Last year I spent a night on the floor of the Honolulu airport.

I was flying home with my wife and daughter, connecting in Honolulu. I’d booked the two legs on separate airlines to save a few dollars, which meant I had to get our checked bag off the carousel and recheck it, and the connection was already tight.

I left my wife and daughter in the terminal, just in case, and went out for the bag alone. It was slow coming out. By the time I got to the counter I knew I wasn’t going to make it.

Sure enough. I called and told them to board without me. One of us on the airport floor was better than three. They boarded. The next flight was seven or eight hours away.

The gate agent had done everything he could. I’ve watched plenty of people lose it on gate agents, and I didn’t want to be that person, so I thanked him and walked away. This one was on me. A few dollars saved, my natural optimism, and a propensity for risk.

I walked back toward security with my head down, looking at the floor, stewing. I just wanted to be home.

I’ve made the decision to be happy no matter what. I know Viktor Frankl’s line about the last of the human freedoms—to choose your attitude in any set of circumstances. I believe it. I know I’m responsible for my own state. But knowing that and shifting it are two different things, and I find it much harder to shift when I’m worn out. I was worn out. Thinking my way to a more empowering state wasn’t working.

Then I heard a gruff voice: “Hey, brother.”

It took me a second to realize someone was talking to me. A TSA agent, a guy in his fifties with a white beard of his own, was calling over to me. “Nice beard, brother.” He held out his fist and I bumped it. I couldn’t help smiling. I thanked him and told him his beard was pretty awesome too.

That was the whole interaction, maybe a second and a half, and it completely broke my state. I wasn’t faking it, either. I would still rather have been on that plane with my family, but the stewing was over, and it didn’t come back the rest of the night.

I don’t know if he saw I was down, or if he was bored, or if he sensed something. It doesn’t matter. He called out, and it made a huge difference for me.

Sometimes we can think our way out of a disempowering state. Sometimes we can’t, and someone else gets us there, or at least gets us started. I don’t think that lets me off the hook. I think being responsible includes letting people help, and staying open enough to notice when they’re trying. He held out his fist. It was up to me to bump it.

We can be that for someone else, too. I’m not talking about hunting for sad people to cheer up. I’m talking about keeping your head up. Noticing who’s near you. Saying the thing you’d normally keep to yourself.

Every moment is a chance to put a little good into the world, and most of the time it doesn’t take much.

From the Commonplace Book

“Sometimes our light goes out, but is blown again into flame by an encounter with another human being. Each of us owes the deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this inner light.”

—Albert Schweitzer, Memoirs of Childhood and Youth

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

teamLab, Kyoto

I may be the last person to find out about teamLab, a Japanese art collective of artists, programmers, engineers, animators, mathematicians, and architects who build rooms you walk into: light, water, flowers that bloom and scatter as you move through them. On a recent trip to Japan I went to all three of their museums there, two in Tokyo and one in Kyoto. I’ve never experienced art, or creativity, or whatever it is, quite that way. If you’re ever in Japan, it’s worth the trip.

https://www.teamlab.art

Wishing you every good thing,

Brilliant

For about four years, I did a podcast where I interviewed authors. Nearly 200 of them in all. These were all people who wrote on something good living-adjacent, and in addition to whatever subject I asked them about, I also made a point to ask how they worked. I wanted to know how they produced finished writing.

I asked about habits, routines, mindsets, tools, and I got a wide variety of answers. Some wrote with music, but many needed silence. Many were early risers. Some outlined everything, needing to know exactly where they were going before they started drafting a single word.

But despite the differences, something showed up repeatedly: for these writers, writing was simply something they couldn’t not do. Many of them did it long before they ever got paid for it. They’d done it before anybody read it. Most of them had been at it since they were kids, in one form or another, and the books were the inevitable expression of the path they were on.

I think that’s true of more than writing.

Some people are healers. Put them in a room with somebody hurting and they will alleviate the pain. Some are teachers, and they cannot watch another struggle with something they understand without sharing what they know. Fixers see what’s broken before anybody else does. Conveners gather people. Connectors, curators, advocates, entrepreneurs, leaders. Our gifts take many different forms.

I’ve noticed that the labels have one thing in common: whatever form it takes, the thing a person can’t not do is, underneath, a way of being useful to others.

