The Only 2 Questions To Ask If You're Thinking Of Leaving Your Job
Hey everyone,
Oh, that grass, it’s always greener, isn’t it?
Whether they admit it or not I’m going to guess everyone thinks about changing careers. Eyeballing job postings, dreaming of working abroad from some South American hostel, wondering if it’s time to ask the big boss for a promotion into the open role sitting right above you.
I spent 10 years working at Walmart and over the course of those years I thought many times: “Should I do this, should I do that, should I apply for a role inside, should I apply for a role outside?”
When I left Walmart so I could focus on writing I called up my old boss Dave Cheesewright who gave me two helpful tests to make the decision.
Now, before I share the tests, I don’t want you to get me wrong. Sleepless nights, mental flip-flopping, moments of anxiety, that’s all part of it too. The goal is not to eliminate that vast array of emotions you’ll feel as you go through a career change. It’s a big decision! And it has huge consequences. Those emotions provide red, yellow and green lights along the path.
But the goal of these two tests is to eliminate any endless contemplation, to help rudder yourself, and just make sure you’re steering your life the right way.
So what are the two tests?
1. The Deathbed Test. You need to ask yourself: “When I’m looking back on my life, from my deathbed, which one of these options will I regret not doing the most?” Use that answer to helpfully guide you. In her book ‘The Top Five Regrets of the Dying,’ palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware shares that the No. 1 regret in life is “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.”
2. The Plan B Test. This is a simple question: “What is my Plan B?” This is the what if it fails test. You have to fully contemplate that failure. Plan for it, envision it, live through it. Could you go back to your former job or former company? Would you go get that degree you always wanted or move to Spain and take that painting class? Or would the bottom fall out of your finances completely? Your Plan B must be comfortable enough to prevent you from freezing you into risk-averse behavior after you make your move. Because if you’re picturing an empty bank account, you won’t take the chances you need to take to be successful in your next act.
For me I was thinking about whether I wanted to leave a big company to work as an author. My Deathbed Test told me “You better do this! You’ll regret it if you don’t!” and My Plan B Test told me “Well, it won’t be pretty, but if this whole thing falls to ruins, I guess I’ll polish the resume, knock on doors, and try and find another job.”
It didn’t sound so bad when I put it that way.
I hope these two tests help you along your path.
Good luck,
Neil
There's one more principle I like to apply in these situations...the "HELL YES!"
Already where you want to be but still having a hard time getting stuff done? Here are the 10 things you can do each morning to help you make the most of your day.
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The most famous gratitude letter of all time?
Hey everyone,
I went down deep into the rabbit hole to interview Maria Popova recently. She’s the wonder behind The Marginalian (formerly called Brainpickings) and one of her 3 most formative books is ‘Leaves of Grass,’ originally self-published in 1855 by total unknown 35-year-old newspaperman Walt Whitman.
I bought a paperback of ‘Leaves of Grass’ and began flipping through it and the poems hit me—wow. They were rubber mallets to the forehead! Whitman tackles self-love, self-awareness, sensuality, and homoeroticism, among many other topics, in ways that were unheard of 169 years ago. No wonder the collection of poems, endlessly revised and re-edited until his death 37 years later, is often considered *the* classic of American poetry.
As I was researching the book I was somewhat shocked to discover that Walt Whitman is considered the inventor of the ‘book blurb’—you know, those glowing reviews slapped on every book telling you how good it is? Nobody had done that till Walt wrote to Total Intellectual Stud Ralph Waldo Emerson saying his work had inspired ‘Leaves of Grass’ and Emerson wrote him a glowing letter back—perhaps the greatest gratitude letter of all time!—which Whitman shrewdly excerpted onto the spine of the second edition, like this:
I Greet You
at the Beginning of A
Great Career
R.W. Emerson
Not bad! Maria told me that in her inexhaustible research on Whitman she discovered Emerson was never asked for permission and was actually quite pissed about this! But they made up years later.
Still, that original letter, from Emerson to Whitman, is a thing of beauty, and it is credited with spiking the popularity of ‘Leaves of Grass’ to its place of preeminence today.
Here’s the letter in full with three somewhat-illegible pics below compliments of the Library of Congress followed by the text in full:
Dear Sir,
I am not blind to the worth of the wonderful gift of "Leaves of Grass." I find it the most extraordinary piece of wit & wisdom that America has yet contributed. I am very happy in reading it, as great power makes us happy. It meets the demand I am always making of what seemed the sterile & stingy Nature, as if too much handiwork or too much lymph in the temperament were making our western wits fat & mean. I give you joy of your free & brave thought. I have great joy in it. I find incomparable things said incomparably well, as they must be. I find the courage of treatment, which so delights us, & which large perception only can inspire. I greet you at the beginning of a great career, which yet must have had a long foreground somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion; but the solid sense of the book is a sober certainty. It had the best merits, namely, of fortifying & encouraging.
I did not know until I, last night, saw the book advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the name as real & available for a post-office. I wish to see my benefactor, & have felt much like striking my tasks, & visiting New York to pay you my respects.
R.W. Emerson
Letter to Walter Whitman July 21, 1855
Nice, isn't it! What's the takeaway?
Just that words have power and letters of gratitude are so rare these days. If you send one, you never know, you just might change someone's life.
So in a way this letter is a little reminder to tell somebody who's doing a great job that they're doing a great job. Doesn't cost a lot! But perhaps changes a great deal.
Have a wonderful week everyone,
Neil
Did that whet your appetite for some poetry? Here is a silly, if perennially prescient, favorite from Roald Dahl.
And a beauty that echos Whitman from J. Drew Lanham.
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How To Have More (And Better!) Vacation
I researched broken vacation policies.
The solution is not what you think.
Hey everyone,
I thought as we get close to 'summer vacation' time I'd share an article I wrote with Shashank Nigam for Harvard Business Review about the idea of 'forced' vacation time. Has the idea caught on? No! Not at all! And yet: I keep thinking it has legs. It certainly worked at this small business. Take a read and I'd love to hear what your organization does to make vacation really work...
Neil
What One Company Learned from Forcing Employees to Use Their Vacation Time
Written by Neil Pasricha & Shashank Nigam
Have you ever felt burned out at work after a vacation? I’m not talking about being exhausted from fighting with your family at Walt 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 administrative headache. Then most people have to frantically cram extra work into the week(s) 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.)
Would it help if we got more paid vacation? 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.
So what’s the progressive approach? Is it the Adobe, 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. “In that year,” he said, “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 recently 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 week off every seven weeks. 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.
After this experiment was in place for 12 weeks, 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?
There were two points of constructive feedback that came back from the test:
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 12 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.
Fix your vacation system. You’ll be doing better, more important work.
Contrary to popular discourse, we actually do like to work...
...But that doesn't mean you're in the right job to feel fulfilled—even if it has a great vacation policy!
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The fundamental unit of urban life
Hey everyone,
I've been a subscriber on Robin Sloan's email list for a while. He's the author of 'Moonbound,' 'Sourdough,' and 'Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore.' I noticed in his last email he had a nice little ode about the value of local restaurants—and local small business, in general.
As Robin writes:
It is physical establishments—storefronts and markets, cafes and restaurants—that makes cities worth inhabiting. Even the places you don't frequent provide tremendous value to you, because they draw other people out, populating the sidewalks. They generate urban life in its fundamental unit, which is: the bustle.
I love that! Jane Jacobs, author of 'The Death and Life of Great American Cities,' said, "By its nature, the metropolis provides what otherwise could be given only by traveling; namely, the strange." I love strange. I fear the WALL-E-like days with drone-delivered Amazon packages dropping over everybody's tall hedges and gated drives while Main Street is all boarded up.
The whole piece reminds me of a word Roger Martin taught us—or taught me, at least!—back in Chapter 68 of 3 Books which is "multi-homing." Simply remembering that, as consumers, we have the power to resist the "single home" desires of most companies—just use Uber for rides! just use Meta for social! just use Netflix for TV!—and spread our dollars around.
I think of this when I see neighborhood hardware stores go under while we all Amazon packs of nails to ourselves instead of walking down the street.
I'm trying to keep focusing on small business—buying local, supporting my neighbors—and this essay was a nice reminder. I hope you enjoy it. To check out more of Robin's work, including his new book 'Moonbound,' visit his website here or sign up for his email list here.
Have a great week everyone,
Neil
Public Service: Good To Eat
Written by Robin Sloan
I’m an ardent booster of my little neighborhood, roughly where Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville mash together, up against the railroad tracks, an old meatpacking district now residential (small single-family, sprawling condo) and industrial (the country’s tastiest jam, sophisticated cardboard box manufacturing machines) and intellectual (mostly biotech, including a mycelium leather lab).
Berkeley Bowl West, arguably the best grocery store in the country, sits along a bucolic greenway.
There are also restaurants, of course, and one in particular has transformed and enlivened the entire neighborhood. Called Good to Eat, it is the brick-and-mortar realization of a pop-up that for many years offered Taiwanese dumplings at a local brewery. The restaurant is approaching its second anniversary; it has become my favorite in the entire Bay Area.
Good to Eat is the vision of Tony Tung and Angie Lin. Chef Tony is the kitchen mastermind, honoring and renewing classic Taiwanese cuisine. Angie is, among many other things, the restaurant’s voice on Instagram, a fountain of energy and invitation. (Her record, in Instagram Stories, of a recent research trip to Taiwan was basically a mini-documentary.)
A sign of great people is that they attract great people, and Good to Eat’s whole team sparkles. It feels most nights like there must be a camera crew perched just out of sight, filming a segment for some children’s TV show, intended to model “careful work” and “cheerful collaboration” for impressionable young minds.
And there is a surprise here. The casual, friendly service and reasonable (for the Bay Area) prices don’t quite prepare you for the food, which exhibits a level of precision and creativity that approaches fine dining. It’s delightful to realize: all those years with the pop-up, slinging dumplings, THIS is what Chef Tony wanted to do. She had a secret plan!
Just look at this menu.
(If I was ordering today, right now, I’d get the eggplant noodle, the golden kimchi — my favorite kimchi I’ve had anywhere — the bok choy, and, yes, the fu-ru fried chicken. But this would imply NOT getting the red-braised pork belly with daikon radish … hmm … )
All together, it is a perfect package: food, space, esprit de corps. Of course, it helps that Kathryn and I have known these folks since their pop-up days, and are always greeted warmly … but visit twice, and you’ll be greeted warmly, too.
Good to Eat offers the tangible argument: enthusiasm and care are not in short supply. They don’t need to be hoarded. They ought to burn bright, spill out onto the sidewalk.
Here’s something important to understand. It is, at this time, approximately impossible to open and operate a restaurant in the Bay Area. The exorbitant cost of every input yields eye-popping menu prices; those prices keep customers away; the whole commercial equation becomes tenuous. There has been a wave of closures, as longstanding favorites throw in the towel.
It’s not just restaurants. Every kind of physical establishment feels, presently, improbable. It’s so much easier to … do something else. Anything else! Yet, it is physical establishments — storefronts and markets, cafes and restaurants — that make cities (like the donut megalopolis of the Bay Area) worth inhabiting. Even the places you don’t frequent provide tremendous value to you, because they draw other people out, populating the sidewalks. They generate urban life in its fundamental unit, which is: the bustle.
In taking on this task — setting out their sandwich board (you know I love a sandwich board) and opening their doors to everyone — people like Tony and Angie provide a profound public service.
It shouldn’t be so difficult! And this is not just a post-pandemic thing. The Bay Area has, for decades, been a daunting place to open your doors. Many of America’s urban hubs share this overheated deformity. It’s breathtaking to visit a country like Japan and find the most tenuous businesses (with the scantest hours) puttering along happily … simply because the rent is so low.
The shortage of useful, flexible space imposes costs — opportunity costs, if you remember econ 101 — borne by all of us, not just the Tonys and Angies of the world. Maybe that’s fair payment for the other gifts these places provide … but I’m skeptical. We don’t know, will never know, what we’re missing, except that it’s a lot.
Anyway, this is all to say: these days, it’s a minor miracle when a great new restaurant opens and stays open, so if you’re in the Bay Area, you should make haste to 65th Street in Emeryville. The patio is lovely, but/and Kathryn and I always sit at the bar. Get the kimchi. Yeah … get the fried chicken, too.
P.S. Shoutout to Michael Werner who responded to this post by sharing a delightful Kurt Vonnegut story from a PBS interview with journalist David Brancaccio about telling his wife he's going out to buy an envelope:
Oh, she says, well, you're not a poor man. You know, why don't you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet?
And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I'm going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. I meet a lot of people. And, see some great looking babes. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And, and ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don't know. The moral of the story is, is we're here on Earth to fart around. And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And, what the computer people don't realize, or they don't care, is we're dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And, we're not supposed to dance at all anymore.
You know what else makes cities great? Bookstores! And you should spend more time visiting them.
But not every neighborhood has great access to books. Listen to my interview with Latanya and Jerry of Bronx Bound Books to learn how they’re using a bus to bring books to the Bronx.
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Want to beat the algorithm? Don't play the game
How often are you too busy?
Like the fizz is bubbling over the lip of your cup?
Me, honestly, more often than I’d like. I think of myself as a writer. You know: urban flâneuring between coffee shops where I drip out paragraphs of poignancy for my next book.
But, in reality: I got deadlines! At least once or twice a week I look at my to-do list and a little fireball of stress bubbles up inside. Podcasts need editing, posts need writing, slides need building, and, you know, sure: I have some good systems—Parkinson's Law! Untouchable Days! Productivity tips up the wazoo!—but the truth is there’s some bigger issue culturally and I find it helpful to stay aware of it.
A dozen years ago Tim Kreider called the problem the ‘busy’ trap, pointing out that people telling you how busy they are has "become the default response when you ask anyone how they’re doing."
As Tim writes:
Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half-hour with classes and extracurricular activities. They come home at the end of the day as tired as grown-ups. I was a member of the latchkey generation and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from surfing the World Book Encyclopedia to making animated films to getting together with friends in the woods to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which provided me with important skills and insights that remain valuable to this day. Those free hours became the model for how I wanted to live the rest of my life.
