This week’s highlights: The State of Youth In America
Happy Friday everyone –
It’s fall break here in Nashville and the fiery yellow leaves out my office window confirm it is well named. Fifteen on Friday is back for its 486th week after several weeks of travel and meetings. Back, but changing. There was no master game plan when I launched this newsletter 10 years ago. Over the coming weeks and months, I am going to be evolving the format and timing.
So first off, at least for now, I’m going to shift to publishing every other week. This should be a more sustainable pace given my overall bandwidth. As I continue to write more (working on both a second book and what has turned into a monograph), I am going to give precedence to production vs. curation of content.
Second, I am going to work to distill each edition around a core theme. The core theme will change from week to week, and may include multiple mediums – podcasts, videos, and books. That will be accompanied by a selection of other ‘must-reads’ that in Fifteen on Friday tradition will be a jump ball of subject areas.
Third, finding fifteen reads a week can be challenging. Analyzing the readership statistics shows that the vast majority of people click on the top 7-8 articles. So going forward, Fifteen on Friday may sometimes have fifteen articles, and maybe other times, the “Fifteen” in the name will just mean that it takes fifteen minutes of your time to read.
Hopefully these steps create an email that you find even more interesting and valuable and also remains a sustainable labor of love here.
Thanks for your support
Cheers,
David
Topic of the Week: The Rising Generation
The traditional greeting of the Masai tribe of Africa is “How Are the Children?” This week’s curated deep dive looks at the state of the youth in the West, and not surprisingly, the answer to the question is not well.
- NYT – Teenagers Are Telling Us That Something Is Wrong With America
- BBC – Why Gen Zers are growing up sober curious. A complex combination of outside pressures and information overload is driving young people to snub alcohol, far more than generations before them.
- NYT – The Crisis of Men and Boys. – David Brooks reflects on masculinity in the cultural moment.
- NYP – How London teen Molly Russell’s suicide could spark social media reforms for US kids
- WSJ – Illinois’s Shocking Report Card. The Land of Lincoln is failing its children and covering it up.
Other Great Reads
- ActonInstitute – Why Should Businessmen Read Great Literature? – Credit PS – In every society, power must be humanized and used morally in order that free and civilized life might prosper. And in a money-based economy, businessmen and businesswomen wield great power and are frequently called into roles of civic and political leadership.
- CommonSense – Scheduled to Die: The Rise of Canada’s Assisted Suicide Program. What do you do when you discover your son has made an appointment for his death?
- DailyBeast – ‘Movie Magic’: An Oral History of the ‘Pitch Perfect’ Riff-Off, 10 Years Later
- Bloomberg – Use the Market to Combat Climate Change — and Hurricanes. Florida’s dysfunctional home insurance industry is making it harder for its residents to adjust and respond to more extreme weather.
- CulturalTutor – Why Mixed Use Development Makes for Better Cities
My Book:
When Anything is Possible – Wealth and the Art of Strategic Living
- Does how you handle your wealth actually align with what you care most about in the world?
- Do you feel like you are pro-active and intentional with your financial affairs or entirely reactive to a busy world?
Growing financial wealth is a natural occurrence on the path to success. While this should make life easier, that is not always the case. With greater wealth, comes great opportunity and an overwhelming number of choices to make.
When Anything is Possible is the guidebook about how to engage strategically with wealth. It will help you change your wealth from something overwhelming and all-consuming towards a resource to be deployed to help you positively impact the things that you value most.
If you are interested in learning more, visit here and download a free chapter.