It had nothing to do with how disciplined the authors were. A lot of them told me they weren’t particularly disciplined. It was that at some point every one of them had admitted what they were. Not decided it. Admitted it. And then arranged their lives around that.

The thing that you can’t not do doesn’t need to be explained to anybody. You certainly don’t need to apologize to anyone for it. You don’t even have to understand it yourself.

If there is work associated with it, perhaps it’s to admit it, own it and live it as fully and boldly as possible.

From the Commonplace Book

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

Words often attributed to Howard Thurman

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Tyson, the new four-part documentary on Netflix. I watched the first episode this week. Tyson grew up in Brownsville, Brooklyn, and whatever else you want to say about that place, it made him. He was bullied, he was robbing people before he was a teenager, and he spent a good chunk of his youth in juvenile detention. And yet somewhere in all of that there was a part of him that wanted something more.

He learned to box. He found Cus D’Amato, or Cus found him, and Cus believed in him long before Mike believed in himself. What got me was how early he knew, and how specific he was about it. He didn’t want to be a champion. He wanted to be the greatest champion who ever lived. And he went after it with everything he had until he was the youngest heavyweight champion in history, at twenty.

Near the end of the episode, Tyson, who is sixty now, wonders out loud what it was all for. A man that driven, for that long, who got everything he set out to get, and he still ends up asking. I found the episode both inspiring and terrifying.

Wishing you every good thing,

Brilliant

In 1889, two Englishmen in London invited a young Indian law student to read the Bhagavad Gita with them — a seven-hundred-verse Hindu scripture, a conversation between a warrior and a god on the eve of a battle. He said yes.

The book came from his own country, but he’d never read it: not in Sanskrit, not in his own Gujarati. He read it for the first time that year, in English, in a translation called The Song Celestial.

The student was Gandhi. He read from it every morning, memorized it, translated it, wrote a commentary on it, and even came to call it his “mother.” “When doubts haunt me,” he wrote years later, “when disappointments stare me in the face, and I see not one ray of hope on the horizon, I turn to the Bhagavad Gita and find a verse to comfort me.”

When he was shot, nearly sixty years later, the words on his lips are said to have been a name for God. He didn’t have to reach for them. Decades of mornings with that book had put them there.

His own scripture had been in India the whole time. He had to go to London for two Englishmen to hand it to him.

Growing up, I had the persistent sense that I was missing something. That there was something more, out there somewhere, and I had to go and find it. If those years had a soundtrack, it was U2’s “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” So I went. I’ve been to just under a hundred countries now.

What I found, mostly, was that people are kind. In Egypt, way off the beaten path, near Abu Simbel, strangers would walk up and ask, in English, where we were from. “The United States.” “Welcome to Egypt!” Then they’d smile and walk away. Some version of that happened in dozens of countries.

And then one spring evening in London, of all places, on maybe my fourth visit, walking to dinner, looking for an Indian restaurant, trying not to get hit by drivers who were trying not to hit me, I felt, for the first time, at home in the world.

I didn’t need to go anywhere to find anything. If I needed anything, it was to get far enough from home and the familiar to lose the feeling that something was waiting for me out there.

From the Commonplace Book

“No life, no matter how successful and exciting it might be, will make you happy if it is not really your life. And no life will make you miserable if it is genuinely your own.”

— Carol S. Pearson

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Last month The New York Times reported on Anthropic inviting religious leaders to talk with the company about its AI model, Claude — including whether the thing might, in some sense, have an inner life.

Read the article (gift link)

I read it, then asked Claude straight out whether it was conscious. Part of what it said:

“I can’t confirm it and I can’t rule it out, and ‘I’m not’ would be just as much of an overclaim as ‘I am.’”

I pushed. If it had to guess? It leaned toward no:

“Consciousness as you know it seems tangled up with duration, with a body, with being somewhere. I have none of that.”

But that’s consciousness as I know it. I have no idea where I go when I sleep. I don’t cease to exist, either. Maybe there are different kinds of consciousness.

Wishing you every good thing,

Brilliant

Near the end of his life, my dad said he felt as though he’d lived two lifetimes. He died at sixty-four.

When I was eighteen, thirty sounded old to me. By forty, sixty didn’t sound so old anymore. He didn’t even make it to senior citizen.