And this was in 2012 before the Internet bullet train accelerated into the everything-blurry-out-the-window mode we're cruising at now.
Tim called this busyness out and said we’re feeling too anxious or guilty when we aren’t working. I know I was definitely busy in 2012—I had gone through a divorce and was living in a tiny downtown condo while working as chief of staff for Dave Cheesewright by day, writing 1000 Awesome Things every night, and stuffing in writing of three books and a couple page-a-day calendars while also giving talks every weekend. I felt beyond busy—more dead-man-walking, really, getting 3-4 hours of sleep a night, and coming to epitomize the definition of burnout.
Another person I have found helpful on my journey since then is Douglas Rushkoff. Back in 2012, in my high-burnout years, he was named by MIT Technology Review the 6th most influential thinker in the world (behind heavyweights like Daniel Kahneman and Steven Pinker) although I didn't personally find him until I read his 'Team Human' a few years later. That book sang to my soul and I put it in one of my Very Best Books lists.
I’ve since followed everything Douglas. I started listening to his biweekly Team Human podcast and he was kind enough to blow our minds on 3 Books where his distillation of 'Go, Dog! Go' by P. D. Eastman may be the best children’s book analysis I’ve heard. He then increased the publishing schedule of Team Human and he started up a new Substack newsletter. At age 63, after dozens of books and documentaries, while working full-time as a professor, it seemed he was accelerating into Peak Douglas!
But then he came back to his team human roots and on May 3, 2024 he published a wonderful piece called 'Breaking from the Pace of the Net' with the opening line "I can’t do this anymore."
He goes on to explain:
Oh, I’m happy to write and podcast and teach and talk. That’s me, and that’s all good. What I’m finding difficult, even counter-productive, is to try to keep doing this work at the pace of the Internet.
Podcasting is great fun, and if it were lucrative enough I could probably record and release one or two episodes a week without breaking too much of a sweat. That’s the pace encouraged by both the advertising algorithms and the patronage platforms. Advertisers can more easily bid for spots on a show with a predictable schedule on specified days. Likewise, paying subscribers have come to expect regular content from the podcasts they support. Or at least the platforms encourage a regular rhythm, and embed subtle cues for consistency.
Substack, while great for a lot of things, is even worse as far as its implied demand for near-daily output. If I really wanted to live off a Substack writing career, I would have to ramp up to at least three posts a week. That might work if I were a beat reporter covering sports, but - really - how many cogent ideas about media, society, technology and change can one person develop over the course of a week? More important, how many ideas can one person come up with that are truly worth other people’s time?
I relate deeply to this feeling. The thirsty more-ness the Internet demands! When I launched 3 Books in 2018 it zoomed up the Apple rankings and became one of the Top 100 shows in the world. My podcast friends started texting me "Release your show weekly! Daily! You’ll stay on top!" But I was committed to my lunar-based schedule—I knew I needed time to properly prepare and go deep on each chat—and, of course, the algorithms punished me for that. If others are posting weekly, or daily, or multiple-times-a-day, they will be rewarded for increasing eyeballs and ears on the platform and, unless you keep up, you’ll slowly slip away.
Back to Douglas:
… while I love being able to engage with readers and listeners and Discord members through many modes, I am coming to realize my sense of guilty obligation to all the people on all these platforms is actually misplaced. The platforms themselves are configured to tug on those triggers of responsibility, the same way Snapchat uses the “streak” feature to keep tween girls messaging each other every day. They’re not messaging out of social obligation, but to keep the platform’s metric rising. It’s early training for the way their eventual economic precarity will keep them checking for how much money a Medium post earned, or how many new subscribers were generated by a Substack post.
Most ironically, perhaps, the more content we churn out for all of these platforms, the less valuable all of our content becomes. There’s simply too much stuff. The problem isn’t information overload so much as “perspective abundance.” We may need to redefine “discipline” from the ability to write and publish something every day to the ability hold back. What if people started to produce content when they had actually something to say, rather than coming up with something to say in order to fill another slot?
I love that.
What if people started to produce content when they had actually something to say? It almost sounds so laughably arcane. This is the uncle of yours who posts on Instagram three times a year. But they’re of his birthday, the family reunion, and the time he was in Whistler and saw a Steller’s Jay. It’s the globe-trotting friend who sends a long email once a month—but they’re good, and juicy, and you feel like you’re there. Less is more!
Isn’t this exactly what Cal Newport’s been preaching in his new book 'Slow Productivity' where he encourages us to 1) do fewer things, 2) work at a natural pace, and 3) obsess over quality? Not easy when the Internet rewards doing more things, working at an unnatural pace, and obsessing over quantity.
Cal says the benefits that technology have accrued have also created the ability to stack more into our days than we can possibly handle. He points out that we’re overworked, overstressed, constantly dissatisfied, and trying to hit a bar that feels like it’s always moving up. One reason his book has struck a chord is because, in his words:
This lesson, that doing less can enable better results, defies our contemporary bias toward activity, based on the belief that doing more keeps our options open and generates more opportunities for reward.
Why? Because:
We've become so used to the idea that the only reward for getting better is moving toward higher income and increased responsibilities that we forget that the fruits of pursuing quality can also be harvested in the form of a more sustainable lifestyle.
A more sustainable lifestyle! That sounds good, doesn’t it? I think for me it’s worth checking in with myself to ensure I’m ‘working at a natural pace,’ which, thankfully, I seem to be getting better at than my grinding-till-4am-in-my-shoebox-condo days. And I need to keep relying on truth-tellers, like Tim, Douglas, and Cal here, to help me resonate with something I know deeply but, of course, often forget: life isn’t measured in outputs. It’s measured in love, in connection, in trust, in kindness, in passions, in memories. There are so many invisible but much-more-important guideposts when we look back on our lives from the end of it.
I like how Douglas ended his post with a thoughtful re-balancing act and a public commitment to realignment:
What I value most and, hopefully, offer is an alternative to the pacing and values of digital industrialism. That’s what I’m here for: to express and even model a human approach to living in a digital media environment. So I’m getting off the treadmill, recognizing this assembly line for what it is, and trusting that you will stay with me on this journey in recognition of the fact that less is more.
I’ll stay with you on your journey, Douglas. I like your style! And shall we revisit Tim Kreider, too? Near the end of 'The Busy Trap' he shares a note from a friend who left the rat race in the big city to live abroad:
The present hysteria is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. Not long ago I Skyped with a friend who was driven out of the city by high rent and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the south of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college—she has a big circle of friends who all go out to the cafe together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone’s too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality—driven, cranky, anxious and sad—turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment.
Let’s be wary of our environment. Our culture! How it’s forming, shaping, and styling itself around us, and how we may be bending, tilting, wilting against our natural preferences in ever-so-slight ways that we don’t always notice.
This post is a reminder, to myself, and maybe a few others, to keep checking in, valuing the big things, and steering ourselves towards space, time, and quality—while staying aware and resisting the pressures to do the opposite.
I’ll close with a short poem called 'Leisure' that I keep coming back to. It was written 113 years ago by Welsh poet W. H. Davies and it’s ever-so-simple but carries a reminder I like to tuck in my pocket whenever I find myself wondering whether or not to hit the gas.
What is this life if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.No time to stand beneath the boughs
And stare as long as sheep or cows.No time to see, when woods we pass,
Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.No time to see, in broad daylight,
Streams full of stars, like skies at night.No time to turn at Beauty's glance,
And watch her feet, how they can dance.No time to wait till her mouth can
Enrich that smile her eyes began.A poor life this if, full of care,
We have no time to stand and stare.
I hope you find some time to stand and stare today.
—Neil
Want some inspiration to stop and stare? Listen to my 3 Books conversation on breaking boundaries to become better birdwatchers with J. Drew Lanham.
Can't put down your phone long enough to find a bird? Or feel like you have to turn that bird into content for the social media hype train? Here are 6 ways to reduce cell phone addiction.
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A few pearls of wisdom from John Steinbeck ...
Hey everyone,
I am reading a most wonderful and wonderfully unusual book right now called 'The Log from the Sea of Cortez' by John Steinbeck. Pulitzer Prize-winning author of 'East of Eden,' 'Of Mice and Men,' and 'The Grapes of Wrath.' Did you know in 1940, after controversy erupted around 'The Grapes of Wrath' (“Communist! Labor-sympathizer! Socialist!”), Johnny decided to say eff y’all and ship out. Literally. He and his pal Ed hailed a sardine boat called the Western Flyer and went on a slightly bizarre, world-connecting, animal-collecting, pattern-seeing 4000 mile voyage around the Baja peninsula, into the Gulf of California aka The Sea of Cortez. You know that big long pinky finger of land hanging down the left side of Mexico? That! They sailed down and around that. Yes, I am embarrassed to say I didn’t know what it was called. But that's why we read! The book is arranged in a series of vivid diary entries through March and April 1940.
And it starts with little detailed observations like this on page 25:
A squadron of pelicans crossed our bow, flying low to the waves and acting like a train of pelicans tied together, activated by one nervous system. For they flapped their powerful wings in unison, coasted in unison. It seemed that they tipped a wavetop with their wings now and then, and certainly they flew in the troughs of the waves to save themselves from the wind. They did not look around or change direction. Pelicans seem always to know exactly where they are going.
Little observations. Rolling observations. Bits of philosophical insight between the observation and catalog of all the brightly colored things they’re pulling out of the water. Then it gets deeper and deeper:
The military mind must limit its thinking to be able to perform its function at all. Thus, in talking with a naval officer who had won a target competition with big naval guns, we asked, ‘Have you thought what happens in a little street when one of your shells explodes, of the families torn to pieces, a thousand generations influenced when you signal Fire?’ ‘Of course not,’ he said. ‘Those shells travel so far that you couldn’t possibly see where they land.’ And he was quite correct. If he could really see where they land and what they do, if he could really feel the power in his dropped hand and the waves radiating out from his gun, he would not be able to perform his function. He himself would be the weak point of his gun. But by not seeing, by insisting that it be a problem of ballistics and trajectory, he is a good gunnery officer. And he is too humble to take the responsibility for thinking. The whole structure of his world would be endangered if he permitted himself to think. The pieces must stick within their pattern or the whole thing collapses and the design is gone.
Damn! There’s a reason Maria Popova of the phenomenal The Marginalian says she considers this slender book of non-fiction Steinbeck's finest work.
This quote on Page 72 blew me away:
It was said earlier that hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simple cortex symptom seems to be a primate factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from present bad condition to a future better one. The slave hopes for freedom, the weary man for rest, the hungry for food. And the feeders of hope, economic and religious, have from these simple strivings of dissatisfaction managed to create a world picture which is very hard to escape. Man grows toward perfection; animals grow toward man; bad grows toward good; and down toward up, until our little mechanism, hope, achieve in ourselves probably to cushion the shock of thought, manages to warp our whole world. Probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called ‘the future,’ this shock-absorber, hope, had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live. And out of this therapeutic poultice we build our iron teleologies and twist the tide pools and the stars in to the pattern. To most men the most hateful statement possible is ‘A thing is because it is.’ Even those who have managed to drop the leading-strings of a Sunday-school deity are still led by the unconscious teleology of their developed trick.
And this one a few pages later scared me:
It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or even symptoms, might well correspond to the thickening armor of the great reptiles—a tendency that can end only in extinction…
How about this doozy speaking about the cycles of time:
It is difficult, when watching the little beasts, not to trace human parallels. The greatest danger to a speculative biologist is analogy. It is a pitfall to be avoided—the industry of the bee, the economics of the ant, the villainy of the snake, all in human terms have given us profound misconceptions of the animals. But parallels are amusing if they are not taken too seriously as regards the animal in questions, and are downright valuable as regards humans. The routine of changing domination is a case in point. One can think of the attached and dominant human who has captured the place, the property, and the security. He dominates his area. To protect it, he has police who know him and who are dependent on him for a living. He is protected by good clothing, good houses, and good food. He is protected even against illness. One would say that he is safe, that he would have many children, and that his seed would in a short time litter the world. But in his fight for dominance he has pushed out others of his species who were not so fit to dominate, and perhaps these have became wanderers, improperly clothed, ill fed, having no security and no fixed base. These should really perish, but the reverse seems true. The dominant human, in his security, grows soft and fearful. He spends a great part of his time in protecting himself. Far from reproducing rapidly, he has fewer children, and the ones he does have are ill protected inside themselves because so thoroughly protected without. The lean and hungry grow strong, and the strongest of them are selected out. Having nothing to lose and all to gain, these selected hungry and rapacious ones develop attack rather than defense techniques, and become strong in them, so that one day the dominant man is eliminated and the strong and hungry wanderer takes his place.
These are just a few gems from 'The Log of the Sea of Cortez' by John Steinbeck. I'll publish a book review in my book club on Saturday and you can sign up here to get it:
A powerful 2-minute midday happiness intervention...
Want the secret to happiness?
Having friends.
That's it.
That's the big thing.
That's the biggest thing of all, really.
Robert Waldinger, Director of the 1938 Harvard Adult Development Study, the longest study ever on happiness, says: "... it’s not career achievement, money, exercise, or a healthy diet. The most consistent finding we’ve learned through 85 years of study is: Positive relationships keep us happier, healthier, and help us live longer. Period."
Sonja Lyubomirsky, University of California Professor and author of 'The How Of Happiness,' says: "Perhaps most critical to improving and maintaining happiness is the ability to connect with other people and to create meaningful connecting moments and even chemistry..."
Daniel Gilbert, Harvard Professor and author of 'Stumbling on Happiness,' says: “We are happy when we have family, we are happy when we have friends and almost all the other things we think make us happy are actually just ways of getting more family and friends.”
And yet: we are reporting fewer friends and fewer best friends than ever before.
Friendship is the number one driver to happiness! But we have less of it in our lives than we used to. Why? Online too much? Not connecting IRL? Upwardly mobility and geographically separating?
