Hey 👋

Being anti-new year new you is so en vogue that making a New Years resolution or 10 borders on contrarian.

My unsolicited opinion: resolutions make sense.

This time of year forces/encourages many of us to slow down enough to connect more authentically with each other and our values. As we reflect on the year around the dinner table, in holiday letters and while lying in bed at night, resolutions are reflected back.

New year new you is dramatic. What’s more realistic is the planned installation of the iOS upgrades you’ve delayed throughout the year that provide bug fixes, performance enhancements and better connectivity.

Still, if you do need to start over, don’t let the anti-new year new you crusaders stop you. And if you change your mind on day 161 of 2020, it’s ok to start again.

🧠Think: 13 life lessons from 13 years of brain pickings Brain Pickings, 8m

Maria Popova shares lessons and reminders learned while creating her blog and newsletter, “an inquiry into what it means to live a decent, substantive and rewarding life.” It’s the first email newsletter I signed up for, and one of the few I consistently open when it hits my inbox.

Have more time? Wait But Why is like The Magic School Bus for adults/adult-like-people. In neuralink and the brain’s magical future, Tim Urban explains the evolution of the brain, brain machine interfaces and what Musk is quietly cooking up next. It took me 2 hours to read this article, and it was totally worth it.

❤️ Feel: think like a bronze medalist, not silver Sivers, 2m

Instead of comparing up to the next-higher situation, compare down to the next-lower one.

🚶🏽‍♀️Do: not start with thank you

Advice on writing thank you notes from Daniel Handler, author of “A Series of Unfortunate Events”:

Do not start with thank you.
Start with any other sentence. If you first say "Thank you for the nice sweater", you can't imagine what to write next. Say "It was wonderful to come home from school to find this nice sweater. Thank you for thinking of me on Arbor Day.
Then you're done.

I see you, I love you, let’s have a magical week.

P.S. on my website this week: lots of workout music.