📫 Side Notes
I send a monthly letter to friends, family, and fellow curious people. Each letter contains notes from what I’m writing, reading, and thinking about. It's my effort to digest and make sense of both what I consume each month and what's on my mind.
Get it here. 👇
KIND WORDS FROM READERS:
Phenomenal as always, Clayton. Your writing resembles pure, crisp air: it is both refreshing and purifying.
Another masterpiece here!
I can never get through your whole newsletter in one sitting, but I'm so excited to receive it every month!
for most newsletters I receive I never felt the urge to write back. Yours is different. Thank you for carefully crafting it. I enjoy reading it, every time it's in my inbox.
Dude this was an amazing newsletter.
Loved the letter. Saved a couple of these things to go back to over the coming week. Keep on keeping on!
I love reading Side Notes every month. You have a talent for pulling out the very best of what you read. I loved the bit about hardware - one of those things I intuitively agree with but never would've thought to put into words.
As always, great read.
what you can expect =
WRITING.
On Friendship:
Friendships are powerful. In the presence of friends we talk, listen and feel differently. Usually, for the better. Ralph Waldo Emerson explains this well in his beautiful Friendship essay. I’m writing some of these ideas to remember now, and later.
We should treat friendship with the roughest of courage says Emerson.
“When friendships are real, they are the solidest things we know.”
This is not arguing or fighting but caring. We learn a lot from how our friends respond in raw moments. If they care enough to be honest, show forgiveness and call out our faults, then joy may flow from that relationship for years to come.
We speak differently around friends. In Emerson’s words, “...a person with whom I may be sincere. Before him, I may think along.”
I notice this courage showing itself as vulnerability. In the confines of our friends we feel comfortable speaking before we have a complete thought. Once said out loud it becomes real. As soon as we hear the new thought ourselves, we respond to the feedback immediately; from our own ears as well as our friend’s reaction. We are open to their reaction because trust is there. We crave their opinion.
We listen to our friends. Emerson recognizes, “we overestimate the conscious of our friends...Our own thoughts sound new and larger from their mouth”
Their words weigh more on us and our opinions. With them, we have already formed a foundation of respect. Friends have the power to breathe life into ideas we aren’t confident in or deliver the final blow when we need to move on. Without them, we are caught in a pendulum of inaction and timidness. Even a slight push of encouragement from a friend can spark a deep fire that’s waiting inside of us.
Friends allow us to feel secure and safe. No matter what situations life spins up they are there to catch us. We feel inspired, courageous, and confident when we lean into friendship and it is reciprocated. We are all facing challenges. Friends act as self-selected guides through these times and help each other come out stronger on the other side.
QUOTES NOTES:
"It’s not what a man does during working-hours, but after them, that breaks down his health."
-George Lorimer
"When we cook things, we transform them. And any small acts of transformation are among the most human things we do"
- Tamar Adler
”Do one thing well and watch it compound.”
- James Clear
BOOK NOTES:
The Three Marriages - David Whyte
This book is a beautiful argument against the idea of balance, especially between work and life.
The author explains how we should aim for work/life harmony instead and how we seek different items from all 3 marriages we enter.
The 3 marriages include one with another person, one with our work, and one with ourselves.
"A real work, like a real love, takes not only passion but a certain daily, obsessive, tenacious, illogical form of insanity to keep it alive."
"We leave the beckoning blank page of our life completely empty because we don’t have confidence in the particular first sentence that confronts us."
Recommendation - This blog post - What's your time preference?
NOTES OF INTEREST:
1. Fascinating graphs and diagrams - Tim Urban
2. Austin Kleon shared this poem by Mary Karr on Twitter. "Eat a sandwich" is some of the best long-term traveling advice Emma and I received on our around the world journey in 2016. Before you lash out or be angry with someone, consider that you may just need a sandwich.
3. Family Values - John Candeto. I‘m glad I came across this post and now am using it as a guide to put our own family values in writing.
4. 100 Simple Truths - some favorites:
Being creative is just combining interest with initiative
Be interesting to others by being interested in them
If you have time to consume, you have time to create
5. Longboarding - If you find videos of longboarding intoxicating (and nostalgic) and enjoy great music - you’re welcome.