Favorites From The Year

• From Nuclear Families to Forged Families (link)
• Redefining what “prosperity” means for capitalism (link)
• The Inner Ring by C.S. Lewis (link)
• Solitude and Leadership – An Annual Favorite (link)
• Reflections From a Token Black Friend (link)
• Powerful Essay on Risk, Losing Friends & What Matters from Morgan Housel (link)
• Venkatesh Rao’s Art of Gig had a very high signal to noise ratio while being consistent source of wisdom for navigating the solo path throughout this insane year
• Stephen Cope’s Great Work of Your Life was probably my favorite book of the year

Work, Work, Work

The theme of the newsletter is the modern state of work and contemplating what this means for how we live our lives. Thus there are a lot of links in this category.

Gig Economy & The Future

• Decision day for 1,300 Vanguard workers as their jobs head to India-based Infosys (link)
• The profound changes caused by the Internet are only just beginning; aggregation theory is the means (link)
• Re-Read: The Real Future of Work (Politico) (link)
• New York Gig Workers Win Right to Unemployment Benefits (link)
• Within the historical relationship between capital and labor, gig-workers would be considered scabs (link)

Indie Life, Solopreneurship & Hacking A Living

• Politician quits politics to become a Jesuit Priest (link)
• Gig Worker Identity: “For a free-agent, being an amateur, as opposed to a professional, is more important than being paid by the gig rather than with a salary” (link, Art of Gig)
• We regret the things we don’t do.  Not the things we do.  (link)
• Hunter S. Thompson’s Life Advice To A Friend Is Priceless (link)
• Reflecting on our ‘radical sabbatical’ living on the Thai Island of Ko Lanta (link)
• The negative effects of burnout spill over into every area of life (link)
• The “Middle-Income Trap” and Careers (link)
• How Can Indies Not Waste the Reboot? (link)
• Being an Illegible Person: This older post from @vgr on Ribbon Farm is still very relevant to someone not following the default path of work (link)
• What does it mean to be an independent researcher? (link)
• Strategy for challenges you might expect in working online and self-employment (link)
• The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class (link)
• Nat Eliason on “passive income” – “My interest in entrepreneurship originally started as an interest in passive income” (link)
• A field-guide for independent strategy consultants (link)
• Matt Trinetti Should I niche down my blog? (link)

Ponderings On The State of Work

• Universal Basic Income and the Capitalist Production of Consciousness – Oshan Jarow (link)
• How Work Became a Job (link)
• Losing the Narrative: The Genre Fiction of the Professional Class (link)
• Workism Essay from the Atlantic in 2019 (link)
• “For a secular monk, the only knowable pursuits are human pursuits, the
  only genuine aims human aims.”  (link)
• A reflection on “corporate man” from the NYT in 1984 (link)
• Re-read: If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living? (link)
• Morning Brew’s “Decade in Work” (link)
• In Praise of Work: “The problem isn’t that we derive too much of our worth and value from work.  The problem is that our jobs are becoming increasingly abstracted from work.” (link)
• Anne-Laure Le Cunff on “Are we too busy to enjoy life?” (link) and how to shift from “productivity porn to mindful productivity” (link)
• Are Our Management Theories Outdated? (link)
• The Case Against Work: Ignoring enormous human suffering and potential (link)
• From Productivity to Psychedelics: Tim Ferriss Has Changed His Mind About Success (link)
• “It’s Time to Think!” – Should we not focus on true leisure first before we fall again into the trap of materialism? (link)

Remote Work & New Ways of Working

• I contributed to the Holloway Guide to Remote Work (link) – no affiliation
• Citi to Offer Workers a 12-Week Sabbatical, Extra Vacation Days (link)
• Startup and entrepreneur visas around the world (link)
• Pieter Levels 5-part series on the future of work (link)
• Facebook will now let some employees work from anywhere, but their paychecks could get cut (link)
• From airlines to Starbucks, a massive part of our economy hinges on white-collar workers returning to the office (link)
• Stripe’s One-Year Remote Reflection (link)

  Interesting Surveys, Demographics & Trends

• The average age of Congress will now be a decade younger, thanks to the midterms (link)
• “The Slacker” – What Americans should understand about Japan’s 1990s economic bust (link)
• Millennials are less wealth that previous generations, even worse for those without a degree (link)
• A different way of thinking about inflation: The Cost-of-Thriving Index (link)
• Americans’ Perceptions of Success in the U.S. are disconnected from their own definitions of what matters (link)

Reflections On The Future

Future Of Education

• Purdue is keeping tuition locked at $10,000 (link)
• Adjuncts are taking over Academia (link)
• Reflections on achievement from Singapore, 1974 – “The Great Paper Chase…Training ground for the adult rat race” (link)
• Lazy Rivers, The Price of Education & Student Debt (link)
• The Long Decline of American Higher Education Has Begun (link)
• A looming shortage of students will upend the business model of higher education. To survive, colleges need to do more with less. (link)
• Colleges Have a Silver Bullet to Win COVID Tuition Lawsuits, But Can They Afford to Use It? (link)
• What Happens to All the Asian-American Overachievers When the Test-Taking Ends? (link)
• Google announces 100,000 scholarships for online certificates in data analytics, project management and UX (link)
• The Invented History of ‘The Factory Model of Education’ (link)
• The financial returns to college are falling “Is College Still Worth It?” (link)
• Disadvantages of an Elite Education: “Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers” (link)

Economics & The Future

• Vinay Gupta on Spiritual Colonialism: “We are all pretty clear something is profoundly wrong with the world, and maybe with humanity itself. But what is wrong, and what do we do about it?” (link)
• Definite Optimism and its role in innovation in human nature (link)
• The Social Capital Stall Behind America’s Gerontocracy (link)
• Why Democratic leaders still misunderstand the politics of social class (link)
• Russ Roberts: The Economist as Scapegoat (link)
• Ray Dalio: Our Biggest Economic, Social, and Political Issue (link)
• The $1 Trillion Question: New Approaches to Regulating Stock Buybacks (link)
• Critiques of meritocracy are on everyone’s lips right now. Why? (link)
• Is Productivity Growth Becoming Irrelevant? (link)
• The Medieval Future of Management (link)
• Professor David Autor’s latest research shows how economic polarization stems from urban job loss (link)
• Tech Companies Want You to Believe America Has a Skills Gap (link)

Pandemic, Crisis & Response

• Covid-19 is like a rehab intervention that breaks the addictive hold of normality (link)
• System dynamics and our response to Covid – Bonitta Roy (link)
• How the coronavirus is creating a political opportunity to overturn one of the worst practices of the kleptocracy era (link)
• COVID-19: A War Broke Out In Heaven (link)
• The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System (link)
• The Nature of Work after the COVID Crisis:  Too Few Low-Wage Jobs (link)
• Liminality?…Well, there’s a free sample! (link)
• A Plague Is an Apocalypse. But It Can Bring a New World. The meaning of this one is in our hands. (link)
• Martin Gurri: The Prophet of the Revolt (link)

Other Interesting Things, Etc.

