👯 Some tenets of the ‘friendship theory of everything’ Ava highlighted really resonated:
You accept that in choosing who you spend time with you choose who you are.
Almost everyone who’s unhappy is unhappy because they feel isolated. The best cure for isolation is a strong friend group. So much of happiness is having someone you can get a last-minute dinner with on a Monday night, or ask to water your plants while you’re gone for a week. The opposite of loneliness, as it were.
🍪 I got lucky enough to get a sneak preview on the draft of this post. Itay went through points truly close to my heart. It made me remember an old debate at home when I was a kid: if we should get an ‘all-in-one’ TV-VHS combo or not -we decided we shouldn’t. Designing for a single purpose.
🌊 Another beautiful -and important- read by Henrik and Johanna on shortcuts and longcuts.
Almost everything that is meaningful, beautiful, life-affirming, empowering, transformational, true—it can’t be reached by shortcuts. But what we can do is make the longcuts walkable, put out footbridges and stairs, and a table where the ocean comes into view.
👴 I like this framing by Brian -retire often- and can't agree more on his first sentence -which made me think of the power of ‘sabbatical’, ‘gap year’ and cie.
In the end, it’s the things we did not try that we’ll regret most in life.
♟ Another framing that resonated last week came from Jonathan: successful underachievement.
I think the idea of successful underachievement matters. I don’t know how else to make sense of succeeding while failing without lying to ourselves. We need to make peace with ourselves as beings blessed to strive and condemned to fail.