“We’re only as sick as our secrets.” — recovery people

If that were true, I could tell you everything about me and become well. “I fart in my sleep. I feel so much better now for saying that!” Ridiculous. We’re as sick as our behavior. Immoral is a more accurate word than sick, anyway. Morality is about choice. That’s why we shouldn’t execute people who aren’t mentally competent. We shouldn’t execute anybody, really. We shouldn’t shame addicts, either.

Some things are beyond my control. When I smoked, I couldn’t help craving cigarettes. I quit smoking, and now I don’t crave cigarettes, but I do miss them, even if they’re nasty. No one has the right to make someone else uncomfortable to make themselves comfortable. I don’t have a right to light up a cigarette in a restaurant anymore. That’s my kind of law. It says, “You have no right to cause others pain to ease your own pain.”

Intimacy is knowing the good and bad about another person, like they fart in their sleep, but sharing details like “I fart in my sleep,” doesn’t make us more intimate. Some things are meant to be discovered rather than revealed. “We’re only as sick as our secrets” is a reaction to the shame we’d be better off not feeling, which isn’t all shame. Shamelessness is worse than never feeling shame. There are many things people have been ashamed of that aren’t worth the trouble, but some things are worth being ashamed of.

“I make high cost loans to poor people.” You should be ashamed.

“I get up in the middle of the night and eat the sheet cake I keep under my bed.” Is that shameful? No, it’s sad, which is very different.

Maybe our current shameless era will reorient us to what’s worth being ashamed of, and we can bring back a more useful form of shame.

In John Grisham’s “The Firm” the main character cheats on his wife with an attractive woman who was hired to seduce him. In the book he keeps the infidelity a secret, but in the movie he tells her. Why? Presumably because the movie producers felt it would alienate ticket buyers if he kept his cheating a secret. That’s Hollywood. If he admits he cheated he’s a good man. Baloney. Cheating makes him less likable, not keeping the secret.

To make amends, he might confess his weakness and commit to being stronger, but not confess that specific act. He can confess specifically to himself and to God, if he has one. He doesn’t have to confess to his wife. Confessing to his wife will hurt her even if it makes him feel better. Doing something to help yourself that hurts someone else is cruel, even shameless. I’ve apologized several times to make myself feel better and in the act have hurt the person I was apologizing to. I didn’t realize I was doing it at the time. I felt good getting something off my chest. I didn’t consider how the other person would receive it. A selfish apology is worse than no apology.

Some things need to be shared with someone else, even if it hurts them. “I just lost $10,000 on sports betting, but I won’t tell my wife. It might hurt her.” That is a sick secret, and I’d be sick for keeping it. But it’s not the secret that makes me sick. It’s sports betting for high stakes. We’re only as sick as our vices. Some vices we’re so ashamed of we keep them secret.

I eat ice cream after Anna goes to bed. She knows it. It’s not a secret as much as a ritual. The worst time to eat ice cream might be 10 pm, but it’s not something I’m ashamed of, unless I eat half a carton, and I buy the expensive little cartons. If I’m eating the ice cream because I don’t want to go to bed with her, that’s a sick secret, or a secret that will make me sick and make my marriage sick if it goes untreated. But that’s not why I eat ice cream at 10 pm. I eat it because I like how it tastes.

I’m a fraud if I want shame only in other people’s lives but not in my own. How can shame be a good thing for me? There are things in my past I should feel bad about. Torturing myself over them does no one any good, but I shouldn’t feel good about them, I shouldn’t not regret them, or totally forget them.

“Forgive yourself, but remember.” – someone smart

When I torture myself over a long past mistake… (transgression? What’s the right word? 3+3 = 7 is a mistake. Cheating on your wife needs a stronger word.) When I torture myself over a sin, if I’ve humbly repented and tried to make amends where amends makes sense, I can remind myself that I’m forgiven. Maybe a story would help.

Growing up my two brothers and I loved music. We still do. When I went to college I took several records with me that I knew were my brothers’ records. Eventually I mailed them back when I was trying to make amends. I may have kept the best ones - I can’t remember if I bought my own copies or kept some of the ones I loved, but there are records in my collection that my brothers had, and don’t belong to me if I didn’t buy duplicates, which I might have. Perhaps I just returned the ones I didn’t like that much. Cheap grace. It doesn’t matter now because no one listens to records.

Should I be ashamed that I may have only made a partial amends? If I did make half an amends it would be in character. Half measures are my middle name. Taking your brothers’ records isn’t something that should generate as strong an emotion as shame. Only returning the ones you don’t want might be.

Self deprecation is useful, but not more useful than shame. Self deprecation is like a paring knife while shame is an axe - both are useful, and they can’t be substituted for one another, but you may use a paring knife every day, and an axe only rarely. Shame is crippling by design. Shame stops behavior. There was a time when fear of public shame prevented some behaviors. Now sex tapes make us famous. As Kim Kardashian’s mother confessed when her daughter’s sex tape became public, “As a mother I was horrified, but as her manager…” Call me old fashioned, but I prefer public stocks to sex tapes. Used infrequently and in small doses, shame, like pornography, can be a good thing.

I’m not interested in writing right now. I’m interested in conversation. The world has too much writing and not enough conversation. Conversation flows, has give and take, is changed by obstacles and doesn’t ignore them or try to flatten them like much of writing does. Conversation is spontaneous. Writing is formal; conversation is relaxed. I want to converse with the pixels and with myself. I’ll leave writing with all its assurance to others.

“Only the fools are certain and assured.” – Montaigne

Last Saturday I was eating breakfast at my kitchen island, dressed in my fancy navy pajamas, spa robe, and camouflage house slippers, when someone knocked on the front door. A few minutes before then, I’d noticed my wallet wasn’t in its usual place. I always put it in the drawer by the front door, but that day it wasn’t there. “No matter. It will turn up in a coat pocket or on my desk downstairs,” I thought, and went back to breakfast.

I didn’t recognize the man outside the door, and wondered sarcastically if he was from ICE. He had a bald head and a black athletic shirt on. I picked up Alice’s leash and answered the door.

“Hello?” I asked.

He stepped back from the stoop. “Are you Thomas?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering if I was going to be summoned. He thrust out his hand. My wallet was in it.

“I found this in the middle of Murphy Road,” he said. I took my wallet from him. He began to back away.

“Thank you!” I said. “Thank you very much.” I reached out to shake his hand. “My name’s Tom.”

“Daniel.” He took another small step back. “Everything’s in there,” he said.

I looked in the wallet. Everything was there just as he said.

“Thank you,” I said again.

“I lost my wallet once, and it was returned to me intact. This is kind of my chance to pay it forward, I guess,” he said, and he went away.

I went back inside, put my wallet in the drawer where it belonged, and returned to breakfast.

How had my wallet gotten in the middle of Murphy Road, a broad and busy thoroughfare about half a mile from my home? I had no idea. The day before I’d been out to get coffee and a pup cup on the way to the dog park. I also took our eight-month-old puppy Alice out for one final bilge emptying before bed, but neither time had I been near Murphy Road except to cross it in the car on the way home from the dog park. We had the windows open to calm the dog, and I take my wallet out of my pocket when I drive, which is a problematic habit, but none of those decisions should have resulted in my wallet ending up in the middle of Murphy Road. So how did it get there? God must have stolen it. It’s about as good an explanation as any. Something happened I can’t explain — God must have done it. It’s a line of reasoning that’s worked for eons.

