Chapter 15: Mitch Albom on making music, managing mojo, and memorializing Morrie
Release Date: 12/01/2024
Chapter 25: James Frey on drunk, defiant differentiation
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
What do you know about James Frey? Or what do you think you know about James Frey? I’m guessing it’s not nothing. Everyone has an opinion! When I first spotted '' on my wife’s bookshelf when we were moving in together I was like “Oh? Really? That book? The Oprah guy?” And she was like “Have you read it?” And I was like “No, no idea what it’s even about. Just that it’s not real or whatever.” She looked at me with disappointed eyes. Understandably so! I hadn’t bothered to go below the surface. To read about it on my own. I had just soaked in some distant fumes off...
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Chapter 145: Lindyman leverages long-lasting lessons on living a limitless life
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Don't use mouthwash. Why? It's not Lindy. At least that's what Paul Skallas, a Chicago-born technology lawyer who goes by Lindyman online, says. I was fascinated to read a New York Times profile of him titled "The Lindy Way of Living," and knew I wanted to have him on 3 Books. In the 2012 book 'Antifragile,' the statistician and scholar Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined "the Lindy Effect." He wrote, "For the perishable, every additional day in life translates to a shorter additional life expectancy, kind of like me and you and the cheese and our fridge, or the milk and...
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Chapter 22: Tim Urban on shivering in shorts and shifting from sheep to chef
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
We live in interesting times. And they're getting interestinger! I keep my eyes open for big thinkers to help guide and inform me as I keep trying to make sense of the world. My friend Tim Urban is one of those people: Tim has a giant mind willing to engage with our fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. The big questions! Tim's blog still scores millions of readers per month with big-name fans like , Bari Weiss, Sam Harris, Bryan Johnson, and (yes) Elon Musk. Why? Because Tim has an incredible way of smallifying...
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Chapter 144: Nick Sweetman on breaking boundaries with brilliant birds
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
is one of Toronto's most prominent graffiti artists. Last February I was walking down Lansdowne Avenue in Toronto with my friend , who was our guest back in , and as we strolled under a giant bridge I saw a giant ... well, it looked like a photo! But it wasn't a photo. It was a massive spray-painted image of a , and at the very bottom corner was a signature that said "Nick Sweetman." Looks like a photo, right? Look at that eye! That bill! But I discovered there's this Toronto mural artist named Nick Sweetman and turns out I've seen the guy's stuff all over the place. He paints , , , and ...
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Chapter 18: David Sedaris on holding happiness hostage and healing holes in our hearts
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Who else loves David Sedaris? I discovered him in 1997 when an old mentor/editor at Golden Words, my college humor papers, suggested I pick up his book 'Naked' to become a better writer myself. I found the essays sardonic, witty, uncannily observational, and laugh-out-loud funny. I couldn't believe how gently and elegantly he wrote about topics ranging from his obsessive compulsive tics to dropping out of school to (in the namesake essay) visiting a nudist colony. Like millions of people around the world I became obsessed with David Sedaris. I’ve read all of his books—'Me Talk Pretty One...
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Best Of 2024: Neil Pasricha plucks pithy pointers to prime ponderings
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Happy Solstice! As we do every December solstice it's time for our 7th Annual "Best Of" episode of 3 Books. 3 Books is our 22-year-long conversation to uncover and discuss the 1000 most formative books in the world. This year we sat with to , with in Santa Cruz to in the North York Moors, with the and , with to a . This year I've changed tack and made the "Best Of" highly concentrated—under 50 minutes long!—with little snippets from our diverse guests to provide reflection, provoke your thinking, and help to set intentions for 2025 and beyond. Thank...
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Chapter 143: Chris Smalls on anti-Amazon activism and abolishing aristocracy
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world with over a million employees in the U.S. alone. A monolith responsible for trillions of dollars of revenue through retail, entertainment, and infrastructure. But Chris Smalls took it on anyway. Chris had worked at Amazon for 5 years before he was fired in March 2020 after leading a walkout at Amazon's Staten Island warehouse to protest pandemic working conditions. "We all got radicalized at some point in our lives," he told me. "My life changed forever when I got fired from Amazon." Chris used that motivation to...
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Chapter 15: Mitch Albom on making music, managing mojo, and memorializing Morrie
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Once you find purpose, and once you find style… what’s left? Beauty. What’s left is finding and putting out beauty into the world. There are not many writers who have genuinely figured this out … but one of them is Mitch Albom. Mitch is the author of ',' the bestselling memoir of all time, as well as '' and his latest bestseller '' which came out in 2023 and debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list. His books have sold over 40 million copies. Mitch just doesn’t turn off. He’s like a Tasmanian Devil. He’s hosting a , he’s on TV, he’s writing columns in...
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Chapter 142: Oliver Burkeman relishes reflection and reveals writing rituals
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Are you ready for a writing masterclass from one of the best self-help writers in the world? After graduating from Cambridge, Oliver Burkeman wrote the popular column “” in ‘The Guardian’ for over 15 years sharing his real-world, real-time poetic exploration of the self-help universe. In 2021 he published ',' a literary examination of how we live today. Mark Manson (our guest in ) called it “a reality check on our culture’s crazy assumptions around work, productivity and living a meaningful life” and Adam Grant (our guest in ) called it “the most...
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Chapter 7: Vishwas the Uber driver on setting standards and secrets of stellar service
3 Books With Neil Pasricha
Let's jump into the backseat of Vishwas Aggrawal's Uber and take a trip you won't forget. This is a story about setting your own standards in a world constantly hammering us into "human resources." This is a story about setting your own winning lines in a world that wants us to be widgets. This is a story about raising the bar for yourself and deeply valuing the human connection and love that has the potential to exist between every single one of us. Uber has no formal leaderboard, reward mechanism, or pay-for-performance tied to driver rating. So why would Vish care? Why would he...
info_outlineBeauty.
What’s left is finding and putting out beauty into the world.
Mitch is the author of 'Tuesdays with Morrie,' the bestselling memoir of all time, as well as 'The Five People You Meet in Heaven' and his latest bestseller 'The Little Liar' which came out in 2023 and debuted at #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.
His books have sold over 40 million copies.
Mitch just doesn’t turn off. He’s like a Tasmanian Devil. He’s hosting a radio show, he’s on TV, he’s writing columns in the Detroit Free Press, he’s a musician, he’s even running an orphanage in Haiti.
Mitch is full of energy and life and moves quickly and talks quickly … and so we talked about that. We go deep into why he moves through life so fast. We unpack his relationship with Morrie and talk about how I actually misinterpreted parts of the book.
We talk about what the worst thing you can say to an artist is (which he learned from Maya Angelou) and what the true enemy of getting things done is (and surprise, it’s not time or energy).
Fly down to Detroit with me and let's take the elevator way, way up the 96-year-old Fisher Building. Let's enjoy the wise Mitch Albom sharing his 3 most formative books with us in this classic chapter.
Let's flip the page to Chapter 15 now...