Oh, the humanity! with Josh Lynott
Find out how Australian runner and poet Josh Lynott - famous for his inspirational running notes on Instagram - started thinking more deeply about running
I’m on a video call with Josh Lynott. To many, the Australian is simply the purveyor of ultra-shareable, handwritten motivational running notes on Instagram, but he’s much more than that.
Right now, he’s having a relaxing week in Hawaii, and he has “some space in [his] brain today,” after a series of speaking events around the Pacific Rim focused on his book A Note to the Runners where he tells me that he rarely got his only rider request for a little bit of peace and quiet.
Josh, now 29, has amassed 100,000 followers on Instagram over the decade since he first understood the power of social media. They’ve not all come from running, though. He started out with travel photography, and then hiking content, which naturally led to the trail running life that now consumes him. It all started in Hawaii, after he realized the conventional path wasn’t for him.
Having grown up in Adelaide with a “typical middle-class privileged childhood,” Josh spent 15 years sinking all of his efforts into playing tennis. By all accounts he was very good, but the plan was for him to become a doctor. Alas, after failing the necessary high school tests, he chose to take a general health sciences degree rather than pursue becoming a professional tennis player. It was then that he got into running, through a good friend, and it was a sports environment like he’d never experienced.
“I found tennis tournaments toxic, and isolating – not a welcoming environment. Running is so welcoming and so inclusive, and people really want to help you.”
When he didn’t enjoy the degree he’d shoehorned himself into, he quit and booked a one way ticket to Hawaii. There, he lived in a house with a bunch of adventure photographers. He tried re-enrolling in university a couple of times but it never stuck. He always felt out of place.
“I’d go for a run, go to the gym, swim, before going to uni, and I was so energized, and then I’d get to university and everyone was just dull and tired. Where’s the zest for life?”
From there, Josh traveled full-time as a content creator. As he began to get media accreditations to write about trail races, and started experiencing different trail environments, he realized that was the place for him. He started running longer, and farther, and homed in on his passion for poetry and inspirational quotes. He tells me about being a ten-year-old boy, “obsessed” with collecting dozens of pages of motivational quotes from the likes of Muhammad Ali and Charles Bukowski, and sharing them with his friends.
“I always found it so interesting how we would hold onto one or two sentences in history from people.”
His current form has been a long time coming. There’s a beauty in Josh’s writing. I sense this yearning for simplicity, gentleness, and humanity that drags me into Josh’s work time and again. There was one note that he posted here that cut to the core of what I was feeling that day:
“Learn to speak.
Learn to write.
Learn to love.
Learn to run.”
It is a somewhat Socratic method of writing, that leaves enough space around the words to encourage the reader to think a little more deeply than just what’s been written down, where the reader can imprint some of their own thoughts and biases upon the work.
I replied jokingly to Josh that AI can probably do all of those things for us, so what’s the point. It was one of those deeply depressing jokes – one that transmits my current feelings on artificial intelligence perfectly. We don’t need machines to do those things for us. We should all be comfortable and confident enough in our own abilities to speak, write, love, and run. We should be able to express ourselves in each of our inimitable ways. It’s what makes us who we are.
“It’s the two things I love the most – writing and running – and I’ve merged these worlds.”
As runners, I know that you’ll immediately understand what I mean when I say that you have to trust your body and mind when you’re running, but increasingly, I need you to trust in your ability to do all of those things that Josh has asked us to learn. In an evermore digitally-assisted world, losing our faith in our own abilities could be a death knell. What if we forget how to flex those muscles altogether?
“Trust in what you want to make someone feel, and trust in the human component, because that stuff shouldn’t be automated,” Josh says. “I want people to do what they love, take more risks, appreciate the small things in life, and ultimately slow down. If we all did that we would probably be better off.”
Those hand-written notes on Instagram are exactly that. They are a fragment of humanity, delivered digitally, and that’s why they resonate so hard. You’ve opened IG ready to doomscroll, and coming across one of Josh’s posts is the equivalent of finding a love note in your lunchbox. The sandwich is fine, but this is what made picking your phone up worthwhile.
The handwritten notes as we know them started as the primary content on Josh’s Instagram at the tail end of 2024, soon after his book A Note to the Runner was released. The book is a clarion call for all of us to slow down, and appreciate what makes each of us special. Modern life dictates that we fly by the seats of our pants between work, life, and love, and for what? To fully appreciate none of it? That doesn’t sound like much of a life to me.
It’s not his first manifesto for a better world. Back in 2018, his first book, Why Don’t You: Thoughts Worth Thinking comprising 200 pages of “little quotes about ‘wouldn’t the world be better…’” and his photography. He talks about his biggest creative inspiration being one of his best friends, who was a writer and poet. They would send poems back and forth between one another, giving feedback all the time.
“These are just my thoughts. What I like about poetry is that there’s no rules. It can be cryptic. It can not make sense. It can be broken. Poetry is like how a lot of us are trying to make sense of things. I like poetry because it doesn’t have to be perfect.”
His path to where he is now certainly hasn’t been a straight line, but one of those attempts at going to university was to study fashion at the Academy of Art in San Francisco. It tracks that Josh has been working on an apparel company with friends called Notes Running. With ideas around “style and elegance,” where you can run on the trails and then be comfortable wearing the gear to a cafe afterwards. They’ll start with a bag towards the end of 2025, because there are bizarre culture wars over who needs to wear a running vest, and a belt isn’t the most fashionable item.
From teen tennis hopes to books (plural) of running poetry before hitting 30 via university attempts and travel photography. It’s a curveball career path but he seems to have figured out what he enjoys at this young age better than most (“Maybe it’s my stubbornness, but I get so frustrated if I’m not doing something that I love.”), and also how to follow that path.
“There’s no way in the world I could be a doctor now,” Josh laughs. “I don’t know if I can ever go back.”
If Josh Lynott has been rewilded from those manicured lawns he used to hit balls on in years gone, it’s clear that he’s only moving forwards, and that is humanity’s gain.
Links & further reading
Josh Lynott [Josh is on Substack] [IG]
A Note to the Runners [BUY IT]
Notes Running apparel [IG]
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Thanks for reading
Raz x
Raz, thank you for taking the time to chat with me (and for the patience of getting onto a call).
I'm so glad we've connected and smiled many times throughout this piece. A few parts even making my eyes water.
Thank you for capturing my little slice of the world, thoughts, and running in such beautiful form.
I appreciate it greatly.
Big Love,
JL
I wrote already on LinkedIn and will put it here too: Josh is one of my favorites on the internet. Love his content. Love his creativity! Good that you had time to chat! Raziq, after reading the whole newsletter, man…they way you write: soooooo smooth! Keep it up!