5 Day Reading Challenge in January 2024 📚✨

Day 1️⃣

1. Rare Skills by Morgan Housel (3 mins)

• Understanding Delusions: Recognizing and respecting that everyone's beliefs are shaped by personal experiences and biases, leading to differing viewpoints, and emphasizing the importance of self-awareness in one's own beliefs.
• The Value of Quitting Early: Emphasizing the skill of knowing when to stop before reaching excess, applicable in various aspects of life such as business, career, and personal habits, to avoid burnout and achieve sustainable success.
• Concise Communication: Highlighting the critical skill of communicating effectively and succinctly, by treating words as valuable and focusing on eliminating unnecessary details to enhance clarity and impact.
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2. The Four Idols: Money, Power, Pleasure, & Fame by Sahil Bloom (5 mins)

• Four Idols Concept: Discusses Dr. Arthur Brooks' framework of the Four Idols - Money, Power, Pleasure, and Fame - and their distraction from true happiness.
• Risks of Idol Worship: Highlights the dangers of unconsciously pursuing these idols, leading to a continuous, unfulfilling quest.
• Personal Idol Identification: Introduces a method to identify one's primary idol and emphasizes the importance of awareness in differentiating this pursuit from the search for genuine happiness.
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3. How to Ask Bad Questions: 5 Questions to Avoid by Chris Meyer (4 mins)

• Leading and Loaded Questions: Both types steer responses towards a biased or implied answer, often resulting in skewed or manipulated information.
• Double-Barreled Questions: These combine multiple queries into one, causing confusion and unclear responses; it's better to separate them into distinct questions.
• Why Questions and Cunningham’s Law: "Why" questions can provoke defensiveness, while Cunningham's Law uses incorrect statements to elicit corrections, effectively drawing out accurate information.
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Day 2️⃣

1. Systematic inventive thinking: the power of thinking inside the box by Anne-Laure Le Cunff (5 mins)

• Origin of SIT: Systematic Inventive Thinking (SIT) stems from analyzing 200,000 patents, focusing on innovation within existing parameters, countering the traditional "think outside the box" mantra.
• SIT's Approach: Utilizes five tools (Subtraction, Multiplication, Division, Task Unification, Attribute Dependency) to innovate within constraints, enhancing creativity and solution efficiency.
• Impact: SIT challenges conventional creativity norms, proving effective in various industries by fostering innovative solutions using existing resources and limitations.
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2. How to figure out what you want out of life by Allie Volpe (7 mins)

• Berrak Sarikaya's story illustrates the challenge of navigating personal desires versus societal and familial expectations, as she initially pursued a legal career due to pressure but eventually chose a path more aligned with her true interests.
• Societal norms often dictate life milestones like education, career, and family, leading many to pursue paths that may not align with their intrinsic motivations, resulting in a lack of fulfillment and authenticity in life choices.
• To achieve a more authentic and fulfilling life, it's important to engage in self-reflection, assessing personal values and motivations, and making decisions based on intrinsic desires rather than external pressures or societal norms.
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3. Your attention span isn't dead — yet. These tips can help restore your ability to focus. by Rebecca Ruiz (6 mins)

• Digital Distraction Challenge: The average attention span on screens has dropped to under a minute, highlighting widespread digital distractions, such as compulsive social media use and task interruptions for online activities.
• Strategies for Improved Focus: Dr. Gloria Mark's book "Attention Span" proposes methods like visualizing future consequences of current distractions and creating 'negative space' or breaks in daily schedules, emphasizing well-being over productivity.
• Personal Attention Rhythm: Mark suggests understanding one's own 'rhythm of attention' to optimize focus, recommending activities like tracking productivity trends to identify peak focus times and scheduling challenging tasks accordingly.
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Day 3️⃣