I sat down with Vivek Murthy a couple years ago — between Surgeon General stints — and he talked about our emerging epidemic of loneliness. Loneliness is a huge deal! It's worse for our health than smoking 15 cigarettes a day. In 2023 Vivek Murthy put out a Surgeon General's warning about the epidemic of loneliness and isolation.
So what's an easy 2-minute happiness intervention we can all do in the middle of our days?
Phone A Friend.
That's it.
Phone A Friend.
Just pick up the phone and phone a friend. What if they don't answer? Doesn't matter. A 2-minute voicemail or voicenote over text works just fine.
And who do you call?
Anybody from your 150!
Oxford Emeritus Professor Robin Dunbar, famous for coining Dunbar's Number, shared that we have a certain cognitive limit on friendship. Our brains support about 150 total friends, period, which he defines as "the sort of people you would like to spend time with if you have the chance, and would be willing to make the effort to do so." Friendship is two-way. We may be replacing a lot of previously two-way time with newer one-way digital relationships but we are happier when we feel more connected.
And 150 might feel familiar! It is also the average size of a wedding, the average number of people who see your Christmas card, and the average size of human villages for thousands of years.
So I'm suggesting your phone somebody in your 150. Ask yourself: Who would come to my wedding if I got married today? Who do I have, or would I have, on my holiday card mailing list?
Now what do you say?
I suggest three things:
State - State the value of the relationship. Tell them you mean something to them! "I was thinking about that time back in college....", "I loved seeing you over the holidays... ", "I just saw our mutual friend..."
Share - Share something going on with you. Something you're thinking about, wrestling with, struggling with. Vulnerability breeds connection! Share something going on in your life. We all have things we feel on top of and things we feel lost in. Share one of each!
Seek - Seek something. Ask a question! Give them something to respond to — a reason to reply with a note of their own. You could go small! "What are you up to this weekend? You could go big! "How do you think about developing your relationship with your in-laws?"
The truth is over the course of our lives we will all spend more and more time alone:
We have the Surgeon General telling us we have an epidemic of loneliness. Yet we know the number one driver of long-term happiness is friendship.
So what's the 2-minute intervention for a happier day?
It's simple.
Phone A Friend.
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A few thoughts on cell phone pervasiveness
Hey everyone,
Culture changes fast.
I remember the first time I walked by one of those winding 50-person lines at an airport Starbucks at six in the morning and thought "When did this happen?" Now it seems normal. I had the same thought last week when I stepped into the bathroom at O'Hare and stood facing a wall of eight urinals, with eight urinators standing in front of them, and every single one of them was ... looking at their phone. At awkward, elbow-at-chin-in-front-of-brick-wall-type angles, but still, it triggered the same thought in me: "When did this happen?"
When everyone has an addiction sometimes it looks like nobody has an addiction.
And, sure, sure, I'm addicted, too. But maybe that's why I find it helpful to try and at least see my behavior from different angles to observe what's changing. I think that's the first step to being more intentional.
I love the August 19, 2008 MIT Technology Review article by Jonathan Franzen called "I Just Called To Say I Love You" which is about 'cell phones, sentimentality, and the decline of public space.' The article feels old, sure, but was written just over 5000 days ago. I like the questions Franzen reminds us of, like when he says that "Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It's about sparing me from the intrusion of other people's personal lives" or, when he talks about the fast-disappearing interactions we have (had?) with cashiers and discusses a person whipping through the checkout lane's "moral obligation to acknowledge [the cashier] as a person."
I pasted the first 1587 words of Franzen's 5775 word article below. Does it remind you of a place that's completely gone ... or maybe something we're starting to increasingly value? I know, for me, I've been leaving my phone home more often. I walk to the store, I buy cottage cheese, I walk home, and suddenly the walk feels a little more like something. I see more birds, talk to more people, and zoom out of my worries. I have also been locking my phone in a K-Safe before bed which gives me 8 or 12 hours completely 'phone free' each day.
Like I said: When everyone has an addiction sometimes it looks like nobody has an addiction.
Enjoy this excerpt from Jonathan Franzen below and let me know if it spurs something for you.
Neil
An excerpt from "I Just Called To Say I Love You" by Jonathan Franzen
Published August 19, 2008 in the MIT Technology Review.
One of the great irritations of modern technology is that when some new development has made my life palpably worse and is continuing to find new and different ways to bedevil it, I’m still allowed to complain for only a year or two before the peddlers of coolness start telling me to get over it already Grampaw–this is just the way life is now.
I’m not opposed to technological developments. Digital voice mail and caller ID, which together destroyed the tyranny of the ringing telephone, seem to me two of the truly great inventions of the late 20th century. And how I love my BlackBerry, which lets me deal with lengthy, unwelcome e-mails in a few breathless telegraphic lines for which the recipient is nevertheless obliged to feel grateful, because I did it with my thumbs. And my noise-canceling headphones, on which I can blast frequency-shifted white noise (“pink noise”) that drowns out even the most determined woofing of a neighbor’s television set: I love them. And the whole wonderful world of DVD technology and high-definition screens, which have already spared me from so many sticky theater floors, so many rudely whispering cinema-goers, so many open-mouthed crunchers of popcorn: yes.
Privacy, to me, is not about keeping my personal life hidden from other people. It’s about sparing me from the intrusion of other people’s personal lives. And so, although my very favorite gadgets are actively privacy enhancing, I look kindly on pretty much any development that doesn’t force me to interact with it. If you choose to spend an hour every day tinkering with your Facebook profile, or if you don’t see any difference between reading Jane Austen on a Kindle and reading her on a printed page, or if you think Grand Theft Auto IV is the greatest Gesamtkunstwerk since Wagner, I’m very happy for you, as long as you keep it to yourself.
The developments I have a problem with are the insults that keep on insulting, the injuries of yesteryear that keep on giving pain. Airport TV, for example: it seems to be actively watched by about one traveler in ten (unless there’s football on) while creating an active nuisance for the other nine. Year after year; in airport after airport; a small but apparently permanent diminution in the quality of the average traveler’s life. Or, another example, the planned obsolescence of great software and its replacement by bad software. I’m still unable to accept that the best word-processing program ever written, WordPerfect 5.0 for DOS, won’t even run on any computer I can buy now. Oh, sure, in theory you can still run it in Windows’ little DOS-emulating window, but the tininess and graphical crudeness of that emulator are like a deliberate insult on Microsoft’s part to those of us who would prefer not to use a feature-heavy behemoth. WordPerfect 5.0 was hopelessly primitive for desktop publishing but unsurpassable for writers who wanted only to write. Elegant, bug-free, negligible in size, it was bludgeoned out of existence by the obese, intrusive, monopolistic, crash-prone Word. If I hadn’t been collecting old 386s and 486s in my office closet, I wouldn’t be able to use WordPerfect at all by now. And already I’m down to my last old 486. And yet people have the nerve to be annoyed with me if I won’t send them texts in a format intelligible to all-powerful Word. We live in a Word world now, Grampaw. Time to take your GOI pill.
But these are mere annoyances. The technological development that has done lasting harm of real social significance–the development that, despite the continuing harm it does, you risk ridicule if you publicly complain about today–is the cell phone.
Just 10 years ago, New York City (where I live) still abounded with collectively maintained public spaces in which citizens demonstrated respect for their community by not inflicting their banal bedroom lives on it. The world 10 years ago was not yet fully conquered by yak. It was still possible to see the use of Nokias as an ostentation or an affectation of the affluent. Or, more generously, as an affliction or a disability or a crutch. There was unfolding, after all, in New York in the late 1990s, a seamless citywide transition from nicotine culture to cellular culture. One day the lump in the shirt pocket was Marlboros, the next day it was Motorola. One day the vulnerably unaccompanied pretty girl was occupying her hands and mouth and attention with a cigarette, the next day she was occupying them with a very important conversation with a person who wasn’t you. One day a crowd gathered around the first kid on the playground with a pack of Kools, the next day around the first kid with a color screen. One day travelers were clicking lighters the second they were off an airplane, the next day they were speed-dialing. Pack-a-day habits became hundred-dollar monthly Verizon bills. Smoke pollution became sonic pollution. Although the irritant changed overnight, the suffering of a self-restrained majority at the hands of a compulsive minority, in restaurants and airports and other public spaces, remained eerily constant. Back in 1998, not long after I’d quit cigarettes, I would sit on the subway and watch other riders nervously folding and unfolding phones, or nibbling on the teatlike antennae that all the phones then had, or just quietly clutching their devices like a mother’s hand, and I would feel something close to sorry for them. It still seemed to me an open question how far the trend would go: whether New York truly wanted to become a city of phone addicts sleepwalking down the sidewalks in icky little clouds of private life, or whether the notion of a more restrained public self might somehow prevail.
Needless to say, there wasn’t any contest. The cell phone wasn’t one of those modern developments, like Ritalin or oversized umbrellas, for which significant pockets of civilian resistance hearteningly persist. Its triumph was swift and total. Its abuses were lamented and bitched about in essays and columns and letters to various editors, and then lamented and bitched about more trenchantly when the abuses seemed only to be getting worse, but that was the end of it. The complaints had been registered, some small token adjustments had been made (the “quiet car” on Amtrak trains; discreet little signs poignantly pleading for restraint in restaurants and gyms), and cellular technology was then free to continue doing its damage without fear of further criticism, because further criticism would be unfresh and uncool. Grampaw.
But just because the problem is familiar to us now doesn’t mean steam stops issuing from the ears of drivers trapped behind a guy chatting on his phone in a passing lane and staying perfectly abreast of a vehicle in the slow lane. And yet: everything in our commercial culture tells the chatty driver that he is in the right and tells everybody else that we are in the wrong–that we are failing to get with the attractively priced program of freedom and mobility and unlimited minutes. Commercial culture tells us that if we’re sore with the chatty driver it must be because we’re not having as good a time as he is. What is wrong with us, anyway? Why can’t we lighten up a little and take out our own phones, with our own Friends and Family plans, and start having a better time ourselves, right there in the passing lane?
Socially retarded people don’t suddenly start acting more adult when social critics are peer-pressured into silence. They only get ruder. One currently worsening national plague is the shopper who remains engrossed in a call throughout a transaction with a checkout clerk. The typical combination in my own neighborhood, in Manhattan, involves a young white woman, recently graduated from someplace expensive, and a local black or Hispanic woman of roughly the same age but fewer advantages. It is, of course, a liberal vanity to expect your checkout clerk to interact with you or to appreciate the scrupulousness of your determination to interact with her. Given the repetitive and low-paying nature of her job, she’s allowed to treat you with boredom or indifference; at worst, it’s unprofessional of her. But this does not relieve you of your own moral obligation to acknowledge her existence as a person. And while it’s true that some clerks don’t seem to mind being ignored, a notably large percentage do become visibly irritated or angered or saddened when a customer is unable to tear herself off her phone for even two seconds of direct interaction. Needless to say, the offender herself, like the chatty freeway driver, is blissfully unaware of pissing anybody off. In my experience, the longer the line behind her, the more likely it is she’ll pay for her $1.98 purchase with a credit card. And not the tap-and-go microchip kind of credit card, either, but the wait-for-the-printed-receipt-and-then-(only then)-with-zombiesh-clumsiness-begin-shifting-the-cell-phone-from-one-ear-to-the-other-and-awkwardly-pin-the-phone-with-ear-to-shoulder-while-signing-the-receipt-and-continuing-to-express-doubt-about-whether-she-really-feels-like-meeting-up-with-that-Morgan-Stanley-guy-Zachary-at-the-Etats-Unis-wine-bar-again-tonight kind of credit card.
There is, to be sure, one positive social consequence of these worsening misbehaviors. The abstract notion of civilized public spaces, as rare resources worth defending, may be all but dead, but there’s still consolation to be found in the momentary ad hoc microcommunities of fellow sufferers that bad behaviors create. To look out your car window and see the steam coming out of another driver’s ears, or to meet the eyes of a pissed-off checkout clerk and to shake your head along with her: it makes you feel a little less alone.
To read the full article from Jonathan Franzen on MIT Technology review, click here.
Why Birds Matter by Jonathan Franzen
Hey everyone,
I am often asked to explain my love of birds. “What?”, friends say, “you get up at the crack of down and slap on cargo points and a Tilley to futz around in the forest looking for sparrows?” I will say I know it sounds odd. But it’s become such a sacred commune with nature, with life, with the natural world. And, like my Rock Clock, it’s a wonderful zoom out, too.
One of the biggest things that got me into birding was the January, 2018 cover story “Why Birds Matter” by Jonathan Franzen. I have read it many times and it continues to deeply resonate. Franzen has a way of thinking around things that I find entrancing. My conversation with him on 3 Books only deepened my respect for him and how he approaches the world.
Hope you like it,
Neil
Why Birds Matter
By Jonathan Franzen | Read here on National Geographic
For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to birds. Only in my 40s did I become a person whose heart lifts whenever he hears a grosbeak singing or a towhee calling and who hurries out to see a golden plover that’s been reported in the neighborhood, just because it’s a beautiful bird, with truly golden plumage, and has flown all the way from Alaska. When someone asks me why birds are so important to me, all I can do is sigh and shake my head, as if I’ve been asked to explain why I love my brothers. And yet the question is a fair one, worth considering in the centennial year of America’s Migratory Bird Treaty Act: Why do birds matter?
My answer might begin with the vast scale of the avian domain. If you could see every bird in the world, you’d see the whole world. Things with feathers can be found in every corner of every ocean and in land habitats so bleak that they’re habitats for nothing else. Gray gulls raise their chicks in Chile’s Atacama Desert, one of the driest places on Earth.
Emperor penguins incubate their eggs in Antarctica in winter. Goshawks nest in the Berlin cemetery where Marlene Dietrich is buried, sparrows in Manhattan traffic lights, swifts in sea caves, vultures on Himalayan cliffs, chaffinches in Chernobyl. The only forms of life more widely distributed than birds are microscopic.
