📚 3 Awesome Books, 30 Day Challenge That Can Change Your Life, and more.

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👋 Hey everyone,

Instead of a book summary this week, I wanted to share 3 life lessons.

If you’re looking for a book summary, you can find 3 awesome ones here:

• “The 5 Types of Wealth” by Sahil Bloom

• “The Expectation Effect” by David Robson

• “Why We Remember” by Charan Ranganath PhD

PS: I’m almost at 20,000 followers on LinkedIn, follow me there for more book recs!

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⭐️ 3 Life Lessons:

1) Stop Guesstimating Your Health (& Start Gamifying It)

Earlier this year, I was inspired by Bryan Johnson and other health content creators to get an Oura ring–a popular health-tracking device.

I kept seeing people post about their sleep and other health stats, and wondered to myself, “If the most important thing in life is health, why don’t I track it more closely?”

If there’s something you want to improve on, tracking it will make sure you’re heading in the right direction.

For example, people track:

• How many books they read to read more the following year.

• How many hours they worked so they know how much to bill clients.

• How much they spend each month to make sure they aren’t overspending.

So I decided to take my health more seriously and start tracking it.

One discovery I made early on–and this is a bit embarrassing to admit–is that if you sleep from 12am to 8am you aren’t getting 8 hours of sleep.

You’re in BED for 8 hours, but you’re probably only asleep for 7 of hours hours.

It takes me anywhere from 5-15 minutes to fall asleep and I tend to spend 20-40 minutes awake at night.

So this whole time that I THOUGHT I was getting 8 hours of sleep per night, I was actually only getting 7…

It also turned sleep into a game.

Each morning I got a sleep score and tips on how to improve it based on millions of data points from other users.

For instance, meditating increased sleep scores on average by +2, whereas eating late decreased scores by -4, and partying decreased it by -12.

Now instead of guesstimating how much sleep I was getting and what influenced it, I now know exactly what is having a positive or negative effect on me.

It also gamified other important parts of health such as daily steps, exercise, stress levels, and much more.

Just like how your phone or car has a ton of data points to tell you what’s working and what needs to be fixed, I believe in the near future all of us will have some type of wearable tech that will measure our body and guide us on how to live happier, healthier, and longer lives.

📖

2) A 30-Day Challenge Can Change Your Life

Every month or so I like to do a new 30-day challenge to either build a new habit or break a bad one.

For instance, I’ve done 30 days of: no alcohol, no coffee, no porn, no shopping, and no video games.

I’ve also done 30 days of: daily reading, daily walks, daily journaling, and daily workouts.

What I love about these challenges is that if you see a massive improvement in your life after 30 days, you’ll likely keep it going for months or years.

For instance, I sold my Xbox back in 2019 because I was addicted to video games, and haven’t bought any video games since and it’s been one of the best changes I’ve made to my life. Now I spend that time reading books, writing, or exercising.

Another 30-day habit that I’ve made permanent is going for a 15-minute walk every morning. By doing so, this winter was the first time I didn’t get seasonal depression in my life.

So at the start of 2025, I decided to begin a new challenge: 30 days of no sweets.

This was one of my most difficult challenges yet because sweets are my biggest vice–I LOVE a good sweet treat.

However, a few months ago I realized that I was losing my self-control.

I’d have a bagel with jelly after breakfast, a sweet protein bar after lunch, and chocolate or ice cream after dinner. I was basically eating 3 desserts a day and felt like garbage from all the sugar crashes.

So on January 1st, 2025, I gave up sweets for 30 days.

The first week of the challenge was absolute torture and I had insane cravings. I was cranky and easily agitated.

Whenever I had a craving for something sweet, I’d eat some fruits instead.

But around the second week, something changed. I didn’t care for sweet treats whatsoever and felt free.

For the first time in a long time, I could walk past a donut shop and not feel tempted to go inside. I could go to the grocery store and not feel a desire to buy a bunch of chocolate.

My energy levels were much more stable throughout the day, my skin cleared up, and I felt like I had control over my food instead of the other way around.

However, even though I gave up sweets, it was impossible to completely escape sugar.

I was shocked to realize just how many products had added sugar in it:

• My organic ketchup which I thought was healthy had added sugar.