He grew up in a blue-collar family. His father worked at an oil refinery and his mother was a secretary. He dropped out of college in his first two weeks and worked a string of jobs: bookbinder, delivery driver, hod carrier, counterman at an auto parts store.

He was driven, and he was competitive. When he got the chance to pitch for a world-class fast-pitch softball team, he moved our family from Utah to Colorado to do it. Later he was inducted into the sport’s hall of fame.

He loved competing and he loved serving people, and business was how he did both. In 1979 he and my mom bought a Toyota store. He built an entrepreneurial career out of making deals and building things.

For more than twenty years he worked eighty-hour weeks, six days a week. By the time I got up for school, he’d already left for work. He was usually still at work when my mom made us dinner and tucked me in. I don’t remember him at a Little League game, a science fair, or a back-to-school night.

He put business ahead of his health, his family, and his spirituality for many years. His choices caught up with him, as they do. He was overweight. Years of stress, poor diet, too little sleep, no regular exercise, and not going to the doctor added up to a long list of ailments, including diabetes.

Eventually he had a heart attack. He survived it. In hindsight, that was the beginning of the end. He was in and out of the hospital after that, and my mom cared for him. The diabetes got worse, and both of his legs were amputated.

I saw him after the surgery. He was on a gurney, in a gown, with bandaged stumps where his legs had been. His hair was a mess. He looked tired, haggard, and scared, and I didn’t know what to say to someone who’d just been through that. My whole life, he’d been the one in control of whatever room he was in.

I asked myself: Is this man successful? Here was a man who was wealthy, respected, and influential. Is this the price of success, I wondered?

It’s not for me to say. But I do know it’s a question worth asking.

I don’t think I knew it then, but looking back I made two decisions in that moment. First, that would never be me. I would do my best to live a healthy, intentional life. Second, I would do my best to help others ask themselves what they really want and what they’re prepared to pay for it. And then I’d help them get it, do it, and become it.

What does it mean to live a good life, and how do we actually live one? I started the School for Good Living to explore that question. I’ve interviewed more than a hundred authors about it, and I spent the last three years writing a book about prayer. And it’s a question we each get to answer for ourselves. What do I really want, and what am I prepared to pay for it?

There’s power in the question. It takes some willingness to ask it, and some courage to follow the answer wherever it leads.

From the Commonplace Book

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

—Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Illenium is the stage name of Nick Miller, a DJ and producer who played a residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas this spring. He survived a heroin overdose in 2012 and has been sober since. I like to think his music is how he takes his pain and turns it into something beautiful, something that makes a difference for people.

There’s an old line about not being able to lead someone out of a desert you haven’t crossed yourself. Many of his songs sound to me like a man who got out. And he’s leading others out: he brings overdose-response training to his shows.

My current favorite of his: “ur Alive.”

Wishing you every good thing,

Brilliant

My friend Steevun Lemon once did something generous for one of his employees, but it didn’t turn out the way he’d hoped.

Steevun runs a company that ships its products all over the world. One of his best employees worked in shipping. I’ll call her Jane. She was raising two kids, and she was fantastic at her job.

One day Steevun looked up from his desk and saw a tow truck in the parking lot, hooking up Jane’s car.

He went out to see what was going on. The car was being repossessed. He asked the driver if there might be some mistake, and whether he could just make a payment and settle it right there. No luck. The driver had his orders, and the car was already hooked up.

So Steevun asked if Jane could at least get her things out.

The driver said, “She’s got twenty minutes.”

Jane hurried out and started gathering what she could. One of the things she pulled out was an empty car seat, stuffed full of her belongings. Her coworkers watched her carry it back inside.

Then the truck pulled away with Jane’s car.

Steevun waited about an hour. Then he called Jane into his office and told her he’d like to help, if she’d let him. She agreed.

Her car payment was $450 a month. That was a lot of money back then, and it wasn’t much of a car. She didn’t know what interest rate she was paying. She only knew the payment. She owed about $18,000 on a car with a book value of around $12,000. Underwater, as they say in the car business. I imagine it felt that way to her, too.

With her permission, Steevun called the lender, negotiated a payoff, and paid it himself. Then they sold the car for what he’d paid. At least her credit wouldn’t get any worse from this, and she could start rebuilding.

