24 Dec - 30 Dec 2018
Aside from Monday, I’ve had a rather lazy week relaxing with my family — although they’ve all been ill for a day or few during the course of the week so our week has been quiet and cooped up.
I’ve been enjoying my Apple watch, filling my rings each day. I plan to keep it up. I’ve found I’m enjoying the daily walks, and I like the mix of activities the rings “enforce”. It’s certainly more gratifying and harder to try and game than simply hitting an arbitrary step count.
Reading Progress
I finished The Soul of a Butterfly, It doesn’t have to be crazy at work_and _7 Habits of Highly Effective People to reach my goal of reading 36 books in 2018.
I enjoyed Soul of a Butterfly. I certainly learned a bit more about Ali. He has had a positive impact on this world, but I felt many of the things he was saying were a bit overshadowed by his seeming ego.
I was less than impressed by It doesn’t have to be crazy at work. It wasn’t a bad book, but it wasn’t great. It felt like a collection of blog posts, which sound great as soundbites, but there wasn’t much detail on the how. Just lots of prescriptions. Great, if you’re running a subscription software product business. Less so for the rest. Don’t get me wrong, you can certainly take and apply many of their lessons, but for some reason with this book their writing style rubbed me the wrong way and it felt more like I paid to read an extended advert for working at Basecamp.
As a polar opposite, I was blown away by 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I wish that I had read this 20 years ago. It was clear, well-written and while it was written more than two decades ago, it’s still as applicable, and will continue to be so. There were many echos of Stoicism in the principles he talked about, which I really liked. A book I will keep coming back to time and again.
A week in Stoicism
We are reminded that reading quotes and journaling are not a means to an end. They are there to inspire action, and as Seneca said, turn those words into action.
All study of philosophy and reading should be for the purpose of living a happy life… we should seek precepts to help us, noble and courageous words that can become facts… we should learn them in a way that words become works. Seneca
Stop wandering about! You aren’t likely to read your own notebooks, or ancient histories, or the anthologies you’ve collected to enjoy in your old age. Get busy with life’s purpose, toss aside empty hopes, get active in your own rescue–if you care for yourself at all—and do it while you can Marcus Aurelius
weeknotes