• Agnes Callard has a great essay on how we glorify geniuses and how it relates to The Queen’s Gambit (link)
• Kevin Kelly’s 68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice (link)
• Speaking is for motivation, writing is for thinking (link)
• The cynics guide to reading business books (link)
• What is Transcendence? The True Top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (link)
• Calling Bullshit Course: Data Reasoning in a Digital World (link)
• Robert Hogan on the “Dark Side of Charisma” (link) and related: Can we tell good leaders from bad? (link)
• Thinking For Yourself & Curiosity, Paul Graham (link)
• Positive and Negative Liberty (link)
• Kevin Love, NBA Player: “To Anybody Going Through It, Being depressed is exhausting” (link)
• Psilocybin therapy 4 times more effective than antidepressants, study finds (link)
• Society has a cultural bias towards extroverts (link)
• The case for one billion Americans (link)
• Rather than attempting to persuade us (via our rational, analytical minds), ads prey on our emotions. Read Ads “Don’t Work That Way” (link)
• The Blue of Distance, an essay from Rebecca Solnit (link)

Memorable Podcasts From This Year

• The Conversational Nature of Reality, David Whyte (link)
• Peter Attia & Jason Fried: Work-life balance, avoiding burnout, defining success, company culture, and more (link)
• Seth Godin on Argument against using remote work to copy in-person working habits, especially meetings (link)
• Daniel Kahneman: Putting Your Intuition on Ice (link)
• Mall Mullenweg on Sam Harris: The Remote Playbook (link)
• Shane Parish, The Knowledge Project: Roger Martin (link), Chamath (link) & Patrick Collison (link)
• Multiple Econtalk Episodes: Emily Oster, Zena Hitz, Steven Levitt
• Tyler Cowen and Audrey Tang (link)
• Agnes Callard on Big Ideas with Erik Torenberg (link)
• Derek Sivers, Entrepreneurialism as Spiritual Practice (link)
• Eric Weinstein’s Interview with his 14 year old son (link)
• Ben Hunnicutt: Leisure: the (Forgotten) Basis of American Progress (link)
• John Vervaeke: The Cognitive Science of Capitalist Realism (link)
• Malcolm Gladwell On Democratic Lotteries (link)
• Tim Ferriss’ Journey After Childhood Abuse with Debbie Millman (link)
• ZigZag podcast with Khe He on his “male identity crisis” (link)
• Not Overthinking: Inner Rings – The Desire to Fit In (link)

Boundless Creations

A listing of all the essays and podcasts I published this year.

My Essays

• Hustle Traps: Ten Guaranteed Paths To Burnout For The Self-Employed Creator (link)
• Recovering from “Lifestyle Creep”: How I cut my cost of living by 75% (link)
• Boomer Blockade: The boomers reached power at younger ages and then have stayed in power (link)
• Why Did People Stop Caring About Developing a Meaningful Philosophy of Life in the 1970s? (link)
• The dark side of consulting: A belief that the scale of “impact” matters more than what you are doing (link)
• The Future Of The Prestige Economy: Who Gets Status? (link)
• Check out Hamsternomics: Printing Money, The Economy & Work Beliefs , a collaboration of Paul Millerd and Ryan Borker, who both have experience jumping on and off the hamster wheel at multiple points in their lives
• Chaos Theory & Building Resilient Organizations (link)
• Going Remote? Here are five tips from companies who are already fully remote (link)
• Virtual Spaces: How To Teach & Engage With Virtual Communities (link)
• The best advice on working remotely your boss doesn’t want you to see (link)
• Matt Mullenweg’s & Automattic’s Five Levels Of Remote Work (link)
• The ultimate guide to becoming a digital nomad or remote worker (link)
• The Second Chapter of Success: Figuring Out What Matters (link)
• Updated: A gift economy is not about the money, it is about unlocking generosity & gratitude (link)
• Work In Tech, Finance or Go Solo or be without a career path: The Reality Of An Economic Model Without Enough Jobs (link)

Reimagine Work Episodes

• Diania Merriam on Imagining The New American Dream (link)
• Group reflection with Andrew Taggart on Total Work and our present crisis
• Steph Smith on a 21^st Century Career (link)
• Oshan Jarow – Life Beyond Work (link)
• Laurel Farrer on How to work remotely, well (link)
• Will Bachman on independent consulting (link)
• Amy McMillen on carving her own path and writing a book (link)
• I Interviewed my wife about her own journey (link)
• Packy McCormick on writing a kick-ass newsletter (link)
• Uri Bram on running The Browser remotely & #goodreads (link

My Indie Consulting Lessons (A Small Experiment)

I’m still not sure what I’m going to do with this but this is an ongoing holding ground for short videos and lessons I’m compiling for navigating life as an indie consultant.

• Shifting your mindset: connecting with other freelancers, grappling with your fear & defining what “success” means (link)
• Naming your practice (link)
• How to identify as a freelance consultant without trapping yourself in that identity (link)
• How to think about your service offerings & positioning (link)
• Four ways of finding those initial projects (link)
• How to work with consulting talent platforms (link)

Newsletters, Creators & Spaces That Inspire Me & I Keep Coming Back To

• What Really Matters, Russell Max Simon (link)
• Not Boring, Packy McCormick (link)
• Mythology Studio, Martha Balaile (link)
• Dig Well, Amy McMillen (link)
• The Diff, Byrne Hobart (link)
• Khe He & Rad Reads (link)
• Maria Popova’s Brain Pickings (link)
• Anne-Laure’s Ness Labs (link)
• Venkatesh Roa’s Art of Gig (link) and Breaking Smart (link)
• Curious Humans, Jonny Miller (link)
• Two Truths and a Take, Alex Danco (link)
• Pam Hobart’s philosophical advice for smart people (link)
• Curious Lion, Andrew Barry (link)
• Robbie Crabtree’s Three Things Thursday (link)
• Noah Smith’s Noahpinion (link)
• Wellness Wisdom, Patricia Mou (link)
• David Perell’s Newsletters (link)
• Nat Eliason’s Monday Medley (link)
• The Fire Jar (link)
• Deliberate on the Internet, Artur Piszek (link)
• Musing Mind (essays, podcast, & book notes), Oshan Jarow (link)

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post 150+ Things Worth Reading & Listening To From 2020 appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

As I started my career, I began my own sort of philosophical and liberal arts education.  But given my limited background, I had to lay the groundwork to get to some of the deeper questions and mental models that helped me eventually take a leap to carve my own path beyond the corporate world.

