Patrick O'Shaughnessy

When you think of the most imaginative person you've ever encountered, who comes most immediately to mind?

What was their story?

I used to love the Nintendo idea.

I think they had something like lateral thinking with withered technologies or something like new use cases for very old things or something like that.

When you study history and you think about the parts of life that have pulled some of these characteristics out of people that we've talked about so far, you come across rites of passage a lot.

And it seems like the modern world is as low on different kinds of rites of passage as at any point in history.

And that that is very strange and troubling and hopefully like a historical anomaly when we look back on it a thousand years from now.

Why do you think that's the case?

And what would be your prescription for changing it?

If you had other exercises you would recommend families engage in, in addition to like, okay, we need to design rituals.

We need to design rites of passage for our kids.

Let's say parents for the kids.

Any other exercises for the family that you would recommend?

What about in a marriage specifically?

So setting aside the parent-child relationship, obviously that's critical, but just purely at the level of spouses in the same general vein, exercises, rituals, whatever, anything that you have done or would recommend people think about?

Speaking of three, my third most powerful takeaway from the book was this notion of the three gates, this idea of asking yourself three questions before you say something.

Can you give us that incredibly cool and useful idea?

I have a background in philosophy, and so I can't help myself but focus on your advice that's very big and grandiose and about life and work.

But the book is also full of very tiny bits of advice and very tactical bits of advice.

Are there any few that stand out to you as like your favorites that make you chuckle or make you happy?