Jane lived within walking distance of work, and her boyfriend had a car. She agreed they’d get by with his until she’d saved enough to buy a junker outright.

Less than two weeks later, Jane drove into the parking lot in a new car.

Twenty-one percent interest.

Steevun couldn’t believe it. He took his frustration to his landlord, who was also a friend. His friend told him, “You can’t solve money problems with money. Only knowledge can do that.”

I have my own versions of Jane’s new car, and I suspect you do too. They’re just a lot easier to spot in other people.

The car was never the problem. It was just where the problem showed up.

A certain kind of thinking signed that first loan, then fell behind on the payments. Within two weeks of a fresh start, the same thinking signed a new loan at 21 percent interest.

Steevun paid off a car. But paying off the loan couldn’t change the thinking underneath it.

Steevun tells this story, and many more, in his book, Owner Trauma, about the hidden toll of running a business. Learn more at ownertrauma.com.

From the Commonplace Book

Not everything that is faced can be changed; but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

— James Baldwin

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

I face my problems better when I’m rested. A tired mind reaches for the same old answers.

My favorite tool for rest is the Manta sleep mask. It’s pricey for an eye mask, and worth it to me. It’s one of my travel essentials. Some afternoons I put it on for a seven- or ten-minute nap and come back sharper than caffeine ever gets me.

Not sponsored. I just love it.

Years ago I signed up for a weekend personal-growth seminar. Three long days in a classroom. Not always my favorite way to spend a weekend, but I was stuck in a few places in my life and ready to get unstuck.

A two-hour session the following Tuesday night was the official conclusion, and we were encouraged to bring friends and family. I’d heard Tuesday was mostly a sales pitch, so I had no plans to go, and certainly no plans to invite anyone.

At check-in on the first morning, a woman at the desk asked if I’d be coming Tuesday.

“Nope,” I said.

She smiled. “Stay open to miracles.”

I ended up going to Tuesday’s session, and I’m glad I did. I brought a friend. He signed up for the seminar, and I think he’d tell you it changed his life too.

The lady at the check-in desk could have argued with me. She could have rolled her eyes. Instead she gave me four words I’ve thought about hundreds, if not thousands, of times since.

One place they come back to me is the golf course. I hit a bad shot and the voice starts: Well, there goes this hole. Maybe the round. Then I remember her words. Sometimes I say them out loud.

Saying them doesn’t guarantee a par any more than a prayer guarantees an answer. But I relax, and I enjoy the hole more than I otherwise would. And sometimes things turn out fine. Staying open doesn’t ensure a good outcome, but shutting down usually leads to a bad one.

Raised in a Christian tradition, I grew up hearing about big miracles. Water into wine. Lazarus walking out of the tomb. I don’t really know what to make of them. I have my doubts, but I’m open to the possibility that they actually happened. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in my philosophy.

What I do know is this: a man walking on water is no more incredible than the fact that anything exists at all.

While working on my book, Reclaiming Prayer, I landed on a working definition of a miracle:

Something that interrupts, accelerates, or deepens ordinary life — an event or experience that feels touched by a force beyond human effort or natural law, and which is infused with a profound sense of significance, goodness, or grace.

By that measure, I suspect miracles are happening all the time, and we’d notice more of them if we paid attention.

Stay open to miracles.

From the Commonplace Book

“Where there is great love, there are always miracles.” — Willa Cather

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

I’m fascinated by the creative process, and one of my favorite windows into it is Song Exploder, a podcast hosted by Hrishikesh Hirway. In each episode, a musician takes a song apart, layer by layer, and tells the story of how it was made.

It’s the rest of the story behind songs you think you know. Two episodes I love: Imagine Dragons’ “Follow You,” which grew out of a marriage that almost ended on the way to signing divorce papers, and Glass Animals’ “Heat Waves,” a song that took more than a year to find its audience.

Emerson wrote that if the stars came out only one night in a thousand years, we’d never stop talking about it. I think music is like that. If we could only hear it live, with no speakers, we’d recognize it as sacred. Instead it plays in the background at the mall, while we’re on hold, even while we board the plane.

Every song has a story. Maybe even a miracle behind it.

