Daniel O'Brien's Newsletter: March '23!

Hello!  This is the official substack of me, Daniel O'Brien, four-time Emmy-winning Senior Writer for Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, author of How to Fight Presidents and its adaptation Your Presidential Fantasy Dream Team, Head Writer for the Cracked De-textbook and editor and contributing author for You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News (a New York Times Bestseller), co-host of the popular nothing podcast Quick Question with Soren and Daniel and sole host of the less popular podcast Dead Presidents. I co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Cracked After Hours, which is easily the most popular thing I've ever done, but that's in the past. This is the second volume(?) of my substack, a thing you signed up for on purpose. 

Once a month I will send an email with: 

-Three-to-five book recommendations;

-Updates on whatever I'm working on, if applicable;

-That's really it! 

You might notice that both the first issue(?) and this one are sort of "staple books," evergreen books about writing and (spoilers) life that I return to often. Foundational books for me, personally. I promise going forward there will be more of a mix of lower stakes books/books* I happen to be reading currently, it just seemed worthwhile to me to start this newsletter book club off with a solid base of, for lack of a better term, Me Stuff.

*A note on "books" I happen to be reading currently; I'm a bad reader, or rather I'm not as good a reader as I'd like to be. What I mean by that is I wish I could be a) the kind of reader who focuses fully on one book at a time and b) the kind of reader that doesn't need to trick himself into reading (a thing I on paper love to do). I've found that if I finish a book, days or sometimes weeks will go by before I pick up another one, like I suddenly lost the time I used to have reserved for reading. My method for tricking myself into reading more is I'm always kind of reading two books at once, so when one finishes I don't have room for a gap in between. It's imperfect, but that's how I make sure I read a lot. Curious how other people get themselves to start reading after a slump; sound off in the comments, I'll read them.

Anyways. 

Three Nonfiction Books About Life n' Stuff

Stillness is the Key (Ryan Holiday): Full disclosure, Ryan's a friend of mine, we met a million years ago when we were both in LA and both writing different stuff on the internet. It's been really cool to watch him go from "Ryan, that guy I know" to arguably the face of the modern Stoic philosophy movement. All of his books are great, this one just happened to resonate with me the most. Usually the way things go is I read one of Ryan's books and then about four years later I go "Oooooh, I get it, he was right." Stillness found me at the right time and was the first book that set me on a path towards a quieter, less busy and (so far!) happier life. The title gives it away!

Four Thousand Weeks (Oliver Burkeman): 

"The more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you'll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time."

This book, which pretends to be a book about time management, is actually a book about being present. The title of this book spoils the question I like to ask people when describing it, which is "How many weeks do you think the average person lives, without doing any math?" It's four thousand. Is it less than you thought, it sure is less than I thought. This book has a difficult task; undo decades upon decades of conditioning people to believe if they just work smarter or more efficiently, they'll be able to accomplish all of their tasks so that they can finally have time for [insert the thing you want to make time for here]. You'll never get it all done, so stop pretending you can. “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.” It's difficult for me, a task-oriented machine who consults a to-do list literally every single day, to accept this premise but I'm ultimately embracing it. You're not going to get done all of the stuff you want to get done; all the more reason to focus only on what you enjoy and be present while you enjoy it.

Write it Down Make it Happen (Henriette Anne Klauser)- Before we started dating, my girlfriend mentioned this book being important to her, so I bought it because I knew I wanted to know her better. (Pro-tip: If you're interested in someone and they mention a book that they love, read it. Think about it. Have questions.) There's a mystic aspect to this book that I don't necessarily subscribe to, but the core idea has been useful to me; writing down-- physically writing down-- what you want forces you to look inward and actually figure out what you want and come up with language to articulate it. In 2023, this book inspired me to start a little project: write down Four Goals for the Year, four for the month, four for the week. I have a journal for this specific purpose, I write the goals down and revisit them and make notes to track my progress. Articulation and accountability. 

And that's it! Read books, run, volunteer at your local food pantry and call your parents. Bye.

*NOTE: I think if you click on any of those links and buy a book, I get a commission, but I don't totally know for sure because I haven't looked into it too deeply.