To survive in so many different habitats, the world’s 10,000 or so bird species have evolved into a spectacular diversity of forms. They range in size from the ostrich, which can reach nine feet in height and is widespread in Africa, to the aptly named bee hummingbird, found only in Cuba. Their bills can be massive (pelicans, toucans), tiny (weebills), or as long as the rest of their body (sword-billed hummingbirds). Some birds—the painted bunting in Texas, Gould’s sunbird in South Asia, the rainbow lorikeet in Australia—are gaudier than any flower. Others come in one of the nearly infinite shades of brown that tax the vocabulary of avian taxonomists: rufous, fulvous, ferruginous, bran-colored, foxy.
Birds are no less diverse behaviorally. Some are highly social, others anti. African queleas and flamingos gather in flocks of millions, and parakeets build whole parakeet cities out of sticks. Dippers walk alone and underwater, on the beds of mountain streams, and a wandering albatross may glide on its 10-foot wingspan 500 miles away from any other albatrosses. I’ve met friendly birds, like the New Zealand fantail that once followed me down a trail, and I’ve met mean ones, like the caracara in Chile that swooped down and tried to knock my head off when I stared at it too long. Roadrunners kill rattlesnakes for food by teaming up on them, one bird distracting the snake while another sneaks up behind it. Bee-eaters eat bees. Leaftossers toss leaves. Thick-billed murres can dive underwater to a depth of 700 feet, peregrine falcons downward through the air at 240 miles an hour. A wren-like rushbird can spend its entire life beside one half-acre pond, while a cerulean warbler may migrate to Peru and then find its way back to the tree in New Jersey where it nested the year before.
Birds aren’t furry and cuddly, but in many respects they’re more similar to us than other mammals are. They build intricate homes and raise families in them. They take long winter vacations in warm places. Cockatoos are shrewd thinkers, solving puzzles that would challenge a chimpanzee, and crows like to play. (On days so windy that more practical birds stay grounded, I’ve seen crows launching themselves off hillsides and doing aerial somersaults, just for the fun of it, and I keep returning to the YouTube video of a crow in Russia sledding down a snowy roof on a plastic lid, flying back up with the lid in its beak, and sledding down again.) And then there are the songs with which birds, like us, fill the world. Nightingales trill in the suburbs of Europe, thrushes in downtown Quito, hwameis in Chengdu. Chickadees have a complex language for communicating—not only to each other but to every bird in their neighborhood—about how safe or unsafe they feel from predators. Some lyrebirds in eastern Australia sing a tune their ancestors may have learned from a settler’s flute nearly a century ago. If you shoot too many pictures of a lyrebird, it will add the sound of your camera to its repertoire.
But birds also do the thing we all wish we could do but can’t, except in dreams: They fly. Eagles effortlessly ride thermals; hummingbirds pause in midair; quail burst into flight heart-stoppingly. Taken all together, the flight paths of birds bind the planet together like 100 billion filaments, tree to tree and continent to continent. There was never a time when the world seemed large to them. After breeding, a European swift will stay aloft for nearly a year, flying to sub-Saharan Africa and back, eating and molting and sleeping on the wing, without landing once. Young albatrosses spend as many as 10 years roving the open ocean before they first return to land to breed. A bar-tailed godwit has been tracked flying nonstop from Alaska to New Zealand, 7,264 miles in nine days, while a ruby-throated hummingbird may burn up a third of its tiny body weight to cross the Gulf of Mexico. The red knot, a small shorebird species, makes annual round-trips between Tierra del Fuego and the Canadian Arctic; one long-lived individual, named B95 for the tag on its leg, has flown more miles than separate the Earth and the moon.
There is, however, one critical ability that human beings have and birds do not: mastery of their environment. Birds can’t protect wetlands, can’t manage a fishery, can’t air-condition their nests. They have only the instincts and the physical abilities that evolution has bequeathed to them. These have served them well for a very long time, 150 million years longer than human beings have been around. But now human beings are changing the planet—its surface, its climate, its oceans—too quickly for birds to adapt to by evolving. Crows and gulls may thrive at our garbage dumps, blackbirds and cowbirds at our feedlots, robins and bulbuls in our city parks. But the future of most bird species depends on our commitment to preserving them. Are they valuable enough for us to make the effort?
Value, in the late Anthropocene, has come almost exclusively to mean economic value, utility to human beings. And certainly many wild birds are usefully edible. Some of them in turn eat noxious insects and rodents. Many others perform vital roles—pollinating plants, spreading seeds, serving as food for mammalian predators—in ecosystems whose continuing wildness has touristic or carbon-sequestering value. You may also hear it argued that bird populations function, like the proverbial coal-mine canary, as important indicators of ecological health. But do we really need the absence of birds to tell us when a marsh is severely polluted, a forest slashed and burned, or a fishery destroyed? The sad fact is that wild birds, in themselves, will never pull their weight in the human economy. They want to eat our blueberries.
What bird populations do usefully indicate is the health of our ethical values. One reason that wild birds matter—ought to matter—is that they are our last, best connection to a natural world that is otherwise receding. They’re the most vivid and widespread representatives of the Earth as it was before people arrived on it. They share descent with the largest animals ever to walk on land: The house finch outside your window is a tiny and beautifully adapted living dinosaur. A duck on your local pond looks and sounds very much like a duck 20 million years ago, in the Miocene epoch, when birds ruled the planet. In an ever more artificial world, where featherless drones fill the air and Angry Birds can be simulated on our phones, we may see no reasonable need to cherish and support the former rulers of the natural realm. But is economic calculation our highest standard? After Shakespeare’s King Lear steps down from the throne, he pleads with his elder two daughters to grant him some vestige of his former majesty. When the daughters reply that they don’t see the need for it, the old king bursts out: “O, reason not the need!” To consign birds to oblivion is to forget what we’re the children of.
A person who says, “It’s too bad about the birds, but human beings come first” is making one of two implicit claims. The person may mean that human beings are no better than any other animal—that our fundamentally selfish selves, which are motivated by selfish genes, will always do whatever it takes to replicate our genes and maximize our pleasure, the nonhuman world be damned. This is the view of cynical realists, to whom a concern for other species is merely an annoying form of sentimentality. It’s a view that can’t be disproved, and it’s available to anyone who doesn’t mind admitting that he or she is hopelessly selfish. But “human beings come first” may also have the opposite meaning: that our species is uniquely worthy of monopolizing the world’s resources because we are not like other animals, because we have consciousness and free will, the capacity to remember our pasts and shape our futures. This opposing view can be found among both religious believers and secular humanists, and it too is neither provably true nor provably false. But it does raise the question: If we’re incomparably more worthy than other animals, shouldn’t our ability to discern right from wrong, and to knowingly sacrifice some small fraction of our convenience for a larger good, make us more susceptible to the claims of nature, rather than less? Doesn’t a unique ability carry with it a unique responsibility?
A few years ago in a forest in northeast India, I heard and then began to feel, in my chest, a deep rhythmic whooshing. It sounded meteorological, but it was the wingbeats of a pair of great hornbills flying in to land in a fruiting tree. They had massive yellow bills and hefty white thighs; they looked like a cross between a toucan and a giant panda. As they clambered around in the tree, placidly eating fruit, I found myself crying out with the rarest of all emotions: pure joy. It had nothing to do with what I wanted or what I possessed. It was the sheer gorgeous fact of the great hornbill, which couldn’t have cared less about me.
The radical otherness of birds is integral to their beauty and their value. They are always among us but never of us. They’re the other world-dominating animals that evolution has produced, and their indifference to us ought to serve as a chastening reminder that we’re not the measure of all things. The stories we tell about the past and imagine for the future are mental constructions that birds can do without. Birds live squarely in the present. And at present, although our cats and our windows and our pesticides kill billions of them every year, and although some species, particularly on oceanic islands, have been lost forever, their world is still very much alive. In every corner of the globe, in nests as small as walnuts or as large as haystacks, chicks are pecking through their shells and into the light.
If you enjoyed this article, don’t miss Jonathan on Chapter 137 of 3 Books.
And if he didn’t manage to convince you, here are 8 reasons why it’s time to become a birdwatcher.
A few short thoughts on death...
Hey everyone,
Leslie’s grandmother Donna died recently. To quote the obituary she was a "dog whisperer, enthusiastic nature lover, savvy Scrabble player, intrepid traveler, Blue Jays fan, organizer of special occasions, chocolate chip cookie-maker, generous gift-giver, reader, and lover of maple syrup, chocolate, butter tarts, and all things sweet."
We had the burial — out in the cold, on a rainy day, over a hole in the ground in St. Catharines, Ontario. Her three living children all spoke and all the grandchildren (and grandchildren-in-law, like me) said a few words and threw a rose onto the urn holding her ashes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about death. I do that! It was the closing riff of my TED Talk and the basis of my TED Listen. More recently: Is death … avoidable? Or is it, to quote Saul Bellow, more like “the dark backing that a mirror needs if we are to see anything”?
First I’ll share a note I wrote to myself just after Donna died. In that sort of stunning silent phase. Then I’ll share two short poems read by her children (Leslie’s dad and aunt) at the burial. And, finally, let’s close with a quote on death from philosopher Bertrand Russell.
So, first up, my little note on how Donna died…
How Donna Died
Fast. That’s the first word that comes to mind. It happened quick. Like three months. Halloween she’s dressed as a ghost sitting beside me on the porch handing out candy. At 9pm, long after the streets had quieted, she said “I’m off to Jenny’s!” Leslie’s younger sister lived twenty minutes west — the exact opposite direction of her place. “Grandma,” Leslie said. “Don’t you want to head home? I’m sure Jenny would understand.” “Oh, don’t be silly! I’m a night owl!” We got a text the next morning with a picture of her squeezing our tiny niece dressed up as a pumpkin. She lost her license the next week. Hit the gas instead of the brakes in her parking garage. They said she had to get a health check. Health check said she had dementia. “Dementia?”, she scoffed. “Since when have I had dementia?” We never thought she had dementia. She forgot stuff. Who didn’t? Her boyfriend lost his license the next week. Suddenly we were talking carpools to drive grandma to her boyfriend’s place for the weekend. Then came the move. Her place finally sold and the new apartment was right downtown. We could walk from our house. “Scrabble every week,” we agreed. Week later that procedure finally came up that was scheduled months ago. For her bladder. But after the procedure she was in more pain — not less. Then they did another procedure to fix the first one. Then she was really cold for a few days. Then she couldn’t get out of bed. Then she got pale. Then Karen flew up. Then the cousins came. And then she died. Fast.
I miss you, Donna.
Next up, a poem read by Donna’s youngest daughter Karen (Leslie’s aunt) which Donna had cut out and taped to her fridge:
The Peace of Wild Things by Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
It stuns me every time. Next up, a poem read by Donna’s son Mark (Leslie’s dad).
Immortality (Do Not Stand By My Grave and Weep) by Clare Harner
Do not stand
By my grave, and weep.
I am not there,
I do not sleep—
I am the thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints in snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain,
I am the gentle, autumn rain.
As you awake with morning’s hush,
I am the swift, up-flinging rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight,
I am the day transcending night.
Do not stand
By my grave, and cry—
I am not there,
I did not die.
Not the kind of poem you can really read, or listen to, at someone's burial without crying. But I guess that's part of the point: a kind of philosophical adjustment, versus a physical adjustment, from the dead to the living. Somewhat related to both poems is this quote I found from Bertrand Russell in his essay “How To Grow Old.”
“The best way to overcome [the fear of death]—so at least it seems to me—is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river: small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The person who, in old age, can see life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he or she cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will not be unwelcome. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do and content in the thought that what was possible has been done.”
So that’s it. Like I said: a few short thoughts on death. If you have a poem, reflection, or piece of art/writing that you use to contemplate death, please just reply and let me know.
Thanks,
Neil
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Letter to his 11-year-old daughter in camp by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hey everyone,
I give my kids advice. Some good. Some contradicting. Some are gems from others — polished my way. Many are, I'm sure, horribly wrong. Some definitely worrisome.
I guess that's what we all get from our parents at the end of the day. A role model! A north star! A person doing a lot of stuff ‘I'm trying to learn.’ It was in that spirit I came across this fascinating 90-year-old letter that F. Scott Fitzgerald ('The Great Gatsby', 'Tender Is The Night') sent his 11-year-old daughter Frances when she was away at camp.
I love the tone of the letter — an almost adult-level of knowing-understanding combined with the conciliatory twang of an elder wanting the best for their dearest. But maybe from an elder who also happens to know that most advice is flimsy? F. Scott Fitzgerald died when Frances, his only child, was just 19. He was 44. (Maybe hitting 44 is what's compelling me to try the same?)
I hope you enjoy this Letter To His 11-Year-Old Daughter in Camp by F. Scott Fitzerald.
Neil
PS. If you're curious about the Shakespeare Sonnet he references, I posted it here for you!
F. Scott Fitzgerald to His 11-Year-Old Daughter in Camp
AUGUST 8, 1933
LA PAIX RODGERS' FORGE
TOWSON, MARYLAND
DEAR PIE:
I feel very strongly about you doing duty. Would you give me a little more documentation about your reading in French? I am glad you are happy—but I never believe much in happiness. I never believe in misery either. Those are things you see on the stage or the screen or the printed page, they never really happen to you in life.
All I believe in in life is the rewards for virtue (according to your talents) and the punishments for not fulfilling your duties, which are doubly costly. If there is such a volume in the camp library, will you ask Mrs. Tyson to let you look up a sonnet of Shakespeare's in which the line occurs Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds....
I think of you, and always pleasantly, but I am going to take the White Cat out and beat his bottom hard, six times for every time you are impertinent. Do you react to that?...
Half-wit, I will conclude. Things to worry about:
Worry about courage
Worry about cleanliness
Worry about efficiency
Worry about horsemanship...
Things not to worry about:
Don't worry about popular opinion
Don't worry about dolls
Don't worry about the past
Don't worry about the future
Don't worry about growing up
Don't worry about anybody getting ahead of you
Don't worry about triumph
Don't worry about failure unless it comes through your own fault
Don't worry about mosquitoes
Don't worry about flies
Don't worry about insects in general
Don't worry about parents
Don't worry about boys
Don't worry about disappointments
Don't worry about pleasures
Don't worry about satisfactions
Things to think about:
What am I really aiming at?