Why would God steal my wallet? So I could write about it, I guess. I could write about how often people assume the worst, and the worst doesn’t happen. How we think, “Who would return a wallet with cash in it?” when the answer is, “Many people.”

My benefactor Daniel saw my address on my driver’s license and interrupted his day to return my wallet. What does that say about human nature? Not much, but it says a lot about Daniel. He was a little shy about returning my wallet. He didn’t want to stick around. Of course I was in my pajamas on a Saturday morning, so he must have guessed he’d interrupted something. I didn’t ask many questions; I was too shocked. The best examples of kindness have a sort of ordinary miraculousness about them.

If God stole my wallet so I could write about it, why did He have Daniel find it? Because Daniel wanted to pay his debt forward, perhaps, and to feel good about doing someone a kindness. Perhaps Daniel has a shady past, and this was a test from God that he passed. It makes a nice story, and helps create a way to explain the world, even if it’s all ridiculous.

It’s so easy to make up stories that explain the world. It’s why religion is so soothing — it explains so much. Something doesn’t have to be true to make us feel good, to put our minds at ease. A more likely answer than God stole my wallet is that Daniel got the name of the street wrong where he found my wallet. The night before when I lost my wallet, I reached into my jacket pocket for a flashlight and poop bag. It’s possible my wallet fell out then. That’s more likely than God stole it, anyway. Explanations like this are why it’s so easy for rationalists to feel superior to believers. God stole your wallet? That’s absurd. There are no miracles, only things we don’t understand yet.

A fancy theologian could also take issue with the “God Stole My Wallet” theory. “You and your wallet are much too small for God to trouble with. That sort of belief is childish and egotistical.”

All belief is silly — that’s why it’s belief. Belief is irrational and indefensible by design, unless you explain belief as a kind of self-interest: believing will make you happier than not believing. When Cortes invaded Mexico, he explained to the indigenous people in each village how their idols were evil and should be destroyed, and if they erected a house around the crosses Cortez’s men built them, and kept the cross clean, and prayed to the Blessed Virgin, many good things would happen to them. Belief motivated by self-interest is the belief of conquistadores.

But back to my wallet. Its safe return, intact, only moments after I realized it was missing is a kind of miracle. I have no idea how I lost it, and its return defies expectations. But why should it? Why not believe that people are basically good and want to do what’s right? Most people are not thieves. If Daniel had kept my wallet, he’d have the memory of keeping it with him forever, and doubly sinful with the knowledge that when he lost his wallet, it was returned to him intact while found a wallet and kept it. If he has any conscience, and most people do, keeping my wallet might have haunted him, which would be a very high price for the 30 dollars I had in it.

But what do I know? I’m naive. I can hardly imagine anyone being motivated by evil, and yet it happens all the time. Socrates said no one knowingly chooses wrong. We do immoral things because we think they’re in our own interest. If Daniel had been wrong thinking, he might have thought, “I’ll keep this wallet because I want the money and credit cards to pay for Christmas.” Someone we might call a good person knows returning the wallet will have a more positive effect on them than keeping it. Perhaps good is less appropriate here than ordinary.

Maybe all the Gospels were written because an eyewitness got the details wrong. Maybe Jesus never said he was the son of God, or fed the five thousand. Maybe the five thousand simply shared their food. Maybe Jesus didn’t raise Lazarus; maybe he just woke him up. Maybe Jesus didn’t cast out demons, but was a schizophrenic who experienced a group delusion with other schizophrenics. All answers are more plausible than belief.

I believe in the message of Jesus, that the kingdom of heaven is ours if we choose to love each other without exceptions; if we give up our possessions and praise creation. I know we could do this if we chose to, but I don’t think we’ll ever make the choice. We’d be a lot more uncomfortable physically, we’d have to raise each other’s children, care for each other’s elderly parents, work a lot harder and live shorter lives, but we’d live in the kingdom of love. If you meet someone who needs a cloak and you have one, give them yours. That logic solves a lot of problems, but we have to learn to not want cloaks so much.

I don’t believe God stole my wallet, but I know it was returned to me. Whether God took it, or it just fell out of my pocket, the happy result is the same, and I’m grateful.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

“We’re about as happy as we make our minds up to be.” - Recovery People

Is this true? Let’s find out. I’m going to set a timer for two minutes. I’ll close my eyes and repeat “I’m as happy as I’ve ever been,” over and over until the timer goes off. Then I’ll see if I feel more happy, less happy, or about the same before and after. Here goes.

I feel a little better after the meditation, but what I mostly feel is uncertain. Two minutes isn’t enough time to know.

“I’m as happy as I’ve ever been” makes me second guess my past. Have I ever been happy? Is being as happy as I’ve ever been a low bar? In the middle of my meditation I tried a different phrase: “I can be as happy as I want.” More second guessing ensued. Is it greedy to want to be happier than whatever my resting happiness is?

I’m sympathetic to the idea of happiness being a choice or a skill, but both ideas have limitations. Circumstances have a lot to do with happiness, and choices and skills can’t overcome all circumstances. If I break my leg skiing, I will be unhappy. If someone I care about gets cancer, I’ll be unhappy. Pain makes me unhappy. Pain comes from circumstances. I don’t choose pain; pain is thrust upon me. I started writing about happiness and three paragraphs in, I’m writing about pain. What does that say.

Montaigne did something very difficult: he wrote his thoughts. Why is that so hard? Thoughts are about all anyone could write, aren’t they? No. So much of writing is imitation. Imitation is thinking like someone else. What are my thoughts versus the thoughts of others? In the jumble of everything I’ve heard or read, what do I think? “I’m about as happy as I make my mind up to be” isn’t my thought — it’s something I heard. “I’m as happy as my habits” is something else I’ve heard. I’m a behaviorist. 12 step recovery has convinced me that I can act my way into being happier, if not completely happy. Thinking doesn’t work so well.

Why do I care what other people think, like what anyone else might think when they read this? I want to be liked. Being liked makes me happy. “Should we care about the opinions of all people, or just some people?” Socrates asks in “Crito.” Just some, Crito answers. Which ones? The best ones. Who are the best ones? The dialog works its way to “we should only care about the opinions of the truly good, which might be the gods,” but Socrates doesn’t come right out and say that.

The truly good are very few. I’m likely not among them. So not only should I not care about the opinion of most people, I shouldn’t care about my own opinion. But I still want to be liked. Maybe wanting to be liked is making up my mind to be unhappy.

It’s the same old morality. “Do what’s right, and you’ll be happy.” Socrates was happy at his death. 70 was damn old for 400 BC. Socrates did what was right and was executed. Jesus did, too, and he was executed. Seems like a high bar for simple happiness, to have to die a martyr. Birthday cake is fun, too. And baseball games.

But birthday cake and baseball games are amusements, not happiness. I keep imagining someone else reading this. Will they like it? It’s not just me who wants to be liked, it’s my writing, too. Actually, the writing wants nothing. It just is. Until I delete it, and then it’s not.

Now I’m thinking that, “We’re about as happy as we make our minds up to be,” isn’t true at all. My experiment with thinking “I’m as happy as I’ve ever been,” over and over was a failure. If I can’t decide to be happy, I shouldn’t be able to decide to be unhappy, either. But I do feel like I’ve had occasions where I decided to be unhappy. Was I successful in making myself unhappy after deciding to be unhappy? I don’t have much experience to draw on. I’m generally good humored. I honestly have very little insight into my character defects. I love that phrase from recovery - character defects.

