🐮 The Nouns of November 1, 2024

1. NEW COSTUME: It’s okay to be a cow.

2. NEW QUOTE: Seneca on tranquility

3. NEW BOOKS: What great writers read.

It’s okay to be a cow.

My niece was a cow for Halloween.

But she’s 12.

And none of her friends dressed up at school.

Every one of you knows where this is going. Because every one of you has been there too. You took a swing. And felt like you were acting within the boundaries of social expectation.

And you were wrong.

And it was awful. 😬

I find it funny that when we are kids, the most important thing is fitting in. Wearing the right clothes, listening to the right music, having the right Lisa Frank trapper keeper.

But as an adult, we want nothing more than to be special. Unique. Different. To have opinions and thoughts of our own. This newsletter feels like evidence of that.

This story would have been more poignant if my niece dressed up as a sheep.

This morning, my wife went to get coffee, and naturally put on a costume.

Because it’s halloween, and that’s what you do.

When she got home, she admitted that, walking into the coffee shop, she realized no one else was dressed up.

She panicked and quickly took off her costume to blend in.

But then, like the badass she is, she put it back on, and went in anyway.

Who cares if everyone else is too lame to wear a costume.

She wasn’t going to let that stop her.

I think the whole point of life might be summed up in the small difference between my niece and my wife.

As kids, we learn to fit in. To conform to the safety of numbers while we try new things one little step at a time.

Sometimes it bites us in the ass.

Sometimes we step out and get embarrassed.

But after a few decades, we start seeing what is special about our own perspective.

And we start to value our differences and appreciate what makes us unique.

I would wager that, at the end of life, the people who look back with the most joy are the ones who made the most progress in accepting their own uniqueness.

Who found their costume and said unapologetically, “I am a cow.”

Because behind the 12-year-old girl judgment is a lot of 12-year-old girl jealousy.

People just wishing they had the courage to be themselves.

Oh, and for any 12 year olds who made fun of my niece:

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What great writers read.

Despite wanting to be unique, we all still have this underlying need to know what the cool kids are doing.

Often, we get lost in the tactics of what a person is doing and miss the why they are doing it in the first place. I think books are a rare time when emulating your leaders is a great thing.

Understanding where great authors get their information and inspiration can help us be more critical thinkers. We can establish a two-way conversation with the author by coming to different conclusions from the same sources.

I recently stumbled upon a series of pages Shortform has compiled highlighting the most recommended books by certain authors and thought leaders. They seem to have sifted through interviews, social, and articles to see what content authors recommend. Seems like a great source for finding the next read.