Monthly Top 10

1. If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. This month I read The Choice—the incredible true story of Dr. Edith Eva Eger, a Holocaust survivor who’s now a practicing psychologist. Her mission: to show people that there is hope, light, and kindness, even in the darkest times. The motto she used to survive the horrors of Auschwitz: If I survive today, tomorrow I will be free. I can’t recommend this book highly enough.

2. Love is not about the other person. It’s about you. This was one of my favorite takeaways from Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering: A Yogi’s Guide to Joy. Love is not about the other person. It’s about you. It’s a choice. It’s a way of being.

3. Think beyond your ego

4. That One Should Disdain Hardships by Musonius Rufus. I recently wrote a blog on this idea. The basic idea: people struggle for money, for their opinions to be heard, for fame and recognition—things that are not inherently good. Yet, Musonius says, they’re not nearly as willing to struggle to acquire things like courage, discipline, kindness, or wisdom–things that are inherently good and would, without a doubt, improve the quality of their life.

5. Consistency over intensity.  “You don’t get in shape by going to the gym for 8 hours a few times a year. You get in shape by going to the gym for 30 minutes four or five or six days a week,” says Simon Sinek in the video “Leadership Explained in 5 Minutes”. “It’s little things adding up over time. Your teeth don’t not rot because you go to the dentist twice a year. They don’t rot because you brush them for a couple minutes every day. It’s the little things adding up over time.” (Source: Billy Oppenhiemer’s Six at Six Newsletter)

6. Stop letting yourself be distracted by things that don’t matter. I got this idea on my sixth reading of Meditations. I’ve written this affirmation every morning this month in my journal: I am not distracted by things that don’t matter.

7. How to be sure you’re living life to the fullest: Be present, right now.

8. The power of responsibility. We all know the quote from Spiderman, “With great power comes great responsibility”. In The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck, Mark Manson says, if you switch the nouns around, the quote becomes even better: “With great responsibility comes great power.”

9. The greater the difficulty, the greater the meaning. In Yes to Life, Viktor E. Frankl says that the meaning of life is found in suffering. The greater the suffering, he says, the greater the meaning. “Life no longer appears to us as a given, but as something given over to us, it is a task in every moment. This, therefore, means that it can only become more meaningful the more difficult it becomes.”

10. Many mickles make a muckle. “We overestimate what we can do in one year, and underestimate what we can do in ten years.” This quote is attributed to Bill Gates. I think of it often. Keep going, even if it doesn’t seem like you’re making progress. You are. It’s slowly adding up. Keep going.

1. We don’t procrastinate indiscriminately. Read my super short blog about this here.

2. How to guarantee you have a good day: do good, unselfish things.

3. Put each day up for review: “Anger, [or any vice], will abate and become more temperate if it knows that it must come before a judge every day.” -Seneca

4. More doubt and curiosity, less rigidity and certainty. “Cling to certainty, if it makes you feel better. Just be aware that what you’re clinging to is the opposite of life.” -Neil Strauss

5. It’s all temporary, no need to stress. “It would take an idiot to feel self-importance or distress,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Or any indignation, either. As if the things that irritate us lasted.”

6. The world paradoxically expands when you narrow your focus.

7. Reading and thinking are useless without application. This sounds obvious, but for someone like me who loves to read, I need a reminder that reading is for life, not the other way around. A reminder to take the best ideas from what I’ve read and use them—not mull them over endlessly in my head.

8. Have a schedule when you’re not busy. When you have a schedule for when you’re not busy, you don’t waste your free time trying to figure out what to do. Or worse, waste it on easy defaults like checking social media.

9. Develop pathological empathy for your audience. As Ann Handley talks about in Everybody Writes, you must have pathological empathy for your audience and users. Time is our most valuable non-renewable resource. We should be highly aware—pathologically empathetic—of our user’s time and attention. (An idea I use in my newsletters).

10. Keep your mind clear. In warfare, one side would overwhelm the other with information—trivial, anything—because it caused confusion. When we watch one TikTik video after another, view one status after another, read one headline after another…our minds become confused. Clear thinking goes out the window.

1. Habits are only habits if they’re done daily. Habits done “once a week aren’t habits at all. They’re obligations”. –Jeff Goins, quoted by Ann Handley in Everybody Writes

2. “Be quiet, work hard, stay healthy. It’s not ambition or skill that is going to set you apart, but sanity.” –Ryan Holiday

3. There’s not enough time to read every book, so “read books that the ideal version of yourself (in 20 years) would have been proud to have read. If you’re reading challenging or intimidating books, you’re probably on the right track”. –David Perell

4. The idea of owning your time. When I work out, I own that one hour. I’m making that one hour serve me, not the other way around. (Source: Robert Greene On The Most Important Advice He Gave Ryan Holiday | Daily Stoic)

5. The importance of focus. “A woodpecker,” Seth Godin writes in The Dip, “can tap twenty times on a thousand trees and get nowhere, but stay busy. Or he can tap twenty-thousand times on one tree and get dinner.” Quoted by Billy Oppenheimer in his Six at Six Newsletter

6. Only a fool is always regretting her actions.

7. According to Michal Schur in How to Be Perfect, all moral philosophy boils down to 4 questions: What am I doing? Why am I doing it? Is there something I could do that’s better? Why is it better?

8. It’s not enough to just appreciate moments of wonder and awe, we must hunt them. (From Julia Baird, Phosphorescence)

9. More on hunting wonder: “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.” –Iris Murdoch, quoted by Julia Baird, Phosphorescence

10. Here’s Your Secret To Success: Go The F*ck To Sleep –Ryan Holiday