I often see people suggesting deep philosophical books that question the meaning of life but realize given my own past mental models, that this approach doesn’t make sense for many people.

It is easy to dismiss books such as Dale Carnegie’s “How To Win Friends And Influence People” or David Schwartz’s “The Magic Of Thinking Big” but to someone indoctrinated in business, those may be the most reasonable books to start with.  Alas, it was these kind of books that made me hungry to go deeper.

What follows are ten types of books that you can use as a roadmap to dream of a life beyond the corporate world.  I’ve offered a “starting point” for each category which is probably the most accessible of the options:

1. Thinking About What Matters
2. Building “Human Skills” In The Workplace
3. Know Thyself…In The Business World
4. Questioning The Modern State Of The Business World
5. Finding Some Hope In The Business World
6. Mindfulness & New Emotional Mental Models
7. Carving New Paths & Wandering Into The Unknown
8. New Models For Seeing The World
9. Grappling With The Role OF Work In Our Lives
10. Going Deep – The Hard Questions

I. Thinking About What Matters

Start Here  Tuesday’s With Morrie (Mitch Albom)

Helped me to think about life from the perspective of the end of one’s life. In this story, Morrie has lived a full life and has deep relationships as evidenced by the number of people who are constantly visiting him.

So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they’re busy doing things they think are important. This is because they’re chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning.

Last Lecture (Randy Pausch)

Randy Pausch is a dying professor who decides to devote his energy into a literal last lecture.  What transpires is a talk focused on never ignoring your inner child and a story that will likely deeply resonate with many.

Survival In Auschwitz (Primo Levi)

This book is a deep contemplation into what is means to live and survive in the darkest of places.

Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.

II. Building “Human Skills” In The Workplace

Start Here  How To Win Friends And Influence People (Dale Carnegie)

I know, I know!  Cliche.  So What? The simplicity of the book makes it powerful.  It doesn’t need the latest and greatest psychology studies.  It just offers principles about how to treat people and is a reminder that the norms and assumptions about behavior in the modern business world lead people astray.  For example, if you want to change someone’s mind, focus more on getting that person to like you instead of attacking them with facts and to focus on simple things like listening:

Talk to someone about themselves and they’ll listen for hours.

Influence (Robert Cialdini)

This book was a bit mind-blowing, making me realize we are more susceptible to influence than we realize.  Cialdini has written extensively about how things such as social proof, reciprocity, commitment, authority, liking and scarcity drive our behavior.  Becoming aware of our behavioral biases will help you identify the decisions you really want to make as opposed to the ones you are just falling into

The Art Of Learning (Joshua Waitzkin)

This book is terrific. Waitzkin walks through how he became a chess champion at age 8 and brought Gary Kasparov to a draw at 11 years old. After quitting chess, he applied the same approach to Taiwanese push hands and became world champion. He introduces the concepts of “beginner’s mind” as well as his own framing of “numbers to leave numbers” which is a great way to show that to go fast, you first need to go slow.

III. Know Thyself…In The Business World

Start Here  How Will You Measure Your Life (Clayton Christensen)

This book is a fascinating perspective on how to define success from within the corporate world.  Christensen made me gain hope about leading with principles in the corporate world, positioning “management” as a way to have a positive impact on other people:

“If you want to help people, be a manager”

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (Susan Cain)

I thought I had a good understanding of introversion and extroversion until I read this book. This book also made me realize I was a lot more introverted than I realized. This is where I first heard of the term “ambivert” and realized I am energized by a mix of alone time and activity with others. I was fascinated by the history of how extroversion became such an ideal in modern society and the mistakes that can lead us to make.

Mastery (Robert Greene)

Mastery is an incredible book for anyone with a creative bone in their body.  Greene talks about the different phases one must undertake if they want to become a master at their craft or develop a wide range of skills.  He helps people understand the hard decisions that need to be made, such as leaving a teacher (see: manager, leader) once you have learned enough so that you can go out on your own.

IV. Questioning The Modern State Of The Business World

Start Here The Halo Effect . . . and the Eight Other Business Delusions That Deceive Managers (Phil Rosenzweig)

A clear and convincing case that most explanation of who is “successful” and a failure in the business world is highly subject to market dynamics and the firms that happen to have the most profitable business model of the time.  This book will make you highly skeptical of modern business “research” and stories praising or criticizing leaders.

Shareholder Value Myth (Lynn Stout)

This book is a must-read for anyone who has a suspicion that there may be other and better ways to measure success in the world than money and especially, “shareholder value.”  This book helps show that our current state of affairs is a recent innovation.

Reinventing Organizations (Fredrik Laloux)

This book highlights organizations that are typically led by truly transformational leaders that have questioned the status quo and built organizations (sometimes very large ones) that start with deep trust in people and their ability to solve problems.  This book shows that self-organization can work and that it is likely the only path forward if we want to build a better business world.

Skin In The Game (Nassim Taleb)

Taleb looks at the concept of “skin in the game” in terms of people, employees, and organizations.  His perspective on the modern state of the employee/employer relationship:

So employees exist because they have significant skin in the game –and the risk is shared with them, enough risk for it to be a deterrent and a penalty for acts of undependability, such as failing to show up on time. You are buying dependability.

He argues that the modern employee is no longer a “company man” but rather a “companies man”:

A companies person is someone who feels that he has something huge to lose if he loses his employ-ability

V. Finding Some Hope In The Business World

A big part of my career in the business world was an obsession with trying to understand first why organizations seemed to drive so much stress and anxiety in people and then second, what we could do about it if anything.  This led me to discover a number of books that not only helped me discover new ideas for business, organizations, and leadership but also develop my own perspective on what’s happening in the modern workplace.

Start Here Drive (Dan Pink)

Pink’s introduction of the concepts of autonomy, mastery, and purpose through research and company examples is a great way to discover self-determination theory, which is a foundational theory of what motivates people.  If you look at modern organizations through the lens of motivation, you would assume that everyone had lost their mind.

Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock)

The key takeaway from this book was the fact that many things you can do to improve the employee experience are free.  Too many organizations think that transformation comes at a major cost.  But as Bock shows in many examples in his experience at Chief People Officer, the hardest things to do are to trust people and give them freedom to make mistakes.

VI. Mindfulness & New Emotional Mental Models

Start Here The Heart Aroused (David Whyte)

I wish I read this book at the beginning of my business life, but I wonder if it would have been too soon.  Whyte speaks poetically about the experience of the business world in a way that well, arouses your heart. Whyte’s summary of the book:

(it) will look at the link between soul and belonging, creativity and failure, success and stasis, efficiency and malaise at work, but it sets as its benchmark not the fiscal success of the work or the corporation (though this certainly can be good for the soul) but the journey and experience of the human spirit and its repressed but unflagging desire to find a home in the world.

Nothing Special (Charlotte Joko Beck)

This was the first book I read about Zen Buddhism and mindfulness. The story is a conversation between Beck and her students and will resonate with anyone who is curious about mindfulness, meditation, and spirituality.

VII. Embracing The “Pathless Path”

Start Here: My Book! The Pathless Path (Paul Millerd)

My book, The Pathless Path, was published five years after quitting my job and carving my own path. It’s sold over 25k+ copies with minimal marketing so people seem to like it. It’s not a how-to guide but an inspirational account of my journey combined with “recipes” on how to embrace an unconventional path.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons For a New Kind Of Entrepreneur (Derek Sivers)

Sivers build a company selling CDs of independent artists in the early internet era.  He ignored most of the advice about how to build a company.  He also ignored the advice on how to write a book.  This short book shows that “best practice” doesn’t always lead to happiness.

Field Guide To Getting Lost (Rebecca Solnit)

Rebecca Solnit puts words to the journey of “getting lost” and wandering into the unknown. If this quote resonates with you, you are ready for this book:

That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find, and finding it is a matter of getting lost.

Linchpin (Seth Godin)

Godin has been a self-employed solopreneur and freelancer for decades.  He helps people re-frame their thinking away from needing to be “chosen” for a job towards a world where the world depends on you expressing your creativity and daring to “make a ruckus.”

Designing Your Life (Burnett & Evans)

This book by two Stanford professors was designed to help undergraduate students figure out what they want to do with their lives.  Based on design thinking, they have a number of useful question prompts and exercises that push you to expand the number of ideas and options you can come up with, rather than picking from default options.  If you want to imagine new possibilities, this is the book for you.

Crossing The Unknown Sea (David Whyte)

Whyte is my favorite writer and this book is a beautiful reflection of his own journey from naturalist to non-profit worker to poet. He talks about the inner game of doing the thing which is scary (people thought he was crazy to quit his day-job) and living full out.

The Good Life & Sustaining Life (Andrew Taggart)

A practical philosophical reflection on what it means to live the “good life” in the modern world and the many approaches one might take to sustain such a life.

There may be no greater vexation in our time than the question of how to make a living in a way that accords with leading a good life. Yet if nearly every thinking person has faced this vexation at one time or another and doubtless throughout most of his adult life, virtually no one has ventured to think it through in a well-considered, systematic fashion.

VIII. New Models For Seeing The World

Start Here A Lesson On Worldly Wisdom (Charlie Munger)

This fantastic graduation speech from Munger highlights the need for many different “mental models” for seeing the world and how to move between them.  Worth reading in full.

The Righteous Mind, Why Good People Disagree On Politics & Religion (Jonathan Haidt)

This book made me rethink how people arrive at their beliefs.  Haidt shows that morality is something that is highly influenced by your environment and biology.  This book made me much more understanding of a wider range of ideas beyond politics and religion.

Wanting (Luke Burgis)

The self-employed path is filled with hustle traps and the most powerful one is “mimetic desire.” Luke walks through his own personal journey of awakening and helps steer people toward finding their “thick desires” – things they can sustain over the long term.

Sacred Economics (Charles Eisenstein)

A bold re-imagination of our world to one based on generosity, connection, and embrace of the environment.  This book is a beautiful mix of technical economic analysis with a spiritual questioning of the status quo:

I think ultimately what is happening is that our deep ideologies and belief systems, and their unconscious shadows, generate a matrix of synchronicities that looks very much like a conspiracy. It is in fact a conspiracy with no conspirators. Everyone is a puppet, but there are no puppet-masters.

IX. Grappling With The Role Of Work In Our Lives

Start Here Bullshit Jobs (David Graeber)

Graeber looks at the modern workplace through his definition of a “bullshit job” which is when employees define their job as pointless and without meaning.  He looks at the history of work and shows that our current relationship with employment, time and money was not always the way it was and challenges readers to think beyond the status quo.

Rest (Alex Pang)

Pang’s incredible book on rest covers sabbaticals, unplanned breaks, naps, and sleep while challenging our modern understanding and definition of things like time, leisure, idleness and rest.  He boldly challIf your work is your self, when you cease to work, you cease to exist,” shares counterintuitive results from people who worked 2-5 hours a day and shows the benefits of not following the conventional wisdom that more = better.

As a result, service workers and professionals are rewarded not just for performing work but also for “performing” busyness at work.

Reclaiming Work (Andre Gorz)

Gorz argues that “real work is no longer what we do when at work” and that a lot of what we are doing in the workplace is performing a social ritual we have decided is necessary to “earn a living.”  This book imagines a world “beyond the wage-based society.”

The Normal Chaos Of Love (Beck & Beck-Gernsheim)

While this book is very much about love and relationship, it also frames those relationships and our modern ideal of a family in contrast to the workplace.  The authors (a married couple) argue that the modern reality of having everyone be workers is great for the workplace and freedom, but creates chaos and complexity at home – complexity that we have yet to fully grapple with:

Everybody – including parts of the women’s movement – has the right to expect that offers once made to men should now be extended to women, and assert that women are as useful as members of the job world as men are. They should however realize that this road does not lead to a happy world of co-operative equals but to separateness and diverging interests.

Leisure: The Basis Of Culture (Josep Pieper)

In the late 1940s, Pieper wrote of a crisis of “overwork” and a disconnect from the classical sense of leisure.  He wrote that we “mistake leisure for idleness, and work for creativity” and was skeptical of Max Weber’s assertion that “One does not only work in order to live, but one lives for the sake of one’s work.”  In today’s world, “leisure” often just means a break from work.  Pieper argued instead that leisure was:

the disposition of receptive understanding, of contemplative, beholding, and immersion – in the real. In leisure, there is, furthermore, something of the serenity of ”not-being–able–to–grasp,” of the recognition of the mysterious character of the world, and the confidence of blind faith, which can let things go as they will; there is in it something of the ”trust in the fragmentary, that forms the very life and essence of history.