Socrates says truth is that which doesn’t change. The speed of light is truth. The relationship of a circle’s circumference to its diameter is truth. All people are mortal is truth. People value the wrong things is truth. Montaigne had a phrase that’s out of style but ever so useful - the common herd. He didn’t invent it. Arrogant aristocrats have existed for a long time. In a shameless age the ideas of shame, hierarchy, and judgment seem pretty useful. Every age is shameless. The subjects in a Hieronymus Bosch painting don’t seem a lot classier than the crowd at a NASCAR race.

“We’re about as happy as we make our minds up to be” assumes happiness is a decision, and that we know what it is we’re deciding to be. Aristotle said happiness is the reason we do everything because it’s the one thing worth having just for itself - it’s the highest good. Someone I love and respect recently told me that pursuing happiness is weak and immature. Aristotle and I disagree with this characterization of the pursuit of happiness. We’re not talking about ice cream, rainbows, and Disney World when we talk about happiness. Aristotle and I are talking something that’s worth dying for. Character. Flourishing.

For Aristotle and me, happiness is an outcome from living a good life, from being virtuous. My sister in law has pressed me to define what virtue means. I suppose it means, “Doing what God would have me do.” Bur what if there is no God? Does that mean there’s no virtue? No, I know it doesn’t mean that. I have no doubt virtue exists. Like Socrates, I can’t define it. But I’m sure it’s real.

Our actions determine our happiness in so far as our circumstances allow. Socrates died happy. Jesus might have as well, though it looks like he died in agony. Socrates chose to accept Athens verdict and dink the poison. He could have left town. His friends insisted they’d sneak him out of jail up until his last day. He chose to accept his sentence because that’s what a good Athenians was suppose to do - accept the will of the city. His happiness didn’t come from choosing suicide. It came from the practice of his virtue, part of which was to accept the will of the city.

It’s harder to say about Jesus’s state of mind at the end. If he was able to cure the sick and make the blind see, he must have been able to get off the cross. He didn’t. That was a choice. I don’t know if it made him happy, but by my earlier definition of happiness - something that’s with dying for - his choice made him ecstatic.

I started a novel. I’d like to work on it and maybe share it here. It’s sort of Republic meets The Moon is a Harsh Mistress meets Gulliver’s Travels with a lot of “tech culture sucks” thrown in.

LMK if you have interest in reading some of the book here. It would make my life easier if I can combine this Substack with progress on the novel.

I’m a giant Montaigne fan boy. I won’t bore you with who he was, but he wrote this to introduce his great work “Essays.”

“Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject. So farewell.”

I love how ballsy that is. He’s daring the reader to stop reading. Well, I am the matter of my Substack, and I’m pretty vain, too. I want to do this to have a conversation with myself. I’m intentionally not writing for any audience besides myself, but you’re welcome to listen in.

I’m really not writing at all, or I don’t want to. I want to have a conversation. Good conversation is rare, good writing is everywhere, though the majority of writing is too sure of itself for me.

“Only fools are certain.” Montaigne

I want to live my life in uncertainty. Doubt is my north star.

Good conversation is holy. Besides not writing for an audience, another rule I aspire to follow is that everything I write makes as much sense to atheists as believers. I want to be both a passionate believer and a passionate atheist at the same time. No other way makes sense to me. I don’t want to pick a side, or I’d miss half of the truth. I want to be in the middle, pulled in both directions at once. That’s more comfortable than choosing a side for me.

When I say God, I mean the same thing an atheist means when he says nature, or reality, or the universe—something that is, that keeps being, that makes and unmakes, that’s always changing but ever the same. Or less poetically, just “nature.”

So why is conversation holy, and what does holy mean to an atheist? For me, holy means things that don’t change. Every conversation is different, and yet always the same. Conversation is creative. It connects and builds, and it tears down and leaves things unfinished. It makes new things from constituent parts, and it rips firm structures to pieces. Sounds like God/nature to me.

There is me, there are my thoughts, and together they make a third thing, these flickering pixels. Conversation disappears. I say something, and it’s gone, forgotten. Conversation has no definite beginning or ending. Is this essay the beginning of a conversation? Or is it the continuation of one that began long ago? My vote is for the second one. Sounds like God/nature to me, too.

Conversation has little structure. Cause and effect are nearly undetectable in it. I have no idea why I said what I said after I listened to you — it just popped in my mouth. My pops and your pops make something neither of us makes alone. I can speak with myself, but it’s never the same as speaking with someone else.

But how is talking to yourself holy, since I’m talking to myself now? I am a mystery to myself. Everyone else is a mystery, too. I understand no one, including myself. Mystery sounds like God/nature, too.

The speed of light never changes. I’m an English major. I understand science poetically, which is to say incorrectly. The speed of light probably does change somewhere, but I understand it as a constant, never changing thing.I could look this up—and yes, light is slower in water than in air—but that would interrupt my thought.

I believe there is such a thing as truth. Things that never change are the truth. The speed of light is truth. It’s not relative to other things. The sides of a right triangle always have the same proportionate lengths. It’s not “it depends.” Context is important, but some things are true, others are not. Some things are good, others are not. There are absolutes. Things that don’t change are holy. So that’s my depiction of holy for atheists - things that don’t change. The speed of light. The Pythagorean Therom. You can see I’m not much a salesperson for atheism.

I am a mystery; I’m always the same, and I’m always changing. Seeking to understand mystery, to make it plain and understandable is a holy pursuit. And that’s why conversation is holy. A conversation with myself is a prayer. What’s prayer for atheists? Talking to yourself.

I’m writing about 700 words a day. It takes about 30 minutes. If I like something I’ll put it here.

Gertrude Stein says she wrote 30 minutes a day and never revised. Did she write slowly or all in a rush? Montaigne had to write by hand with a quill pen. How fast could he scribble? I think he wrote slowly, but he didn’t revise much either, though he definitely did revisions - additions and deletions. I wish I could write with my eyes closed. There’s so much poison in my mind. Is it better to write quickly in a rush? Slowly and thoughtfully? Or fast and fearless?

What’s me, and what are my influences? Or am I my influences? Maybe I haven’t done much writing because I’ve nothing to say. Why did I stop? I got out of the habit. Travel. Laziness. Avoidance. Baseball. All the things I thought I’d rather do. Misprioritization. What’s most important? What’s the most important work I can do?

I hate advice. Advice is mostly theoretical. If something has worked in my life, it’s no guarantee it will work in someone else’s. My advice might be fiction. My memory isn’t reliable. Maybe the advice I’m giving is just something I thought I did with an outcome that didn’t happen, but I remember it anyway? Advice assumes too much. When I advise, I assume it’s wanted and helpful, and it may be neither.

Advice is rude. Advice doesn’t consider the other. Advice is a statement of power, an affirmation of the adviser to himself. “If you do this thing, I will be happier.” That’s advice. Or “The action I’m telling you to take will produce your desired outcome. I know because I have the power of knowing all desired outcomes, for my life and yours.” That assumes far too much, too much to be kind.

