happy fathers day, i hope i make you proud.
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Happy Father’s Day: I Am Writing More
My dad read the essay I wrote for my mother’s sixtieth birthday, Half Dome at 60: My Mom’s Lesson in Blue-Collar Humanism, and said, as a former magazine editor and writer himself, “This is good. You should write more.”
It was high praise. Not effusive, not offhand. The kind that arrives in a clean, declarative sentence: half compliment, half command. Better, anyway, than the time my Dad was my basketball coach and I was his eleventh favorite player.
But, like most things between my father and me, a simple sentence can be a big ask.
We are, in different ways, allergic to details. He skips them entirely, leaping straight to grand ideas; epic arcs, sweeping character motivations, existential stakes. I get stuck in them. Paralyzed by the pressure of perfection, I avoid the small stuff the way an ostrich buries its head in the sand. If I don’t look at it, maybe it can’t hurt me. Maybe it’ll go away.
When he says, “You should write more,” I know what he means: pursue the bigger story. Chronicle the long arc. Leave something behind. It’s an invitation, but also an invocation. Join the lineage.
And yet, there are…
of course…
details.
Three, in particular.
One: Writing still takes a great deal of effort. I’m not gliding across the page. I’m a duckling on the pond, legs flailing beneath the surface just to stay afloat.
Two: I’m not, as he sometimes imagines, following my mom up a mountain every week. Most of life doesn’t feel like an epic. So what am I supposed to write about?
Three: In 2025, who is even writing?
My friends post stories. They use X and Bluesky. They Slack. They drop thoughts into disappearing feeds and let algorithms decide what survives. Even jotting ideas into a Google Doc feels like carving a sentence into a glacier and hoping it doesn’t melt.
When I do write about my life, I have to ask: what even happened this week? I don’t always spend my time with my mom summiting peaks or dissecting roadkill (though that story wrote itself). Most of the time, I clean my fridge. I lift weights. I cheerlead someone else’s startup from the sidelines. There’s no arc, no obvious mountain peak. It’s Sisyphean. But maybe, still, a paragraph.
When my dad asks me questions, I worry he wants to hear about the frontier: how I’m shaping new ideas, meeting wild innovators, solving problems that matter. He’s a basketball coach; he wants Steph Curry’s Comeback Story. He wants the modern American myth.
Or maybe I should take “write more” as a prescription. A way to treat our shared flaw: the tendency to skip the details until they catch up to us.
To write is to notice details. It is fluency. The strange, hopeful act of putting words in order until meaning shows up. Sit still long enough, and a shape begins to emerge.
Maybe it’s McLuhanism. In the Age of Intelligence, AI, and memes, the essay itself is a message, not what it says, but that it took time to notice the details, to find a beginning, middle, end, and a moment to reflect.
It might not get published in Nature, or go viral, or win a prize. But sometimes, it makes someone laugh. Or nod. Or want to write something of their own.
Maybe that’s what he meant all along.
I am writing more.
My Dad was a ski patrol at one point. Thanks to him I could ski before I could walk.
He never critiqued my fashion choices, so long as our shoes matched.
One of the unexpected perks of a VC job was getting great Warriors tickets, and being able to bring my dad.