X. Going Deep – The Hard Questions

Start Here: Not a book, but perhaps better than a book? Brain Pickings is perhaps the best source for wisdom on the web.  A voracious reader and learner, Maria Popova pulls the most powerful parts of great writers in history on topics such as love, creativity, art, poetry, philosophy, life and work into compelling synthesized posts.  Start with one post and you’ll end up opening up a ton of tabs in no time.

• Recommended posts: 10 lessons from 10 years of BrainPickings, Ursula K. Le Guin on Busyness, Reclaiming Our Human Dignity in a Culture of Workaholism, or David Whyte on Work/Life Balance

The Great Work Of Your Life (Stephen Cope)

Stephen Cope’s The Great Work of Your Life is a spiritual guide to finding your life’s purpose. The book uses the ancient text of the Bhagavad Gita to frame stories of famous people who have followed their dharma, including Tubman, Whiteman, Frost, Keats, and Susan B. Anthony.

Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert Pirsig)

This book has been around since the 1970s and its central argument still rings true (perhaps more so?) that in our continued acceleration towards the future, we are losing touch with a deeper, spiritual side of ourselves.  Pirsig contemplates what got us to this point:

The range of human knowledge today is so great that We’re all specialists. And the distance between specialization has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forgo closeness with the people around him.

At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (Sarah Bakewell)

What does it mean to be free?  How should one act in accordance with that belief.  Bakewell tackles these tough questions through the lens of the existentialist philosophers that emerged in the early and mid 1900’s featuring the philosophies of Kierkegaard, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Heidegger and more.

The Wisdom Of Insecurity (Alan Watts)

Watts contemplates our desire to continue to put life into neat little boxes:

The more one studies attempted solutions to problems in politics and economics, in art, philosophy,and religion, the more one has the impression of extremely gifted people wearing out their ingenuity at the impossible and futile task of trying to get the water of life into neat and permanent packages.

and on following the default path:

To keep up this “standard” most of us are willing to put up with lives that consist largely in doing jobs that are a bore, earning the means to seek relief from the tedium by intervals of hectic and expensive pleasure. These intervals are supposed to be the real living, the real purpose served by the necessary evil of work. Or we imagine that the justification of such work is the rearing of a family to go on doing the same kind of thing, in order to rear another family . . . and so ad infinitum.

Meditations (Marcus Aurelius)

While it was written over 2,000 years ago, we get a peek into the Empreror of Rome’s private journal and his meditations on life:

When you arise in the morning think of what a privilege it is to be alive, to think, to enjoy, to love …

and

Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.

Essays (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

Emerson’s collection of essays are a great read and accessible for being written in the 1800’s.  Emerson on self-reliance:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. (Self-Reliance)

Nature:

The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles.

…and Education:

The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,—let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

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The magic of this book is that it can be read through many lenses. Creativity is at the center of almost all work in today’s world. After reading this, it is now probably in the top 3 “must read” books for anyone serious about being a great leader/manager in an organization (Drive and Work Rules! are the other two).

1. Creative People Produce a Lot of Crap

Grant talks about the sheer volume of content that some of the most innovative people create such as Edison’s 1,093 patents, Mozart’s 600 pieces and Beethoven’s 37 plays. He notes:

“…when it comes to ideas generation, quantity is the most predictable path to quality. “Original Thinkers,” Stanford professor Robert Sutton notes, “will come up with many ideas that are strange mutations, dead ends and utter failures. The cost is worthwhile because they also generate a larger pool of ideas — especially novel ideas”

2. Expertise Can Lead to Better Intuition But Hold Back Your Ability to Adapt

If you have deep expertise in an area, you likely have developed an intuition for identifying patterns in that domain. A study with people who owned many designer handbags found that when asked to determine if bags were real or fake:

“Experienced handbag owners were 22 percent more accurate when they had just five seconds than when they had thirty seconds”

If you are an expert in your field save some time and trust your gut.

Expertise turns out to be domain-specific, which is limiting when it comes to identifying new ideas. People are limited by the models which carried them to success. He talks about how experts deal with change:

“…expert bridge players struggled more than novices to adapt when the rules were changed and that expert accountants were worse than novices at applying a new tax law.”

Given the speed of change in today’s world, it is no wonder that we have seen failures of experts across many domains.

3. Voicing New Ideas and Concerns Without Status Will Cost you $$

As many people have encountered in organizations, voicing constructive ideas to improve things may be counter-productive:

“In one study across manufacturing, service, retail and nonprofit settings, the more frequently employees voiced ideas and concerns upward, the less likely they were to receive raises and promotions over a two year period”

4. Focusing on Negatives Can Strengthen Your Message

If you are pitching an idea, consider highlighting the flaws or downsides of your opportunity. It will help disarm the audience and get them on your side. If you present something too positively, people naturally look to poke holes in the idea.

Sharing the negatives can also make the audience think more highly of the person delivering the message. In a study comparing book reviews with identical content but positive or negative adjectives:

“…people rated the critical reviewer 14% more intelligent”

Grant details this message more in the following TED talk

5. The More We Are Exposed to Something The More We Like It

Grant has a nifty little trick of introducing a fake word in his book and referencing it five times over a number of pages. He then asks the reader to choose between that word and another made up word for which one you like better. I found myself inevitably drawn to the word I had been exposed to.

He backs this up by pointing to studies that show we prefer photos of ourselves when they are inverted (like in a mirror) as opposed to normal photos of our friends (as we typically see them).

6. The “Middle” Is Risk Averse and Will Try to Kill Your Ideas

Grant discussed a concept calls “middle-status conservatism” which accounts for the anxiety that people in the “middle” feel about the risk of falling to the bottom. Think middle managers that are more worried about being fired or demoted than taking risks.

He points to the research of two MIT professors:

…security analysts were significantly less likely to issue negative stock ratings when they or the banks that employed them had middle status. Making a recommendation to sell a stock can anger corporate executives and investors who value the stock. Analysts with poor track records at minor banks have nowhere to fall by taking this risk, and star analysts at elite banks have a safety net.”

This is not very promising for innovation, creativity and new ideas in modern organizations as they get more complex and larger — with most people falling into the “middle status” category.

Grant notes a practical step to counter this is to look to junior colleagues who may be more open to supporting a new or novel idea. Building a following at the lowest levels can be more important over the long run.

