Hello everyone!
Rather than start with a story, I’d like to ask who you are :)
After 4 months, The Well-Lived Life has almost passed 2000 subscribers! I’m blown away. This started as an experiment and has just exploded. Thank you to everyone who’s read anything!
Two months ago, I put out a request to the readers of The Well-Lived Life to ask if they’d be willing to tell me a bit about themselves. I’d like to do that again today (now that we’ve doubled in size) so that I know who I’m writing to. Let’s get to know each other! I have no interest in being some sort of lunatic guru. I’d like this to be a community.
On my end of things, writing can be pretty solitary. You scribble words, type them up and send them away. You’re not sure if they’re making any sort of impact.
Nothing you read from me is a planned-out email that’s leading you through some scammy sales funnel. Every one of these is written by me, by hand, and then spoken into a laptop (I HATE typing).
I’d love it if you hit reply/left a comment, and told me:
1) Your name, and something I should know about you.
2) Where you’re from
3) What you’re enjoying about The Well-Lived Life
4) What you’d like to see more of from The Well-Lived Life
5) Anything you want to say
*I hate bossy numbered lists, and if you do too, format your response however you want. Write a love poem about turtles for all I care. Just say hi!
I’ll be reading and responding to all of these within the next week!
What’s Worth Reading:
I’ll level with you guys. Two weeks ago, I hit what we could call an “information overload.” I’d been reading so many books about psychology and history, coupled with articles online, that my brain exploded. I stopped reading for a week, unable to connect with the material that I was trying to read.
So I went back to basics. This week I read a classic spy novel and a classic mystery, and my brain feels re-charged! I tricked myself into re-engagement by wanting to know what happens next. Now I’m ready to get back to digging up interesting facts about the good life :)
Here are the two awesome books I read:
The Spy Who Came In From The Cold by John Le Carre
“We have to live without sympathy, don't we? That's impossible of course. We act it to one another, all this hardness; but we aren't like that really, I mean...one can't be out in the cold all the time; one has to come in from the cold...d'you see what I mean?”
I re-listened to Malcolm Gladwell’s interview on Tim Ferris’s show last week, and he said that he reads tons and tons of spy novels. John Le Carre is his favorite author. So I figured I’d give it a try!
All I have to say is WOW. Le Carre is a master of suspense. I’m not really sure how to plug a mystery/spy novel without giving anything away, so I’ll just tell you that it’s based in the cold war time period, and that most of it takes place behind the Berlin wall. That’s ALL I’ll say. There’s too much delicious espionage involved to risk ruining it.
The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
There have been many covers on this classic, but the cover above is the one I was lucky enough to find. My girlfriend and I are obsessed with it now.
It centers around private detective Philip Marlowe, as he tries to solve a blackmail case for a rich California family.
This book is nothing but snappy, action-hero style detective one-liners. I’ve been laughing like crazy. Here are a few of my favorites:
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.”
“It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.”
“Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.”
One of the great regrets of my adult life is that I can’t be a hard-boiled privatedetective from the 1930’s. This book has given me the chance to live out that fantasy, just for a few moments.
I’m now beyond excited to watch the movie, which was made in 1946 and stars fountain of handsomeness Humphrey Bogart.
An awesome anti-guru podcast:
Guru-Wondery Productions
In 2006, a hilariously cheesy self-movie came out called The Secret. If you haven’t seen/heard of it, here are the first 20 minutes. It’s ridiculous on a level that I didn’t know was possible.
One of the “experts” on the law of attraction in the film is a man named James Arthur Ray. The Secret was his big break. It got him on Oprah, and built him a thousands-strong following. Guru is the story of how one of the challenges that he put his followers through to “motivate” them went horribly wrong.
In 2009, two of James Arthur Ray’s followers died on a retreat he was running called “Spiritual Warrior” in Sedona, Arizona. He had constructed something he called a “sweat lodge” (the indigenous population of the region has been very clear that what he constructed was an insult to the idea of a sweat lodge).
Because he was pushing his followers to stay in for more than two hours, three people died of heat exhaustion.
The podcast points out something very important that most of us never think about:
There is no accreditation process for gurus/self-help practitioners. Any charismatic speaker, taking advantage of positive group psychology, can amass a following and sell exorbitantly priced tickets to their own events. Tony Robbins is a prime example. The man never went to college, but he’s mastered pop psychology and the art of putting on a show.
Now, I’m not saying that what TR says can’t be helpful. I AM saying that it’s probably not worth $8000 to attend one of his events. You can get the same mental benefits by being in any large group of positive people (though COVID makes that nearly impossible at the moment).
And now, the feel-good news story of the week!
When I was researching stories for this week’s newsletter, I found this one that made me cackle with laughter. I don’t know if it’s good news, but it will definitely make you smile, which we need in these crazy times.
Last week, hundreds of people named Josh met in Nebraska, pool noodle in hand, to fight for the title of one true Josh.
This started more than a year ago when an Arizonan college student named Josh Swain, in what he called "a spell of pandemic boredom," sent a message to every other Josh Swain he could find on Facebook and challenged them to a duel at a random set of coordinates on April 24th, 2021, saying:
"We fight, whoever wins gets to keep the name. Everyone else has to change their name, you have a year to prepare, good luck."
The world is so bored that that event actually came together. Swain turned it into a fundraiser, and they ended up raising more than $10,000 for Children’s Hospital and Medical Foundation.
The full story can be found here.
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