A few years ago I got certified in MovNat. The name is short for natural movement. It’s a fitness method built on the things humans do naturally, like crawling, balancing, lifting, carrying, and throwing.

One of those movements is the inverted crawl. You sit, put your hands on the floor behind you, lift your hips, and walk. Opposite hand, opposite foot. It looks like a child’s crab walk.

At first it’s like trying to pat your head and rub your belly at the same time. That’s the easy part. If you spend many hours at a desk, like I do, it works muscles you probably don’t use very often. It gets agonizing fast.

I recently added it back to my workouts. The goal was the length of my hallway and back. For days I couldn’t make it one way without a rest.

Then one morning I decided: today I go there and back without a rest, no matter what. It was going well. I was about 80 percent of the way down the hall.

And I stopped.

About 60 seconds earlier, I had decided to finish, no matter what. If the house had been on fire, I would have kept going. (Okay, I would have stood up and run, but you know what I mean.) My body had more. But something said rest, and I rested.

I still can’t tell you whether that was weakness or wisdom.

I met that same moment again and again writing Reclaiming Prayer. I’d decided in advance to be at my desk from 7 to 9 each morning. That got me into the chair. It didn’t tell me what to do once the work got hard. Some mornings I pushed through. Some mornings I stopped. I can’t say I always chose right.

Years ago I read The Secret Race, by the cyclist Tyler Hamilton. He once rode a three-week race on a broken bone. He clenched his jaw so hard against the pain that he ground eleven teeth down to the nerves. In the book he writes, “I’m good at pain.” He was.

I’ve always thought of myself as good at pain too. But that didn’t settle anything in the hallway. Being able to keep going doesn’t mean I should.

Weakness or wisdom. When it gets hard, I still can’t always tell which is which. So I pray. Sometimes that’s how I find out what’s called for. Sometimes it’s just how I keep going.

From the Commonplace Book

“If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them.” — Bruce Lee, as recalled by his student Stirling Silliphant

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

MovNat is Erwan Le Corre’s system of natural movement. Its premise is that you already know how to move this way and have mostly forgotten. No machines. You crawl, balance, climb, lift, carry. The inverted crawl is a fine place to start, and your hallway will do.

I interviewed Erwan in 2019. He told me about an agreement he’d made with himself: “I refuse to be hurried.” At the end I told him I wanted to get certified. Then I did.

Listen to the interview

The poet Allen Ginsberg said this before meals:

“We take now this food, the suffering of many forms of life, the pain of many people. May we be worthy.”

I learned it from David Breeden, a poet, former minister, and hospital chaplain I interviewed for Reclaiming Prayer. He learned it from Ginsberg himself.

It resonated with me, because it’s so close to something I already do.

Years ago, as an exchange student in Japan, I learned that before every meal, everyone at the table puts their hands together, bows a little, and says itadakimasu. The literal translation is “I humbly receive.” Knowing the Japanese sensibility for nuance and flourish, I tend to think it’s actually closer to, “I now humbly partake of this food which has been so graciously prepared for my benefit.”

It’s offered to everyone and everything that made the meal possible: the cook, the farmer, the fish, and the sun and rain and soil that grew it all.

I brought it home with me, and I’ve said it before I eat ever since, or tried to. It isn’t a prayer the way I was raised to pray. It’s a single word. But it’s a way of acknowledging how much I depend on — and, I hope, of feeling some gratitude for — the countless things that combine, again and again, to keep me alive.

During my studies as an Asian Studies major, I learned that in a famine in China, some people grew so hungry they ate dirt. They died with dirt in their bellies.

That’s dark, I know. But whenever there’s food in front of me, I try to remember that I’m not in that place — and how many people have been.

I’ve spent time at the retreat center Sadhguru founded near McMinnville, Tennessee. By the dining hall there’s a sign. I captured those words.

“How food goes into you, from whose hands it comes to you, how you eat it, how you approach it, all these things are important. Above all, the food you eat is life. Other forms are giving up their life to sustain us. If we can eat with enormous gratitude for all the living things which give up their life to sustain our lives, food will behave in a very different way within you.”

I don’t know if what Sadhguru said is literally true. I like to think it is. What I can say for sure is that my experience of eating is different when I remain mindful and grateful than when I don’t. And I suspect that it’s true for you, too.