1. This Zen Concept Will Help You Stop Being a Slave to Old Beliefs by James Clear (4 mins)

• The concept of "Shoshin" in Zen Buddhism, which means "beginner's mind," emphasizes the importance of letting go of preconceptions and being open to new information, contrasting with the closed mindset that often develops with expertise.
• The author illustrates how people, including experts, tend to replicate behaviors and methods they've learned without considering alternatives, a tendency observed in various life aspects such as coaching, politics, and religion.
• To rediscover the beginner's mind, one should let go of the need to always contribute or win arguments, embrace curiosity, listen more, and recognize the limited and biased nature of our knowledge shaped by our experiences and mentors.
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2. The Fine Balance between Short-Term & Long-Term Planning by The Knowledge (2 mins)

• Time influences decisions; "finite time" is controlled short-term planning, while "infinite time" addresses uncontrollable factors.
• Over extended periods, risks increase, illustrated by the cell replication analogy.
• Navigating uncertainty requires optimizing short-term gains and using strategies like the barbell approach for risk management.
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3. Learning Without Schools: Four Points To Free Yourself From The Educational Get-Certified Mantra by Robin Good (7 mins)

• The author critiques the traditional school system, arguing it's outdated and ill-prepares students for today's fast-paced world.
• They propose a new educational approach emphasizing real-world learning, critical thinking, hands-on experiences, and valuing mistakes over formal qualifications.
• The author calls for a shift in education, prioritizing practical skills and experiences over rote learning and certification.
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Day 4️⃣

1. Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter by Casey Newton (8 mins)

• Information Overload: Modern note-taking apps, like Notion and Roam Research, contribute to information overload, making it difficult for users like journalists and farmers to manage and process data effectively.
• Inefficacy of Note-Taking Features: Despite advanced features like bidirectional linking, these apps fall short in significantly improving cognitive processes, with challenges like multitasking and digital distractions hindering their effectiveness.
• Skepticism Towards AI in Productivity: The integration of AI in tools for tasks like summarization is viewed skeptically, as genuine thinking and insight generation are processes that software and AI struggle to enhance meaningfully.
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2. Finding Meaning by Briandito Priambodo (3 mins)

• Shared Discontent in Work: The author and colleagues find their routine jobs lacking in joy and meaning, leading to feelings of being trapped in comfortable but unfulfilling roles, described as "golden handcuffs."
• Shift in Perspective: Initially, the author's career was exciting and fulfilling, but over time, it became monotonous and stressful, prompting a reevaluation of what happiness and meaning in life truly entail.
• Personalized Meaning: The author concludes that meaning in life is subjective and varies for each person, dependent on individual goals, life stages, and experiences, suggesting that the journey towards personal growth and experiences is more important than the destination.
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3. The Most Powerful Paradoxes of Life by Sahil Bloom (4 mins)

• Growth Paradox: Growth is often imperceptible at first but can happen suddenly and rapidly, highlighting the importance of patience and the surprising nature of progress.
• Productivity Paradox: Longer working hours can lead to reduced productivity; effective work mimics a lion's pattern of sprinting and resting, emphasizing quality and intensity over duration.
• Fear Paradox: Confronting fears is crucial for growth and success; what is most feared often needs to be tackled head-on, turning fears into catalysts for personal development.
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Day 5️⃣

1. The Buffett Formula: Going to Bed Smarter Than When You Woke Up by FS (5 mins)

• Lifelong Learning: Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger credit their success to a relentless pursuit of knowledge, primarily through extensive reading and critical thinking.
• Knowledge Application: They emphasize not just reading, but also applying and analyzing information, making informed decisions independently of others' opinions.
• Daily Self-Improvement: Both advocate dedicating time each day to learning and self-improvement, prioritizing this over short-term distractions.
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2. For a More Creative Brain Follow These 5 Steps by James Clear (5 mins)

• Creative thinking is a valuable skill with five key steps: gathering material, mental processing, stepping away, idea return, and feedback-based refinement.
• Frederic Eugene Ives' story exemplifies these creative process stages.
• Creativity involves forming new connections between existing ideas and recognizing relationships between concepts.
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3. 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known by Kevin Kelly (1 mins)

• The author shared 68 bits of advice on their 68th birthday, which gained popularity.
• On their 70th birthday, they expanded the list to 103 pieces of advice they wished they had known earlier.
• These pieces of advice were later compiled into a book called "Excellent Advice for Living," containing 450 bits of wisdom.
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