• My organic oat milk doesn’t have sugar as an ingredient but still had added sugar on the label.

• Everything from the salad dressing to the frozen pizza I usually bought had added sugar.

Throughout this process, I also wore a continuous glucose monitor (similar to this) to track my glucose levels and crashes.

It was fascinating to learn which types of non-sugary foods caused major glucose spikes (it was mostly carb-loaded foods like pizza and pasta), and I could see in real-time how the glucose spikes and crashes affected my mood.

Overall, I’m glad I did this challenge, and going forward, I plan on only letting myself have a sweet treat on the weekends or big occasions.

(Note: I’m not perfect I did have some chocolate cake at my friend’s birthday and a bite of my girlfriend’s jelly croissant toward the end of the challenge.)

📖

3) My #1 BEST Networking Tip

A few weeks ago, a young kid reached out to me and asked, how he could hang out with authors.

“I see you hanging out with these bestselling authors, how can I do the same?”, he asked.

Of course, I understand his point—it would be cool to hang out with people you admire—but he had the wrong goal.

I was once that kid who thought networking was just about getting into the room with people. And here’s what happened:

A few years ago I heard from a successful friend that he was in a business mastermind with about 10 entrepreneurs (everyone there was a millionaire and some were even worth $10M+).

I wasn’t a millionaire, but I asked if he could get me in (it turns out the guy who created the mastermind enjoyed my book recommendations on Twitter so he said sure).

“Sweet, now I’ll be able to learn from them and grow my business to millions,” I thought to myself.

But when I joined the meeting, the entrepreneurs were talking about hiring executives, real estate tax tips, managing sales teams, and lots of other topics that I couldn’t relate to.

They were all so far ahead in the game of business than me, that I couldn’t apply anything they shared.

And I couldn’t really ask that many questions because all of the people there wanted to spend their time learning from one another, not spend time mentoring me.

Here’s a quote from Naval that sums this up nicely:

The same is true of the author dinners I’m now hosting with bestselling author Rob Henderson.

I’ve been a fan of Rob’s work for years so when I read his blog post filled with reading tips, I decided to share it on social media.

The post got Rob a lot of new followers so he reached out to say thank you and suggested we hang out.

We did and we spent an hour talking about books.

At the end, I mentioned the idea of monthly dinners with authors so we could all learn from one another.

He liked the idea and a couple of weeks later we had our first author dinner.

We now have a waitlist of 10+ amazing authors who want to join the next one.

If I had somehow snuck into one of these dinners as a college student, I would’ve had nothing to add. I’d probably just ask them to sign my books or take a selfie with me.

But now that I’ve read 500+ books, worked with 100+ authors, and grown my following to 1M+ people, I can talk to them about social media, book marketing, and much more.

So instead of studying networking hacks or trying to charm your way into a room of people who are successful in their field, work on becoming successful or at least showing people that you have potential in that domain.

If you do so, there’s a good chance you’ll be invited to join the conversation.

PS: If you’re an author in NYC or planning to visit sometime, reply to this email and we’ll consider you for our next dinner.

✅ Actionable Advice:

1) Consider getting a health tracking device to learn more about your body and live healthier:

• Look into getting a Whoop, Oura Ring Apple Watch, or some other wearable device.

2) Consider doing a 30-day challenge of:

• No porn

• No TikTok

• No sweets

• No alcohol

• No smoking/vaping

• No gambling/sports betting

  • And let me know how it goes!

3) Don’t network just to network:

• Create value, share it with the world, and networking opportunities will come to you instead of you chasing them.

💎 Weekly Gem:

Documentary: The Century of The Self

This is one of the most mind-blowing documentaries I’ve ever watched.

It covers the history of psychology, how Sigmund Freud’s nephew used Freud’s teachings to create the advertising industry, how psychology was used to create a mass-consumer society, and so much more.

If you’re interested in psychology, advertising, influence, or politics, you’ll find this documentary fascinating.

It’s about 4 hours long, but it’s worth watching. And it’s free to watch on YouTube.

Your opinion matters!

You’re the reason I write this email every week. Please let me know what you think so I can create better emails for you.

You can also reply to this email–I read every response.

Thank you for your support,

-Alex W.