Guys ahhh sorry this is long. But good! I promise. Enjoy xx (it's also very enthusiastic, brace yourselves for many exclamation marks)

1) Please excuse this interruption to regular programming. I have a minor request. (Don't worry it's going to make your life better and also someone else's, yay!... It's my birthday on Friday & I entitle myself to one request of you per annum.)

Okay so the request is...

Please take 2 mins to write to someone who you feel gratitude towards! That's it!

Maybe they helped you with something last week or 20 years ago. Or said something that has had an impact on the direction of your life. It could be your mum or your kinder teacher. Or someone you only met in passing (but who you can still figure out a way to contact somehow.) I promise they will love to hear from you!

If you already have their number, message them now. Go on. "Hi Granny, you might not remember but one day you xyz and I've never forgotten and I wanted to tell you how grateful I am." Or maybe like me, you need to track the person down as you don't have their details to hand. In that case pls schedule the time now for when you're going to do it. Within the next week!!! (Otherwise by the time my next newsletter comes you'll realise you've forgotten and then you won't open my newsletter and you might even start avoiding me and that would be sad.)

Also don't overthink it! (note to self) If you want to send a handwritten letter that's lovely but only do it if it's not going to take you 6 weeks to buy a stamp and post it. & don't worry about the words. Just "you helped me with X and, [even though it was years ago], I want to says thanks" is lovely and very much sufficient.

P.S. I will tell you who I've written to next week so you know I'm doing it too. (& if you want to tell me when you've sent your message of thanks as well, please do! That will it will make three of us happy.)

2) In other news, (but also so you know I make good on my promises) last time I said I was going to try to get into contact with a hero of mine, Ira Glasser (American civil liberties activist / free speech champion. Not the radio guy.) and so I wrote to someone who I thought might know him. That person told me that he knows Greg Lukianoff better (CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE)), and the mention of that name lead me to finally starting reading The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure by Greg and Jonathan Haidt.

The introduction is classic, & I thought you might enjoy it, so sharing it here (it's a tad long but honestly amazing, enjoy):

This is a book about wisdom and its opposite. The book grows out of a trip that we (Greg and Jon) took to Greece in August of 2016. We had been writing about some ideas spreading through universities that we thought were harming students and damaging their prospects for creating fulfilling lives. These ideas were, in essence, making students less wise. So we decided to write a book to warn people about these terrible ideas, and we thought we’d start by going on a quest for wisdom ourselves. We both work on college campuses; in recent years, we had heard repeated references to the wisdom of Misoponos, a modern-day oracle who lives in a cave on the north slope of Mount Olympus, where he continues the ancient rites of the cult of Koalemos.

We flew to Athens and took a five-hour train ride to Litochoro, a town at the foot of the mountain. At sunrise the next day, we set off on a trail that Greeks have used for thousands of years to seek communion with their gods. We hiked for six hours up a steep and winding path. At noon we came to a fork in the path where a sign said MISOPONOS, with an arrow pointing to the right. The main path, off to the left, looked forbidding: it went straight up a narrow ravine, with an ever-present danger of rockslides.

The path to Misoponos, in contrast, was smooth, level, and easy— a welcome change. It took us through a pleasant grove of pine and fir trees, across a strong wooden pedestrian bridge over a deep ravine, and right to the mouth of a large cave.

Inside the cave we saw a strange scene. Misoponos and his assistants had installed one of those take-a-number systems that you sometimes find in sandwich shops, and there was a line of other seekers ahead of us. We took a number, paid the 100 euro fee to have a private audience with the great man, performed the mandatory rituals of purification, and waited.

When our turn came, we were ushered into a dimly lit chamber at the back of the cave, where a small spring of water bubbled out from a rock wall and splashed down into a large white marble bowl somewhat reminiscent of a birdbath. Next to the bowl, Misoponos sat in a comfortable chair that appeared to be a Barcalounger recliner from the 1970s. We had heard that he spoke English, but we were taken aback when he greeted us in perfect American English with a hint of Long Island: “Come on in, guys. Tell me what you seek.”

Jon spoke first: “O Wise Oracle, we have come seeking wisdom. What are the deepest and greatest of truths?”

Greg thought we should be more specific, so he added, “Actually, we're writing a book about wisdom for teenagers, young adults, parents, and educators, and we were kind of hoping that you could boil down your insights into some pithy axioms, ideally three of them, which, if followed, would lead young people to develop wisdom over the course of their lives.”

Misoponos sat silently with his eyes closed for about two minutes. Finally, he opened his eyes and spoke.

“This fountain is the Spring of Koalemos. Koalemos was a Greek god of wisdom who is not as well-known today as Athena, who gets far too much press, in my opinion. But Koalemos has some really good stuff, too, if you ask me. Which you just did. So let me tell you. I will give you three cups of wisdom.”

He filled a small alabaster cup from the water bowl and handed it to us. We both drank from it and handed it back.

“This is the first truth,” he said: “What doesn’t kill you makes you weaker. So avoid pain, avoid discomfort, avoid all potentially bad experiences.”

Jon was surprised. He had written a book called The Happiness Hypothesis, which examined ancient wisdom in light of modern psychology. The book devoted an entire chapter to testing the opposite of the oracle’s claim, which was most famously stated by Friedrich Nietzsche: “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger.” Jon thought there must be some mistake. “Excuse me, Your Holiness,” he said, “but did you really mean to say ‘weaker’? Because I’ve got quotes from many wisdom traditions saying that pain, setbacks, and even traumatic experiences can make people stronger.”

