Dear Friends,
Nick Kristof wants you to get married. Janice Turner wants you to have children. Ali Abdaal wants you to start a business. Jonathan Haidt wants you to get off your phone. T. M. Luhrmann wants you to go to church.
And if you’re a writer? Then
says success depends on providing your readers with concrete advice.Don’t worry, I do have a piece of advice: We could stop telling others how to live and get curious about the myriad ways to live a meaningful life.
Are you a workaholic who can’t wait for tomorrow’s conference? I salute you. Perhaps your children are your everything. Or maybe it’s Jesus. Either way, I think it’s great. Does extreme exercise give you a transcendental chill? I relate! Or maybe you love having 50 friends and spending all of your time discussing life’s idiosyncrasies. I love it. There is no one way to make a meaningful life, though we seem to enjoy telling others that they should do more of this and less of that.1
The advice we give is often the advice we need to hear. That certainly applies to me: I know I give unsolicited advice. Hopefully, this week’s newsletter will remind me to preach less and show more curiosity.
🧰 A useful tool: Matter
I enjoy spending an hour or so each morning reading the news. But if the article is more than 1,000 words long, I save it to Matter and listen to a remarkably human AI voice read it to me while I take Coco for his walk. Thanks to Matter, I feel caught up on The New Yorker for the first time in my life! If you wear AirPods, tap them twice and it will automatically highlight the section it is reading. (This also works with the transcripts of podcasts.)
Now, I’m not preaching that you ought to use Matter. I’m just sharing that it works for me. 😉
👏 Kudos: La Clásica Juquilita
Last month, I was invited to join the Mayordomo cycling team here in Oaxaca. We raced La Clásica Juquilita last weekend, which begins with 20 miles of intense criterium racing followed by an 80-minute climb up to La Cumbre de Ixtepeji. I suffered while a bunch of skinny 20-somethings drifted away during the second half of the climb, but my teammate Oscar (in the green jersey with his two daughters) nabbed 3rd place. This coming Sunday we’re gearing up for La Clásica Benito Juarez. I’m grateful to the organizers who put in a lot of work to make these races happen.
🎵 A Playlist
I’ve been revisiting old music podcasts that I made nearly 20 years ago with my friend Sparsh. Here’s one from 2006:
Have a great week!
David
I am reading
’s memoir, Troubled. I relate to his difficult upbringing and his anti-authority, upper-class resentment. By learning about his upbringing, we see how he benefited from military service and understand why he now advocates for a 1950s-style atomic family. But if he had grown up in a 1950s-style atomic family, he likely would have written something like Kerouac’s On The Road. (Ironically, the stable, atomic family seems just as counter-cultural today as Kerouac’s Beatnik characters did in the 50s.)
A tangentially related read - both on the topic of life advice/coaches but also something you posted recently about talent vs. motivation (or something like that) - that I enjoyed today: https://anniki.substack.com/p/why-is-everyone-on-instagram-suddenly
I'm still struggling to find a good system to save articles not just for future reading but for research and writing that I might want to come back to (and highlight or summarize etc). I started doing it in Scrivner but its more cumbersome than having an easy browser extension... I'll check out Matter.
I finished reading Troubled by Rob. I enjoyed it. Thank you for recommending Matter!