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I feel best when I am learning, creating and sharing, and I’ve been thinking about how to lower the bar when it comes to creation. In response to my growing stack of unfinished and unpublished longer form writing and podcast projects, I’m thinking that maybe the answer is simply to start smaller and share.
Top of Mind
Presence & Gratitude - Every once in a while I have a realization that makes me feel simultaneously enlightened, and a bit sheepish. Perhaps like many others, I can be guilty of comparing my life to the most extreme idealistic scenarios I can imagine. Not shockingly, this causes quite the spiral, and the goalpost always moves. I’ve been trying to lean into simple practices of presence and gratitude as a foundational state, and needless to say have been enjoying it. If only there were volumes of texts about this concept…
A fun reminder from 19 Cleveland, an excellent Telavivian restaurant on the border of the SoHo & Nolita neighborhoods in NYC.
Big Idea
Beauty & Luxury - With the rise of aspirational lifestyles through social media and the K-shaped economy, I’ve been playing with an idea that the concepts of beauty and luxury are being inappropriately merged. What I mean by that is there’s an idea being promoted that in order for something to be worthwhile, it must be luxurious. Of course, many luxurious things are beautiful. However, a lot of things that are celebrated and known to be luxurious, such as excess consumption and vanity, often aren’t beautiful at all. In my own life, many of my most beautiful moments weren’t luxurious, but rather pulled at much simpler, deeper and more universal elements of the human experience. Especially with the proliferation of cultural ideals through the megaphones of social media, I predict a cultural re-wiring will be necessary over the coming years or decades, but maybe this is nothing new.
Borrowed Wisdom
Lessons from Jim Rohn - I recently came across a few thought provoking ideas from the American entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker Jim Rohn. Rohn describes the ingredients for a good life as (1) productivity, (2) friendship, (3) heritage and culture, and (4) experiences. If you watch this video clip I think you’ll agree that he nails it. Especially in our culture of external validation and comfort, productivity was the one that surprised me the most. It’s easy to think that a good life is circumstantial. However, I’ve been in many conversations with friends over the years, and experienced it myself, whereby everything is fine and going well, but there’s a sense that something is missing. For me, it’s usually about learning and growth, and sometimes I have to look to places outside my daily and weekly routines to get that. Rohn describes it as doing the things that are easy to do but also easy not to do. For me, these are things like making an effort to connect with friends or family, reading, sitting down at the keyboard, or lacing up my running shoes.
Reading, Watching, Listening
Reading: The Leopard: This is known as one of the greatest Italian novels from the 20th century. It’s about a fading Sicilian family dynasty in the 1860s. I haven’t gotten to the lightbulb moment yet, but the characters, settings and scenarios have been pretty fun.
Watching: Cinema Paradiso (Rotten Tomatoes: 90%): A classic Italian film from 1988, also set in Sicily, like The Leopard above. A beautiful movie about love and loss, and the stories we tell ourselves about the past.
Listening: Streetwise: This is the new autobiography of Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs. Lloyd grew up in the public housing projects of East New York, Brooklyn, and went on to attend Harvard, Harvard Law and ultimately to lead the pre-eminent investment bank. Lloyd's story is such a radical example of the American dream and economic mobility that seems increasingly less common today, and potentially at further risk given the ongoing socio-economic changes. The book follows a familiar modern autobiographical structure, similar to Danny Meyer's Setting the Table and Stephen Schwarzman's What It Takes.
Let me know if anything stands out. Grateful for the chance to create and share.
Adam
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