7. Delaying tasks can increase creativity

Grant details the Zeigarnik Effect, which shows that unfinished tasks “stay active in our minds.” He talked about how Martin Luther King delayed writing and finishing his famous “I had a dream speech” until the day before the march.

To make this practical — you can take a break in the middle of a task and go for a walk or even “sleep on it.” It may help you generate better ideas.

8. First movers are not as successful

It is conventional wisdom that the “First mover” is often the one that captures success, but this happens not to be true. Grant details a study from Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis comparing the success of “pioneers” (first movers) and “settlers” (followers):

…they found a staggering different in the failure rates: 47 percent for pioneers, compared with just 8 percent for settlers. Even when the pioneers did survive, they only captured an average of 10 percent of the market, compared with 28 percent for the settlers”

A reason he offers for this is that the first mover often has to define what to offer, whereas the followers just have to decide how to do that better. Hence, the first movers are prone to making mistakes — either offering too much or the wrong things altogether.

9. Groups are judged externally by the most extreme views

Looking at the women’s suffrage movement, Grant highlights research by Blake Ashforth and Peter Reingen showing that internally groups identify with the people who are “most central and connected in the group.” At the same time, outsiders judge groups through the person with “the most extreme views.”

For any group trying to drive change, balancing these two competing identities can be a challenge. If the group associates with views that are deemed too extreme by the public or broader audience, the group may not accomplish what it sets out to.

This has played out in politics over and over. As the Republicans emerged from the primary to the general election and to Trumps victory, many politicians tried to distance themselves the “alt-right” as those views are not widely embraced by the broader public.

10. “The Oldest” in your family is less likely to be creative or a rule-breaker

Grant found that prior to Darwin publishing his theory of evolution, first born scientists were much less likely to support evolution and “laterborns” were more open to supporting the idea — even though it did not have broad consensus.

He showed that this trend is more important than age. He quotes historian Frank Sulloway:

“An 80 year old laterborn was as open to evolutionary theory as a 25 year old firstborn,” Sulloway writes, arguing that evolutionary theory “only became a hitorical reality because laterborns outnumbered firstborns 2.6 to 1”

He also looked at major league baseball and found a similar patter with regards to stealing bases:

“Younger brothers were 10.6 times more likely than their older siblings to attempt to steal a base”

11. “Commitment-driven cultures” become more homogenous, resistant to dissenting views and less able to adapt over time

Grant profiles the famous research around organizational cultures from James Baron and Michael Hannen

Grant highlights these “commitment cultures” in Originals or as Baron and Hannan put it, ones “which strong emotional bonds are the basis of employee attachment.” These companies will often prioritize “culture fit” over everything else.

While these cultures can be great to be part of during the startup stage,the challenge with these types of companies is two-fold:

First, they have a harder time cultivating a diverse workforce.

Second, they become homogeneous over time and less able to adapt and evolve, especially in more dynamic industries.

The danger of this is the fact that minority viewpoints disappear. Grant highlights Charlan Nemeth’s research showing that minority opinions are valuable even if they are incorrect. She conducted a study where participants had to choose between three candidates. Most candidates start out choosing an inferior candidate but only are willing to change their pick when they are challenged with an argument for a clearly wrong choice.

One of the most successful companies, McKinsey & Company, incidentally has a value that holds people accountable for “uphold the obligation to dissent.”

Looking for dissenting view can be tough. Research by Michael McDonald and James Westphal showed that in companies that were facing challenges, “CEOs sought advice from friends and colleagues who shared their perspective.”

12. The messages needed to change behaviors depend on how risky the new behavior is perceived

Grant highlights Peter Salovey’s research on how people perceive change:

If they think the behavior is safe we should emphasize all the good things that will happen if they do it…But when people believe a behavior is risky, that approach doesn’t work…Instead, we need to destabilize the status quo and accentuate the bad things that will happen if they don’t change. Taking a risk is more appealing when they’re faced with a guaranteed loss if they don’t

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post A Dozen Things I Learned From Originals (by Adam Grant) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.

I’m here to make a plea with you: please stop watching the news?

Our addiction to the constant flow of news, whether it be about the latest political crisis, sports soap opera, hunt for a missing airplane or a moral crusade against someone who said something 30 years ago, it is all doing the same thing. It is hijacking our brains and distracting us from being in the world with each other, distracting us from getting started on that creative project we’ve been telling our friends about for five years and holding us back from spending time on things we might otherwise derive some joy from.

I want to share my own approach to the news which is that I almost spend no time consuming it. I am sharing my approach to the news because in conversations with people, no personal practice has raised more questions and more indignation than telling them “I don’t follow the news.” So I want to share with you a bit about why I decided to move away from the news. I’ll also share a bit about why the news is so outrageous, why politics is a special kind of monster, why people will likely never change their minds and how we can block it. I’ll close with a few of my suggestions on better things to read.

Let’s dive in.

The news will kill you (or at least lower your sperm count)

Countless studies show that watching, reading or listening to the news can contributed to increased levels of stress. These headlines not only stress me out but share the same story:

Stress drives a whole bunch of things we don’t want:

This study looked at 250+ patients who had a heart attack and asked them immediately after their incident what caused the heart attack:

Attributing the initial attack to stress responses (e.g., worrying, nervousness) was also predictive of greater morbidity in 8-year survivors

and more:

between 20 and 40 percent of sudden cardiac deaths are precipitated by acute emotional stressors.

for the men who hope to be fathers one day, this study found that your sperm count might be harmed by stress:

the number of “healthy” sperm was significantly reduced in both groups of stressed men compared to reference values

Newspapers have always been crazy, but the internet has turned them into click-seeking monsters

The news sells to our emotions. The more emotional we become, the more we consume. The best emotion to tap into is fear. Humans have a negativity bias that long ago would protect us from danger, but now mostly forces us to spend an unreasonable amount of time focused on news that is designed specifically to activate this reflex.

This is and always has been the business model of news media organizations. Except at one time only a small number of newspaper titans like William Randolph Heart got to control the headlines and people didn’t spend that much time reading newspapers. No longer supported by print subscriptions and having to shift to digital means to survive, most media companies are competing in a race to the bottom get-the-most-clicks competition that is the modern internet.

This is why digital news is filled with projection, outrage, spin and terrible images. This is also why you never stumble upon articles that tell you that some things are actually getting better!

