Good Life Project

There is a letter most of us keep meaning to write, and never do. Lindsay Hurty has spent her adult life writing the ones other people put off, and she makes a case that the part of a life we account for least carefully is the part that matters most.

Lindsay is a Harvard-trained former high school English teacher who left the classroom for motherhood, started writing one line a day to her newborn daughter, and ended up building a practice around it. She co-founded Everwell, has designed and led more than 350 programs, and now helps people write legacy letters, launch letters, and life letters to the people they love. She came to this work through a story involving her eighth-grade math teacher, a mailbox, and a conversation that found her five years after he died.

In this conversation, you’ll explore:
The five types of letters she teaches, and the one most people have never heard of until someone dies
What a dying teacher’s family learned about him from an envelope a 14-year-old left in their mailbox
The five-part structure that turns a blank page into something you can actually finish
Why the thing you write at the very end usually belongs at the beginning
The question she asks anyone who says writing a letter to their own spouse would feel too awkward
What to write on a note card when a full letter feels like far too much

Somewhere in your life there is a person who has no idea what they mean to you, and this is the hour that gets you to tell them.

If you LOVED this episode, you can find the 1-page worksheet HERE.

You can find Lindsay at: Website | Substack | Instagram | Episode Transcript

Miss the magic of camp? We’re launching Good Life Pop-Ups in 2027: one-day gatherings full of insight, joy, and real connection. Where should we go first? Vote now!

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When Stanford physician Bryant Lin was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer, a friend gave him one piece of advice about his own prognosis that he still credits with how he's lived every day since.

Bryant Lin is a Clinical Professor of Medicine and Director of Medical Humanities and the Arts at Stanford, a fourth-generation physician who spent two decades in primary care before his own stage four diagnosis in 2024. He built a medical school class around his experience that drew coverage from the New York Times and CBS Mornings, and he's the author of Sunshine: An Exploration of Living When You Are Dying.

In this conversation, you'll explore:
The advice from a fellow doctor that changed how Bryant thinks about his own prognosis, and why he stopped looking at the numbers everyone else obsesses over
A simple filter he now uses to decide which commitments are worth keeping, and what needs to go
Why he changed very little, even after learning how much less time he likely had
Why he chose to teach a Stanford class, narrating his own cancer journey, while going through chemo in real time
What a good life means, once you learn you have a lot less time to live it.

It's a conversation for anyone asking themselves what's actually worth their time, whether or not a doctor has given them a reason to ask.

You can find Bryant at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

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The most accomplished women in Terri Cole's therapy practice kept describing the same private emptiness, and almost none of them could name where it came from. After nearly thirty years and a research group of 650 women, she has an answer that has very little to do with what you would expect. It’s about something called The Father Wound.

Terri Cole is a licensed psychotherapist and the author of Boundary Boss and Too Much, whose new book Father Wound: Break Unhealthy Patterns to Reclaim Your Worth and Power is the first secular, science-grounded treatment of a subject she found almost nobody was writing about. She coined the term because she kept seeing it in her office with no name attached to it. For anyone in their forties or fifties who has done the work, checked the boxes, and still feels like something underneath is running the show, this conversation names the thing.

What you'll explore in this conversation:
The question Terri's own therapist asked about her ambition that reframed twenty years of striving in a single sentence
Why the traits most likely to get you promoted are often the exact adaptations that keep you from enjoying any of it
The two behaviors that look identical on a Tuesday night on the couch and do opposite things to your nervous system
What Terri means when she says you need nothing from your father to heal this, including his apology, his participation, or his being alive
The fear that stops high achievers from starting this work, and her direct answer to whether healing costs you what you built

If you have built a life that looks right from the outside and quietly wondered why it does not feel like yours, this is the conversation about what is actually underneath that.

You can find Terri at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

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The year-end review most of us attempt starts with goals and ends in self-criticism. Tiago Forte has run one every year since 2008, and he has come to treat goal setting as the last step of the process, almost an afterthought.

Tiago is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Building a Second Brain and The PARA Method, which have reached more than half a million readers in over twenty-five languages, and his new book is Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review. Through Forte Labs, he has taught this practice to more than ten thousand students in over seventy countries. He is also, by his own description, someone who resists self-reflection and does it anyway, which makes him unusually useful on the question of how to start.

The question Tiago offers the person whose year contained something they would rather not open, and the year his entire review became a single long walk
Why nearly everyone reaches for their work life first, and where he finds the actual source of most people's dissatisfaction
A daily capture habit with a name, and his sharp reason your AI-generated notes are the wrong raw material for it
Three signals he waits for in his own body before committing to anything big, and what he does when only two show up
Four principles built to stop a life review from turning into the performance review you dread

If you have ever closed out a year feeling like it went by without you, this is a conversation about getting some of it back.

You can find Tiago at: Website | Tiago's YouTube | Episode Transcript

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Most of us treat anxiety as a malfunction to be fixed or medicated away, and the neuroscience points somewhere stranger. There is a narrow band, a razor's edge, where the same emotion stops running you and starts fueling you.

Dr. Wendy Suzuki is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at NYU and the incoming Dean of its College of Arts and Science, a leading authority on neuroplasticity, and the author of Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life. Her TED Talk on exercise and the brain has been viewed more than 55 million times. What makes this one land is that she doesn't teach anxiety from the outside. She has lived with social anxiety since she was a kid at birthday parties, still feels it walking into a cocktail party, and built her science around it.

In this Best Of conversation, you'll explore:
The half of your nervous system nobody talks about, and the one lever you can consciously pull to switch it on
What to do the morning after a 3 a.m. spiral that converts the worry into forward motion, a practice she picked up from a stranger at a birthday party
Why ten minutes of walking lowers anxiety, and the timing detail almost everyone gets wrong
How much of your own anxiety you can predict before it arrives, and what becomes possible once you can
The form of anxiety you're most embarrassed by, and the thing it has been quietly training you to do for other people

If you've spent years trying to get rid of the feeling, this is an invitation to stop fighting it and start setting the volume.

You can find Dr. Wendy at: Website | Instagram | Episode Transcript

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