About - My Five Things

Welcome to Five Things I’ve Learned on Substack.

Five Things I’ve Learned brings you the essential lessons, ideas, and experiences of a lifetime from the artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers we admire most. Every Five Things I’ve Learned session is a handmade, personal class.

This Substack gives you glimpses into our library of 140 archived classes. We make it easy for you to access on-demand sessions from creative artists and thinkers like acclaimed author Isabel Allende, Pulitzer-Prize-winning Jerry Saltz, Grammy winning Joe Henry, National Book Award winning Phil Klay, Academy-Award-winning director Alexander Payne, Guggenheim fellows Camille Dungy and Aaron Dworkin, and more.

We love Substack! We’re so pleased to be part of a community that values writers—and creative people of all types—as much as we do. Substack writers have delivered some of our favorite Five Things I’ve Learned classes.

All Five Things I’ve Learned subscribers get these Substack Essentials:

Coming Soon: Exclusive access to one Five Things I’ve Learned class each month — right in your inbox. You’ll receive free on-demand access to Five Things I’ve Learned classes from some of Substack’s best writers.
Substack writers who’ve joined Five Things I’ve Learned include:
- Cara Black
  on crafting a sense of place,
- Sari Botton on aging,
- Liza Donnelly on creativity,
- Grant Faulkner on brevity, and on writing with vulnerability,
- Sarah Fay
  on writing illness,
- Eddie
  Glaude Jr on America’s past, and its urgent lessons for today,
- Will Hermes
  on writing about music and musicians,
- Jane Hirshfield
  on poems, as fields of discovery,
- Ann Hood
  on finding the story growing in your heart,
- Steven Johnson on where creativity comes from,
- Carol Kino on the forgotten heroines of American feminism,
- Scott Klug
  on America - by talking to Americans lost in the middle,
- Stephanie Land on writing from the margins of America,
- Julie Lythcott-Haims
  on making love work,
- Rebecca Makkai on getting unstuck,
- Megan Matson in conversation with Stuart Stevens, Beto O’Rourke, and Trygve Olson on America and democracy,
- Allison Moorer on the demands of memoir,
- Beto O'Rourke
  on America - and our common ground,
- Susan Orlean on finding the perfect story,
- Holly Lynn Payne
  on the power of page one,
- Maya C. Popa on poetic form,
- Michael Ruhlman
  on writing, by writing about food,
- Maurice Carlos Ruffin
  on publishing his first book,
- Maggie Smith
  on creativity during times of upheaval,
- Matthew Specktor
  on writing the self in memoir and fiction,
- Danté Stewart
  on the power of narrative,
- Laurie Stone
  on how to write a seductive sentence,
- Cheryl Strayed on nurturing your artistic life,
- Amber Tamblyn
  on harnessing emotion in the service of powerful art,
- Robert Thurman
  on wisdom, bliss and openness,
- Alexander Vindman on the war in Ukraine,
- Brooke Warner on how creative women thrive,
- Rick Wilson on saving democracy,
- Matthew Zapruder
  on honoring family as a source of creativity, and
- Larissa Zimberoff on how technology is reshaping our food.
$10 off your first class. Choose from our extensive library of classes on everything from creativity and motherhood to the upside of aging to finishing your book to psychedelic science. Visit myfivethings.com, and type SUBSTACK10 in the Discount Code field as you make your purchase.

Visit myfivethings.com.

Updates and announcements. Newsletter announcements about upcoming live classes—including upcoming sessions from Substack writers. You’ll also be among the first to know about upcoming classes, series, and other Substack-only things.
Free access to special classes and conversation focused on America and the values we share. We think this is important. And we hope that you do, too. Check out Five Things I’ve Learned about America, right here.

How it works.

Like Substack, Five Things I’ve Learned sessions deliver immediate revenue to class hosts. We believe doing so is another important way that people with something worth sharing can get fairly compensated for their ideas and experience.

Each 90-minute class is available live for $40; a ticket for each live two-hour class is $60. Visit myfivethings.com to discover the great line up of live, online classes coming soon.

See something you like? Try out our new Multi Pass. It’s a great way to catch up on your dhoice of 140 great classes from people we admire, any time you like.