human by David Cain

Ten years ago David Cain wrote an article on Raptitude mentioning my blog 1000 Awesome Things and I noticed a traffic spike and hyperlinked over to say hello. I wrote that blog for four years. David’s been writing his for over ten (ten!) and has been constantly getting deeper and deeper into what it means to (yes) get better at being human. David is a fortysomething guy from Winnipeg and he’s one of the best street-level philosophers out there. He writes about The Elegant Art of Not Giving A Shit and how Everything You Own Is A Relationship You’re In and about The Simple Joy of “No Phones Allowed.” (I like his writing so much I got permission to quote him a bunch in The Happiness Equation.) My wife Leslie and I often swap Raptitude posts back and forth over email with our thoughts on top. Because I know so many “thought leaders” who read David’s writing I sometimes think of him as a bit of a thought leader’s thought leader. His writing is crisp and thoughtful and occasionally veers into challenging and cerebral waters. David Cain isn’t on the lecture circuit. His books aren’t front of the bookstore. He isn’t posting Insta-stories, sweating the size of his platform, or trying to “build his list” with piles of Facebook ads. Why? Because he’s chill. Because he’s beautiful. And because he’s living the life he preaches.

• Frequency: Sporadic (approx. every 2–4 weeks)

• Perfect for: People looking to live more pacefully, anyone feeling an itchiness about the world today, and people looking to lengthen their attention spans…

• Number of subscribers: >30,000

• Signup Form: https://www.raptitude.com/

And, yes, yes, of course: I also have my own email list which I didn’t put on the list above. I write and send an article every other Wednesday morning to over 30,000 people all about living intentionally (failure, trust, reading, resilience, etc.) Samples? This article you’re reading, “8 More Ways To Read A Lot More Books,” or “Why You Should Never, Ever Retire.” I’d love for you to check it out.

Now, those are my dinner guests!

Time is precious. Attention is precious. Thanks for reading.

A slightly modified version of this article originally appeared on Medium.