Hi all,
Happy Saturday.
Below is your edition of “saturday mornings”, a weekly recap of what I’ve been pondering and exploring over the past few days.
✍️Quote I’ve been thinking about:
“Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anais Nin
📝Product I’ve enjoyed:
I’ve always tried to build journaling into my morning routine, as a way to clear my head and set my day up for success, but often felt confused about what to journal about and worried that journaling would take up too much time.
Over the past two years I’ve been using The Five Minute Journal and found it to be a sustainable but highly effective tool to gain appreciation, create better days, and focus on what matters. (And, I’ve found that improving the quality of my days improves the overall quality of my life.)
Each day, the journal includes a quote at the top of the page and provides three prompts to write about in the morning upon waking and two prompts to write about in the evening. The format is straightforward but there’s a lot of value hidden in it’s simplicity - and if I have learned anything from building habits, it’s that complexity fails.
It’s a small commitment (as the title suggests) but one that has had an outsized impact on driving positive change in my life and framing my days in a positive light. Aptly subtitled, “The simplest, most effective thing you can do every day to be happier.”
If you’ve been interested in journaling but are not sure where to start, The Five Minute Journal could be a really beneficial tool. It currently has +1 million copies sold with an average 5-star rating across +1300 reviews.
For further reading, check out How Tim Ferriss Uses The Five Minute Journal.
🎙️Podcast I’ve loved:
Episode #1309 of The Joe Rogan Experience with Naval Ravikant (YouTube, Spotify)
Naval Ravikant is an entrepreneur and angel investor, a co-author of Venture Hacks, and a co-founder and chairman of AngelList.
Although his credentials scream “startups and investing”, Naval has a lot of interesting thoughts and perspectives on happiness, work-life balance, well-being, and outlines his views on how to develop the habits and beliefs of a highly successful (and happy) person. Despite thriving in Silicon Valley and becoming massively successful, his ideas (refreshingly) run in stark contrast to the over-glorified “hustle-culture”.
Naval has refined his way of living in very unique ways, and you can borrow what he’s learned, read the books that have changed him, and experiment with the habits he has developed through trial and error.
In my opinion, he’s one of the most interesting people currently alive to hear speak and I’d highly recommend checking out this episode.
❓Question for reflection:
Am I hunting antelope or field mice?
Below is a great excerpt from the book Buck Up, Suck Up . . . and Come Back When You Foul Up: 12 Winning Secrets from the War Room that highlights a question Newt Gingrich used to distill the essential from the non-essential and focus primarily on the former.
Newt Gingrich is one of the most successful political leaders of our time. Yes, we disagreed with virtually everything he did, but this is a book about strategy, not ideology. And we’ve got to give Newt his due. His strategic ability—his relentless focus on capturing the House of Representatives for the Republicans—led to one of the biggest political landslides in American history.
Now that he’s in the private sector, Newt uses a brilliant illustration to explain the need to focus on the big things and let the little stuff slide: the analogy of the field mice and the antelope. A lion is fully capable of capturing, killing, and eating a field mouse. But it turns out that the energy required to do so exceeds the caloric content of the mouse itself. So a lion that spent its day hunting and eating field mice would slowly starve to death. A lion can’t live on field mice. A lion needs antelope. Antelope are big animals. They take more speed and strength to capture and kill, and once killed, they provide a feast for the lion and her pride. A lion can live a long and happy life on a diet of antelope.
The distinction is important. Are you spending all your time and exhausting all your energy catching field mice? In the short term it might give you a nice, rewarding feeling. But in the long run you’re going to die. So ask yourself at the end of the day, “Did I spend today chasing mice or hunting antelope?”
Putting this into practice, after writing down your day’s to-do list you can ask yourself: “Which of these are field mice and which are antelope?”
In other words, “Which one of these tasks, if done, would render all the rest easier or completely irrelevant?” (Similar to the idea of “eating your frog”).
And, as always, I’d love to hear any feedback from you. Which topic above is your favourite? What do you want more or less of? What challenges and ideas are you exploring and grappling with or have found particularly interesting?
If you’ve enjoyed the newsletter, feel free to share it with a friend.
Thanks again for reading and your continual support. It means the world to me.
Have a great weekend.
Much love to you and yours,
Thomas