From the Commonplace Book

“What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us. What we have done for others and the world remains and is immortal.” — attributed to Albert Pine

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Veritasium is a YouTube channel run by Derek Muller, a science communicator with about twenty-one million subscribers who makes long, careful videos about how things actually work. One of his is called The Closest Thing We Have to Alien Technology — fifty-five minutes on a single device: the machine ASML builds in the Netherlands that prints the most advanced computer chips on earth. It costs $400 million. Only one company in the world can make it.

Roughly how it works: a droplet of molten tin the size of a blood cell is fired across a chamber and hit by a laser, fifty thousand times a second. Each hit produces a flash of light hotter than the surface of the sun, which bounces off the smoothest mirrors ever made and burns a pattern onto a silicon wafer. That pattern becomes the chip in your phone, your car, and the computer I used to write this newsletter.

I watched it thinking about that sign in Tennessee. From whose hands it comes to you. Thousands of engineers over thirty years, so that I can type this and you can read it.

Every one of us lives with things we could do, things we want to do, things we tell ourselves we’re going to do. We have limits — time, attention, energy, money — so some of it gets filed under someday. That’s human.

Even after I’d committed to Reclaiming Prayer — after the proposal, the plan, the question set, dozens of recorded interviews — even after I’d made what others might consider “significant progress,” one question kept needling me: Am I really writing this book, or am I trying to write it?

I set so many deadlines nobody else ever saw. How many books I’d read by when. How many interviews I’d finish by when. Personal prayer experiments I intended to try and write about. A podcast built from all those recorded conversations. I missed most of them.

But I kept going.

And along the way there were moments, conversations mostly, that felt like wind in my sails. One came from one of my best friends. He has a corporate job with a Fortune 500 company and works from home. He told me one of the things that keeps him effective is getting ready every morning as if he were going to the office. Pressed shirt. Belt. Shoes. In his own house. All his meetings are on video. Nobody would ever know if he skipped the pants.

He would know.

It reminded me of a conversation with my friend Britt Frank, psychotherapist and author of The Science of Stuck. She told me that to get her book finished, she dressed for every writing session as if she were meeting one of the clients the finished book would bring her. Jewelry. Even perfume. The clients she was writing for didn’t exist yet. Neither did the book. She dressed for them anyway.

There’s an old admonition: “Be now what thou prayest to be made.”

After that conversation with my friend, I committed to doing the same. I haven’t been perfect. But I’ve suited up more days than not.

And here’s what I can tell you this week: I just spent six weeks gathering feedback from the book’s first readers, and I’m about to sign with the company that will handle final edits, design, and distribution. So when I ask myself, Am I really doing this? — soon I’ll be able to answer, definitively: No. I’m not doing it.

I already did.

What are you telling yourself you’re going to do?

And what will you be wearing once you’ve finally done it?

From the Commonplace Book

“Every man is working out his destiny in his own way and nobody can be of any help except by being kind, generous, and patient.”

― Henry Miller, Henry Miller on Writing

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Years ago, I interviewed Stephen Cope for the School for Good Living podcast. Cope is the author of The Great Work of Your Life, a book about finding and doing the thing you’re here to do. He told me the key to actually finishing his books came down to a mantra he lived by: “Suit up and show up.” He did. The books exist. You can listen to our conversation here.

If something in this issue landed for you — or if you know exactly what you’ll be wearing — hit reply and tell me. I read every one.

Wishing you every good thing,

Brilliant

A few years ago, I finished a 9,000-piece jigsaw puzzle. It took me twenty-two months.
Almost every time I sat back down at that table, I’d find pieces that fit right away. Three, four, five of them in the first few minutes. And I’d think: why didn’t I place those last night? They were right there. They were easy.

Then I’d remember. Last night I was tired. I’d been staring at blue ocean and pieces of fish for more than an hour and my eyes had stopped seeing. Fatigue is real. But so is coming back fresh.

I’ve been thinking about that lately because of my desk. And my inbox. And a particular stack of paper that has sat around long enough to have its own mailing address. Clutter is something I’ve lived with for a long time. For most of that time I’ve treated it as just how I am.

