GQ magazine’s 2013 “Life Coach of the Year” can be spotted walking around Syracuse University’s campus.

It isn’t legendary basketball coach Jim Boeheim and it isn’t Texas Bowl-winning coach Scott Shafer. It’s George Saunders, a New York Times best-selling author and English professor in the College of Arts and Sciences.

In 2013, Saunders released a best-selling book, was a guest speaker at Orange Central, won the PEN/Malamud Award and was named a finalist for the National Book Award.

Along with GQ’s accolade, Saunders made TIME magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. His commencement speech in May to Arts and Sciences students went viral with more than 90,000 views online, and will be published into a book, according to an Aug. 6 SU News release.

Saunders released his book, “Tenth of December,” last January, which caught GQ’s attention.
Byard Duncan, a freelance writer for the magazine, pitched Saunders as one of the annual “Men of the Year” after he was inspired by Saunders’ writing.

“I felt every story in that collection was incisive, compassionate and inspiring,” Duncan said. “He inspired me to be a little bit more patient with strangers and try to really understand them.”

Originally, Duncan wanted to name Saunders “Teacher of the Year” because of his career as a teacher at SU and his ability to teach through his writing, but he switched it to “Life Coach of the Year” after he interviewed him.

In the article, Saunders gave a lot of advice: how to be decent, how to age, how to write, how to teach, how to be a man and how to be yourself.

Even after being named one of GQ’s men of the year, Saunders said in an email he still doesn’t consider himself “anyone’s life coach,” adding that he doesn’t think “anyone should be coached by me.” Saunders said his life had been full of so many mistakes that he shouldn’t be providing advice at all.

In fact, one of his resolutions for 2014 is to “give less advice and listen more.”

Saunders’ advice for SU students in 2014 is to do the opposite of what he did when he was in college.

“I was very much in a sort of achievement track — wanted to graduate and not flunk out and so on,” he said. “And that’s all good. But I was suppressing a lot of my real interests, particularly writing and reading.”

He said he wished he had paid more attention to his family and had been less self-centered when he was in college. For 2014, he said he hopes to be more productive and nicer, and to get back to work on his new book.

Saunders provided five pieces of advice for students in 2014 as “Life Coach of the Year:”

1) Give some real thought to what happens to a person after death.
2) Read one book that is too hard for you to understand. Persevere to the end of it, no matter what. Find someone who might get it, and ask them to help you get it.
3) Ask your mother or father who they think was the wisest person they ever met and why.
4) Write a 200-word piece of fiction in which you totally nail a type of person you really can’t stand. Then write another 200-word piece of fiction from that person’s point-of-view. Try to make him or her sympathetic.
5) Consider this quote from the poet Longfellow […]: “If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man’s sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility.”

Published on January 13, 2014 at 12:07 am

Contact Alfred: alng@syr.edu

@alfredwkng