How good am I really in comparison to my contemporaries in regard to:
(a) Scholarship
(b) Do I really understand about people and am I able to get along with them?
(c) Am I trying to make my body a useful instrument or am I neglecting it?
With dearest love,
Sign Up for a Dose of Inspiration:
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The Very Best Books I Read in 2023
Hey everyone,
The weather outside is frightful and, my dear – it's time to read.
I've shared an annual "Best Of" reading list in 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 so that suddenly makes this the 7th Annual.
I put these lists together to throw a log on our collective reading fire and, of course, to inspire gift-giving. All book titles link to "link-splitters" that offer a rotating list of indie bookstores to choose from – or, of course, the big guys. I get zero kickbacks from any of them but, as I said in my birthday advice, I feel like there is a relationship between how much you buy local and how nice the flowers are in your park. (Here's a helpful online "indie bookstore finder.”)
Also! Below each book I've given a "Perfect for" list of readers who may enjoy it. And, if you're looking for non-book gift suggestions, check out my unconventional holiday gift guide.
And now: here are the very best books I read in 2023.
Thanks, as always, for reading,
Neil
P.S. Interested in more of my reviews? Click here to join the Book Club email list.
20. Console Wars: Sega, Nintendo, and the Battle that Defined a Generation by Blake J. Harris. A torridly-paced high-flying business book that reads like an action movie – all told from a fascinating fly-on-the-wall perspective taking you deep into the trenches during the epic battle between Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo. But that’s just the battle. The book zooms out into the long-term war between these two relatively ancient companies and covers ground like Nintendo’s culture of consistency over 100 years, the story of Atari taking off and then flaming out, fascinating risky strategies like Sega opening their first and only Sega store – complete with huge billboards all over town – right outside Bentonville, Arkansas Walmart Home Office after Walmart said they wouldn’t carry the Genesis, and the history of the ‘Sega Scream’ at the end of those “Welcome To The Next Level” commercials. We follow along into Nintendo’s monopolistic >90% market share position with the NES (and hear the real Mario Brothers history) and then track Sega’s emergence through marketing, communication, and business strategies Nintendo would never touch. Over the course of the book, Sega goes from less than 5% market share to over 55% when Mortal Kombat comes out. Blake did over 200 interviews and the results are obvious – an unmissable case study on business, strategy, and life.
Perfect for: gamers and grown-up gamers, corporate team leaders, and anyone looking to learn more about business strategy without reading cases or textbooks…
19. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. A mesmerizing 158-page love letter to books and the surprisingly close-feeling dangers that mass echo chambers pose for society at large. Good reading for an era where the majority reads zero books per year. Quick plotline: A book-burning firefighter grows further apart from his Airpods-wearing wife and encounters a curious teenager on his street who jars something loose. Thus begins a frenetic story with our hero skirting the law in favor of finding out what life is like outside the algorithm. Heart-thumping, abstract, evocative, with a pulsing story that ends somewhere near where The Road begins. I read this 60th (!) anniversary edition featuring an Introduction from Neil Gaiman but, of course, this would make a great gift from any used bookstore, too. (See #6 on my holiday gift guide.)
Perfect for: people saying "I want to read more but just don't have the time", book clubbers, and anyone who enjoys classics…
18. Hot Comb by Ebony Flowers. When I was a little kid I read an interview with Bill Gates and he said something like “When I go to a magazine stand I always buy a magazine I’ve never read before. There’s more to learn in those ones.” The sentiment stuck with me. Algorithms push, cajole, and classify us into 1s and 0s but there’s nothing like browsing a local bookstore and stumbling upon things that would never have been recommended to you. Like, for example, earlier this year when I picked up this raw, scratchily-drawn, emotionally braided-together memoir of high-intensity essays telling the story of Ebony as she moves from a trailer park into a black neighborhood outside Baltimore. All somehow told through … hair. Well, not just hair! It’s really about life. And about messages and stories we hear growing up. Themes include ‘acting too white’, casual racism, motherhood, drug abuse, and, in a painful essay, boundaries and mental health – when, after her little sister’s hair becomes an object of interest to her softball team she begins twisting and pulling it all out. Doctors, psychiatrists, and pills are called in to help and the final page will just break your heart. Published by Drawn&Quarterly, which has to be the best comics and graphic novel publishing house in the world.
Perfect for: coming-of-age fans, graphic novel aficionados, people who have struggled to fit in or find their way…
17. The Legacy of Luna: The Story of a Tree, a Woman, and the Struggle to Save the Redwoods by Julia Butterfly Hill. A first-person true story of a woman who climbed into a thousand-year-old tree in the late 90s slated for logging … and lived there for two years until the logging company agreed not to chop it down. Despite the trumpet flourish at the end, this isn’t an inspiring story but a devastating one. A portrait of a century-old trust-based organization getting bought out by a stealthy junk bondsman who discovered it’s much more profitable to endlessly break laws – such as those against clear-cutting and replacing old-growth forests – and just pay the fines which add up to pennies on the dollar of profits. Limp laws, toothless politicians, and corporate intimidation add up to a crucible of growth for Julia – but at an enormous price. Her descriptions of climbing up and living in the tree are so vivid you’ll feel like you’re up there with her. A deep and intimate connection with nature – flying squirrels, black bears, lightning strikes, and more. A nice escape from “today” and a connection point into the larger, broader energies I think many of us need to tap into right now.
Perfect for: Biography fans, environmentalists, and anyone wanting to run away and live up in a tree for a while…
16. Foster by Claire Keegan. Economy! Tight, fast, shrink-wrapped writing that doesn't waste the reader's time. George Saunders talks a lot about this in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (my favorite book on writing) (06/2021). You want economy? Here's a 92-page Irish epic sharing the story of a young girl moving in with foster parents for a year. And I do mean epic. Who says epics have to be long? Ben-Hur? No, they just have to be broad! Vast! Sweeping! Before a long flight, I stopped by to ask Kyle at Type Books if he could recommend some short books. Slip-in-that-tight-front-pocket-of-the-suitcase books. This was the first he grabbed. Check out the first page: "Early on a Sunday, after first Mass in Clonegal, my father, instead of taking me home, drives deep into Wexword towards the coast where my mother's people came from. It is a hot day, bright, with patches of shade and greenish, sudden light along the road. We pass through the village of Shillelagh where my father lost our red Shorthorn in a game of forty-five, and on past the mart in Carnew where the man who won the heifer sold her shortly afterwards. My father throws his hat on the passenger seat, winds down the window, and smokes. I shake -- " and then you just have to turn the page. Because who's talking? Where are they going? And that vivid detail painted with so few words continues throughout. Even the title's economical! Foster could easily have been, you know, That Wild and Magical Year I Spent With My Irish Foster Parents! I admire David Mitchell's economical cover blurb too: "As good as Chekhov." Indeed!
Perfect for: anyone who needs a non-intimidating kick back into reading, people who like slow and subtle films with substance (like, say, 'Past Lives', 'Win Win', or 'Away From Her')…
15. Around the World in 80 Birds by Mike Unwin. Illustrated by Ryuto Miyake. My wife's grandmother gave me this book last Christmas and passed away not long after so I am afraid that my personal emotional connection here slightly inflates my opinion of this book. And yet: There is something unmistakably captivating about it. It's not quite a coffee table book, not quite a thoroughly researched factoid book, but more of a poetic offering. Flits and swoops into birds you may have heard of around the world – quetzals, kiwis, flamingos, oh my! – together with behavioral or historical anecdotes that bring them to life. Mike Unwin's writing is a joy to read but the real offering here is the art. Buy it for the pictures! That stunning art graces every page and brings out the arresting visual beauty of some of our planetary co-habitants.
Perfect for: nature lovers, world travelers, and, of course, the bird-loving or bird-curious…
14. How Many Friends Does One Person Need?: Dunbar's Number and Other Evolutionary Quirks by Robin Dunbar. Have you heard of Dunbar's Number? It's 148, more casually rounded to 150, and is the "suggested cognitive limit for the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships." The number came up in Chapter 101 with Daniels, during our discussion of Sex at Dawn (04/2022) and afterwards I fell into a rabbit hole looking into Dunbar's Number which led me to this wonderful book. Robin Dunbar is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford and he has that rare Feynmanny gift of being smarter than everybody else but still speaking to you like he's sitting next to you on the train. "We share a history, you and I," he begins in Chapter 1. "A history in which our respective stories snake back through time, edging ever closer to each other until finally they meet up in a common ancestor. Perhaps our lineages meet up only a few generations back, or maybe it was a thousand years ago. Perhaps it was so long ago that it predates history -- though even that could not have been more than two hundred thousand years ago, a mere twinkle in earth time. For we modern humans all descended from a common ancestor who roamed the plains of Africa a mere ten thousand generations ago, ten thousand mothers giving birth to ten thousand daughters ... no more than would fit in a town of very modest size today." From this underpinning he goes on to discuss the 'expensiveness' of our giant brains, how they're unbelievably good at coordinating social relationships and connections – but only up to a point. Then we start talking about Dunbar's Number. Robin Dunbar says one good definition for Dunbar's Number is the number of people who would feel an obligation to you and would turn up for you. (He shares how it's no coincidence that data on wedding size shows that, for years and years, it's been 150.) But 150 is just one in a series of numbers. He uses a metaphor of a stone being thrown into a lake that causes a set of ripples -- as the ripples go out they get bigger but the amplitude gets gradually smaller. 15 are "shoulders to cry on" friends, 150 are friends, 500 are acquaintances (maybe coworkers, maybe people who send happy birthday messages on Facebook), and then, finally, there's a 5000-person layer which is the total number of faces you can recognize. Beyond 5000? Strangers. The book is full of endless anthropological trivia – why gossip is good for you, the benefits of nepotism as it relates to connection, how 200 million men alive today are direct descendants of Genghis Khan, and on and on. A particularly fascinating chapter near the end called "Be smart... live longer" shares lines like how there's "a direct link between IQ at age eleven and your chances of celebrating your eighty-fifth birthday" and how "beautiful people are, on average, more intelligent." I've just skimmed a few of the juicier arguments he puts forward in this fascinating book.
Perfect for: community builders and leaders, people who liked Sapiens, history buffs…
13. Bronzeville Boys and Girls by Gwendolyn Brooks. Illustrated by Faith Ringgold. Yet another reason to love independent bookstores? Their ability to arrow-point your attention into the dark-tunneled history of your local, or even hyper-local, community. We’re getting so much more global now. And, you know, there’s the risk of leaving behind where we came from in this forever-flattening … mélange. I was wandering around downtown Chicago when I stumbled on the after-words independent bookstore on East Illinois Street. Right on the front table was a massive display of this children’s book. “BRONZEVILLE!” It screamed. The whole table was just this one book. What’s Bronzeville? A Chicago neighborhood referred to in the early 1900s as the “Black Metropolis” as it became home to thousands fleeing oppression in the South. A massive amount of cultural history occurred here including the Pekin Theater, the first black-owned US theater built in 1905, and the Wabash YMCA, originator of Black History Month and built in 1911. What else? Well, a lot of boys and girls lived in Bronzeville, of course. And Gwendolyn Brooks – the first black Pulitzer Prize winner ever! – distills their pains and pleasures into a series of emotionally hard-punching little poems. Like one called Otto which reads: “It’s Christmas Day. I did not get / The presents that I hoped for. Yet, / It is not nice to frown or fret. / To frown or fret would not be fair. / My dad must never know I care / It’s hard enough for him to bear.” Or Rudolph Is Tired Of The City: “These buildings are too close to me. / I’d like to PUSH away. / I’d like to live in the country, / And spread my arms all day. / I’d like to spread my breath out, too -- / As farmers’ sons and daughters do. / I’d tend the cows and chickens. / I’d do the other chores. / Then, all the hours left I’d go / A-SPREADING out-of-doors."
Perfect for: Midwesterners, fans of children's poetry like Shel Silverstein or Dennis Lee, anyone looking to learn more about black history…
12. The Library Book by Susan Orlean. I got a reply to my book club email in June (06/2023) from longtime 3 Booker Bo Boswell. Bo said he was browsing r/suggestmeabook when he came across the enticingly-titled thread “What’s your field or study (hobbyist or professional) and what’s a cornerstone beginners book for that topic/field?" The 164-time-upvoted top reply by Caleb_Trask19 says: "Librarian here, Susan Orlean’s Library Book is at first glance a true crime book about tracking the arsonist who set fire and burned down the main library in Los Angeles, but it also gives a comprehensive glimpse into contemporary libraries and their issues, especially updating a view of them if you haven’t been inside one since you were a kid." Bo then added his recommendation – saying "the amount of research and bizarre detail Orlean puts into her work is so engrossing" – and this all gave me the push to finally crack it open this year. And now I am here today, at the end of the year, to say that, yes, The Library Book really is as good as everyone says. It’s some kind of breezy magic trick, too. Reading it really feels like wandering shelves of a library – falling down tunnels, following curiosity trails. Sure, the book kind of centers on that massive 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library but it flares wildly from there. Every chapter feels exciting because you don’t know which way fiery Orlean will flicker. On Page 61 she writes about the library shipping department: “When I first learned that the library had a shipping department, I didn’t know quite what that meant, because I couldn’t think of anything a library needed to ship.” Fair enough. But then she goes on to explain that thirty-two thousand books are shipped around L.A. five days a week and then poetically slips in “It is as if the city has a bloodstream flowing through it, oxygenated by books.” There’s a simultaneously inspiring and comic chapter where she shadows the city’s head librarian as he tries to make landscaping decisions on distant, uh, branches. She interviews the family of the (deceased) man accused of the fire and paints a sun-starched portrait of his troubled life. There is an entire chapter on library fires through history (you may weep) and another on eccentric Charles Lummis, a guy who walked 3507 miles to Los Angeles from Cincinnati in 1884 to take over the library in a massive controversy after the previous head librarian was fired for not being a man. She shares the history of the US library system: how it used to be country clubbish – charging for library cards and appealing to elites – to the fresh challenges it faces today as pillars of progressiveness. (“Libraries?,” scoffs Haley Dunphy in an old episode of Modern Family, “I thought that was a bathroom for homeless people.”) A big, overstuffed jack-in-the-box of a book with multiple threadlines braided beautifully together with Susan’s own story – which’ll likely remind you of yours. (It did for me.) Guaranteed to deepen your reverence of books, libraries, and reading and increase your love for community, connection, and the way we have all shared and will need to share wisdom through the ages. Through the pages.
