How To: Do More, Read More, and Be More

The Rabbit Hole

This week I went on a very small productivity rabbit hole (I will probably go on a big one sometime next quarter).

I want to share some of the findings with you, so you can apply the value to your own life.

30 seconds summary:

• Elon Musk mindset: compress your 10-year goals into 6 months for exponential progress.

• Naval Ravikant says: “Be impatient with actions, but patient with results”.

• 5 tips to read more: start to read what you love, you don’t need to finish a book, read multiple books, buy a Kindle, and try audiobooks.

• Challenge for you: Try doing deep work tasks in blocks of 90 minutes, instead of the classic Pomodoro of 25min. It gives you more focused time and you’ll get more done than you can think.

Reaching goals faster

Elon Musk said: "Stop being patient and start asking yourself, how do I accomplish my 10-year plan in 6 months? You will probably fail but you will be a lot further ahead of the person who simply accepted it was going to take 10 years”.

This reminds me of a quote from Naval about being impatient with long-term goals:

“Impatience with actions, patience with results.”

Read those again. Understand them, don’t just read the words. And act on them.

5 tips to read more books this year

I previously shared that if a guy who runs a successful satellite company can read 85 books in a year, so can you and I 😅

“Read what you love, until you love to read” - Naval Ravikant.

• If you don’t have the habit, start reading what you enjoy and after that, you can look into other books that interest you but may be more “scary”.

Stop caring about the numbers. You don’t need to finish a book.

• If you’re not liking it and it’s wasting your time, then stop reading it! You’re not playing a game to achieve X amount of books read. The goal of reading is to improve your knowledge and life.

Read multiple books at once.

• Sometimes you may not be in the mood for a certain book, so you can pick another. That helps reduce the friction to start reading, but you also start connecting concepts from different books to create new ideas in your mind.

Use a Kindle.

• The last point leads to this one. It’s cheap, you can have multiple books there, you can hold with one hand, and you can take it anywhere you go (hundreds of books in your pocket). Personally, this also helped me read so much more. (I know some people who don’t want to buy 100’s of books so they just buy a Kindle and find a way to put free books inside. I’m not encouraging it tho :)

Listen to audiobooks.

• You can listen to audiobooks while you’re doing other tasks like driving, walking, doing chores, etc. It will make you start absorbing the knowledge of books easily.

I challenge you to try this next week:

There’s a classic productivity method of working called Pomodoro. You work for 25min, rest 5, and repeat. Some people do 30, others 45 but it’s the same.

I challenge you to work in blocks of 90 minutes of deep work and then rest around 15 minutes.

I tried it and saw a huge difference in focus and work done. Humans tend to spend 10-15 minutes to get into a deep work flow so the classic 25-45 minutes is not enough.

For bonus points (and work done), combine that with some deep-focus music.

No voice, just instrumental. Look into it.

I’ve tried Brain FM for music and it’s incredible. It’s based on science to help with deep focus. I don’t know if it’s Placebo but it works lol. There are also plenty of good playlists on Spotify.

The Revenue Stream

The Career Hub

The Personal Hub

That’s all for today, I hope you enjoyed it!

If you want to give feedback or connect, reply to this email or reach out on my socials below 👇