My monthly round-up: best book, films, most useful video, skill of the month, habit, hypothesis and the main insight. October 2024.
1) Best book
Built to Last by Jim Collins. A superb guide for anyone who wants to build a large and influential organisation.
2) Films and series
Nastya and I went to the cinema to see Trap. It keeps the tension up, has several unexpected turns, and isn’t formulaic. I’d never seen that particular screenplay idea executed before at all.
3) Most useful video
I discovered Bryan Johnson’s YouTube channel. This entrepreneur is running a fascinating experiment on himself: he spends millions of dollars trying to halt his own ageing and stay in extraordinary physical shape.
I’m taking plenty of interesting health tips from it.
4) Skill I worked on
Delegation. I’m currently handing over to other people the things I’ve long been used to doing myself — both work tasks and household ones.
It doesn’t matter how small and simple a task is. If it recurs regularly, I look for a way to pass it to someone else.
When you’re not frittering yourself away on trivia, you’re left with time and attention for the important, strategic things.
5) Hypothesis I managed to test
If you start doing brain exercises, your productivity goes up several times over. Jim Kwik’s YouTube channel has simple exercises for training the different hemispheres of the brain. I started doing them and saw an enormous difference within the first few days. Now I’m building it into a daily habit.
6) Habit I worked on
Not eating after 10pm and going to bed around midnight. For the first time in a long while it’s actually working. I’m still afraid to celebrate too loudly — I hadn’t managed to fix my sleep schedule in several years.
7) Main insight of the month
Nothing is stopping us from changing our life and shaping it into what we want it to be.
For years I thought about and planned to start writing books. I even tried once to bring in an outside person who was supposed to draft them from my courses, so I could edit them afterwards. But the whole thing stalled after a couple of weeks.
Now that I’ve given up short-form content and started doing brain exercises, every morning I calmly sit down and spend 40 to 60 minutes working on my books.
It’s an incredibly good feeling to be doing exactly what you want to do, exactly the way you want to do it. My habit of writing to the blog every day, plus running 15 different programmes at my New Lifestyle school, have built up such an informational flywheel in my head that I can barely write the ideas into the books fast enough.
I do slightly regret not quitting social media sooner. I can now see how badly it was messing with my brain and holding my capacity back. The dopamine needed to carry out difficult, large projects simply never had time to accumulate, because I was draining it on content in social feeds.