Prior to the internet there was a certain amount of friction to getting the news. You either had to buy or subscribe to a paper or set aside time to watch the news. Oliver Burkeman, a journalist, notes the shift here:

It’s easy to assume that the reason you spend so much time thinking about the news is simply that the news is so crazy right now. Yet the news has often been crazy. What it hasn’t been is ubiquitous: from its earliest beginnings, until a few decades ago, almost by definition, the news was a dispatch from elsewhere, a world you visited briefly before returning to your own. For centuries, it was accessible only to a small elite; even in the era of mass media, news rarely occupied more than an hour a day of an educated citizen’s attention.

Politics is a special kind of madness

Politics is the soup du jour of news junkies these days. While people realize that politics is about power, they do not react to the news by saying “oh wow, what an interesting attempt to gain more attention and power by using divisive language.” Most tend to react to it by falling into the trap of moral outrage and disgust.

In 1990, New Gingrich had discovered that elevating the level of outrage was a good political strategy. Here is a fascinating NPR podcast about this shift:

There was one memo I write about in the piece called “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” that literally included a list of recommended words that Republicans should use in describing Democrats. And they included words like “sick,” “pathetic,” “lie,” “anti-flag,” “traitors,” or “radical” and “corrupt.”

The kind of broader strategy when waging these national campaigns was to reframe the kind of policy debates in Washington that may have seemed kind of dull or inaccessible to the average American and turned them into these big struggles between good and evil, or white hats versus black hats, and a battle for the character and soul of America.…

This led to a fake division on issues that had and still have broad agreement such as reforming healthcare, supporting social security and medicare, improving gun control and improving education.

Politics is about priorities. Except people like Gingrich have helped convince many people that a lower priority ranking of an issue is really a moral fight of good versus evil.

While right-leaning parties embraced these tactics earlier and more often (In 2011: “conservative media use significantly more outrage speech than liberal media”), they are now common place across the spectrum and have been adopted across the globe.

“But you don’t understand, most people have crazy ideas about politics and we have to change their minds!”

Great rebuttal, but that’s not the case. When you look at people that watch cable news on a nightly basis its only a few million people watching Fox News, CNN or MSNBC. Here is some Fox News data from 2019:

Meanwhile, Fox News’ flagship primetime program, “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” remained the highest-rated show in cable news with 3,353,000 overall viewers and 557,000 in the 25-54 demographic.

People freak out about Fox News, but fewer than 1% of the country is actually watching it on any given night and less than 15,000 people between 25-54 per each state on average are locked in. An enormous amount of elderly people seem to be sitting around watching these programs and let’s admit it, we’re not going to change grandpa’s mind.

In 2018, the “Hidden Tribes” report helped to add some nuance to the polarization meme that seemed to be accepted as gospel. They found that four divisive issues “divided” America but that 67% of the public could be described as an “exhausted majority”

A consistent finding of the study is the contrast between the more tribal beliefs and behavior of the 33 percent of Americans in the wing segments (Progressive Activists, Traditional Conservatives and Devoted Conservatives) and that of the 67 percent in the Exhausted Majority (the Traditional Liberals, Passive Liberals, Politically Disengaged and Moderates).

The report also found those that hold the most extreme views (14% of people) are the least likely to ever change their minds:

Those in the wing segments tend to hold views that conform to their tribe and do not deviate from the party line.

Being a good person does not equal “staying up with the news”

You might be saying “okay okay I get it, but what about staying up with the what’s happening in the world?” This is a good question, but I think the sentiment is disconnected from what is really happening.

The most common response people offer when I say I’ve cut the news is “well how do you find out about things?” The implication being that one needs to know. Here is Oliver Burkeman again:

But the creeping colonisation of our personal sense of reality by “current events” has also seen the emergence of a strange new moral imperative – a social norm which holds that ignoring the news, or declining to grant it preeminence in our lives, is an irresponsible indulgence, available only to the fortunate.

The problem with this mindset is that the act of immersing yourself in the news literally makes you more stressed, takes you away from other things which might have an actual positive impact on the world and keeps you in a state of energetic addiction waiting for the next bombshell to drop.

Learning why we react the way we React

It is easy to fall into the trap of believing that people carefully work through their beliefs via reason and rationality, but that’s not how it plays out in the real world. Studies on twins have found that genetic factors influence greater than 50% of many of our beliefs about the world.

One of the best books I’ve read on this is by Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind. The book has an apt subtitle: “why good people are divided on politics and religion.” In the book, he gives us a sense of what’s at stake and is at the core of what I’m trying to convince you:

If you think that moral reasoning is something we do to figure out the truth, you’ll be constantly frustrated by how foolish, biased, and illogical people become when they disagree with you.

Another book worth reading if you are intrigued by how our brains operate in the world is Thinking Fast and Slow  by Nobel prize winner  Daniel Kahneman. He breaks down our brains processes into “System I” and “System II.” System I is our automatic reactions to the world and System II is our more well thought out rational brain. Many people think System II dominates, but when we start to realize that System I is calling the shots most of the time, we can become more aware of what the news is attempting to trigger

If you’re not the book reading type, this video is worth watching:

Okay, you’re convinced…First step: block the madness

In order to find better stuff to read, you first need to spend time building some walls to protect you from the social media barrage of fear and outrage driven content. Here are some steps I recommend:

Step 1: Delete all the news apps on your phone. I hear you saying “but I like staying informed!” Lets take a look a a sample of what is keeping you informed:

These are the headlines that get blasted to your phone as notifcations 24 hours a day. Are you “informed”? Sure — but have you learned anything new or shifted your perspective on anything? Doubtful.

I’ve found that if something is worth knowing, you typically find out about it via word of mouth within 24 hours. Try it out and let me know if this holds true.

Step 2: Delete the twitter and facebook apps from your phone. In addition to saving valuable battery life, you will have to go out of your way to check them in a web browser. You’ll use it less, trust me.

Step 3: Go through this long piece of 45 tricks to make your “phone work for you and not against you” and pick and choose some of the hacks that work for you. My favorites were:

• Removing e-mail from my phone
• Turning off almost all notifications
• Using app limits to limit twitter, facebook and instagram to less than 10 minutes a day (works for browser-only access too)
• Turn off “raise to wake”

Step 4: Install the chrome extension “News Feed Eradicator for Facebook.” a and LinkedIn Feed blocker. This replaces your news feed with a motivational quote. After you go to facebook a few times and find nothing, you will eventually stop checking it out during the work day.