“Did I say ‘weaker’?” asked Misoponos. “Wait a minute . . . is it weaker or stronger?” He squeezed his eyes shut as he thought about it, and then opened his eyes and said, “Yes, I’m right, weaker is what I meant. Bad experiences are terrible, who would want one? Did you travel all this way to have a bad experience? Of course not. And pain? So many oracles in these mountains sit on the ground twelve hours a day, and what does it get them? Circulation problems and lower-back pain. How much wisdom can you dispense when you're thinking about your aches and pains all the time? That’s why I got this chair twenty years ago. Why shouldn’t I be comfortable?” With clear irritation in his voice, he added, “Can I finish?”

“I'm sorry,” said Jon meekly.

Misoponos filled the cup again. We drank it. “Second,” he continued: “Always trust your feelings. Never question them.”

Now it was Greg’s turn to recoil. He had spent years practicing cognitive behavioral therapy, which is based on exactly the opposite advice: feelings so often mislead us that you can’t achieve mental health until you learn to question them and free yourself from some common distortions of reality. But having learned to control his immediate negative reactions, he bit his tongue and said nothing.

Misoponos refilled the cup, and we drank again. “Third: Life is a battle between good people and evil people.”

We looked at each other in disbelief. Greg could no longer keep quiet: “O Great Oracle of Koalemos,” he began, haltingly, “can you explain that one to us?”

“Some people are good,” Misoponos said slowly and loudly, as if he thought we hadn’t heard him, “and some people are bad.” He looked at us pointedly and took a breath. “There is so much evil in the world. Where does it come from?” He paused as if expecting us to answer. We were speechless. “From evil people!” he said, clearly exasperated. “It is up to you and the rest of the good people in the world to fight them. You must be warriors for virtue and goodness. You can see how bad and wrong some people are. You must call them out! Assemble a coalition of the righteous, and shame the evil ones until they change their ways.”

Jon asked, “But don’t they think the same about us? How can we know that it is we who are right and they who are wrong?”

Misoponos responded tartly, “Have you learned nothing from me today? Trust your feelings. Do you feel that you are right? Or do you feel that you are wrong? I feel that this interview is over. Get out.”

....

There is no Misoponos and we didn’t really travel to Greece to discover these three terrible ideas. We didn’t have to. You can find them on college campuses, in high schools, and in many homes. These untruths are rarely taught explicitly; rather, they are conveyed to young people by the rules, practices, and norms that are imposed on them, often with the best of intentions...

The book is about these three "Great Untruths", and how they are causing problems "for young people, universities, and, more generally, liberal democracies....To name just a few of these problems: Teen anxiety, depression, and suicide rates have risen sharply in the last few years. The culture on many college campuses has become more ideologically uniform, compromising the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers. Extremists have proliferated on the far right and the far left, provoking one another to ever deeper levels of hatred... etc."

Very good read so far!!! Highly recommend.
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3) This (and last) week on Growing Up with Delia Burgess​
Ep. 107 - Tom McLeod: the non-linear path to building companies
​Tom is an investor, mentor and partner who loves building software.
​Tom has had such an interesting journey, we ran out of time and are going to do a part two ep shortly! I love non-linear stories, especially for anyone who is questioning (or their child is questioning) things like, "they tell us to get good grades at school. But why?" Or "people seem to want to go and do these specific types of jobs after uni. But why?" And then find themselves needing to spend a few years travelling the world or living on a mountain while they figure things out for themselves. & that's great!! They might do that and subsequently end up happy & fulfilled raising four children and doing work that they love, like Tom.
He is also doing amazing work at Melb Uni with start ups and loves connecting with people! This is him.

Ep. 108 - Justin Breen: connecting visionaries to serve humanity
​Justin partners with the 0.1% because they create the technologies, companies and systems that benefit the other 99.9%. He is the author of Epic Business and Epic Life. theepicfit.com​

Crazy episode. Justin taught me a really cool framework that came from Randy Molland. This is the type of person I aim to be like and this is the type of person I love associating with!
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​1. Listening more than speaking
2. Having a giving mentality without expecting anything in return
3. High character and alignment
4. Prioritising impact over income
5. Asking 'how can I help you?'
6. Being excited about the opportunity to connect again

That's all for now!
Don't forget to send your thank you message. Don't wait until it's too late and the person dies! Or you die. The time is now. xoxo

P.S. I'm running off to the airport now... spending my birthday in Ischia with my friend and famous Growing Up podcast guest Izzy (famous because her two podcast appearances are in the top 10 most listened to episodes). & then have a couple of days in Positano on my own. Yay! I booked last minute and my airbnb is situated up the mountain only accessible by foot 30 mins up many steep "irregular" stairs. My exact type of holiday!! (I am making the most of a truncated summer because I am going to be spending a few months in the Southern Hemisphere from July... look forward to seeing some of you soon!)
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P.P.S. The open rates on this thing are crazy. Meaning you guys are actually consistently opening and reading this each fortnight. It seems like maybe more people might enjoy reading it too?? A cheeky second request if I may... feel free to forward it to anyone who you think might be interested...

xxx stay healthy

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