RadReads 154

This Week: Why resolutions fail, the origins of farming, a f**k it bucket, Emotional detachment

Good Morning, RadReaders 💚

I hope everyone had a great week and welcome to all of our new subscribers. For the second straight week I’m blown away by the generosity of our Patrons, both new and old. Thank you Mike 💜, Karthik 🙏, John ↗️, Rick 🙌, and Paul 🔥. There’s a lot of building happening behind the scenes + new events coming up (beyond NYC). Join the fam for as little as a Venti Pike per month.

A quick note about last week’s postscript on male loneliness — it clearly struck a nerve, as I received moving responses from teenagers and grandpas alike (and someone even sent me some bitcoin!) This is exactly why I do this — to create the space to look within ourselves. Once that takes place, beautiful things will emerge.

Emotional detachment is a ticking time bomb

Rad Awakenings | 59 Mins | iTunes | Google Play | Stitcher

Thomas Page McBee is an author and journalist who writes about masculinity, and gender more broadly. Because Thomas is also trans, I entered the conversation with a preconceived set of beliefs, mostly based on the popular narratives I’d seen in media about trans people. Thomas and I discussed where his story and reporting diverged from those narratives, and helped me understand how gender is complicated for all of us. He’s got a unique and informed perspective on issues many men struggle with, including emotional detachment, gender policing, shame, and violence. Thomas’ Man Alive is fantastic and I’m eager to read Amateur (due out this August).

Life Coaches on Instagram break the first rule of therapy — that’s why it works

11 mins | Quartzy

Is everyone a life coach these days? (Ahem, I may have dabbled.) In the era of the wellness and personal branding movement, this nascent (and unregulated) industry has found a fertile new ground for marketing: Instagram. Can one effectively be coached by someone their junior? How does it differ from therapy? And most importantly, does it work!?!?!

How to ride your brain bicycle

9 mins | Breaking Smart

Why do resolutions fail? There’s design, implementation, and forecasting errors. But those are remediable. What about a failure of commitment due to some deeper-seated angst? Rao offers a counter to the “FB is stealing your attention narrative,” arguing that distraction is actually a human feature to enforce commitment. And over a lifetime we must cultivate the emotional balance that is akin to the way we stabilize ourselves on a bike. Venkatesh discussed uncomfortable introspection on the podcast.

The Best Advice of the Year

4 Minutes | The Wall Street Journal (paywall)

I typically avoid these mini-advice columns, but the advice here is so random yet weirdly applicable. There’s one nugget describing a snipers’ breathing strategies to manage your emotions; another on the inevitable triage required to stay in touch with friends; and the last, a “f*ck it bucket” to really hone in with precision on what really matters.

Why did we start farming?

20 mins | London Review of Books

This article reads like the lovechild of Sapiens and the Omnivore’s Dilemma. It explores the origins of farming and its consequences on record keeping, taxation, disease, environmental impact, barbarians and the ultimate rise (and collapse) of the city-state.

Postscript: Rituals

Habits are the sh*t. Habit formation is the silver bullet to hacking and honoring your New Year’s resolutions. The productivity p*rn stories will tell you to wake up earlier (but isn’t that just doing more work?) or to develop incredible stores of willpower or to delete social media apps. These are just band-aids. Habit formation gives a structural advantage.

Developing a new habit is hard, once you develop the ability to subconsciously internalize certain behaviors it becomes nearly effortless to sit for 40 minutes of meditation or drink 64 oz of water each day. (Please forgive my humblebrag.) Another cute quality of habits is that the negative consequence of not doing the habit is often better than the positive benefit of completion. For instance, I’m more likely to say “Damn, I didn’t workout today and feel like crap” versus “I feel awesome because I worked out.”

But being habitual, can be a double-edged sword. Take our typical greeting, “How are you?” How often are these words empty and internalized? Consider “How are you” in Arabic: “Kayf haal-ik” which translates into “How is your heart doing at this very moment, at this breath?” While I probably won’t greet my homies this way, the fervor, curiosity, and intentionality behind this question inspires awe.

Now take the phrase “I love you.” Is it said out of habit? Are the words effortlessand empty? Lisa gut checks me on this. She’ll quip “what is it you love about me?” Not because she wants the adulation. She wants to know that it’s an affirmation and not some throwaway Hallmark scrawl (“Uh. I think you’re beautiful.”)

The word ritual evokes a sense of ceremony and worship. It is intentional, dare I say sacred. What if we turned “I love you” from a habit, to a ritual. And in that moment, as the words are being uttered, NOTHING else mattered but the truest and most heartfelt appreciation of the phrase. One could call it worship. The morning and evening kiss to your kids — same thing. Is there anything more important at that specific moment?

Frank Ostaseki shows the standard we should aspire to in his book The Five Invitations. In one of the book’s moving scenes, Frank asks a husband what he wanted to share with his wife stricken with cancer and in hospice care:

He didn’t hesitate for one moment. ‘I hope to love her with my whole heart,’ he said. ‘To love every part of her without reservation. To make sure she knows how blessed my life has been to be married to her.

Below the Fold

UNBUNDLED CAREER
📲 App Ideas for Beginners (10 mins, Super Easy Apps): I never contemplated the process (and economic case) for building a simple app, like a timer.

✏️ 10 years of professional blogging — what I’ve learned (8 mins, Andrew Chen): I find blogging to be one of the most rewarding and impactful activities in my life. A great guide on how to approach the activity.

LONG READS
💄 The Magic Skin of Glossier’s Emily Weiss (13 mins, The Cut): The rise of the ultimate Millennial e-commerce company.

💩 Improving Ourselves to Death (16 mins, The New Yorker): Is the cult of self-improvement hollowing out our souls? A survey of the genre’s recent books.

LAST WEEK’S MOST READ
🔒 Protect your digital accounts by disabling number porting and SMS-based password recovery (3 mins, Rad.Family): I have a nagging suspicion that many of you did not set up your password manager and 2-Factor authentication…

ICYMI
🏓 Leaving Bain Capital Ventures to pursue the pro squash tour (Rad Awakenings, 47 mins): Mike Lewis created a playbook on jumping off the known path, and interviewed 40 people on how they did it.

💼 RadJobs: Back to back weeks of a ton of sweet gigs at RadJobs. This week includes another huge week from Tattly, DevotedHealth, Everytable, X, Square, and The Mission. If you’re looking to have your dream job delivered directly to your 📲, sign up here!