Manifestation, Tiny Gains & My 2 Rules for Reading Books
What I Learned this Week
Hey y’all,
Happy Friday, the 13th!
As the election news continues to make its rounds, Covid also continues to rattle around. This week, the US surpassed 10M cases. California crossed 1M cases, the second state to hit 1M (Texas was first).
Let’s jump into a few things rattling around my brain this week.
How to Manifest Your Ideal Life
There are a couple books that I’m currently reading that, frankly, I was not planning on sharing that I am reading them 😝. I blame my wife for one of them, but no excuse for the other (I love self-help books — sue me) 😆.
The first book: Untamed, by Glennon Doyle. And the second: Think and Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill. Very different genres, but somehow the overlap makes total sense.
Here’s an excerpt of the section from Untamed, that jumped off the page for me:
Then—and this is crucial—she put pen to paper. The people who build their truest, most beautiful lives usually do. It’s hard to jump from dreaming to doing. As every architect or designer knows, there is a critical step between vision and reality. Before imagination becomes three-dimensional, it usually needs to become two-dimensional. It’s as though the unseen order needs to come to life one dimension at a time.
- Glennon Doyle, Untamed.
It’s easy for me to say: “I want to be successful.” But that is not specific enough.
I have to be able to articulate what I want, so much so, that I can put it into words on paper. If I cannot do that, I do not yet have a definite desire. And that is okay! But again, if I’m looking for “success,” I cannot skip this crucial (and difficult) step.
I have heard many successful people say that later in life they they found old journals with what they wanted out of their life, written out very specifically, with eery accuracy. Tim Ferriss, Brenee Brown, Chris Sacca, Matthew McConaughey, to name a few.
And this is basically the entire concept of Think and Grow Rich. Here is the Contents of the book, I think it serves as a great overview in case you’re curious.
I’m only four chapters in, but I would highly recommend even reading the first chapter. PS - it was written in 1937. So Lindy Effect would agree that you should read it.
1% Better Every Day (Compounding Growth)
Lately, I’ve started to focus more of my attention on compounding growth. Doing small things each day, trusting that over a long period of time, they will not only “add up,” but “exponentially multiply.”
James Clear puts it nicely with this graphic:
Pretty compelling, right?
I can easily get paralyzed by the long-term goal, and not hit the daily tasks (inputs) to accomplish the goal (output) successfully. Compound thinking feels very contrary to the way my human brain naturally wants to process. But it has started to help me a lot. One final quote from James Clear on the concept:
Successful outcomes are never the result of a single choice. They are built up through good choices over time.
A profitable business is never a choice, it is a series of choices.
A fit body is never a choice, it is a series of choices.
A strong relationship is never a choice, it is a series of choices.”
Quality over Quantity
My wife jokes with me about how long certain books take me to get through. Yes, I’m definitely a slow reader. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the books she says that about are the books that I am intentionally picking my way through, meticulously. Studying. Pausing. Rewinding. Re-reading. Scribbling notes. Going down rabbit holes and tangents of the sources they used. Savoring the heavy wisdom-per-word contained in the pages.
I stumbled across this tweet, and it summed up my thinking very neatly:
By the way, here is a list of some of the books that fell into this category for me this year:
And here are two rules I now live by, when it comes to books:
Don’t feel guilty skipping around, not finishing, etc. Life is too short to read books (or chapters) you don’t enjoy.
A quote I’ve been chewing on:
What did you do as a child that created timelessness? That made you forget time. There lies the myth, to live by.
- Joseph Campbell
How did you feel about this week’s post?
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Thanks for reading this far. If you enjoyed this week’s newsletter, I’d be honored if you forwarded it to a friend to two. Seeing more folks reading and giving feedback helps me continue writing and sharing.
PS - BTC is now sitting about $16K. Here are the bull and bear cases for it from here.
See y’all next week!
Cheers,
Brendan J Short
Loving this man. This is gold. Particularly the George mack tweet.