I have thoughts without any idea what thought is to follow. And then there’s another thought that might not be related to the first thought that leads to another and this third thought is at least two steps removed from the first. I might have made a straight line or I might have gone from Jupiter to Mars, or from Mars to laundry. Conversation does the same thing.

I can make a misstep in reasoning and still get to a better destination. Suppose I see a path across a stream - six rocks, and I reach the other side, dry. One of the rocks is actually a turtle. I step on one the turtle, but it’s as good as a rock for me. When I pick my foot up it moves. I got to the other side and didn’t get wet, but no one can follow my path because the turtle moved. Mistaken reasoning is like my path across the stream. I make mistakes, lean on falsehoods and wrong assumptions as part of my argument, but the argument can still get me to my desired place anyway. Think of religion that way, you atheists. It’s all lies to you, but it works for others. And think of atheism that way, too, you believers.

No one can follow me because I was mistaken. The rock was a turtle. The replication crisis. “You can get the same results in your experiment we got in ours if you make the same mistakes we made. “

I don’t understand what I wrote, but I’m going to leave it because I like it.

“The worst person to ask what something means is the person who wrote it.” — Plato

By Margaret the Pug, with translation by Tom Noser

Tom asks me a lot of questions that make no sense. “Why do we exist? Why is there suffering and pain? Why are some born rich and others poor? Why are some dogs not pugs?” There is so much humans ask that makes no sense, but humans are still lovable and very useful to know, so I will answer the questions, even though I don’t ask questions like “Why do we exist,” and “Why is there pain,” because they are very silly questions that have no answers.

Life is wonderful, and life is painful. Knowing why life is wonderful or why life is painful does not make life any more wonderful or less painful. In Dog, wonderful means something I don’t understand that’s also interesting. So wonderful applies to both enjoyable things and painful things. Enjoyment and pain make me wonder. It’s wonderful to hear, it’s wonderful to taste, to be cold and get warm by a vent, to be full of energy and spend it on something interesting, to become tired and to rest, to be young and know nothing, to mature and learn tricks, to eat dinner alone and then again with the family, to see a shadow that becomes a cat when it moves, to smell food and know what it will become when it’s cooked. It’s painful to be sick, to grow old, to watch animals I love grow sick and old. These painful things are also wonderful because they make me wonder. I am happier not asking why. Why does not tell me what to do about any of them. I must understand how something is and not why it is to know what to do about it.

When I observe things, I learn how they are. Anything I observe well becomes wonderful. Observing things and thinking about things are not the same. When I observe a thing, I have no thoughts about it. I am with the thing, and together we make something new called “me-and-the-thing-I-observe.” When I think of something, I do not make something new. I remember something old. Thinking is remembering. When I think of something, I think a thought. My thought is just a thought. It is not real. It’s a memory of something, not the real thing. I can think of fried chicken, and remember the smell of fried chicken and its taste, but I can’t eat my thought. Thoughts are not real, and why is not real. Why do I eat? Because I am hungry. Why do I sleep? Because I am tired. Why do we die? Because we are alive. Why is there pain? Because we feel. On and on. Now you see why I don’t ask why. The answers to why questions have no meaning and are not real.

Opossums play dead so they won’t be eaten by creatures who don’t eat dead things. Opossums play dead to stay alive. Asking, “Why do opossums play dead?” is answered with, “To stay alive.” That answer is real. All other answers to why are just stories. Why does not tell me what needs to be done. Pain tells me what needs to be done. Pain that teaches me and gets me to do what needs to be done is good pain. Pain I can do nothing about is bad pain, and must be endured. I defeat bad pain by feeling it and enduring it. This makes me stronger than the bad pain. Tom should let his pain teach him what to do. He does not need to know why he has pain to grow from pain. He can do what his good pain tells him to do, and he can endure his bad pain, the pain he can do nothing about. That’s what I do with pain I can do nothing about; I endure it.

All animals look different but are the same in nature. We keep different company, and we have different dispositions. Some of us are strong and some weak. Some of us endure and others do not. Some prefer to sleep in a bed and some on the ground. Some like doughnuts and others tuna. (I like both, but I’m easy going.) We are all the same because we are all alive. Being alive is bigger than all the things that make us different. We all become hungry and feel better when we eat. We all become lonely when no one wants us. We’re all happy when we’re with someone who loves us. I never ask why this is so. What would be the point? Asking why is a game like ball chasing, a pastime. Some animals love to chase balls. I don’t find it interesting, and it can be dangerous if it distracts me from dangerous things like an oncoming car. I smell, I hear, I taste, I feel, and I see. These keep me safe, and they keep me happy. If I knew why I smell, hear, taste, feel, and see, nothing would be different.

I will tell you a story to show why I don’t ask why. I’ll have to show you because if you are like Tom, you never listen to what your dog says; you have to be shown to learn anything.

A lazy cat who wants to eat some mice without having to chase them decides to play a trick. (Why is the cat doing this? Because it is a cat. See? Why answers nothing.) The cat knows the mice like to steal food from the pantry at night. “I will imitate a sack of flower and hang from a high shelf in the pantry,” thinks the cat. “Then the mice will come right up to my mouth, and I will be able to eat all the mice I want, and I won’t have to run after them.” Only a cat would think like this, and it’s not important to the story, but it does show how lazy and stupid cats are. Anyway, the cat gets in the pantry and hangs from the high shelf. A little time passes, and six or seven mice come into the closet looking for food.

“Do you smell a cat in here?” asks one of the mice.

“What’s that?” says another mouse. “I was thinking about all the children I will have after eating all the fine food in this pantry, and I didn’t hear what you said.” (Why didn’t the mouse listen to his friend? Pick any answer you like; it doesn’t matter.)

By this time the mouse who smelled the cat has forgotten what he asked because he’s thinking about the bed he will build with all the wonderful cardboard he’s going to get from the boxes inside the pantry. “Did you say something?” says the mouse who first smelled the cat but then forgot about the cat when he started thinking about making a bed out of cardboard.

The mouse who is thinking about all the names for its future children does not answer because it’s wondering why the pantry smells like cat when there could never be a cat in a pantry. None of the other mice have been listening to the two mice who are talking past each other, and none of them think they should leave the pantry that smells like cat because they are wondering why mice have so many children and why mice make their houses out of cardboard and all the other ridiculous things mice ask why about. None of the mice are reacting to their senses and getting out of a pantry that has a cat in it.

The mice work their way toward the cat, asking why about all sorts of silly things, not paying any attention to being in a pantry where a cat is hiding. One old mouse hangs back from the others because he hears something breathing that does not sound like a mouse. The old mouse has been in this pantry many times, and nothing in it ever breathed before. The mouse stops and listens hard to learn what’s making the breathing sound. Then he hears his companions screaming as they’re attacked by the cat, gobbled and crunched between the cat’s pointy teeth, their little mousey tails hanging out of the cat’s cruel, greedy mouth. Cats are like this, and mice are so stupid and selfish they don’t call out to their companions, “Hey, I think I hear a cat!” Even if they did, the mice would fall back into their own thoughts and ignore the warning, since mice are always asking why about things. Anyway, a lot of mice get eaten, but the one old mouse says to the cat, “Hah! I was not fooled! I remembered that I was in a pantry, and you Mr. Cat, like to attack mice in the dark!” That’s not really what happened, but mice have very short memories, so he said what he believed was true.

What’s this all mean? When you go to get food in a dark pantry, don’t think, and don’t ask why. Just pay attention to your senses and listen for breathing. You never know when a cat is hiding in there.

