The Only Manual For Living You'll Ever Need

Four years ago, on September 8th, 2021, I sent my first How to Live missive into the ether. Literally. I had zero subscribers. By the end of that first day, I had 52. By the end of the month, I had nearly 500.

I've watched it rise and fall and rise and fall for four years—unpredictable, like emotion. It's a continuous lesson in uncertainty and impermanence.

Now, it hovers around 13K subscribers, which is still hard for me to believe, and it's all thanks to you that I keep writing this. Without your interest, engagement, emails and curiosity, there'd be no How to Live. Thank you.

The entrance into September finds me strangely emotional. Last week, I was in upstate, NY, winding down a month of intense writing. On one of my last days, I took the car to run errands, and was walloped by a sadness so acute, I had to pull off the highway to sob in the car. Why was I so sad? I still don’t know.

And yesterday, I lost control of my emotions in a way I haven’t in a very long time. It scared me. I was, after a long bunch of minutes, able to calm myself down, but later I thought: have I learned nothing in four years of writing this newsletter?

How did my emotions get past me?

We've all been there—completely hijacked by our own feelings, wondering how we became strangers to ourselves. Maybe you've woken up at 3am to a panic attack, or also been sideswiped by a grief so deep you had to pull over and sob in your car.

Lots of people have spiritual or religious practices they turn to that ground them, but what if you don't? What if you need something that works right now—not after meditation, not after therapy, but in the heat of the emotional storm?

That's when I remembered my copy of AIM—a 15-page document I have stored in a secret folder on Evernote.

AIM is not theory or philosophy. It's a precision instrument—specific, actionable steps that can reset my emotional state when everything feels chaotic and out of control.

Yesterday, I pulled it out and started reading through it, and felt that immediate shift everyone talks about but so few things actually deliver. The kind where your breathing slows, and your perspective shifts.

AIM isn’t available in bookstores or online. You can't google it, or ask ChatGPT for a summary.

But I have it, and it works. Every single time.

Today, I'm sharing what's inside the AIM document—and how you can get your hands on a copy.

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