Mark Aduana

Last week, I published a piece about digesting ideas from books. 

A while ago, I came across a passage from Ryan Holiday that relates to my main point in that piece.

From Ryan: 

“You highlight the passages for a reason. Why type the quotes if you aren’t going to memorize and use them? Drop them in conversation. Allude to them in papers, in emails, in letters and in your daily life. How else do you expect to absorb them? The more fulfilling an outlet you find for the fruit of your database, the more motivated you will be to fill it. Try adding a line to a report you’re doing, find solace in them during difficult times or add them to Wikipedia pages. Do something.”

Don’t just read or highlight or take notes.

A day in the life of Ryan Holiday

Wake up at 6 am. Take a 3-mile walk with children. Go to office and write for 2-3 hours.  Lunch.  Read a book. Admin tasks. Go home and spend time with kids. (3 pm or 4pm). Dinner. Take a second walk. Tuck kids to bed. Read them poetry. Spend time with wife.  Workout.  Sleep. 

A restful life is a more creative and productive life. 

It’s also a happier life. It’s a life that treats work and rest as equals. 

It’s a life that avoids the trap of pointless busyness. It’s a life of doing more what matters most.   

Here are some ideas to live a more restful life:

• Limit your focused work for 4-5 hours a day.

• Take frequent breaks during deep work.

• Take a nap.

• Sleep at least 8 hours every night.

• Take a walk.

• Do activities that activate DMN and mind wandering.

• Take sabbaticals

• Play with your friends. 

• Practice mindful breathing.

Here are two steps to craft your theme statement:

Step 1. Ask yourself, “What’s this about?” The answer will serve as the subject of your theme statement. 

Step 2. What do you want to say about it? Then write the transitive verb and its object.

Examples:

• Theme: The Big Horn Mountains preserve the character of early fly-fishing in the West. 

• Theme: Journalism educators and professionals should quit bickering and start focusing on common ground. 

• Theme: Successful freelancers must master self-editing. 

• Theme: My father wanted me to understand the complexities and contradictions of war.

Here’s my theme statement for this post:

Reading or writing about an idea doesn’t translate into a skill or behavioral change. Deliberate practice does.

But it doesn’t mean that the reading and the writing go to waste. 

“We should dare to move the emphasis of our thinking away from execution and towards strategy,” writes Alain de Botton.

“There is a fundamental distinction to be made between two kinds of thinking: figuring out what we would like to achieve, and working out how to achieve it."

The former he refers to as strategy. The latter, execution.

The problem is we rush execution. We don’t bother asking the “first order questions,” like:

What are we ultimately trying to do here? What would best serve our happiness? Why should we bother? How is this aligned with real value? We concentrate more on making money than on figuring out how to use it well. We put a lot more effort into becoming successful without reflecting what success really means to us.

“We chain ourselves to schedules, timelines, and performance targets. We avoid asking what we might really need to flourish and so frequently learn, at the end of a lifetime of superhuman effort, that we had the wrong destinations from the start.”

This reminds me of a quote I’ve read years ago, and it sounds like this: 

Everybody is busy climbing the ladder of success. They don’t bother asking if the ladder is leaning against the right wall.

How can we avoid the trap of mindless execution?

Devote 20% of your effort to reflect on the deeper ‘why’ questions before allowing yourself to execute on autopilot.

Here are some guiding questions (in addition to the “first order questions” mentioned above):

A left-branching sentence is a sentence that starts with an adverbial phrase or a dependent clause.

It’s always best to place the actor (subject) and its action (verb) near the beginning of a sentence. Sentences that begin with the subject is called a right-branching sentence. 

But there are some cases when you may consider writing in a left-branching structure.

Here are some of those:

1. When you want to vary the sentence structure.

2. When you want to end with the most important idea or an idea that you want to develop next. 

Be more mindful of what advice you follow.

Every time you say “yes” to something, you’re saying “no” to everything else.

You can’t give your attention to many things at once. 

So be more mindful of your priorities. 

I’ve started reading a lot of books this year, but I only finished a few of them.  Here are the books that I finished reading so far: 1. Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee 2. A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Webb Young 3. How to Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson 4. In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell 5. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel 6. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca And here’s what I’m currently reading:

From How to Be Idle (by Tom Hodgkinson):

“If you want nothing, you don’t need to work. If you are full of desires, then you will have to work in order to get the money to fulfill those desires.”

This reminds me of Naval’s words: “Desire is suffering. So limit your desires.” 

Work is not a bad thing. The bad thing is overwork. And overwork most often stems from the desire to get ahead of everybody. 

The less you seek approval from other people, the less things you need. 

The less things you need, the more money you can save. 

I think what you should write about are ideas you love thinking about. 

And ideas you love thinking about are ideas that you love consuming (reading, watching, listening) about. 

What books have you read these past few months? What movies, documentaries, YouTube videos have you watched? What about podcasts you loved listening to?

What are those about?