Introducing "A Rich Life"

Just over three years ago- January 9th, 2021 - I wrote my last “Towers to Bridges” newsletter. That edition focused on New Year's Resolutions. It felt like a perfect time for fresh starts. We were ten months after COVID's arrival, and the first vaccines were just being deployed in hospital systems nationwide. My wife Kelley and I had welcomed our first son, Fitz, eleven days earlier. This would be the year to find a rhythm with writing and a laundry list of other things—the bright horizon of a new season for productive engagement with the world.

Ah, blissful oblivion!

As those much older or wiser might have counseled, the transition toward one and now two children, along with growing professional obligations, has been more challenging than I anticipated. As the intensity of my personal and professional obligations increased, creative side projects like the newsletter "Towers to Bridges" fell away. 

But, entering the New Year, I can't help but anticipate another fresh start – hence why you find me in your inbox once again. What’s a New Year without a New Year’s Resolution?

A Vision for “A Rich Life”

So, how will 2024 be different?

For the long-term readers, the first thing you will notice is a title change -- "A Rich Life.” Over the last few years, one of my real professional joys has been co-teaching a class called "Morality and Markets" with my colleague and friend Abram Van Engen, who serves as the chair of the English Department at Washington University. Our course was built on a shared belief that the market's moral complexity required careful attention with a wider set of tools than the traditional language of business and case analysis could provide. And so, for a set of bright-eyed first-year undergraduates, we assigned novels from James Baldwin set in Harlem in the 1930s and Willa Cather on the American frontier at the turn of the century. We put Benjamin Franklin in conversation with Henry David Thoreau and unfolded their distinctly different visions of success in the market. We followed Amor Towles’ Count from A Gentleman in Moscow as he searched for purpose in work and relationships while confined to a hotel in Communist Russia. We wrestled through Ayad Akhtar’s critique of 1980s leveraged buy-outs in the masterful play Junk. But across each of these readings, our shared aim was to help students work to develop a personal view of how to build an upstanding life in the market systems. What is the good life? And how does it relate to markets?

The more we talked about the course, the more interest it piqued in those outside of the class. Out of this public curiosity, we invited leaders like Dan Schulman, the CEO of PayPal, to discuss their decision to leave North Carolina in response to HB2. We had a Board Member of Southwest Airlines join our class to discuss how leadership navigated their response to the cancelation of thousands of flights during the 2022 holiday travel. We hosted an energy trader to discuss with us the moment the price of crude oil dipped below $0. At the end of last term, we debated Sam Altman's exit (and return) to OpenAI and what it meant for the future of artificial intelligence and the modern marketplace.

As you might expect, we loved the class. But out of this love, we wanted to share these insights more broadly than the spatial limits of a classroom in St. Louis, Missouri. In "A Rich Life," we hope to explore this landscape with you!

Meeting the Team

The second thing you will see in this newsletter relaunch is a realization that I wanted to explore this space in partnership. Joining me in this work is Abram Van Engen, a noted scholar on American Exceptionalism and the co-leader of one of the best podcasts on poetry, "Poetry for All." The more I taught with Abram, the more I realized how much I learned by seeing his attentiveness to literature and historical context–so different than mine to business and social psychology. Furthermore, as we waded into the complexity of human behavior, the more I wanted to bring in my friend and social psychologist, Daryl Van Tongeren. Daryl is the author of Humble and an upcoming book on religious de-conversion. Their considerations and observations of human behavior are unmatched, and I am honored to call them friends. On my end, I hope that my work over the last several years to understand the challenges of balancing purpose and performance in ownership for closely held businesses will help fill out the team's perspective. Finally, we also intend to bring in the same kind of guests we had throughout the class to round out these perspectives. 

So, what do you get when an English professor, a business professor, and a psychologist walk into ... your inbox every few weeks? We hope you find a unique and thought-provoking exploration of questions around purpose, meaning, success, and strategies for building a rich life in the market systems we all inhabit daily.

We look forward to having you join the conversation.

Peter, Abram, and Daryl