#19: start today
What's on my mind
Ten years from now, your future self will thank you for a seed you planted today.
The habit you started developing.
The inner voice you listened to.
The few sentences you wrote.
The idea you acted on.
Even if you can't tell where it will lead, today is the day to begin.
It’s the first day of the rest of your life.
👋 Welcome to the 19th volume of Out of Curiosity, a weekly newsletter sharing ideas to help get 1% better everyday in work and life.
Every week, I go through nearly 100 pieces of content (from books and podcasts to newsletters and tweets), and bring you the best in this newsletter.
📚 Do the Work (by Steven Pressfield)
Notes on staying foolish, taking action and managing projects:
Stay stupid. The 3 dumbest guys I can think of: Charles Lindbergh, Steve Jobs, Winston Churchill. Why? Because any smart person who understood how impossibly arduous (difficult/tiring) were the tasks they had set themselves, would have pulled the plug before he even began.
Don’t think, act. We can always revise and revisit once we’ve acted, but we can accomplish nothing until we act.
Any project or enterprise can be broken down into beginning, middle and end. Fill in the gaps, then fill in the gaps between the gaps.
While we're on the topic of books, here are 5 very short books you can read in a day.
🧠 First Principles
First principles are the building blocks for better thinking.
A basic assumption that can’t be deduced from any other assumption.
The right set of first principles help you think better and faster by mixing them in different ways.
This is a neat guide on all things related to first principles. I'm also in the process of writing a few pieces on this topic that I'll share with you soon.
😌 Becoming a more patient leader
In a survey of nearly 600 leaders, those who showed patience, enabled more creativity and collaboration in their teams.
Looking at this brief mind map of leadership behaviours, the best leaders constantly strike a balance between the two behaviours (task-oriented and relationship-oriented).
If you want to build your patience, you need to recognize when it might be tested the most. And depending on the context, give it a boost by redefining the meaning of speed, and practicing gratitude.
💭 How to think better
Thinking is a skill that you can learn and master like any other skill. Common thinkers aren’t born that way!
The basics of thinking better rely on:
Creating healthy thinking habits to question our initial intuitions
Avoiding shortcuts
Considering second-order consequences of our decisions
5 Principles to become better thinkers:
Think about thinking (metacognition)
Be aware of cognitive biases
Aim for second-level thinking
Study and design your own mental models
Practice emotional agility
👋 Community Session: capturing and organizing content
Next week, I'm running a free session (exclusively for our community here) on how I capture, organize and summarize content.
I'll also share my thoughts on two courses I've been following over the last month: Building a Second Brain and Effortless Output.
I'm capping the session at 8 people (first come first serve) to ensure it's fruitful for those who attend.
We’ll mainly discuss the approach (regardless of the specific tools), but the examples I'll share will be focused on this stack:
Roam Research for note-taking
Sorted³ for task management and scheduling
Pocket for reading later and highlighting
Mailbrew for newsletters and tweets
Readwise for spaced repetition and highlight consolidation
{Sign up here} (first come first serve)
Final Thought
Starting next week, you’ll notice a new section in the newsletter… I'm really excited by it and I think you'll like it too!
Have a great end of the week 👋