After 9 books and 20 years of writing and speaking it’s time for me to come up with a new plan.
While I am working on book #10, now is a great time to ask you for your thoughts. SInce you care enough to follow my work, I want to know what I do that you value and what you’d like to see in the future. It’s basic customer research and product management I’ve never done for my own career! How silly.
Thanks for your help and I promise to report back on what I learn and what my plans are.
For my tenth book, about wisdom, I’ve been experimenting with Substack, posting draft ideas each week. In a recent video update I explained I’m now starting phase two: revising these shorter, informal pieces into a complete first draft.
What does this mean to you? I don’t know!
My ambition for this project is to capture the best ideas about living well I’ve encountered in life and do it in as concise a way as possible. AND also avoiding the common annoyances these kinds of books have.
If this interests you, it’s a good time to join the Substack for this book. Why? You’ll be first to see parts of the project as they develop and as phase two completes I’ll likely send the entire draft to the list for your feedback.
If you want to learn more, here are the first ten draft rules I’ve posted:
I rarely write about food here, but eating and cooking are two of my favorite things. Pho, Vietnamese rice noodle soup, is a pleasure I discovered more than a decade ago, when I went gluten-free for a time and struggled to eat anything anywhere. I’ve always loved noodles and it was a perfect match.
I’ve eaten it regularly ever since and it’s staple here in Seattle with dozens of places that specialize in it (the soup and where I’ve eaten it are even mentioned in the acknowledgements of Confessions Of A Public Speaker).
What I don’t like about people who write about food is pretense. The pretense that there’s a wrong way to eat. I have two rules about eating:
It is your mouth – put in it what you like, not what an expert (who has their own maw to fill) says
It is your money – you paid for it, eat it how you like
Of course you should experiment with different foods and different ways to eat things, and experts can help offer good experiments to try first, but only to discover what you enjoy. Everyone’s palate and tastes are different. Rules for food are for fools.
And now, Pho.
Pho is traditionally served with many ingredients for you to use as you please: bean sprouts, basil, lime, jalapeño, and at least two sauces, a hot Srirachia sauce and a sweet and salty Hoisin sauce. It’s quite a taste chemistry set and you’ll see many people who have very specific cauldronesque recipes for their pho.
I’m a simpleton: I taste the broth first, then put just about everything in (except basil which is rarely worth the effort), a shot of hot sauce, a shot of Hoisin, and I’m off and running. Maybe less sauce if I think the broth is great, maybe more if it’s not so impressive. I use the chopsticks for noodles, and sometimes drink the some of the broth at the end.
It’s no surprise all the experts have their laws, rules and traditions to which i say hooey. Traditions are great to try at least once, but you should always remember every tradition we have was invented by someone who tried something different than what had been done before:
