Hi All!

Here is your weekly dose of 5-Bullet Friday, a list of what I’m pondering and exploring. Feel free to forward along if the spirit moves you.

This edition is brought to you by AG1, my daily nutritional insurance. Be sure to see their offer in the P.S.

Article I’m reading

​“Masters of Love.” (The Atlantic). Alternate link. This is the best article on courtship, love, and dating that I’ve read in years. It’s not only well-researched and full of memorable insights, it’s very actionable and gives labels to concepts you can use.

Book I’m reading

​The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. This is a masterpiece. It explores the subtleties, beauty, and insanity of the human condition through the lens of sex and all that entails. After all, as attributed to Oscar Wilde, “Everything in human life is really about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.”
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​I’d certainly heard of this book 100 times, but I’d never read it. Hearing this, one of my closest friends mailed me a copy as a gift. His accompanying words were “I’m so envious that you get to read this book for the first time. I wish I could do it again.”
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The original manuscript was written in Czech, Kundera’s native language, but published in French in 1984, as Kundera was living in exile in France at the time. The renowned translator Michael Henry Heim translated it into English that same year, when it was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. Legendary literary critic Elizabeth Hardwick called it “a work of the boldest mastery, originality, and richness.”
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It tells the story of two couples—a young woman in love with a man torn between his love for her and his womanizing, and one of the man’s mistresses and her faithful lover—as it explores both the burden and lightness of eternal recurrence.
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​The Unbearable Lightness of Being is actually an easy and fast read, but be forewarned that the beginning is bizarre. That’s part of the charm.
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And if you enjoy this book, you may also enjoy Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, which was his first book to blow my mind.

Documentary I’m watching again

​An Honest Liar. An Honest Liar is a documentary about James ‘The Amazing’ Randi, the world-famous magician, escape artist, and enemy of deception. Randi publicly exposed psychics, faith healers, and con artists with quasi-religious fervor. But when there is a shocking revelation in Randi’s personal life, it isn’t clear whether Randi is still the deceiver… or the deceived. Entertaining and informative, this is a real joy to watch. Special thanks to filmmaker Jon Favreau for first mentioning ‘The Amazing’ Randi to me.

Podcast episode I’m listening to

“The vital question TaskRabbit founder Leah Solivan wished she asked investors.” What a great trip down memory lane! This is a short and tactical podcast episode. Leah Solivan explains how she founded TaskRabbit, launched it in Boston, and expanded it from an experiment in one neighborhood to a global business that was ultimately acquired by IKEA. If you want to skip around, the genesis story and early prototyping starts around 08:05 with “I’m going to take you back.”

Passages I’m pondering

Below are just a few of the 100+ highlights I’ve made in The Unbearable Lightness of Being.
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​Far from being depressing, I find a lot of Kundera’s insights incredibly liberating if you look at them closely enough. For instance, in the case of the second quote, I don’t take it to mean we’re all doomed to sadness. I take it to mean that the endless pursuit of happiness is almost doomed to backfire, but that, per a quote often attributed to Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Happiness is a butterfly, which when pursued, is always just beyond your grasp, but which, if you will sit down quietly, may alight upon you.”
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​“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”
​― Milan Kundera
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​“And therein lies the whole of man’s plight. Human time does not turn in a circle; it runs ahead in a straight line. That is why man cannot be happy: happiness is the longing for repetition.”
​― Milan Kundera
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​“The goals we pursue are always veiled. A girl who longs for marriage longs for something she knows nothing about. The boy who hankers after fame has no idea what fame is. The thing that gives our every move its meaning is always totally unknown to us.”
​― Milan Kundera
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And one just for the spice, since the book is full of it:
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​“She had an overwhelming desire to tell him, like the most banal of women, Don’t let me go, hold me tight, make me your plaything, your slave, be strong! But they were words she could not say.
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The only thing she said when he released her from his embrace was ‘You don’t know how happy I am to be with you.’ That was the most her reserved nature allowed her to express.”
​― Milan Kundera

You can complement this edition of 5-Bullet Friday with my interview with pioneering couples therapist Dr. Sue Johnson, my conversation with legendary magician Penn Jillette, and an all-new episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, featuring my good friend, serial entrepreneur Kevin Rose, who joins me for our latest edition of The Random Show!
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And, as always, please give me feedback on Twitter. Which bullet above is your favorite? What do you want more or less of? Other suggestions? Please let me know. Just send a tweet to @tferriss and put #5BulletFriday at the end so I can find it.
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Have a wonderful weekend, all.
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Much love to you and yours,
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Tim

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