The new book is a collection of thirty or so essays written from the point of view of my dear departed 18 year old pug Margaret, a wise soul. Here’s the table of contents:

1. A note on the translation

2. You can learn a lot from dogs

3. Why I never ask why

4. How to be good, or “What would a dog do?”

5. Everything is a story

6. Why I love my friends, no matter how bad they are

7. How disposition and usefulness show what a dog is about

8. Sometimes I think so much I forget where I am

9. How words get in the way of living

10. Of studs and bitches and who decides which is which

11. Pain and endurance

12. Good and bad and good and evil

13. I know eating poop is gross, but I like it anyway

14. Thinking is fun but not worth anything

15. On intelligence

16. Of the education of dogs

17. Of names

18. How breed has nothing to do with the value of a dog except for poodles

19. By diverse means I arrive at the same end

20. Of vain action

21. That the taste of good and bad depends in large part on whether they are in a pill pocket

22. How numbers mean nothing when I don’t know how much is enough

23. How every day I learn more about what I want

24. Of predator and prey

25. Of sleep

26. On mating

27. Of the custom of wearing clothes

28. On sadness

29. Of forgetfulness

30. Of being still

31. On loneliness

32. How I’m a dominant dog

33. On being in a pack

34. We own nothing

35. How we cry and laugh at the same thing

36. The chapter Tom made me write

37. Why life is enough and so is dinner

I have solid drafts for about 2/3 of the chapters. My goal is to have a complete draft of the book done October 31, no matter how bad it is. Now is not the time to be judgmental; now is the time to type fast.

You can read why Margaret agreed to write the book with me in the excerpt below:

You can learn a lot from dogs

Dogs don’t write many books. We enjoy life and learn all we need by living. Humans don’t get everything they need from living, so they look in books for what’s missing. They don’t find it because there are not enough books written by dogs.

We dogs love humans and want them to be happy. We are happy when humans are happy, and we are happy when humans are not happy, but we’re very happy when humans are happy. This book describes the mind of a dog, so it follows no particular order. A dog’s mind roams and follows the order of nature, which is the order of wisdom.

Humans are very unwise. Dog wisdom comes from instinct and training. Instinct is our first thought, and training is our second thought. Humans have either no instinct or bad training. My hope is humans can be trained to think like dogs, which is the right way to think, and if they obey, humans will be as content as dogs. We dogs will be happier, too.

All creatures feel pain. Pain can be either good or bad. Being hungry is good pain because it tells me to do something: eat. Being bitten by another dog is a bad pain because I can’t do anything about the pain. Even with food, health, entertainment, shelter, companionship, and no dog bites, humans feel pain, pain they think is bad, but may be good. Humans spend too much time with pain, which means we dogs spend too much time with humans who are in pain. Humans worry and fret. Humans are anxious. Some dogs are anxious, but only because they have not learned endurance, or they are of some inferior breed. I am a pug, and pugs know endurance, so I know endurance. Plus, I’m very old, and you must learn endurance to be very old.

Some time ago my hips began to ache. At first the ache appeared only after too much exercise. Then I felt the pain every day, but only so I was aware of it and not enough to stop me going up stairs. Then I could go up stairs some days and not others. Now I need help to go up stairs. As the pain grows, my endurance grows. I develop new ways to get up stairs, like getting the humans to carry me. Pain teaches me; it is my friend. If I learn from pain, then it’s good pain.

I started this book because of treats. I noticed Tom gave me more treats when we wrote together. He was happier, too, and that meant he filled my bowl more. After a while I saw how much Tom loved it when we wrote, and I began thinking other humans would give me more treats in the future if I kept writing. The promise of future treats is why I have done something as foolish as write a book, which is a lot of bother and not nearly as much fun as daydreaming. I will never do anything like this again. It’s very un-doglike behavior.

Why humans do what they do is a mystery. Why we dogs do what we do is plain; we do what we must to survive, and we do what we enjoy, and it’s best when those things are the same. We dogs are very patient, and we are good teachers. Someday, humans will see we know better and will learn to live more like us. Then everyone will have all the treats they want.

Living with a dog is like living with an alien intelligence. I tried like hell to understand her. We slept in the same bed and ate the same food, but I’ll never really know her. I loved her very much, and I believe she loved me, which is probably just as good as if she really did. Who knows. Maybe the smile on a dog is real happiness and not just hidden pain, or maybe it’s both. Just like us.

It helps to look at old pictures of Margaret. Anna and I are also watching pug videos on YouTube many nights when we go to bed since all our televisions are too complicated to use.

Here’s some old pictures of Margaret for you, and by you I mean me.

A long video of Margaret doing nothing. I can watch this over and over. That’s the mystery of animals; they seem to do nothing, but they’re endlessly fascinating.

I could add pictures all day. She was the best. Rest In Peace dear friend.

(No ranked choice, please.)

Front Cover Concepts

#1

#2

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Back Cover Concept

The purpose of a back of a book is to establish the author’s authority and to give the reader a reason to read the book. Below is the current concept for the back cover.

“Fortune’s Path delivered everything we asked for and more. Now our product team is stronger than ever.”

— Anthony Blanco, COO AND CO-Founder, XOi Technologies

Fortune’s Path combines principles of recovery and product management to guide you on a journey of professional and personal improvement. Packed with exercises and tools, Fortune’s Path gives you value right away that can last a lifetime. Transform your career and your life with the 12 Steps of Product Management™

“Soft skills are critical for product management. This is where the 12 Steps come in. It’s an investment in your product org that equips your people to build technology that solves business needs.”

— Chris Boyd, Vice President of Product, Built Technologies

“Fortune’s Path’s hard work was extremely valuable as we reset our strategy and go-to-market. We can’t wait to let loose the field reps with the insights they provided.”

— Jim Somers, Chief Marketing Officer, CipherHealth

“Tom is a fantastic teacher and practitioner of his craft.”

— Matt Walker, Product Manager, nContracts

About Tom Noser, Founder and President, Fortune’s Path

Tom is the President and Founder of Fortune’s Path, a multi-disciplinary consultancy in product, marketing, and sales. Tom helped grow one of healthcare’s first SaaS companies from 1 million users to over 4 million while quadrupling revenue and achieving a 10x improvement in the stock price. He founded Fortune’s Path to help SaaS companies grow rich by pursuing virtue. Tom lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife Anna and his seventeen-year-old pug Margaret.

What do you think?

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There’s still time to add a blurb to the book for anyone who wants to help establish my authority. I’ll be reaching out to folks individually, but feel free to volunteer in the comments.

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Why Are We Here? or Messaging 101

I had a great conversation with SaaS growth ninja Anne Chaconas yesterday when we recorded an episode for the Fortune’s Path Podcast. Anne said “You can redo features, and you can fix bugs, but you can’t redo your messaging.” Messaging is really hard when it’s real. Do the soul searching required. Find out why you do what you do and why what you do is valuable to your customers. For Fortune’s Path, we help SaaS organizations grow in spirit and in market.

Anne encourages us to be our authentic selves in business and to help other people be their anthemic selves. After all, if we want to grow into the biggest Total Addressable Market (TAM) possible, we need to address people who don’t look like us or talk like us. But speaking as a CEO with revenue responsibility, what if no one wants to buy your true, authentic self?