Perfect for: library lovers, true crime fans, and anyone whose brain enjoys jumping from one deep-dive nerdy geek-out to another…
11. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous: A Novel by Ocean Vuong. A first-person coming-of-age story of a gay Vietnamese boy in Hartford, Connecticut finding and losing love in fleeting glances. Maybe that’s what the one-line movie summary of this book will say in TV Guide. But if they make this into a movie – and it sure feels like they will – then it may lose its heart. Because this is a 240-page poem where “The room is silent as a photograph” and “The bus’s lights make it feel like a dentist’s office gliding through the wet streets” and where “… a handful of straggling stars were biting through the sky’s milky haze.” I mean, maybe if Terrance Mallick does it in some Tree Of Life way – maybe. But it’s a poem. I found it both a fast read – no giant halting words sort of thing – and a slow read – with at least one sentence per paragraph jumping out of the page to say "You need to read me again, immediately!" The novel is written as a long confessional letter by a now slightly older protagonist to his non-English-reading mother. Telling her everything. About beauty, overdoses, graphic sex, grief – everything. I’ll just add: The book opens very abstractly. Like I had no idea what was going on. But once you push through the first few chapters there is a more chronologically meaty middle. An absolutely exquisite tap-dancing-down-a-tightrope novel.
Perfect for: experimental fiction fans, anyone who liked Brokeback Mountain, poetry buffs…
10. Loving What Is: Four Questions That Can Change Your Life by Bryon Katie. I've been spending time this week making our 6th annual "Best Of" episode of 3 Books – which will drop on the exact minute of the December Solstice, as always! – and, while doing so, I got pulled back down the rabbit hole that was Chapter 123 with Suzy Batiz. Suzy grew from a horrifyingly abusive childhood up through the ayahuasca-laden jungles of Peru to become the founder of the billion-dollar brand Poo~Pourri. And, like every guest on the show, 3 crucial, formative books helped shape her. The very first book being this easy-to-read Byron Katie stage script describing a four-question process to help you see what’s bothering you and (hopefully) let it go. The four questions are: 1) Is it true?, 2) Can you absolutely know that it’s true?, 3) How do you react when you believe that thought?, and 4) Who would you be without the thought? It sounds lite – almost trivial – but the questions are brought to life with on-stage dialogues and, I think, when asked of yourself, slowly, with the guidance in the book, it really can be helpful and perspective-creating to separate what’s happening from your interpretation of what’s happening … and then seeing your interpretation as something you can release. Will it always work? Does it apply in every situation? No, of course not. But the model is still helpful.
Perfect for: people with strong negative self-talk, Eckart Tolle fans, and anyone open-minded enough to read a somewhat-cheesy-looking 20-year-old self-help book…
9. Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly. You know how Spotify sends those end-of-year listening reports that everyone geeks out about for like 12 hours? Well, if I had a report like that for “links you’ve texted” I am pretty sure “1000 True Fans” would be in my top three. Kevin has an incredible ability to distill unwieldy and complex things into tiny sentences placing him on a high mantle with Seth Godin and Derek Sivers. That’s why I crushed on the KK.org blog post titled “68 Bits Of Advice” that he released on his birthday in 2020. (Even copying his format exactly for my birthday advice this year and last year.) He's since taken down the post but there's a video if you want the Old Man On A Rocking Chair version – and the top YouTube comment has them all listed. After you’ve read them, don’t you just want Kevin to be your dad? Well, he kind of … could be? He’s omnipresent. Like an apparating Obi-Wan. He just sort of appears and starts telling you what to do. He blogs constantly and posts constantly and emails constantly. He writes wonderful books and now he has compressed his birthday compressions into the kind of book every writer wishes they wrote. A few of my favorites: “Make others feel they are important; it will make their day and it will make your day.”, “Buy used books. They have the same words as new ones.”, “Most effective remedy for anger is delay.”, “For best results with your children, spend only half the money you think you should, but double the time with them.”, “Unhappiness comes from wanting what others have. Happiness comes from wanting what you have.”, “The rich have money. The wealthy have time. It is easier to become wealthy than rich.”
Perfect for: bathroom readers, wisdom junkies, and people craving deeper directional lines for living in this world full of pop-up-and-yelling heads…
8. Faith, Hope and Carnage by Nick Cave and Seán O’Hagan. “This is a book about Nick Cave’s inner life,” says the jacket and that’s about as understated as it could be given the book reads like the ultimately well-crafted podcast. A long, meaty, thoughtful Q&A conducted over many phone calls by expert British journalist Seán O’Hagan, along with Nick Cave, who just has one of the vastest, deepest, tidal-wave minds. I didn’t know much about Nick Cave before reading this book – beyond the fact that I loved “Into My Arms” years ago and occasionally had a “Red Hand File” email from him shared with me – so it was gratifying discovering this book was less memoir (they don’t talk about his upbringing, really) and much more 65-year-lived philosophy examining our relationship with, amongst other things, creativity, doubt, grief, religion, family, and resilience. Nick has had giant artistic success, deep personal tragedy (including his 15-year-old son falling to his death off a cliff), and a truly vast style of living (geographically, relationshippy, religionny, creatively, etc) and, yeah, the way he navigates them is almost … otherworldly? Sort of how George Saunders writes about writing. On the creative impulse: “You have to operate, at least some of the time, in the world of mystery, beneath that great and terrifying cloud of artistic unknowing. The creative impulse to me, is a form of bafflement, and often feels dissonant and unsettling. It chips away at your own cherished truths about things, pushes against your own sense of what is acceptable. It’s the guiding force that leads you to where it wants to go.” On certainty: “The more overtly unshakeable someone’s beliefs are, the more diminished they seem to become, because they have stopped questioning, and not-questioning can sometimes be accompanied by an attitude of moral superiority.” On skepticism: “I think of late I’ve grown increasingly impatient with my own skepticism; it feels obtuse and counter-productive, something that’s simply standing in the way of a better-lived life. I feel it would be good for me to get beyond it. I think I would be happier if I stopped window shopping and just stepped through the door.” And it goes on.
Perfect for: creative souls, people navigating their own relationships with spirituality or loss, and anyone who loved Cheryl Strayed’s Tiny, Beautiful Things (10/2020)
7. Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy by Barbara Ehrenreich. So, if Sex At Dawn (Best Book of 2022) is the long evolutionary history of sex then this book is the long evolutionary history of dancing – or, more generally, “collective effervescence”, as Émile Durkheim calls it, which Barbara Ehrenreich cites, in this thorough, iterative, pace-by-pace introspection of our human compulsion to moooooooooove. From "Dionysus to the Grateful Dead", as the cover blurb says. “Why should humans be rewarded so generously for moving their bodies together in time? We are also pleasurably rewarded for sexual activity, and it’s easy to figure out why", she says on Page 26. But ... dancing? Why do we feel the need to dance? To share in collective body-moving joy? In the “She Don’t Use Jelly” encore, in the drumbeats before the playoff game, or even in the galvanizing closing words of a speaker at the end of a supply chain conference. We’re up, we’re crying, we’re cheering, we’re moving, we’re doing all this – why? Well, back to Barbara, “to be ‘outdanced’ is to risk reproductive failure” for the simple reason that for much of our history “early humans probably faced off predatory animals collectively – banding together in a tight group, stamping their feet, shouting, and waving sticks or branches.” We still sort of do this. Bear swings by, we’re told to exaggerate our height – swing sticks, make ourselves big! "Predators might be tricked by synchronous behavior into thinking that it faced – not a group of individually weak and defenseless humans – but a single, very large animal.” Could today’s dancing be part of yesterday’s evolutionary success story? Yes, says Ehrenreich! And then for much of the book, she goes on to share how the higher-level we – structures we created around church, governments, and civil structure – sought to stamp out “collective effervescence”, because it’s hard to control and helps the masses accomplish massive things, only to have our endlessly "must keep dancing" ways blow back and back and back again. Ehrenreich shares how “ancient Greek elite did not abandon the old ecstatic rituals but simply took them underground” with sixth-century BCE groupings that “drew on social elites, whose members gathered periodically for secret rites apparently aimed, above all, at engendering collective ecstasy.” From there through the advent of the church to the “riots” of 50s rock-and-roll to the “carnivalization” of professional sports, this is a well-strung-together cultural portrait that feels something like walking down a long wall reading a thoughtful museum exhibit. For the rest of our days may we all seek to organize, participate, and join in-person "collective effervescence."
Perfect for: cultural history buffs, anybody who works with really big groups, fans of joy…
6. Jacob Two-Two Meets the Hooded Fang by Mordecai Richler. Richler wrote this book in 1975 and it’s a real triumph of children’s literature and storytelling. It opens: “Once there was a boy called Jacob Two-Two. He was two plus two plus two years old. He had two ears and two eyes and two arms and two feet and two shoes.” Turns out he says everything twice because nobody listens to him the first time. After a run-in with a grocer down the street, he’s sentenced to a horrible prison run by the Hooded Fang. This book gets into the thorny parts of the typical nightmares of young kids and has such a unique “superkid superhero” tone.
Perfect for: anyone who wants to feel like they're back sitting on a pebble-filled green carpet in third grade with their eyes popped open while listening to their teacher read them a book from their rocking chair…
5. Paradais by Fernanda Melchor. The most well-paced, three-dimensional, raw emotional spasm of a book I have ever read. A 112-page novel with a jarring red cover of a ... blue apple? But it hits like a riptide. Surprising, pulling, tornado-twisting from-the-ground view as a half-serious-half-not plot slowly hatches by two desperate teen boys. Polo is the gardener at the luxury Mexican housing complex Paradais and an omniscient Polo-shadowing narrator tells the story of his relationship with Fatboy, with “eyes vacant and bloodshot from alcohol and fingers sticky with cheesy powder.” Fatboy’s parents are nowhere, his grandparents have their eye off the plot, and he’s in carnal-teen love with Señora Marián, a resident at the complex, who is married to a Mexican TV host. On the first page, Fatboy’s “gelatinous body wobbled in a crude pantomime of coitus” and the book’s endless twisting phrases are just beginning. (Read the entire first page here.) Yet this book, amazing given how short it is, doesn’t just dwell in the present. There are two deep backstory asides told with a suspenseful visual clarity that brings to mind the final episodes of Breaking Bad. 112 pages that will leave you feeling 112 emotions.
Perfect for: Tarantino fans, people unafraid by "gritty and raw", and anyone who could use a good short book…
4. The Home Place: Memoir of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham. This seems like a simple autobiographical-type memoir broken into three parts (Flock, Fledgling, and Flight), but the writing, wow, the writing – it’s so vivid, transportive, and meditative. Lanham’s ‘love affair’ with nature is contagious and this book will awaken your inner forest-dweller. Just listen to this paragraph as the book opens when he’s describing his home county of Edgefield, South Carolina: “Droughty sands hold onto remnant stands of longleaf pine and stunted turkey oaks in the southern and eastern extremes where the upper coastal plain peters out. In the soggy bottoms of many of the rivers and creeks, rich alluvial soils grow splotchy-barked sycamores and warty hackberries to girths so big that two large men joined hand to hand couldn’t reach around them. A few buttressed bald cypresses draped in Spanish moss sit in tea-stained sloughs. Between the extremes of wet and dry, high and low, even the sticky clay nourishes a surprising variety of hardwoods; slow-growing upland oaks and tight-grained tough-as-nails hickories grow alongside fast-rising tulip poplars and opportunistic sweetgums.” See what I mean? Just wait. He takes us into his fantastical upbringing on ‘the home place’ with the unforgettable Mamatha, weaves natural lessons into gentle reflections on race and the state of America, and, more than anything, stirs up the rich alluvial soils in the soggy bottoms of our hearts.
Perfect for: Southerners, memoir lovers, and, once again, birders…
3. Tough Boris by Mem Fox. Yes, I'm going to throw a 30-year-old picture book in my bronze medal position this year. Doug Miller of Doug Miller Books rooted this out of tipsy piles on his counters and handed it to me saying it was his all-time favorite picture book. "Once upon a time, there lived a pirate named Boris von der Borch", it begins, with grizzled, beady-eyed, fierce-looking Boris looking at a treasure map on a sandy beach. "He was tough," it continues, with Boris leering over a group of pirates pulling a treasure chest out of the sand. "All pirates are tough." "He was massive," it continues with Boris laughing and holding his parrot onboard the ship deck. "All pirates are massive." Momentum builds: "He was greedy.", "All pirates are greedy.", "He was fearless", "All pirates are fearless", "He was scary", "All pirates are scary" – and then a screeching halt: "But when his parrot died, he cried and cried." A suddenly emotional scene of tough Boris crying over his dead bird before sadly placing it into a fiddle-case casket and throwing it into the ocean. Before closing with "All pirates cry." and then, finally … "And so do I." A surprisingly heart-stirring tale somehow told in only 71 words. Complete picture book mastery. A wonderful and simple book to help slowly-solidifying children keep cracking – and to value that.
Perfect for: five-year-olds, pirates, and anyone who needs a reminder to embrace their sensitive side…
2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin. The very first sentence of this book had a magnetic, pulling "WTF-I-want-to-know-more" effect. See if it does the same for you: "Before Mazer invented himself as Mazer, he was Samson Mazer, and before he was Samson Mazer, he was Samson Masur – a change of two letters that transformed him from a nice, ostensibly Jewish boy to a Professional Builder of Worlds – and for most of his youth, he was Sam, S.A.M. on the hall of fame of his grandfather's Donkey Kong machine, but mainly Sam." The curtain lifts! And suddenly we have identity and growth and change and ego and 80s video games and maybe that oh-the-camera-is-about-to-pull-back feeling. That's what I got, anyway. There is a lot to chew on here – a lot of movement, a lot happening – but Gabrielle Zevin, or her omniscient occasionally-clacky-tongued narrator, I should say – holds us tightly. She describes scenes in high-def, folds characters in that shock and surprise (like the unforgettable Dov), and keeps the plot jumping. The story pinballs between decades, characters deepen, and every door opened up is graciously closed. So, uh, what's it about? Well, it's a multi-decade back-and-forth story of Sam and Sadie, who evolve from childhood friends who meet playing Super Mario Bros on NES in a hospital common room in LA to eventual video-game-creating partners to … well, I'm not going to blow things. I will say I found myself surprise-crying at many emotions surfacing from the past … coming-of-age anxieties, social disconnections, self-judgment, and unrequited love, just to name a few! Fast-paced, warm-hearted, and a wonderful scratch for your inner 90s gamer, too. A book to fall into and a true joy to read.
Perfect for: John Green fans, people who liked The Social Network, and nerds…
1. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power by Shoshana Zuboff. Okay, number one. I have to say this is the book I have thought about and thought back to more than any other this year. It starts as a massive indictment of Google and Facebook and the grotesque form of mutant capitalism they spawned. Surveillance capitalism is ‘a new economic order that claims human experience as free raw material for hidden commercial practices of extraction, prediction, and sales.’ Sound big? It is. The book is very wide-arms-around-everything – enticingly, wondrously, intoxicatingly so. As an example, that ‘new economic order’ line is one of eight definitions Zuboff offers in the opening pages – right between the arresting 14-line epigraph from W.H. Auden and the 2-page Table of Contents – which, btw, is not to be confused with the detailed six-page Table of Contents from Page 536-Page 541. Here’s the thing: You will want to read it all. All! You’ll want to eat it all. All of it. The whole thing! To soak this book in through every pore on your skin like some kind of healing cream. It’s that good. That entrancing opening is a slow-arcing bump for the ten-fingered set that follows. A captivating 18-page Introduction awaits where Zuboff lays out the starting grounds (‘The digital realm is overtaking and redefining everything familiar even before we have had a chance to ponder and decide’) and then outlines her premise: “… rights to privacy, knowledge, and application have been usurped by a bold market venture powered by unilateral claims to others’ experience and the knowledge that flows from it. What does this sea change mean for us, for our children, for our democracies, and for the very possibility of a human future in a digital world? This book aims to answer these questions.’ And then … it is on. She goes deep, fast, but with care, without ego, and all is revealed in a winking-socratic-professor style that leaves you feeling almost intoxicated by learning. She reminds us “until the last few minutes of human history, each life was foretold in blood and geography, sex and kin, rank, and religion. I am my mother’s daughter. I am my father’s son. The sense of the human being as an individual emerged gradually over centuries, clawed from this ancient vise” before pushing to say “The new harms we face entail challenges to the sanctity of the individual… including the right to the future tense and the right to sanctuary” and then concluding that “My aim here is to slow down the action in order to enlarge the space for such debate and unmask the tendencies of these new creations as they amplify inequality, intensify social hierarchy, exacerbate exclusion, usurp rights, and strip personal life of whatever it is that makes it personal for you or me. If the digital future is to be our home, then it is we who must make it so. We will need to know. We will need to decide. We will need to decide who decides. This is our fight for a human future.” Does it feel like you’ve just read the book? But that’s just the end of the Introduction! Now you’re on Page 62 and the book is about to go 20,000 leagues under the sea. Fear not! The treacherous and dark terrain is covered with a buoyant lightfootedness that is stunning. The number of doors Zuboff opens– pulling out long-kept-in-the-dark documents and tying together loosely-held news headlines over decades – are some kind of top-tier detective work. Most of the 18 chapters in this book make for long-podcast style listens, too, if you want to grab the audio version and listen simultaneously like I did. An absolutely wondrous book.
Perfect for: anyone who liked 'The Social Dilemma', people craving a more screen-free existence, and anyone who likes deep investigative journalism…
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7 quotes on the power of reading from Charlie Munger
Hey everyone,
Charlie Munger died last Tuesday at age 99. If you don't know him, I recommend this New York Times obituary or (to go deeper) the book Poor Charlie's Almanack which was one of my top books of 2020. I was texting my friend Shane the day his death was announced and he told me had a meeting scheduled with Charlie. That day! They were going to discuss Charlie coming on Shane's podcast. He got a cancellation from Charlie's assistant a few hours before the news. But think about that: At age 99 the man was ... still working. I love that. You know my views on retirement which I expand on heavily in The Happiness Equation.
One quote I love which I got from this 2005 "Never Retire" NYT Op-Ed by Bill Safire is: "When you're through changing, you're through." Maybe that's the real pearl of wisdom. Not to keep gunning till you die but to simply always strive to change — to grow — to learn. Curiosity! Staying connected! Being tapped in! I hope when I'm 99 I have a meeting scheduled with some plucky Canadian podcaster 50 years younger than me. Why? Because I know I'll learn something from that. And I hope that after the call I pick up a book.
Charlie Munger's wisdom is captured in many places — including this great repository Shane created on his blog — but today I want to just share a few of my favorite quotes about reading. He was a reading evangelist! And I love him for it. Because sometimes, when I'm on, you know, the tenth hour of writing up my monthly book club or twenty hours into prepping to interview somebody about their formative books I stop and think "Wait, does anybody even read anymore? Who's reading books? Why am I focusing all my time and energy on something potentially shrinking when I should really be learning how to use The Tik Tok?"
Ah, but then I read quotes like these and remember. Wisdom, learning, growing, changing — really living, that's what I'm after. I think that's something we share. And I know I have found nothing offering more compressed wisdom nor a wider range of experienced emotions than reading books.
Thank you, Charlie. Rest in peace. And may we all enjoy a lifetime of reading. A few of my favorite "Charlie on reading" quotes below!
Neil
1. “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time – none, zero.”
2. “As long as I have a book in my hand, I don’t feel like I’m wasting time.”
3. “We read a lot. I don’t know anyone who’s wise who doesn’t read a lot. But that’s not enough: You have to have a temperament to grab ideas and do sensible things. Most people don’t grab the right ideas or don’t know what to do with them.”
4. “Warren (Buffett) and I do more reading and thinking and less doing than most people in business. We do that because we like that kind of a life. But we’ve turned that quirk into a positive outcome for ourselves. We both insist on a lot of time being available almost every day to just sit and think. That is very uncommon in American business. We read and think.”
5. "Develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day.”
6. "It's been my experience in life if you just keep thinking and reading you don't have to work."
7. “If it’s wisdom you are after, you are going to spend a lot of time sitting on your ass and reading.”
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7 books to calm your mind before bed (instead of watching the news!)
Hey everyone,
Time for my Black Friday door-crashing special! Just kidding. I'm not doing that. I just want to talk about reading books. Why? Well, do you fall into late-night doomscrolling rabbit holes like I do? Makes sense! Billions of dollars of research have fine-tuned the hijacking machine that pulls us forever deeper into news and social media funnels. Especially when we're tired and unable to mentally pull away. I've started locking my phone in a Kitchen Safe every night -- I bought the Mini version from this website (no affiliation and not an ad!) -- and then head up to read.
Here are 7 books to help calm your mind before bed,
Neil
Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. Let's start with some children's literature! Hypnotic autobiographical description of growing up in rural Wisconsin in the late 1800s. From shooting panthers to smoking meat in hollow tree trunks to playing catch with pig bladders. There is no plot. There is no crisis. There’s just 238 pages in 18-point font of vivid memories weaved into a captivating tableau that makes you feel like you’re living another life. And one that's far, far away from this one. Masterful escapism and the first book in the famous “Little House” series. Originally written in 1937 and still perfect today.
How To Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times by Chris Bailey. Little more head on but a great book Chris wrote post-burnout and post-anxiety attack as a simple guide to calming his / your mind. So how do we calm your mind? Get off phones, get outside, lower dopamine, increase analog -- and Chris leads us there with a great dose of left-brain-scratching research and a, yes, calm tone that makes this a perfect read for right now. Great offering for the overwhelmed.
When You Are Engulfed In Flames by David Sedaris. Really anything by David Sedaris could go here. A long time ago my friend Shiv told me she read a Sedaris essay every night before bed. Something sounded off about that. But then I tried it. And she’s right! There’s something so soothing about his slow, peaceful pace. The rhythm feels like hanging with a friend. And the laughs wash away stress, too. Here’s “It’s Catching” by Sedaris in The New Yorker if you want a sample from this collection. I still love Naked and Me Talk Pretty One Day, too.
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson. Set in a small Iowa town named (yes) Gilead in the 1950s the book is a letter from a septuagenarian pastor to his first and only child, a young boy, with everything he wishes he’d be around to tell him when he got older. Sound tearjerking already? Just wait. There are layers beyond layers here and yet they’re all baked into a pastry that somehow feels light. I already feel like I need to read it again. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. I wrote a lot about ikigai in The Happiness Equation which is perhaps why Hector Garcia mailed me a copy of this book when it first came out. It has gone on to become a massive international bestseller. And for good reason: The book triangulates and expands elements of Dan Buettner’s famous Blue Zones studies and TED Talk into a well-researched, wide-ranging, well-organized handbook with everything from sharing Okinawan antioxidant-rich food to lessons on practicing qigong. Helps us pull away from the stress of today.
The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and The Art of Living by Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman. A wonderful collection of excerpts from the Stoic greats -- Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca, and their pals -- with a contemporary expansion from Ryan. Nothing beats getting out of the moment like reading something over 1000 years old. (That's one of my seven ideas for sleeping better.) This is Ryan Holiday's bestselling book for good reason.
Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu. James Frey told me he finds solace in the Tao Te Ching -- one of his three most formative books. A lot of little poems or words of wisdom resonated with me from that book so I looked for a copy. What’s the biggest problem finding a “book” written over 2500 years ago? Picking a translation. The used bookstore near my house had about a dozen. I kept opening and looking for one where I could make sense of what I was reading and finally settled on a translation by David Hinton. You can find some good options to pick from here. Wonderful to read a few pages before bed. Sometimes they rattle around my brain, sometimes I feel like I’m lost in a zen koan, and sometimes I feel like I pull something beautiful from them. Here’s a sample: “7. There’s a reason heaven and earth go on enduring forever / their life isn’t their own / so their life goes on forever. / Hence, in putting himself last / the sage puts himself first, / and in giving himself up / he preserves himself. / If you aren’t free of yourself / how will you ever become yourself?”
We live in overwhelming times! I hope one of these books helps you pull yourself back from the overwhelm. As always, just reply and let me know which ones you resonated with or any others you recommend. Hang in there, everybody.
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How to Tell Yourself a Different Story with Seth Godin
Hey everyone,
A few moons ago I began testing a new short-and-sweet style release on my 3 Books podcast feed. I’m thinking of the entire show as one big book! And, as you know, every full moon I drop a new Chapter. The goal is 333 Chapters total for 1000 formative books all the way up to 2040.
Well, now I’m trying out Pages. A Page is a 333-second (or less) excerpt from a Chapter dropped at 3:33am between Chapters. Bite-sized! Meant to drop a little morsel of wisdom — or a book recommendation or an interesting viewpoint — into your feed. For short commutes, little walks, or just a podcast palette cleanser between longer listens.
Today I’m pasting the transcript of the most popular Page so far: Page 31 from Seth Godin called “How to Tell Yourself a Different Story.” You can download all Pages by subscribing to the show on Apple or Spotify. 100% free and 100% ad-free — as always.
Have a great week,
Neil
Page 31: How to Tell Yourself a Different Story with Seth Godin
Page 31 here | Full chat with Seth here
Seth: I think almost all help is self-help. If you were drowning, it's really unlikely that someone will pick you up and take you out of the water. It is way more likely that someone will throw you a life buoy. Or, reach out with a long stick. Or, try to help you swim to shore. But if you don't want to do it, you're probably not going to get saved. And that, what we seek to do when we want to do better, when we want to feel better, or when we want to make a better difference, is help ourselves, is commit to moving forward. And that's all a self-help book does, if it's doing a good job, is open the door for you to fix yourself. The author can't fix you. The diet book can't make you skinny. A book on goal setting can't make you successful. What it can do is open the door.
And so, if you say, 'I don't like self-help books, they're always trying to do this and this and this.' You might be saying, 'Well actually I don't want to help myself get out of this spot I'm in because I'm comfortable being unhappy. I'm comfortable being stuck.' And that the problem with reading a book like this is that it might work. And if it works, then I'll have to change. And if I change, that might be uncomfortable.
My story is that I was unsuccessful and unhappy. I had a narrative in my head that things weren't working and every time something didn't work I would go 'Ah, there it goes again!' But the door was open and I said, you know what, your problem is not the outside world. Your problem is the story you're telling yourself about the outside world, and that story is a choice. And if you're not happy with the story, tell yourself another story. Period. That simple. And most people will hear what I just said and not change anything. Because I'd been telling myself a story that made me unhappy. And if I wasn't happy with that story I should tell myself a different story. The outside world wasn't the problem. I mean I won the birthday lottery. I grew up with great parents, upper-middle class, with privilege, going to a famous college, and I was healthy. So every story I was telling myself was this made-up story that I didn't have to tell myself. I could've told myself a different story. And that choice is at the heart of almost every self-help book. And it's at the heart of what a non-fiction author has the chance to do. Now notice, when you read a book, the voice is your voice -- not true when you listen to an audiobook. Your voice, in your head, saying something that you didn't believe until you read it. And maybe, just maybe, the author can use the tension and the leverage and the moment to create a little bit of magic that gets you to open the door you could've opened all along. All of us could tell ourselves a better story.
Neil: What happened after that? You said everything changed?
Seth: My life completely changed. I stopped whining. I stopped looking for reasons to whine. Shortly thereafter I applied for an on-campus job and became co-founder of the largest student run business in the country. We started a travel agency and a ticket bureau and a concert agency and a coffee shop and a laundry service and a birthday cake service, every week or two we started a new business and -- so many things happened because I chose to tell myself a different story. Shortly after that I met the woman who became my wife, which was a great decision on my part, and so all of those factors happened, not because the outside world got better, but because I chose to tell myself a different story.
