Grief scares the sh*t out of me

🧲165: Andrew Garfield on grief, being seduced by more and the law of personal growth

Nov 06, 2023

Welcome to the 165th consecutive edition of the newsletter.

Here are 5 ideas I have been reflecting on this week that you might find useful in your life.

Enjoy.

1/ The cost of more.

I was in a bookstore the other day and saw a new edition of a book I own — Creativity, Inc - The Expanded Edition. (Insert eye roll here)

Publishers know that people equate value with more. So they made a long book even longer.

Just to be clear, they didn’t make it better. They made it longer.

Here’s my message to all publishers of content— STOP making things longer. Ruthlessly eliminate the unnecessary so they are easier to consume and act on.

Takeaway → Don’t be seduced by more. More comes at a cost | 1. More resistance to get started | 2. More time to consume | 3. More work to figure out what is important.

2/ The law of personal growth.

I was scrolling through my Twitter feed and found this post from a year and half ago.

The older I get the more true this is.

That excites me. That should excite you as well.

3/ Disguising complexity.

I took a screenshot of this summary of an article that was super popular on the app Readwise last week.

I had no interest in reading this article because of this one word — ELABORATE.

Elaborate is an elegant way to say complicated or complex.

I don’t do complexity — EVER! — because it does not scale long-term.

Takeaway → Treat complexity like COVID. When you see it coming hightail it out of there pronto.

4/ Seeing isn’t always believing.

The Wright Brothers achieved something once thought impossible — human flight. They did so on December 17th, 1903. Yet people who saw them flying around still didn’t believe flight was possible.

Check out this excerpt from Fredrick Lewis Allen’s 1952 book on American History.

I highlighted the part I can’t stop thinking about.

People were so convinced that flying was not possible that they convinced themselves what they were seeing was some sort of trick.

I think we do something similar when it comes to our dreams and desires.

We think what we are trying to accomplish is impossible and as a result we dismiss or diminish evidence to the contrary.

I’m still processing this, but at the root of that story I believe there is a law that captures human nature.

The law of reality → We interpret events so they support what we believe to be true, contrary to what might actually be true.

5/ Revisiting Andrew Garfields grief mindset.

This might be the most beautiful mindset I have ever encountered.

There are 3 lessons that impacted me deeply.

Grief scares the sh*t of me, but thinking of it as unexpressed love just might save me when grief comes calling.
Andrew said he hoped that grief would stay with him. Seeing it as unexpressed love means grief is not something he is trying to get past, it’s something he intends to carry with him.
He also mentioned he loved talking about it. Seeing it as unexpressed love means it’s not something he must hide or be shameful of.

Seriously, this might be the most profound thing I have ever learned.