Joshua Oakes would say if no one wants to buy your authentic self, it’s because you’re authentically selfish. When you do your soul searching, think not about what you want, but about what you want to give to others; how can you be of service? Start with what your customers want, what they need, and then think about how you’re qualified to help them. When I taught 9th grade, none of my students ever got what I though they “should” get out of a lesson, but I still had one student say he hoped I’d teach his little brother and another one – Jason – say thank you 20 years later when we met at Office Town. (Jason is a mailman now.) I thought I was going to teach them how to understand a poem. They seemed grateful for something else.

The true value you provide is often not what you think. You have to ask to know.

Thanks again for being a reader.

All the best,

Tom

PS - And share this so we can get other votes!

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My book You’re the Product: Use Principles of Recovery and Product Management to Enrich Your Life has lots of charts. I love charts. I love how the eye can scan across a chart and engage with the words in any order. A good chart organizes ideas visually, like a share poem, and thematically, like a sonnet.

Each chapter in the book has two charts. One chart summarizes the chapter, and the other chart guides the reader through an exercise that illustrates the main point of the chapter. I’ve reproduced two charts from the book below. Unfortunately for us, web pages are hell on charts, so I put them in as images. If you have trouble reading them, you’ll just have to buy the book come September.

Here’s my Chapter in a Chart for Chapter 1: Identify what you can and can’t control.

Here’s an exercise chart from the same chapter. I start out simply:

“Look at the list below and decide how you think of each item. Do you have control of it, can you influence it, or do you have no control? Put a √ in the column that describes how you feel about attitude, effort, schedule, and what you do next.”

In a later chapter, I ask readers to write about why they think they can or cannot control something. The chart looks like this:

Here’s what I say about this chart in the book:

“The last column is where the work happens. Take ten solid minutes to think about why you feel the way you do. Write it out for all four items: attitude, effort, schedule, and priorities. Write whatever comes to mind without judging what you’re writing. Maybe you feel like you can’t control your attitude because you’ve been getting bad results. You can still take pride from things like your approach, your discipline, your growing competence and professionalism. A good attitude doesn’t mean you feel good; it means you’re open to the possibility that something good can come from your current situation.”

What do you think? Are the charts helpful? Are they interesting? Let me know in the comments.

The book would be structured like a book of daily meditations; each page starts with a popular quote, sourced from Pinterest or the like, and Margaret the Pug’s response to the quote. Sometimes Margaret agrees, and sometimes, like in the example below, she thinks the quote is ridiculous. 

Here goes:

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.” — Marcus Aurelius

“It’s a fact you’re dead, Marcus. And that’s the truth.” —Margaret the Pug

The Emperor Marcus Aurelius enters wearing his best toga. An adoring chorus of ninth graders gasps at his appearance.

“You look well, Emperor,” says his accountant, Margaret the Pug.

“In your opinion, Margaret,” says the emperor. 

“Yes, yes!” echoes the chorus. “It depends! It depends! The truth always depends!”

The Emperor acknowledges the loving crowd with a wave. “And how are the accounts today?” he asks.

“Not well, Your Overratedness. The people come to us for bread, and we have little bread to give, since the rains stopped and the fields dried.”

“That’s just an opinion,” answers Marcus. 

“The rain gauge, the storehouses, and the calendar say otherwise,” answers Margaret. 

“Yes, yes!” echoes the chorus. “Who is counting the rain? And the bread? Why should we trust them? It depends! It depends! The truth always depends!”

“What is a calendar? Time is arbitrary. We choose the time and place for everything,” answers the Emperor.

“Perhaps emperors do, but not farmers,” says Margaret. “If we want a good harvest, we must adjust to nature.” 

“Yes, yes!” echoes the chorus. “Time is relative! Age is just a number! It depends! It depends! The truth always depends!”

“Good harvest, bad harvest, it’s all perspective. Who is to say what’s good and bad? Let each man decide for himself,” answers the Emperor.

“Yes, yes,” echoes the chorus, “Good and bad, it’s all the same.”

“Unless you’re talking about french fries. Then the difference is great,” answers Margaret.

“Let them master their own desires!” says the emperor. “It is a manly thing to suffer in silence.”

Just then a mob breaks the doors, bursts into the throne room, and grabs the Emperor from his lounge. They put him in chains and drag him from power, and later the people install a different leader who recognizes that the need to eat and respond to the weather are facts, no matter your perspective. 

And Margaret says, “Relativism is the start of a journey to wisdom, but it sure ain’t the destination.”

What do you think? Would 364 more things like this make a good book?

For those of you I know through business, don’t get the idea I’ve dropped Fortune’s Path to pursue writing. My consultancy is open for engagements, and helping SaaS companies grow is our bread and butter. You can reach us at hello@fortunespath.com

I’m not going to write much about business on Substack anymore. Substack is going to be about the book and about whatever I happen to be thinking about other than business. My business writing will live on in the Fortune’s Path newsletter.

I need to write a conclusion for the book. I’m going to call it, “A Vision for You” which is the title of the last chapter in Alcoholics Anonymous, the textbook for that organization. My editor is encouraging me to think about what I want the reader to get from each chapter. All those take-aways together should add up to a vision for how the reader can be different after reading the book. 

Here’s the list of takeaways so far:

1. You have to understand what you can and cannot control to be happy.

2. You can control more than you think, but you’re trying to control the wrong things.

3. If you love everyone, even people you don’t like, you will acquire power and be happy.

4. You can decide what kind of leader to be, and you can decide not to be a leader at all.

5. You can change your own character, and a good character leads to a good life.

6. You need other people to learn what will make you happy.

7. You can only shape your character and improve it if you embrace all of it, virtues and vices, because vices are just over or underdeveloped virtues. (Thank you, Aristotle.)

8. More people love you than you know, including people you haven’t met yet, and all of them can help you.

9. You can get more from someone by listening to them than by talking to them.

10. Being busy and making progress are very different. “I am happier today than I was before,” is progress. Busyness is distraction.

I don’t have 11 and 12 because I haven’t finished those chapters yet. Both are getting a complete rewrite. I won’t know what they’re about until after I write them.

(Now that I’ve written this list, I need to go back and make sure this is what these chapters are really about. It’s a pretty good list.)

These takeaways come both from the book and from thinking about Lucretius’s On the Nature of Things, which is the best book for teaching you how to think that I’ve ever read. When you read the excerpt below, keep in mind it was written 60 years before Jesus was born.

Unless there is some smallest thing,

The tiniest body will consist of infinite parts,

Since these can be halved, and their halves halved again,

Forever, with no end to the division.

So then what difference will there be between

The sum of all things and the least things?

There will be none at all. For through the sum of things

Will be completely infinite, the smallest bodies

Will equally consist of infinite parts.

But since true reasoning protests against this,

And tells us that the mind cannot believe it,

You must admit defeat, and recognize

That things exist which have no parts at all,

Themselves being smallest. And since these exist

You must admit that the atoms they compose

Themselves are also solid and everlasting.

From Lucretius: On the Nature of the Universe. A verse translation by Ronald Melville, Oxford World’s Classics.

Using poetry to write about science: how cool is that? Or maybe observing things so closely you stumble into science. Lucretius was translating and expanding on Epicurus, who wrote about 200 years before Lucretius was born. Great thinking never goes out of style.