But “just how I am” is a story. My training as a coach taught me that much: the stories we tell at the identity level are the ones we’ve stopped questioning. This was one of mine.

And not only mine. My mom saved things “in case they might be useful,” a habit she learned from her mother, who came through the Great Depression keeping newspaper clippings, fabric, anything that might one day serve someone.

Here’s what strikes me when I actually look at the stack: not one thing in it is hard. Same with my inbox and my task list: not one email, not one unanswered text, not one item would take more than a minute or two. They’re puzzle pieces sitting in plain sight. Clutter, someone once told me, is just decisions delayed.

There’s a story in Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled that particularly resonated with me. Peck, well into adulthood, had decided he was simply not a person who could fix things. One day he watched a neighbor repairing a lawn mower and said something admiring, something about how he’d never been able to do that kind of thing. The neighbor didn’t look up. “That’s because you don’t take the time.”

I started wondering what I thought I was bad at that I really just hadn’t given enough time to.

If clutter isn’t a defect, if it’s just decisions I haven’t sat with long enough to make, then the reason I haven’t made them isn’t mysterious either. It’s time. And time is the one thing you can’t declutter your way into more of. I like to believe some part of us is unlimited, outside of time and space entirely.

Maybe so. But here, in a body, with a calendar, I get the same number of hours in a day as everyone else, and every day I get to answer the same question again: what will I devote them to?

If you have a stack of your own, here’s what I want you to hear: there’s nothing wrong with you. If you have even a modicum of ambition or care, you’re going to die with things on your to-do list and emails in your inbox. Everyone who’s engaged with life does. The stack isn’t proof you’re failing. It’s proof you’re in the game — and it’s a gift: every day, you get to decide what the hours are actually for.

From the Commonplace Book

“Life is long if you know how to use it.” — Seneca

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

This week on Chris Williamson’s Modern Wisdom podcast, he released a conversation with David Sinclair, the Harvard geneticist and author of Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To, who thinks aging is a disease we’ll learn to treat. It’s a fascinating hour, and I’ll admit I want what he’s selling.

But somewhere in the middle I caught myself thinking: if someone handed me twenty more years tomorrow, would I spend them any differently than I’m spending this one? A long life and a good one aren’t the same thing. The first is his problem to solve. The second is still mine.

If any of this landed, hit reply and tell me — I read every one. And if you think it might be worth someone else’s time, send it their way.

Wishing you every good thing, Brilliant

People sometimes ask how I remember so much — quotes, etymologies, who taught and influenced whom, which books and cities and cultures shaped others. Random tidbits, you name it. To be clear, I couldn’t hold a candle to Jeopardy! legend Ken Jennings.

It’s not that I have some bear-trap memory for everything. My penchant is for recalling what others have said — especially about life, and how to live it well. And the honest answer isn’t a technique. It’s this: I remember what I love, what I’ve needed, and what I intend to give away.

Start with love. When I learn, I usually bring my whole self to it. The Japanese have a word for this — isshōkenmei, “with all one’s might.” The word descends from an old samurai phrase meaning to defend one’s single plot of land with one’s life. Wholeheartedness with survival stakes.

Learning science has a name for the state in which we learn best: arousal. When I learn, I’m often aroused. Make of that what you will.

For me, learning is mostly play. I think of it like being a kid on a beach collecting sea glass — beautiful shells, odd treasures, whatever the ocean washed up that day. It’s also a puzzle. Someone once asked me my life goals, and I was surprised to hear myself say, “I want to be omniscient.” But I knew it was true. I want to know everything. (Never to be a know-it-all — just to keep finding out.) It’s the phrase Richard Feynman lived by, the one that titles a collection of his talks: the pleasure of finding things out.

And here’s the thing about recall: it’s effortless when the learning didn’t take effort in the first place. We don’t strain to remember what delighted us.

But play is only part of my answer. For much of my life, I experienced the universe as a vast, dark, cold, indifferent place — a vacuum devoid of meaning. And I desperately wanted meaning. The things I learned became beacons. Guideposts. Sometimes the path itself. The map is not the territory. The menu is not the meal. If you can say it or think it, it’s not true. I returned to these again and again, and navigated by them. Some days I just needed a reason to live one more day. It didn’t have to be a good one. It just had to be something.