Step 5: Another chrome hack. Install the Momentum extension. Instead of opening the new tab page (where your most visited pages are likely facebook, etc…) you’ll see a lovely greeting, an amazing picture and another inspirational quote:

Step 6 (for Twitter): Change your trends to Japan or another country where you can’t read the language. Also make sure to mute key words that are caught up in outrage. You find find the mute options in setting & privacy => privacy and safety =>safety => muted. Also don’t be afraid to mute or block people that spend all day on twitter peddling outrage.

Now that you blocked the worst, you still need to search for the good content

There is a common belief that “everything is getting worse” especially in terms of content. Steven Johnson challenged this belief in his book Everything Bad Is Good For You by showing that the quality and complexity of television, writing, movies and other popular material have steadily increased over time. The mistake comes from when people take today’s worst content and compare it to the best content of the past.

I do think Johnson missed something, however. He didn’t factor in that it was incredibly easy to find the best content in the past. Today, a lot of the best writing, movies and music are harder to find, part of niche groups and communities.

Luckily, if you embrace some of the tools available and find individual people worth following who share high-quality content, you can start diving deep into the good side of the web.

My reading tools

• Kindle Paperwhite: No brainer if you like to read on the go
• Instapaper: When I find good things to read, I save them here. Install their handy “bookmarklet” in your browser to save articles for later. I prefer longform, so I often don’t have time to read I have a weekly digest of articles delivered to my kindle automatically.
• Book Recommendations: I keep a notepad on my iphone of book suggestions. I ignore most books until they have been recommended at least two times. Then I read it
• Goodreads: A must have for keeping track of books you want to read and getting ratings from other bibliophiles

I’m currently in the process of updating my favorite books, which can be found here.

My Media Diet & Reading Recommendations

Longform Aggregators

I typically check these at least once a week and add any interesting articles to instapaper to real later:

• Longform: The best Longform on the web — has a great app as well to find out what is popular and also has a useful “staff picks”
• Longreads: Similar to longform with suggestions of the best “Longreads” of the web
• The Browser: I check this almost daily — they have a curated selection of 4–5 articles worth checking out
• Reddit’s Investigative Journalism and Longform pages
• The Sunday Long Read Newsletter by Don Van Natta Jr.

Blogs I Check Semi-Regularly (Bookmark These)

• Marginal Revolution: Tyler Cowen is a beast — he seems to read like 1000 books a year. Always has interesting article suggestions, deep economic analysis of current events or random musics about food and music.
• Stratechery: Ben Thompson has a knack for synthesizing complex topics in a way that make them approachable. His free weekly blog always adds a unique perspective too all things happening in tech, media and the internet.
• Seth Godin: I love that Seth sticks to a daily writing practice. Blogs can be hit or miss, but worth checking out every week or so.
• Ribbonfarm: Great longform essays on all ranges of topics, but written in a unique style. Essays often leave me thinking in new ways. (Updated: not updated as frequently these days)

E-Mail Newsletters

E-mail newsletters have increasingly become my largest source of incoming content consumption. This enables me to pick and choose people I trust and their own curation or screening of writing that may be worth reading.

One of the biggest “hacks” I’ve found is to send out a weekly list of “five good reads” every Sunday, which I’ve been doing since 2016. If you want to join, feel free to subscribe here:

Some of my favorite newsletters (I keep this updated

• Brain Pickings — Maria Popova’s site excels at summarizing the wisdom and insights of all sorts of ancient and modern writers, philosophers and leaders. For example, check out this post on “Why We Fall in Love: The Paradoxical Psychology of Romance and Why Frustration Is Necessary for Satisfaction”
• Farnham Street Brain Food Newsletter: Their own mini articles in addition to some of the best reads from across the web both current and past (Shane Parrish)
• John Mauldin’s Thoughts From the Frontline: A weekly macroeconomic / financial newsletter reflecting on all things happening across the world from a financial perspective. These can be hit or miss depending on your curiosities (John’s run deep) – but I love the non-sentimental analysis and simple style of communication. It keeps me sharp on world and economic issues
• Breaking Smart: Venkatesh Rao, as he says on his website RibbonFarm has “unusual takes on familiar themes.” I’m not sure if he popularized the “tweetstorm” but he sends a newsletter where he does such a thing about interesting topics. Sometimes the language is a bit complex, but worth checking out nonetheless
• The Journal — Kevin Rose just started a monthly tech oriented newlsetter. A curious person who also embraces the goal of forwarding “shit worth reading”
• Tim Ferriss’ 5-Bullet Friday — A simple, short newsletter from Tim that usually has at least one or two interesting articles or interesting things from the internet a month
• Barking Up The Wrong Tree: Short buzzfeed type articles from Eric Barker— “top 3 things about X” but fascinating topics backed by research.
• Ritholz’s Reads: A daily curation of news from around the web from Barry Ritholz. Longtime successful financial blogger — he has a good sense for cutting through the BS and giving you things worthwhile to read.
• CB Insights: Technology & business insights plus a huge dose of humor and awesome visualizations.
• Andrew Taggart “Total Work”: Fascinating newsletter (check out the back issues) about work taking over our modern world of work
• Curious Humans: Great newsletter by Jonny Miller on what he finds curious in the world
• Ryan Holiday has a great Reading Recommendations list I enjoy
• Khe Hy, Rad Reads on money, productivity & what matters
• Azeem Azhar, Exponential View tech
• Jocelyn Glein, Hurry Slowly
• Austin Kleon, Weekly Newsletter
• David Perrel, Monday Musings a collection of fascinating things
• Future Crunch, A Positive News Newsletter
• Total Annarchy, Ann Hadley
• Scott Galloway, No Mercy, No Malice
• Nat Eliason’s Medley a collection of interesting things & book notes

No longer subscribe:

Some of these people seem to be shifting away from what I’m interested in or are shifting into outrage which I just am not intrigued by

• NextDraft: Dave Pell is the king of internet curation. His daily newsletter will keep you informed (he sometimes has a little too much news) but always balances it out with shit worth reading. He also has a standalone app you can use to read on the subway and replace your CNN app. (shifted to politics)

What else should I be reading?

41k+ Sold! (Top 1% Book) The Pathless Path is Paul's book about walking away from a "perfect" job with a promising future and starting over again. Through painstaking experiments, living in different countries, and a deep dive into the history of our work beliefs, Paul pieces together a set of ideas and principles that guide him from unfulfilled and burned out to what he calls "the pathless path" - a new story for thinking about work in our lives. Learn More & Buy The Book Here

The post Why You Should Stop Consuming The News & My Media Diet (August 2019) appeared first on Boundless by Paul Millerd.