Tuesday Email: Thanksgiving Post 2025

Happy Tuesday!

Every Tuesday I'd like to offer strategies for the week ahead and a thought to fuel your action.

Every Thanksgiving, I have the same realization at 9 PM.

The dishes are done.

The pie plates are empty.

Everyone's still sitting around, laughing about something that happened five years ago that wasn't even funny then.

And I think: "Why can't every week feel like this?"

By Monday morning, I've already forgotten the answer.

Thanksgiving's real gift isn't the permission to be present—it's the constraint that makes presence possible.

When everything closes, when emails stop, when the world collectively agrees to pause, presence becomes the default option.

Not because we're more enlightened on the fourth Thursday of November, but because the alternative has been temporarily removed.

We mistake this for nostalgia. We call it tradition. But what we're really experiencing is the rare luxury of forced simplicity.

There's a reason Thanksgiving is one of the few truly universal American holidays.

It requires no specific belief system, no particular celebration style, no gift-giving anxiety. The barrier to entry is showing up.

But here's what we forget: that simplicity is designed, not discovered.

The holiday works because constraints create clarity. No meetings. No deadlines. Just people and plates and the expectation that for one day, nothing else can compete for your attention.

The problem isn't that we want more days like Thanksgiving.

The problem is that we want them without the constraints that make them possible.

Change only happens when we're forced to make a choice we can no longer avoid.

Innovation doesn't emerge from open-ended possibility—it emerges from boundaries that force us to think differently.

Action happens at deadlines because deadlines eliminate the option to wait. Presence happens on Thanksgiving because absence isn't an option.

The grinder isn't the enemy. The illusion that we can do everything without constraint is.

When I get home from Thanksgiving and see the calendar packed with family activities and work obligations, I'm not looking at the problem—I'm looking at the symptom. The problem is believing I can maintain Thanksgiving presence while keeping Tuesday's chaos.

We see opportunities only in retrospect because we're blind to them in real-time.

Sitting at the halfway point of this decade, the business environment of five years ago feels foreign.

The next five years will be incomprehensible from where we stand today. The only through-line is change. The only skill that matters is learning to work with it instead of against it. What if the lesson of Thanksgiving isn't to recreate the day—it's to recreate the constraint?

Not the menu. Not the guest list. But the forced simplicity that makes presence unavoidable.

What would your week look like if you designed in the constraint before waiting for it to arrive? What would happen if you treated your attention the way

Thanksgiving treats your time—as something too valuable to split across competing demands?

Change is the only inevitability. But how we navigate it isn't.

I write these notes each week because change is easier when you have a tribe to navigate it with. That's not sentiment—it's strategy. The lessons I'm learning by doing, the failures I'm accepting as starting points, the open-mindedness I'm practicing—none of it happens in isolation.

This Thanksgiving, I'm grateful you're part of that tribe.

I wish you a holiday full of presence, love, joy, and laughter.

Not because those things will show up on their own, but because you'll create the constraints that make them possible.

The best is ahead!

-Matt