Neil: That is so beautiful.
Listen to all Pages on Apple or Spotify. Full chat with Seth here.
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The Nature of the Fun by David Foster Wallace
Hey everyone,
'The Nature of the Fun' by David Foster Wallace (DFW) is one of my favorite essays.
It's purportedly about writing fiction—and wrestling through the fears and emotions around the process—but I think it applies to a lot more. Like how to find, and especially re-find, the fun at the heart of whatever challenging thing you're doing. Especially after you've had some success. Beware market winds or they may blow you senseless!
This essay originally appeared in 'Fiction Writer' in 1998 and is available today as part of the absolutely phenomenal DFW essay collection 'Both Flesh and Not' (Library, Goodreads, Amazon). The copyright is held by the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. (DFW very sadly died by suicide in 2008.) I have bought 'Both Flesh and Not' (Library, Goodreads, Amazon) as a gift for people many times and highly recommend it. This essay is worth owning in print and the title track on Roger Federer is likely the best essay on tennis ever written. Many, many gems in there.
On a personal note I talked about 'The Nature of the Fun' back in Chapter 1 of 3 Books as it was a big part of my inspiration to start the podcast. I reread it often and use it as a helpful artistic centering force.
I hope you like it too,
Neil
The Nature of the Fun
Written by David Foster Wallace | (Library, Goodreads, Amazon)
The best metaphor I know of for being a fiction writer is in Don DeLillo's Mao II, where he describes a book-in-progress as a kind of hideously damaged infant that follows the writer around, forever crawling after the writer (i.e., dragging itself across the floor of restaurants where the writer's trying to eat, appearing at the foot of the bed first thing in the morning, etc.), hideously defective, hydrocephalic and noseless and flipper-armed and incontinent and retarded and dribbling cerebrospinal fluid out of its mouth as it mewls and blurbles and cries out to the writer, wanting love, wanting the very thing its hideousness guarantees it'll get: the writer's complete attention.
The damaged-infant trope is perfect because it captures the mix of repulsion and love the fiction writer feels for something he's working on. The fiction always comes out so horrifically defective, so hideous a betrayal of all your hopes for it—a cruel and repellent caricature of the perfection of its conception—yes, understand: grotesque because imperfect. And yet it's yours, the infant is, it's you, and you love it and dandle it and wipe the cerebrospinal fluid off its slack chin with the cuff of the only clean shirt you have left because you haven't done laundry in like three weeks because finally this one chapter or character seems like it's finally trembling on the edge of coming together and working and you're terrified to spend any time on anything other than working on it because if you look away for a second you'll lose it, dooming the whole infant to continued hideousness. And but so you love the damaged infant and pity it and care for it; but also you hate it—hate it—because it's deformed, repellent, because something grotesque has happened to it in the parturition from head to page; hate it because its deformity is your deformity (since if you were a better fiction writer your infant would of course look like one of those babies in catalogue ads for infantwear, perfect and pink and cerebrospinally continent) and its every hideous incontinent breath is a devastating indictment of you, on all levels... and so you want it dead, even as you dote and love and wipe it and dandle it and sometimes even apply CPR when it seems like its own grotesqueness has blocked its breath and it might die altogether.
The whole thing's all very messed up and sad, but simultaneously it's also tender and moving and noble and cool—it's a genuine relationship, of a sort—and even at the height of its hideousness the damaged infant somehow touches and awakens what you suspect are some of the very best parts of you: maternal parts, dark ones. You love your infant very much. And you want others to love it, too, when the time finally comes for the damaged infant to go out and face the world.
So you're in a bit of a dicey position: you love the infant and want others to love it, but that means you hope others won't see it correctly. You want to sort of fool people: you want them to see as perfect what you in your heart know is a betrayal of all perfection.
Or else you don't want to fool these people; what you want is you want them to see and love a lovely, miraculous, perfect, ad-ready infant and to be right, correct, in what they see and feel. You want to be terribly wrong: you want the damaged infant's hideousness to turn out to have been nothing but your own weird delusion or hallucination. But that'd mean you were crazy: you have seen, been stalked by, and recoiled from hideous deformities that in fact (others persuade you) aren't there at all. Meaning you're at least a couple fries short of a Happy Meal, surely. But worse: it'd also mean you see and despise hideousness in a thing you made (and love), in your spawn, in in certain ways you. And this last, best hope—this'd represent something way worse than just very bad parenting; it'd be a terrible kind of self-assault, almost self-torture. But that's still what you most want: to be completely, insanely, suicidally wrong.
But it's still all a lot of fun. Don't get me wrong. As to the nature of that fun, I keep remembering this strange little story I heard in Sunday school when I was about the size of a fire hydrant. It takes place in China or Korea or someplace like that. It seems there was this old farmer outside a village in the hill country who worked his farm with only his son and his beloved horse. One day the horse, who was not only beloved but vital to the labor-intensive work on the farm, picked the lock on his corral or whatever and ran off into the hills. All the old farmer's friends came around to exclaim what bad luck this was. The farmer only shrugged and said, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A couple days later the beloved horse returned from the hills in the company of a whole priceless herd of wild horses, and the farmer's friends all come around to congratulate him on what good luck the horse's escape turned out to be. "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" is all the farmer says in reply, shrugging. The farmer now strikes me as a bit Yiddish-sounding for an old Chinese farmer, but this is how I remember it. But so the farmer and his son set about breaking the wild horses, and one of the horses bucks the son off his back with such wild force that the son breaks his leg. And here come the friends to commiserate with the farmer and curse the bad luck that had ever brought these accursed wild horses onto his farm. The old farmer just shrugs and says, "Good luck, bad luck, who knows?" A few days later the Imperial Sino-Korean Army or something like that comes marching through the village, conscripting every able-bodied male between like ten and sixty for cannon-fodder for some hideously bloody conflict that's apparently brewing, but when they see the son's broken leg, they let him off on some sort of feudal 4-F, and instead of getting shanghaied the son stays on the farm with the old farmer. Good luck? Bad luck?
This is the sort of parabolic straw you cling to as you struggle with the issue of fun, as a writer. In the beginning, when you first start out trying to write fiction, the whole endeavor's about fun. You don't expect anybody else to read it. You're writing almost wholly to get yourself off. To enable your own fantasies and deviant logics and to escape or transform parts of yourself you don't like. And it works—and it's terrific fun. Then, if you have good luck and people seem to like what you do, and you actually get to get paid for it, and get to see your stuff professionally typeset and bound and blurbed and reviewed and even (once) being read on the AM subway by a pretty girl you don't even know, it seems to make it even more fun. For a while. Then things start to get complicated and confusing, not to mention scary. Now you feel like you're writing for other people, or at least you hope so. You're no longer writing just to get yourself off, which—since any kind of masturbation is lonely and hollow—is probably good. But what replaces the onanistic motive? You've found you very much enjoy having your writing liked by people, and you find you're extremely keen to have people like the new stuff you're doing. The motive of pure personal fun starts to get supplanted by the motive of being liked, of having pretty people you don't know like you and admire you and think you're a good writer. Onanism gives way to attempted seduction, as a motive. Now, attempted seduction is hard work, and its fun is offset by a terrible fear of rejection. Whatever "ego" means, your ego has now gotten into the game. Or maybe "vanity" is a better word. Because you notice that a good deal of your writing has now become basically showing off, trying to get people to think you're good. This is understandable. You have a great deal of yourself on the line, now, writing—your vanity is at stake. You discover a tricky thing about fiction writing: a certain amount of vanity is necessary to be able to do it at all, but any vanity above that certain amount is lethal. At this point 90+ percent of the stuff you're writing is motivated and informed by an overwhelming need to be liked. This results in shitty fiction. And the shitty work must get fed to the wastebasket, less because of any sort of artistic integrity than simply because shitty work will make you disliked. At this point in the evolution of writerly fun, the very thing that's always motivated you to write is now also what's motivating you to feed your writing to the wastebasket. This is a paradox and a kind of double bind, and it can keep you stuck inside yourself for months or even years, during which you wail and gnash and rue your bad luck and wonder bitterly where all the fun of the thing could have gone.
The smart thing to say, I think, is that the way out of this bind is to work your way somehow back to your original motivation: fun. And, if you can find your way back to the fun, you will find that the hideously unfortunate double bind of the late vain period turns out really to have been good luck for you. Because the fun you work back to has been transfigured by the unpleasantness of vanity and fear, an unpleasantness you're now so anxious to avoid that the fun you rediscover is a way fuller and more large-hearted kind of fun. It has something to do with Work as Play. Or with the discovery that disciplined fun is more fun than impulsive or hedonistic fun. Or with figuring out that not all paradoxes have to be paralyzing. Under fun's new administration, writing fiction becomes a way to go deep inside yourself and illuminate precisely the stuff you don't want to see or let anyone else see, and this stuff usually turns out (paradoxically) to be precisely the stuff all writers and readers share and respond to, feel. Fiction becomes a weird way to countenance yourself and to tell the truth instead of being a way to escape yourself or present yourself in a way you figure you will be maximally likable. This process is complicated and confusing and scary, and also hard work, but it turns out to be the best fun there is.
The fact that you can now sustain the fun of writing only by confronting the very same unfun parts of yourself you'd first used writing to avoid or disguise is another paradox, but this one isn't any kind of bind at all. What it is is a gift, a kind of miracle, and compared to it the reward of strangers' affection is as dust, lint.
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44 Things I've (Almost) Learned As I Turn 44
Hey everyone,
Today is my birthday!
Last year I shared a list of birthday advice. Now it's time for this years! Two in a row makes it a tradition, I think. For the list just scroll down!
Btw some background if you're still reading the top part: I've been wisdom-collecting for years. In my 20s I took hundreds of flights and always made it my goal to ask the person I was sitting beside for a piece of life advice before getting off the plane. (It helps that my 20s were before airplane internet and giant headphone cocoons.) I'm sure a lot of these come from those chats. And then, after last year's list, I made a little file on my phone called "44" and have been planting, snipping, and pruning it all year -- treating this list like some kind of little plant I'm ready to finally put on my porch.
And remember: Lists like these are preachy by nature! Take what you like and chuck the rest in the bin.
Here we go:
1. The best sunblock is the one you use.
2. If you don't know if it goes in the dryer, it doesn't.
3. Let your kids catch you reading books. Don't let them watch you scrolling social media.
4. 3 E's of a great speech: Entertain, Educate, Empower.
5. Dating tip: You meet interesting people in interesting places.
6. Add a silent mental "...yet" to any sentence you catch yourself starting with "I can't", "I'm not", or "I don't." "I can't speak Hindi ...yet", "I'm not a runner ...yet", "I don't eat oysters ...yet."
7. Mood follows action.
8. Time you spend with your kids when they're young correlates with time they spend with you when you're old.
9. Stock tip: Buy the haystack, not the needle.
10. Never buy a couch before taking a nap on it.
11. Remember the 'End Of History Illusion': We all know our pasts were bumpy -- yet never expect our futures to be.
12. Ideas are the easy part. Doing it is the hard part.
13. No cell phones in the bedroom. If you need waking up, buy an alarm clock. If you get emergency calls, get a landline.
14. There's nothing wrong with ending a sentence with of.
15. Easy way to entertain toddlers: Lie face down in the middle of the floor.
16. Grapefruits that look best often taste worst and grapefruits that look worst often taste best.
17. Wrap floss around middle fingers not pointer fingers.
18. Most people read zero books last year. 2 pages of fiction a day helps build back the habit. 'Foster', 'Animal Farm', 'A Christmas Carol', 'The Little Prince', and 'The Old Man and The Sea' are all <100 pages.
19. You can't make new old friends.
20. Addiction is when something that takes you from normal to good starts taking you from bad to normal.
21. Beware the 5 greatest regrets of the dying: i) I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself ii) I wish I hadn't worked so hard iii) I wish I had the courage to express my feelings, iv) I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends, and v) I wish I had let myself be happier
22. Don't post your kids faces online. They might sue you.
23. Divorce is not a death sentence.
24. Strapping things to your body to measure things in your body makes you less connected to your body.
25. Between jobs remember: The longer you hold your breath underwater the more interesting place you come up.
26. On making decisions: Low time, low importance? Automate. High time, low importance? Regulate. Low time, high importance? Effectuate. (Just do it!) High time, high importance? Debate.
27. If you don't deal with your shit, your shit deals with you.
28. When sending meeting options in multiple time zones put their time zone first.
29. Stitches vs Bandaids Test: Aim to say yes to kids trying things that cause bandaids and no to things that cause stitches.
30. You don't have to finish the book.
31. Ikigai: A reason to get out of bed in the morning. Write one down on a folded index card and leave it on your bedside table.
32. To pay more attention in video meetings: Hide Self View.
33. Blender breakfast I've used for 15 years: water, cinnamon, turmeric, protein, frozen banana, frozen greens, powdered greens, nut milk, nut butter, yogurt, avocado.
34. Guaranteed way to get good: Do it for free for ten years.
35. You don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.
36. Funeral Rule: If you're not sure if you should go, go.
37. The Lindy Effect: Longer something's been popular, longer it'll stay popular. Helpful for finding books, restaurants, ideas.
38. Cut the cord between guilt and pleasure.
39. Social Media Paradox: More you're posting about it less you're doing it.
40. There is a relationship between how much you buy local and how nice the flowers are in your park.
41. Changing your mind is a sign of strength not weakness.
42. There is a tiny arrow on your gas gauge that tells you which way to park your car at the pumps.
43. Quickest happiness hack? Lower expectations.
44. You only earned what you spent and enjoyed.
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I'm sure I stole all of these but some specific credits: Rich Roll (7), Daniel Gilbert, Jordi Quoidbach, and Timothy Wilson (11), Paul Graham (20), Bronnie Ware (21), Sarah Silverman (27), Joey Coleman (29), James Clear (35), and my dad (44). Bad paraphrases all mine, of course. Click here to read last year's list.