#189: How to Be Successful (& eat well)

Good morning my dear friends
 
We’re back. I trust you have had a good start to your year.
 
I started my year compiling my 2024 reading list (These were my favourite books in 2023). Let me know what you think is missing – read the comments, there are some amazing suggestions. If you’re curious about how I build my reading list, I describe the process here.

These were 2023’s most popular letters.  If you have a few minutes, I would appreciate your feedback on what you enjoy as well as how I could improve. (Here are a few more specific questions, if you’d like some guidance). Thank you to those of you who have already sent me comments.  

Today’s letter eases us into the year, exploring a few ideas about success and joy.

I share these three blog posts with any client redesigning their life, launching a business, or leading one – Paul Graham’s Do Things That Don’t Scale, Jim Collins’ The Ten Lessons I Learnt from Peter Drucker and Sam Altman’s How to Be Successful.

They’re not definitive but they are provocative, teasing out the principles underlying both personal and business growth (all for a mere twenty minutes of reading). My ninja trick, particularly for Collins and Altman, is to convert their headings into questions. Asking them of yourself is quick way turn reading into action.

I have written about Graham here and Collins here, so won’t repeat their ideas. Instead, we will focus on two of Altman’s thirteen thoughts about building success.

/ strategy

Altman says, ‘compound yourself’, declaring “You want to be an exponential curve yourself—you should aim for your life to follow an ever-increasing up-and-to-the-right trajectory” and advises “You don’t want to be in a career where people who have been doing it for two years can be as effective as people who have been doing it for twenty—your rate of learning should always be high. As your career progresses, each unit of work you do should generate more and more results. There are many ways to get this leverage, such as capital, technology, brand, network effects, and managing people”.

I’ve been puzzling over ways I might do this.

In a sense, this letter is a small example. I read widely to enrich my conversations with my clients. I started writing to deepen my engagement with my reading. Then I published it. Now, you read and share it, and it reaches many more people than my reading of the book would’ve done. I think that’s compounding…

Are you using this principle in your business or career? Let me know how, I’d love to share your experience.
Later he writes, “Define yourself by your strengths, not your weaknesses. Acknowledge your weaknesses and figure out how to work around them, but don’t let them stop you from doing what you want to do”.

I see this without fail in my coaching practice, working consistently to achieve excellence using one’s strengths creates powerful momentum (Read more in How You Can Build Sustained Performance).

//self

Altman’s eleventh thought is ‘Build a Network’.

He observes “The size of the network of really talented people you know often becomes the limiter for what you can accomplish”. It’s a theme that recurs in every strategy, business, and personal history you’ll read – being able to draw on skilled people whose values align with yours is a powerful way to create a compounding effect.

He notes, “An effective way to build a network is to help people as much as you can” and “One of the best ways to build a network is to develop a reputation for really taking care of the people who work with you. Be overly generous with sharing the upside; it will come back to you 10x”.

If you build a network in the way that Altman suggests, you will create the scaffolding for compound growth and have a more joyous life. That seems like a reasonable return (Read more in The Magic of Gratitude).

///soul

In 2008, award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver gave a commencement address at Duke University, entitled “How to be Hopeful”. I thought that it might be a good way to start the year.

She punctures declared truths that seduce (compel? imprison?) us into lives that are smaller than we want, observing that the world tells us, “You get what you pay for. Success is everything. Work is what you do for money, and that’s what counts. How could it be otherwise? And the converse of that last rule, of course, is that if you’re not paid to do a thing, it can’t be important. If a child writes a poem and proudly reads it, adults may wink and ask, ‘Think there’s a lot of money in that?’ You may also hear this when you declare a major in English. Being a good neighbor, raising children: the road to success is not paved with the likes of these”.

Aiming to inject hope, she says, “The arc of history is longer than human vision. It bends. We abolished slavery, we granted universal suffrage. We have done hard things before. And every time it took a terrible fight between people who could not imagine changing the rules, and those who said, ‘We already did. We have made the world new.’ The hardest part will be to convince yourself of the possibilities, and hang on”.

It’s a powerful and important address and yet, it wasn’t quite the note I wanted to start on. Frankly, I wanted lighter, playful, more achievable and so I turned to ‘Dwight Garner Always Has a Muffuletta in the Freezer’, extracts from his recently released memoir, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading (thank you Ridwaan Rasool for the share).

If you love great writing, if you love food, if you love New York, read it.

Here’s a passage to make you smile, “Tonight, the first course is our favorite thing: fresh mozzarella layered with slices of the season’s last good tomatoes. We fleck the platter with olive oil, salt, and basil. When we’re alone, we fall on this like vampires onto an ingenue’s neck. I’m astonished, constantly, at how many people are out there — some of them serious eaters — who think they’ve had fresh mozzarella when they haven’t. This stuff must be bought, fellow earthlings, while it is still warm (we usually get ours at the Fairway on West 74th Street), and it can never have been chilled. You need to buy two orange-size balls: one to eat in big hunks while standing over the sink, while they drip all over you as if they were ripe peaches; the second to slice and serve with your tomatoes. You know this, right? If not, you can thank me later”.

This is how I want to live my year, finding pleasure in every day, sprinkling magic into what might otherwise be mundane, making words dance and people smile. I suspect you want the same. Read Garner. He will inspire you.

Kingsolver is impeccable, a genius, a giant and must be read but, for today, read someone who writes “Too much food talk, I’m aware, can make a person feel awfully smug and bourgeois. I like Kenneth Tynan’s answer, when he was asked how he could call himself a socialist and still eat well. ‘Good food should be available to everyone,’ he replied. ‘Socialism which denies the pleasures of the gullet is socialism disfigured by the English puritan tradition’”.
 
I wish you all the best for your year. Thank you for being here. Thank you for reading and sharing.  
 
Much love
 
Karl

PS: I am fully booked until the end of March, so am not taking on any new clients at the moment. You can subscribe to this letter here.