Monthly recap: best book, films, most useful video, skill of the month, a tested hypothesis, a habit and the main insight. September 2025.
1) Best book
Kept reading “Winning the War in Your Mind” by Craig Groeschel. A good book about how the most important battles happen inside our heads.
2) Films and series
We watched “Sound of Freedom”. This is probably the best film of the past year. It’s a heavy watch, about child slavery. But it’s impossible to unsee or forget. Somewhat like “The Pale Blue Eye” with Christian Bale.
We also watched the mini-series “Mixtape”. A very realistic story about teenage love that shaped the rest of both people’s adult lives.
I also stumbled on a YouTube video called “1% of the War,” about a guy who was evacuating people from Ukraine’s hot spots. Recommend it.
3) Most useful video
Alex Hormozi’s podcast episode on the Jay Shetty channel.
I also started watching the Ed Lawrence channel about growing YouTube channels more.
I can’t say it was useful, but I listened with interest to Alla Pugacheva’s interview on the “Skazhi Gordeyevoy” channel.
My whole Facebook feed for two weeks was full of posts from our citizens about that interview. I was pleasantly surprised that such a large percentage of Ukrainians weren’t afraid to publicly say they’d watched a Russian singer on YouTube, despite the hate from the “language patrol.”
4) Skill I worked on
Getting straight into the most important work first thing in the morning.
I’ve reformatted my schedule a bit so that most habits and rituals happen in the evening, when my internal battery is already running low.
And I direct the most important, most productive morning hours toward the hardest strategic tasks.
I picked up this approach from Alex Hormozi in the video mentioned in point 3.
5) Hypothesis I tested
Starting September 15, I began working on a set of new habits and changing the shape of my life. I go into detail about this in a series of separate posts tagged #ost_changing_habits.
Today is day 20 of my habit-change challenge.
An interesting observation for me is that, in practice, nothing and no one is stopping me from changing my life the way I want to. I’m the main limiting factor for myself. In the end, you’re always fighting yourself and the false beliefs in your own head.
6) Habit I worked on
Keeping a paper habit tracker. It’s a kind of meta-habit that lets you keep a finger on the pulse of all your other positive changes.
Every evening, before bed, I open a paper notebook and mark down what I managed to do that day and what I didn’t. This one simple practice has a huge effect on how productive your day is and your level of self-awareness.
Because the notebook — through an empty or checked box — ruthlessly shows what you did today and what you didn’t.
7) Main insight of the month
The brain is wonderfully good at finding solutions for tasks that are visually laid out on paper or in a digital space.
Right now I practice an approach where I just dump all my open questions and tasks into a mind map in MIRO (you can do this on paper too), and try to figure out the right sequence of actions to solve them.
It’s like lining up a row of dominoes and then figuring out which one, if pushed first, will knock all the others down automatically.
So now I just open up a visual map of my life and work for a couple of minutes, and my brain starts throwing out good ideas and finding missing connections on its own.
So “thinking on paper” can turn out to be a very useful practice.