This newsletter is supported by members who get access to my book notes. Keep the content coming by becoming a member.
Writing to Learn
This book has been on my list for a while, but it’s now in the next pile after watching this review of Writing to Learn. I use writing daily to understand what I think about a topic.
How to read more books
Jared has a decent video on reading more books. I like that it’s not about some hack to read more, he acknowledges that you simply have to put the time into reading. As you spend more time reading, you’ll become a better reader.
After watching this I wonder if I take too many notes on books. At one point I tried to take enough notes that I could write a review of the book and be fairly detailed. Today I take less notes like that and aim to give an overview and opinion of the book with a recommendation.
I do always wonder with the competition factor of reading “more” and putting some number on it. Read what you want, when you want, and don’t compare yourself to the number of books that any other people publish.
I started the year reading lots, but as the cycling season has progressed and I have numerous 200km (or longer) events to train for my reading has gone down as my riding has gone up. Then many days when I get home after 6 – 10 hours of riding, I’m simply too tired to do much more than a recovery routine and watch the current TV show my wife and I are enjoying1.
For a good chunk of the summer I’ve been feeling bad about not reading much, but this week during a training session I realised that I’m simply optimising my life differently in the summer and to train well for cycling I have to let reading, writing and YouTube lag. I can come back to those as the weather changes and the cycling season winds down.
Optimising means you have no slack for uncertainty
We’ve all heard the siren call of optimising your life, but Mandy Brown argues that maybe we shouldn’t optimise our lives. Instead of getting the maximum output all the time, maybe we should build for resilience so that when the unknown comes up we have slack in the system to deal with it.
If you’ve accounted for every minute, you have no space to deal with those random things that come up.
- Big Bang Theory for those interested ↩︎