Happy new year from Kyoto

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Candidate,

For the last few weeks, my wife Cass and I have been traveling through India and Japan. Recently, we headed from Tokyo to Kyoto, where we learned how to make artisan notebooks and toured local homes to learn about Japanese design. I've been sharing my highlights over on Instagram, and I wanted to share some of them with you here.

After arriving in Kyoto, Cass and I got to visit a local family who creates handmade notebooks. We love stationery, and Kyoto is famous for its craftsmanship since it housed the palace for hundreds of years. So we were excited to learn.

They showed us how to sew the paper together, use handmade glue to bind the covers, and use a letterpress machine with gold foil to stamp the pages.

I was a little nervous — I used to hate arts & crafts. But it turned out! I am beginning to appreciate the imperfections in my own creations.

While in Kyoto, we stayed at Aman Kyoto, a new hotel that opened in November. It's been in development for 20 years, and I knew I wanted to come here as soon as an opening was announced.

This is a very small property, about 26 "keys" (rooms). It's outside the city and very focused on nature.

Our room was beautiful in its simplicity, texture, and thoughtfulness. What do you notice? How would you feel staying at a place like this?

And the bathroom — wow!

This is a hinoki tub. It's brand new and smells absolutely amazing. It takes about 30 minutes to fill up. It's a beautiful nod to the traditional baths of Japan, where the entire family would rinse off, use the same bath (in order), then rinse off again.

Americans would find this very odd and off-putting, but as we learned more about the historical reasons — the lack of space, the cold, and focus on family — it started to make sense.

We wanted to learn more about Japanese design, so we arranged to see a private home to understand how locals live. The homeowners were architects, so we got to hear insights about how they designed their home.

A few things we learned:

There were no "entertaining" spaces, since it's usually only for family
Many Japanese people don't display photos of family in their homes, or just of ancestors
Because of limited space and other cultural reasons, kids and parents live in small spaces, often sharing the same room or bed
There is an extreme focus on functionality
Many people clean in the mornings and consider it therapeutic

I also showed them pictures and videos of our rooms at Aman Kyoto and our hotels in India. It was one of my favorite moments of the entire trip.

I was there to learn a few design principles from them, but I didn't realize how much joy they'd get from seeing inside our hotel rooms and how much fun we would have sharing our travel and design experiences with them.

We loved that experience so much, that our guide arranged for us to see another private home nearby. This is a 300-year-old home that's still occupied by the same family.

The large space was separated by sliding doors. One led to a beautiful formal room with a stunning garden view.

Many traditional Japanese houses were not master-planned. They were added to as necessary. Lots of additions for purely functional reasons.

Imagine this being slowly built and developed over hundreds of years by your ancestors. In America, we rarely think about the concept of our "ancestors."

These traditional houses are increasingly rare. It's largely impossible to build them now — too expensive. There are only a small number of craftsmen who know how to use this kind of wood and these construction techniques. They mostly work on shrine maintenance. So this is treated as a kind of "landmark," and many architecture students come to study from it.

We also learned that Japanese design uses light and shadows in totally different ways.

In America, we LOVE light and always look for natural light (except in our bedroom at night). But shadow and darkness play an important role in Japanese architecture.

We were honored to visit these homes. This was truly one of our favorite days, a true Rich Life inside another culture. And it inspired us to think about light, simplicity, and functionality in our own place.

I'm showing you all this because my dream is that you seek out meaningful places to spend time and money on. And what's meaningful to me is different than what's meaningful to you.

For example, we didn't see any shrines in Kyoto this time.

Without context, it isn't meaningful to me. We know we'll be back, and maybe then, we'll feel drawn to see it.

I want to see things because I love them (stationery, food, hotels), or because I did research on them and want to see them in person. Seeing a building with no context isn't memorable. This is an example of the IWT principle of going all-in on the things you love and cutting mercilessly on the things you don't.

This is my Rich Life. Taking a 4-6 week trip every year. Inviting family to come to parts of it with us. Eating amazing food, experiencing magical moments, and having time to read and think.

My dream is to inspire you to create your own Rich Life experiences, no matter how much you spend on it.

What is your Rich Life? DM me on Instagram. I read every message. And follow along for more takeaways this week.