Our Values

One of the best parts about my new, freelancing life is that I can take a couple of minutes to expand my mind. Who’s going to tell me that I can’t watch a five-minute video or read a long-form article? My boss says it’s fine!

However, if my brother or Erin Davis send me a link to an article, that’s high praise, and I want a few moments to take it in. Now I can. And there are some writers whose work I follow and enjoy. Mark Manson (author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F**k) is one of them. He publishes wonderful, free content on his website, markmanson.net. (There’s a paid component as well but I stick with free.) Note: He loves the F-word. It’s his thing! It appears in many of his titles. I sent him an email once and he wrote back. Decent dude.

His latest post is about our values. He has a way of drilling into the things we do every day and extracting their deeper meaning. He makes me think. He explains why you can’t argue someone out of their values. (Politics, anyone?) And he shows us a beautiful example of how you can change someone’s values. (It has nothing to do with tweets or orange-skinned Presidents.)

Another site I have a lot of time for is The Washington Post. (They have a paywall, FYI.) It’s a newspaper that still does real journalism. I subscribe to Medium ($5 per month) for writing and mind-expanding info. I plan to contribute to them eventually, too.

There’s so much great stuff out there. Hard work by smart people. I want to drink it all in and learn something new. But my boss is telling me it’s time to get back in the recording booth and read more words.