I read 47 books in 2021.
There’s no real trick to reading that number. Make it a daily habit (get an hour in every day) and carry a Kindle everywhere. Block your lunch hour or another time if you need to schedule.
My star ratings out of 5 are below for every book. Good stuff is in the “To Read” list. I’ve also included a “Do Not Read” list for books I wish I had not wasted my time on.
Part III in a series of posts on getting started on financial independence and resiliency. The initial impetus for this came from COVID Career Advice . The first post in the series focusing on making yourself resilient is Getting Started on Financial Independence: Financial Resiliency .
Part II focused on getting started growing your assets and investing once you’ve sorted your basic financial hygiene out.
This post focuses on moving into slightly more advanced investment topics and strategy around building your portfolio.
The individual point of action of the Great Resignation is quitting.
But how do you know when it’s time to go? If your place isn’t completely toxic or you’re not deeply unhappy, it can be hard to tell when giving up an “alright” thing should yield to a better opportunity, and the effort and risk of moving.
For any job you have, even a great one, you should have a proactive system for evaluating at regular intervals whether consider a change every quarter. There’s also a more reactive “gotta go now” checklist where hygiene issues or changed conditions are a consideration to pull the ripcord.
Productivity in about working a limited number of the right things with sustained focus.
This is what actually worked over years of a lot of personal productivity hacking experiments (and avoiding general hustle culture and cult of busyness garbage.).
If you haven’t read it, go read Atomic Habits by James Clear (or where I first encountered the idea, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adam’s How To Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big .).
I’m always trying to do too much. You probably are too.
Whether through insecurity, lack of assurance about my choices, or just wanting more, until recently, I spent way too much time trying to do it all. And failing. Todos would get ticked done but big rocks didn’t move.
During covid and lockdowns, forced to do less, it actually got better. Sure, a lot of productivity books say to do less, but there is a difference between reading it and living it.
I don’t want to go back to how things were before the pandemic. I want better. You should too. Don’t accept a return to what was normal as sufficient anymore. We can have more.
Alongside the illness, death, inoculation, and dread the virus caused, the virus may actually have made us better in one way.
It has reset both our expectations about the lives we can lead and about the world we can live in. Especially where we saw what choices the world and policy makers made to keep the world spinning. The pause it forced on everyone allowed us to see more clearly what our pre-lockdown days lacked and trade-offs we had made, often unwittingly, in our lives and by our policymakers and employers.
You have to have some sympathy for companies trying to feel their way through the new business realities we see post-covid. Few companies really spent time thinking about what a future might look like after the pandemic, busy trying to stay afloat or dealing with the increase in business from lockdown. And if anything has changed emerging from covid, it’s workers’ expectations of employment.
Command-line interface (CLI) tools have gone through rapid innovation in the last couple years. Ancient stalwarts have been challenged with better newcomers that make life easier, quicker, and better. I feel this Cambrian explosion of new tools may be because of better CLI creation libraries, but think a certain nod has to go to systems programming languages like Go and Rust becoming more popular.
In the vein of my 2021 Software Tools list , and the CLI LIfe Starter post, I’ve run across a whack of great CLI tools in the last couple months which I incorporated into my workflows, and a notable fistful of five. All are available on both OSX (via homebrew) and Linux.
Part II in a series of posts on getting started on financial independence and resiliency. The initial impetus for this came from COVID Career Advice . The first post in the series focusing on making yourself resilient is Getting Started on Financial Independence: Financial Resiliency .
This post focuses on getting started growing your assets and investing once you’ve sorted your basic financial hygiene out . Please read that and go through the 80/20 exercise and assessment if you are not in a position of setting aside 10-20% of your take home for financial growth every month.
I experimented with Improv last quarter to get me out of my comfort zone and a potential gateway drug to standup (and frankly, better communication). I’ve become a big fan of the form, had a blast, and surprised at how it’s spilled over usefully into business and real life.
What the hell is Improv, anyway?
Usually the first question I get from people when I tell them I’m doing improv is some variation on this. Most people have heard the name, associate it with Saturday Night Live, Second City, Whose Line Is It Anyway? or some form of comedy but actually don’t know what it actually is.