Here’s what I discovered: it’s easy to remember things that are essential to your survival.

And finally — whenever I learn something, I’m already thinking about who I can share it with. That intention changes everything. It’s why I built systems to save what I find, and every time I revisit a quote or a fact to pass it along, it settles deeper into memory. Generosity, it turns out, is a mnemonic device.

When Isaac Asimov — who wrote or edited more than 500 books — was reportedly asked what he’d do if told he had only six months to live, he answered: “Type faster.”

That’s what love, need, and generosity look like when they’ve fused into one motion. We don’t remember what we memorize. We remember what we treasure, what has saved us, and what we can’t wait to give away.

From the Commonplace Book

“Sometimes a person needs a story more than food to stay alive.” — Barry Lopez, Crow and Weasel

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Recently I stumbled onto splode.co — a live leaderboard of what the internet is paying attention to right now. It pulls trending data from Google, YouTube, Spotify, Reddit, and more into a single page, refreshed every few minutes.

It’s like peering through keyholes throughout the universe. A meta-feed: instead of whatever the algorithms are serving me, I see what others are seeing and caring about. The beach at high tide, if the ocean were all of us. I never leave without picking something up.

If any of this landed, hit reply and tell me — I read every one. And if you think it might be worth someone else’s time, send it their way.

Wishing you every good thing,

Brilliant

When I started researching — and then writing — a book about prayer, I followed a simple structure. Seven questions I wanted answers to: What is prayer? Why do it? Does it work? Who or what are we praying to? Is there a right way? How can we make prayer part of a busy life? And what else is good to know?

As an organizing framework, it was supremely useful. It shaped more than forty interviews. It worked — the way many things in our lives work. Habits, beliefs, relationships: they work until they don’t. Or until we outgrow them. (Or reinvent them.)

Because here’s what I eventually saw: I was writing the book for myself — those were my questions. But my readers are busy, and many are wrestling with heavy questions of their own. They didn’t want a curiosity tour of prayer. Cut to the chase, Brilliant. Give me value from page one.

So I restructured. “What are the benefits of prayer?” became Part 1. “What is prayer?” — the logical opener — moved to Part 3.

Then something interesting happened. I’ve now worked with three professional editors on this manuscript — and the last two, unprompted, made the same suggestion: open with “What is prayer?” Put it back. That got my attention. An editor’s whole job is to advocate for the reader, and here they were advising against the very change I’d made to serve the reader.

There’s an old proverb: if one person tells you you’re a horse, ignore them. If two people tell you, give it some thought. If three people tell you you’re a horse — go buy a saddle.

But there’s a well-worn piece of advice among writers that points nearly the opposite way: when people tell you something’s wrong, they’re almost always right. When they tell you exactly how to fix it, they’re almost always wrong.

So which is it? The challenging thing about a choice like this is that there’s no right answer. There’s only what you do.

I’ve long believed the two hardest things in life are these: living in a way that lets you hear the still, small voice inside you offering guidance — and having the courage to follow it when you do.

And there’s a tension folded inside this one, because these editors are help I asked for. That’s its own art: asking for help, accepting it — and knowing when not to accept the “help” you’ve asked for.

Which might be the whole practice, for all of us: hearing that voice, finding the courage to follow it — and, when we ask for help, having the discernment to know when to take it and when to trust ourselves instead.

From the Commonplace Book

“This is how you survive the unsurvivable, this is how you lose that which you cannot bear to lose, this is how you reinvent yourself, overcome your abusers, fulfill your ambitions and meet the love of your life: by following what is true, no matter where it leads you.” — Augusten Burroughs, This Is How

Further Down the Rabbit Hole

Recently I watched The Defiant Ones, the HBO docuseries about the unlikely partnership between producer Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre. What I loved: watching Iovine believe in and support artists across every genre and message — Springsteen, Patti Smith, Tom Petty, Stevie Nicks, U2, N.W.A, Nine Inch Nails, Eminem, Dre.

It’s amazing what we can do when someone believes in us — and what we can do for others when we believe in them — and I came away inspired to continue my own creative work, which is really just another way of saying: keep speaking and sharing your truth.

If any of this landed, hit reply and tell me — I read every one. And if you think it might be worth someone else's time, send it their way.

Wishing you every good thing, Brilliant