Brian Mayer

It’s never as hard as we think it is to lose touch with friends. As I’ve said before and I’ll say again, friendship is situational and requires equal effort from both sides. Losing touch is merely a reflection of the nature of the friendship, and has no bearing on how close a friendship it actually is.

The fact is, you won’t talk to some of your best friends for years. Other people, like coworkers, you’ll see every day and never have the same bond with.

I often express regret when I see old friends, as they will, that we haven’t kept in better touch. But the truth is, we’re exactly in touch as we need to be, as the type of friendship we are both comfortable with.

Don’t feel bad about losing touch with people. Focus on building and maintaining the friendships that matter to you and the rest will take care of itself.

Why would you spend any time or energy hating anybody?

I had a classmate I hated once. Really hated. I won’t go into details for obvious reasons, but I so clearly remember the feeling. It was all-encompassing, frustrating hate. I thought about him all the time. Hate not only of who he was and his beliefs and his attitude, but his stubbornness and unwillingness to change. His complete lack of awareness. How could he be like that? I would spend hours complaining to him with a friend who understood.

The reasons I hated him are unimportant, in retrospect. What matters is, it was a complete waste of time. All the time I spent thinking about how terrible he was was time I could have spent having fun with my friends. Instead of tearing him down I could have been building myself up.

I think about hate a lot now, not because I’ve magically managed to become a higher-order zen master and have removed the feeling from my emotional vocabulary, but because I see hate all the time, everywhere. Our entire news cycle, for instance, seems to be dominated by hate. Even the word “nemesis” has been trending.

Hate and anger and jealousy sells really well. It’s a lot easier to get hate to go viral than cuteness. At the same time, it’s a complete waste of energy. Why spend even 5 minutes reading about something some weirdo in Florida thinks? You’re not going to change his mind by arguing with him. You can’t stop him from believing it or silence him through physical force–at least, obviously, you shouldn’t. Plus, maybe you’ve got him all wrong anyway. Maybe he is a victim of abuse. Maybe he has been badly hurt in the past, and maybe this is his way of venting his frustration. Maybe he just saw a tweet from someone he hated, and responded hyperbolically. Maybe if you met him in real life, you would think he was lovely.

Feel free to disagree with who you like. But don’t waste your time investing in hate when there are so many better things to do with your life. Channel your disagreements into positive forces for change: do something about it instead of stewing in anger.

I haven’t achieved zen-level, but I have learned to recognize when my thoughts are being clouded by feelings of resentment and anger. I have learned to turn off the news and most of the media that feeds off of my natural impulse to go tribal and reject those who think differently from me. I have been much happier ignoring sinners against my conscience in everyday life, because they just aren’t worth it.

Yes there are always frustrations and frustrating people. But if you spend any of your precious free time thinking about how terrible someone else is, instead of how great other people in your life are, or what you could be doing to make yourself better, you are doing yourself a disservice. Those feelings will make you bitter and resentful and mess with your judgment. And most of all, they will keep you from being happy yourself. And don’t you owe that to yourself?

When I was in college I thought it would be a good idea to make a website that helped students manage their classes, take and share notes for homework. It did really well in one of my classes; everyone used it to prepare for the final.

Then I took it to the administrators and tried to get them to have me build their course management system, because our course picker was old school and I thought I could do it better. Went back and forth with the IT department for a while. Ended up giving it up and doing other things.

Low and behold, I found out today that my domain name, coursepuppy.com, is expiring. It also happens to be the same day I found out there’s a YC startup called CourseDog that just launched and is doing the exact same thing.

I debated hitting them up to ask them if they wanted to buy the domain. I like CoursePuppy more than CourseDog, to be honest. But I’m instead just going to let the internet gods give them the domain name instead, if they see it and ever want to pick it up.

I dug up the code for the site and took a screenshot, just so I could feel nostalgic for a second. RIP CoursePuppy. May you rest in puppy.

“Imagine a graph,” my friend said, “where one axis is how interesting you are, and the other axis is how self-involved you are.” Done.

Everyone falls on this graph. Donald Trump: extremely self involved, but also extremely interesting. Elon Musk: also extremely self involved and extremely interesting. Probably why people call Musk the Trump of the left. Then you have Bill Gates: extremely interesting, but not at all self-involved. AOC: extremely self involved, and not at all interesting.

I guess the point of this exercise is to give people a little more credit for being self involved when they have something to be self involved about. On the other hand, it serves as a good litmus test for the sort of people you want to avoid (the self involved / non-interesting ones) vs the ones you want to get to know (the non-self involved / interesting ones). I, for one, am in the other quadrant: extremely self involved and not at all interesting.

Amongst other heuristics, this is one way to view the world. But it obviously isn’t the be-all-end-all of how people can be defined. Imagine another graph where there are completely useless heuristics on one side and heuristics that actually work on the other. This Interesting / Self Involved graph would be about in the middle.

Still, you can tell me friend it worked out great.

We all know Donald Trump is terrible at so many things. Reading, for example. Or not lying.

But if Democrats want to beat him in 2020 they have to understand and defeat him at the thing he’s good at: marketing.

Trump is a man whose entire career has been built on the power of marketing, and implicit in that skill set is the ability to find what works to get attention.