The poem below has nothing to do with business and maybe nothing to do with the book, but it’s as close to an explanation for the nature of things as I’ve ever written. I’m don’t know if it’s worth anything to anyone else, and it doesn’t matter. I hope you enjoy it, and if you don’t, that’s OK, too.

I get decide if I believe in God but not whether God exists. 

I believe in a feeling I have felt that I call God 

but that feeling cannot be God because it’s not everything, and God is either everything or God is nothing, 

yet the god I want is both everything and nothing. 

Is there something that exists outside of time? 

Is there anything that doesn’t change? Of course. 

Gravity does not change so far as I know, 

and matter and energy do not change except to change from energy to matter and from matter into energy. 

I do not believe in a supernatural god 

who exists in some other place and watches me like I watch TV, 

rooting for some characters and against others. 

I do not believe in a god of miracles and resurrections. 

I do not believe in a god of magic tricks like water into wine. 

Jesus’s humanity is far more interesting to me than his divinity. 

I do not believe in a god who wants to save or destroy me. I believe in a god who is with me, in me, and of me

and I with it, of it, and in it. 

I believe in an eternal god of elements and laws and forces that can be understood 

but will always have mysteries as yet beyond understanding. 

I believe that I am made from elements and forces and laws that have always existed and will always exist 

but that my personality, my soul, exists only for the length of my life and will not come back. 

I believe that I get to decide if the universe is cruel or indifferent, loving or forgiving, empty or full 

or all of the above 

and that makes me like a god 

except that I cannot write the laws or create the forces or make the elements, I can only understand them 

And so I am not god.

I believe there are many forces and elements and laws that are greater than my will, 

that my will is temporary, and that the forces and elements and laws that make me 

last forever have their own will. 

I believe that every life has only a single destiny, and that is death, 

and that in-between birth and death we can make our own path using our own will, 

but if our will is set against what is good for others we will have a hard time of it. 

I got my first introduction to Nietzsche last night from the awesome History of Ideas podcast from Talking Politics. I had no idea what Nietzsche thought before this. Now after listening to a forty minute lecture I’m feeling very up on Nietzsche. I think he’s going to be a big figure in my next book, he and Milton Friedman, who I want to take down hard. Here’s my quick summary of Nietzsche’s thought based on listening to one podcast. (This post is so internet.) 

Nietzsche thought Christianity was terrible. It created a suffocating morality the weak used to dominate the strong. He thought democracy was bad, too, at least as it was practiced in Europe in his day. Nietzsche loved the Homeric heroes (I do, too) but felt like the ancients went off the rails with Socrates and his followers. Nietzsche and I disagree here. I love those guys. Nietzsche was not a fan of nationalism, militarism, or racism. That was his sister.

Nietzsche is important because he’s an inspiration for American entrepreneurialism, especially tech entrepreneurialism, and for libertarianism, which despite its obvious unworkability just won’t go away; it’s the American communism. Tech believes it’s a meritocracy where the strongest rise to the top. Nope. The richest rise to the top, but that’s another post. 

The mortal enemy of tech isn’t other tech businesses, it’s democracy and regulation. The only thing strong enough to take down dangerous tech (not naming names, but rhymes with WakeHook), is government. The weak — little people who vote — can gang up on the strong and ruin their day. Let’s do it!

I’ve found a structure for Fortune’s Path: How to use the principles of recovery to find fortune and happiness (Working Title) and the rewrites are coming along well, though I’m writing this instead of finishing chapter 7. Below is the introduction, which has nothing to do with Nietzsche or Milton Freedman, but is something I can repurpose without having to spend two hours on this post. I published parts of this introduction before, but it’s had a lot of rewrites, so hopefully it’s not repetitive for regular readers.

If you like the introduction, sign up for this newsletter or get on the mailing list at www.fortunespath.com so I can keep you posted on the publication progress. You can also check out the spanking new Fortune’s Path Pinterest page I’ve created to promote the book and our consulting services. We’re on Pinterest because we want to support non-destructive-to-a-civil-society social media platforms. 

Next week I’ll publish a “Chapter in a Chart” which is my new form of business book philosophical poetry. Until then.

Introduction

Each of us must manage the product that is our life. Before I quit drinking, I was a terrible manager. After thirty years of sobriety I’m happier than I’ve ever been. I’m a master product manager, podcaster, business owner, writer, father, happy husband, and owner of a noble and virtuous sixteen year old dog. Things get better all the time, regardless of my income (mostly). I got this way by applying the disciplines I learned in recovery to every part of my life, and work is a big part of life. I also got this way by defining success for myself. That’s what finding your fortune means.

Here’s an example that illustrates why you have to know what fortune you’re looking for to find it. Imagine you’re hard at work on an important announcement when a top performing salesperson walks into your office. “You busy?” the Salesperson asks. “I need something for a giant new customer and Biggie Cheese says we have to get this done.”

What do you do? 

How you respond can make or break the next few months of your work life, and maybe even your career. Do you know the right thing to say to land the deal without committing the company to a blank check?

Here’s another example. You and your partner haven’t been communicating. It’s your partner’s birthday, and you have reservations at Chateau Hard-to-get-into. You’re about to leave the office when you get a message from your boss. It’s a request for a business plan that will take many hours and you haven’t started because it was supposed to be due in a week. How do you respond?

You can apply the principles of this book to know the right thing to do in both situations. You are not the only customer of the product that is your life. Everyone you know is a customer. Just like with any product, you won’t be right for everyone; any product that tries to please everyone inevitably pleases no one. I’ve made a decision to love my customers. I hope after reading this book, you will, too. If you do, you’re making a decision to love everyone you meet, no exceptions. Don’t think small with your product; we want to create monopoly profits of love. Look for a path that gives you real happiness — not just distraction or amusement — even through trial. That’s the path where your fortune is. Value yourself enough to manage yourself and own your effort. Listen for how you can help others and ask for help yourself. Know that your work and your life are not separate but are not the same, either.  

When I drank I craved more alcohol, and I couldn’t be satisfied with any amount. For some of us work is the same way; no matter how hard we work, we always feel empty. I couldn’t fix my drinking problem with self knowledge or will power. I needed to bring about a personality change through a religious experience. I know “religious” is a loaded word; for me it means something larger than myself. I don’t know if there’s a God, and if there is one if he cares about me. I do know there is love and there is virtue, and I can’t have one without the other. Love, virtue, and happiness are learned disciplines. The disciplines I need to stay sober are the same disciplines we need to build virtuous organizations and great products: think about ourselves less, think of what good we can do for others more. The more we give, the more we get.

I got the schedule from the publisher yesterday. The manuscript is due May 6th. Pre-sale begins in early September. For now we’re calling it Fortune’s Path. I have to finish two chapters a week to make the deadline. No sweat. Probably.

Now seems like a good time to create a list of books that changed me. (Plus lists are super-easy blog posts to write*.) Thinking about what these books did to me may help me think about what I hope my book does to the people who read it.

The list is in rough order of when I read them or when they were read to me.

• A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young. The first book that made me happy, though it was probably my mother reading it to me more than the book.

• Richard Adams’s The Tyger Voyage & Watership Down. More about my mother, a lover of beauty and spontaneous editor of scenes. She censored some passages of Watership Down to protect me.

• Isaac Asimov’s Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Astroids. It’s OK to love garbage.

• George Orwell’s 1984. Even things you don’t understand can make you cry. I read it in fifth grade because I loved science fiction. Oops.

