Ever since getting married, most of my attention has been on my friends. Being fully loved long enough to trust the love is here to stay raises the question: what do you actually want to do, given you don’t need to prove yourself? I’ve long believed that my purpose is to make beautiful things and love my people dearly, but it took a sizable life chapter shift to help me actually reorient my days around that belief. I notice now how my motivation slumps immediately whenever I feel disconnected from either goal.
I suppose what I’m saying is that my ambition is no longer an ambient mystery to me. Instead it lives closer to my heart, directly tied to core beliefs I hold about the world. The kind of rumination that used to fuel the writing I do here feels far less necessary to ground my sense of self, partly because so many of the conversations I once had in my head now play out in far more interesting and unexpected ways with my friends.
The main commonality tying all my friends together is how incredibly individual we all are. None of us are pulling on precisely the same threads, yet we all share a way of going about the world that I can best describe as meticulous, curious, and deeply kind. Vocation is a topic we discuss often — the idea that each of us was designed to work on specific things in the world that we must first do the work to reveal to ourselves.
In many ways, this is the opposite of the Silicon Valley thinking that surrounds us — which sees humans as interchangeable workers rewarded most highly for extremely uneven development. Precocious spikiness is what gets you noticed in the world of startups, so it’s no surprise how many competitive people become razor-sharp, functionally turning themselves into tools tailor-designed to solve specific problems.
But that’s obviously no way to live? Or at least, it’s definitely no way to live long-term. All of my favorite people contain all manner of superfluous, silly, and soft parts that make them so much more than a tool. One of the greatest joys of my life is being able to behold those parts and watch as their confidence in their own uniqueness grows. To say that I am consistently inspired by my friends would be a gross understatement — more accurate is that I am constantly being reminded how lucky I am to be shaped by the wonderful people around me.
Links
Will raising venture sell my soul? (essay)
I’m trying out a career advice column :)Direct and indirect by Josh of Greenlea Lane (essay)
A great example of rigorous writing about a qualitative subject. This oral history of the venture capital greats is another good example.Rewriting the California Ideology by Nadia Asparouhova (essay)
An examination of the ideologies that underpinned early Silicon Valley and their evolution over time. Nadia’s new book Antimemetics is also excellent!Marriage and Philosophy in George Eliot and Søren Kierkegaard (essay)
Close study of the meaning of marriage as seen by Eliot and Kierkegaard.Crossing the cringe minefield by Cate Hall (essay)
Gateway drug to going down the Jungian shadow work rabbit hole (A Little Book on the Human Shadow is good if you want more).The tensions of staying too long by Haley Nahman (essay)
“From a practical distance, achieving public success scanned to me as belonging, which is ironic, because what I’m talking about is actually separation: an elevation of my own standing above the crowd. This must be one of the most common misapprehensions about fame, while somehow also being the most cliché.”
Lorde in conversation with Martine Syms (interview)
I love listening to women who are shamelessly themselves speak candidly. Also good in this way: this interview with Maggie Rogers and this profile of Miuccia Prada.Epic Systems (MyChart) by Acquired (podcast)
Both boring and impressive. Very aspirational for founders who want to retain control of their business and sustain a maker (not manager) schedule.
The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison (book)
Fascinating collection of essays on how our empathy thwarts us.
Swag by Justin Bieber (album)
I listened to this constantly on our honeymoon and felt like it was made for me.
Parting thought
“She was explaining to me that I had won nothing, that in the world there is nothing to win, that her life was full of varied and foolish adventures as much as mine, and that time simply slipped away without any meaning, and it was good just to see each other every so often to hear the mad sound of the brain of one echo in the mad sound of the brain of the other.”
Hey Molly! Thank you for sharing this :)
I find so much resonance in this line as I make my own strides in that direction to live with all the ironies in the mess of my life. "One of the greatest joys of my life is being able to behold those parts and watch as their confidence in their own uniqueness grows. "
I much appreciate the Maggie Rogers link, and since I haven't listened to Biebs since middle school, maybe it's time I gave him another gander.