Today’s case in pivoting on healthcare is a perfect example. Trump knows that in a week, the news cycle will have moved on to something else. But by branding the GOP the “party of healthcare” for a couple days, he learned valuable information. He learned that the American people aren’t going to give him credit for this as a voting issue, and he’d look weak compared to Democrats on it. He knows his base isn’t getting fired up about it. So, he moved on to the next thing.

Trump operates like a political entrepreneur, constantly testing political messages with his market. He’s made for our time: no other era has made the information gathering cycle so rapid as today. Previous presidents had to wait until the weekly paper, or poll results, or even elections to find out what’s working. Trump, on the other hand, has instant access to the world stage with everything he says, which is reported on, dissected, analyzed, praised, and criticized immediately by every facet of society. He can see in realtime what messages work and which fall flat.

What better Petri dish for a marketer to split test ideas?

Remember the caravan? That story started just like the healthcare claim. But that one went viral immediately. He knew he had hit a nerve. He could keep twisting the knife. The “party of healthcare,” on the other hand, was DOA.

You don’t have to like Trump to recognize the genius in his marketing skill set and how he uses the media to shape his message. If Democrats hope to beat him, they need to think like Pepsi going after Coca Cola, not JFK going after Nixon.

This is why I firmly believe the Democrat with the best shot at winning the nomination, and defeating Donald Trump, is Pete Buttigieg. I don’t particularly like him (I mean, he’s barely older than I am and he thinks he has the maturity and experience to be President. The chutzpah.) But he is something the Democrats desperately need right now: a brand.

You can see the stories about him already spreading virally like Trump and Obama before him: he taught himself Norwegian. He’s openly gay. He’s a veteran. He’s a Rhodes Scholar. He’s a small city mayor from a red state. Can you hear progressives and moderate Democrats opening their wallets?

His $7 million Q1 haul is nothing to snark at. And most of all, his youth and vigor give him charisma we don’t see from anyone else in the field except for Booker, Biden and (maybe) Harris.

If Democrats want to beat Trump, they have to beat him at his own game. They have to find a brand that can beat his. This isn’t politics anymore. It’s marketing.

Every once in a while, you realize what you thought about yourself just isn’t the case. And it can leave you feeling pretty down on yourself and shaken up. On the other hand, if you are truly honest with yourself, you can turn this realization into a learning experience, and be better off in the long run.

Both of these things happened to me over the last four days, and it has been a difficult experience facing hard truths that, put simply, I just have to accept. The good news is, I think I can move past this if I acknowledge where I went wrong and work to stop it from happening again.

If that all sounds rather cryptic, I apologize. I haven’t yet mastered the art of putting honest, personal views on the public internet. I do appreciate my friends for both calling my attention to my own shortcomings and being patient with my very, very shallow learning curve. I hope you notice a difference soon.

As of January 1, I’ve now written 90 blog posts for 90 days of the year.

To be totally honest, I’ve slipped a bit and haven’t always kept up day-to-day. There are days (such as today) where I’ve written 2 or more posts I had missed to fill the gap. Other times, I write posts on the go and then post them when I have a connection.

I’m finding that the writing is getting a lot easier as I force myself to sit down and do it. There is very little writers’ block filter left. If I don’t know what to write about, I can usually look around the room and see something that reminds me of something to write about.

I thought by now I would be tired of this, but I’m finding that it is somewhat therapeutic to write every day, even knowing that almost no one is reading it (if you are, don’t be shy, comment!). It is exposing, but it isn’t embarrassing–at least not yet.

Posts 91 – 365, here we come.

Literally not an hour goes by where I don’t check my phone. I bet you’re the same way.

The dopamine rush you get from a notification is addicting. I think they’ve made it that way on purpose.

Of all the areas I need to most improve (and we all do, honestly, as a society), learning to unplug and be OK with not being in constant contact with the entire world at all times is probably at the top of the list.

In the meantime, I’ve checked my phone twice while writing this. And it’s not even that long a post. But I’m waiting for a text, so that tends to make the time drag on real long.

So, on the heels of my epic months-long quest to eat healthier, I’ve dropped my strict dietary restrictions in favor of counting calories straight up. There’s a baseline ‘budget’ I get each day; when I exercise, I get more. As I’ve found out, when I drink, the budget gets eaten up (no pun intended) real quickly.

So, going out tonight with old friends to one of our favorite K-Town spots means I will get to do very little drinking, very little eating, or I’ll blow my budget in one meal.

It’s not the worst problem I’ve ever had, but I’m trying to give this whole calories in, calories out thing a shot. So far I’ve shed 3% of my weight after about a week…so at this rate, I should be the size of a thimble by August. If I can last that long *fingers crossed*

If you’re interested in doing the same thing, the app is called Lose It. Look, they’re app developers, not marketers.

Tonight I had the honor of hosting Drink for LiNK for supporters of Liberty in North Korea in New York.

We had the opportunity to meet as a community and share a quick celebratory toast in honor of 1000 of our North Korean friends who have reached freedom. We lit a candle on cupcakes as they do, explained by LiNK:

North Korean refugees who meet our field staff in Southeast Asia end their difficult journey with a special tradition. They each light a candle on a small cake before reflecting on how far they’ve come and celebrating their first hours in freedom. We call this the cake ceremony. Celebrate this epic milestone by having your own cake ceremony in honor of our North Korean friends.

As moving and poignant as tonight was, there is so much more to do. Please consider donating at our new LiNK NYC page here. Our annual goal is $50,000, which will go directly to the rescue & resettlement of NK refugees. Every bit helps.

Thank you!