• Robert M. Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. 8th grade. Recommended by my English teacher. I’m re-reading it now, and it’s like I haven’t forgotten a line. More of “You don’t have to know what something means to be changed by it.”

• Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha. You have to pay a lot of dues before you reach enlightenment. Maybe there’s an easier way. Hmmm, what could that be?

• Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching. Like a new door in my mind opened and showed me something that had always been there that I couldn’t name. Reading the first line, “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,” is one of my most vivid memories.

• J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Never read it again after you turn seventeen.

• Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception. Still my working theory of the mind. “Death is perception without the hindrance of a body or an ego.” Amazing.

• Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. Not a good book, but fun. It’s better to be Jack than to read Jack.

• Albert Camus’s The Plague. You don’t have to believe in God to be saved by good works. Very much how I feel about life.

• Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. The work of a lifetime to read and understand. My model.

• Donald Justice’s New and Selected Poems. Completely changed how I write for the better. God bless you, Mr. Justice.

• Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society. School sucks but education is amazing. His vision of a better way is here with the internet. He’d hate AI, though. Fascist.

• Homer’s The Odyssey. The ultimate super hero, free of psychological baggage, unbruised by suffering. We could use a little more heathen thinking sometimes.

• William L. Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. The best book I’ve ever read. It all really happened to real people.

• Zen Master Ry
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ôkan’s Great Fool. “Raindrops on the Banana Leaves” may be the best poem ever written.

• Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame. Vivid cruelty.Suffering does not have to redeem us, but it can be made beautiful.

• Lucretius’s On the Nature of the Universe. More brave heathenism. What’s not to like about seeing with the eyes of scientist and writing with the courage of a poet?

So what do I want my book to do? I want it so show readers there’s another way, that success does not require power, that riches don’t require a lot of money, and that they can be happy at work and at home by giving in. Surender to win.

*This still took two hours to write. God help me.

Ingenuity, the helicopter built to fly in the thin atmosphere of Mars, waves to his rover buddy Perseverance.

Observation

Business writing is the philosophy of our age. Rather than study ethics we get MBA’s.

A look at popular business books tells the story:

• How to Win Friends and Influence People

• Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices

• Now, Discover Your Strengths

• Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

• The 4 Hour Work Week

These are books about how to live and what it means to be good. That’s philosophy. 

Application

• Business is how you make money and it can also be how you make a living. Think for yourself. Don't take another's word for what a fortune is.

• Work and life are not separate. We can learn from everyone, and everything can make us better in our work. As Montaigne says, “Everything is useful in a household; even the stupidity and weakness of others will be an education to (the student.) By taking stock of the graces and manners of others, he will create in himself desire of the good ones and contempt for the bad.” Or as Margaret the pug might say, “The sun teaches me to sit.

Observation

• From the world of Canadian start-ups, this article in the Globe and Mail describes a new venture with the unfortunate name Disco that allows anyone to teach classes to others in real-time. Think Substack meets Deschooling Society — one of my favorites: a communist social critic predicts internet business models in 1971. Technology makes anything possible, but it doesn’t make everything smart. Hey founders, ever heard of YouTube? They already have $4.75M is seed capital, so what do I know. One of the founders sold a performance marketing company for $122M and lives full-time in Costa Rica. You can’t make this stuff up. Bonus points for readers who know what “performance marketing” means.

Application

• The term “serial entrepreneur” has many of the same connotations as “serial philanderer.” Is there a trail of broken hearts behind you? If you really loved your businesses, wouldn’t you stick with it? Commitment isn’t for everyone. Some of us are good starters and need to leave serious business to others. Of course, making something out of nothing is no joke, but if you take it too seriously you’ll never finish the first draft. Know who you are, a starter or a finisher. Get people around you who are unlike you and can make the parts you can't that are needed to make something great.

Observation

• Speaking of making something out of nothing, $1.9 trillion new dollars are gestating in Uncle Sam, ready to be birthed into our economy. They’ll join about $2.2 trillion of their young brothers and sisters born in 2020 and another $2.2-ish trillion promised in the 2017 tax cut, and billions more from the bailout. (Remember those innocent days when the only contagions were financial?) So why has there been little inflation so far? The best explanation I’ve heard is that the money has been sitting inside banks or with a small number of organizations and individuals and has never gotten into circulation. If you already have $50 billion and you get an extra $5 billion from the feds, you’re unlikely to spend it. You could argue that there has been inflation— runaway inflation in asset prices— but that’s too scary. The most recent $1.9 trillion is targeted at a different group than the beneficiaries of the previous new dollars. Wouldn’t it be ironic if help from the government came inflation free only when it goes to people who don't need it.

Application

• I have no idea, but it's still interesting. Buy GameStop? 

Observation

• Marketers should think like virologists, or movie-villain virologists anyway. The best viruses are ever evolving, relentlessly searching for the most efficient way to bond to another carrier. The marketing as virus analogy also explains why it’s so hard to pin-point marketing’s contribution to sales; buyers can be asymptomatic carriers of marketing’s messages. Asking people how they heard of you isn’t enough. Understanding the role of asymptomatic carriers in transmission is super difficult. I say stop trying.

Application

• Work to create messages that transfer easily from one person to another. The most effective carriers don't know they're carriers. 

• Selling is very bad for marketing; we all have strong antibodies against being sold to.

• Most of us forget details, but we get the big picture. Never stop painting the big picture.

• Don’t tie marketing to metrics it can’t control. Give it its own territory, and hold it accountable to a revenue goal, as this McKinsey article illustrates. Money quote: “Don’t count on returning to a pre-COVID-19 level of in-person sales coverage, as only 20–30% of B2B buyers want to ever interact with reps in person even in their ideal/post-COVID-19 model.

Gratitudes

• Good editors are hard to find, and I’ve found one. Although there are times when I feel like the Latrell Sprewell to her P.J. Carlesimo, coaches are supposed to make us grow, and sometimes growth hurts. Thank you Suzanna de Boer for the hurt.

• My friend Adam Zais, connoisseur of cool SaaS products, for showing me his latest find, pie.me. It’s project management software you might actually use. The pie analogies get a little cute, but the visual metaphor is striking, and the tactile focused interface is intuitive once you believe it. In software, there’s always a better way to tackle an old problem.

• Members of the Nashville Product Meetup and especially Aaron Briggs. I recently presented about my book writing journey, and the group’s feedback was generous and invaluable.

• NASA and the entire team responsible for the Perseverance rover and its super-cute helicopter buddy Ingenuity. If the trailer doesn’t make you wish you’d tried harder in science class, you have no heart.

• A consumer price index of 1.7% over the last 12 months. Let’s hope it stays there.

Next Steps

• Finishing the book. Publication is slated for October.

• Finishing the analysis and recommendations for product marketing at a healthcare SaaS company.

• Building a collaboration with friends at Crayon.co, a platform for competitive intelligence.

• Experimenting in Clubhouse with our friend Josh Oakes.

• Be sure to catch not-so-serial entrepreneur Dan Hogan on the most recent episode of the Fortune's Path podcast. Dan is funny, smart, and knows how to be rich.

ABOUT FORTUNE’S PATH

Deep thinking, hard working, always learning, Fortune’s Path is a product consultancy that helps SaaS companies grow rich by pursuing virtue. Go-to-market. Competitive intelligence. Fractional leadership.

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