📚 How to Live, How to take notes in books, and more.

👋 Hey everyone,

Here are a few popular posts you may have missed:

• How to take notes while reading a book.

• This video will inspire you to read more books.

• 12 Lessons from the most mind-blowing book I’ve read this year (this book went super viral).

 📝 Need Help Writing, Publishing, or Marketing Your Book?

My friends over at Scribe can help.

Eric Jorgenson is the CEO of Scribe, a good friend, and the bestselling author of “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant”–which has sold 1+ million copies so he knows a thing or two about creating great books.

Scribe has helped publish 2,000+ books including “Can’t Hurt Me” by David Goggins, “The Alter Ego Effect” by Todd Herman, and many more amazing books.

Click here to learn more about Scribe and book a FREE call with them.

📚 Book Summary:

This week's book is “How To Live“ by Derek Sivers.

Derek Sivers is best known for selling CD Baby for $22 million at a young age and for writing the bestselling entrepreneurship book “Anything You Want.” 

In his new book, he shares 27 short lessons on how to live life including advice on becoming independent, getting rich, pursuing pain, and much more.

Here are 3 lessons and excerpts from the book:

📖

1) Pursue Pain

Everything good comes from some kind of pain.

Muscle fatigue makes you healthy and strong. The pain of practice leads to mastery. Difficult conversations save relationships.

But if you avoid pain, you avoid improvement.

Avoid embarrassment, and you avoid success. Avoid risk, and you avoid reward. The crisis–the most painful moment–defines the hero.

Improvement is transformation. It brings the pain of loss of the comfortable previous self.

The goal of life is not comfort. Pursuing comfort is both pathetic and bad for you. Comfort makes you weak and unprepared. If you overprotect yourself from pain, then every little challenge will feel unbearably difficult.

Comfort is quicksand. The softer the chair, the harder it is to get out of it.

Therefore, the way to live is to steer towards the pain. Use it as your compass. Always take the harder option. Always push into discomfort. Choose pain in small doses to build your resistance to it.

📖

2) Get Rich

Making money isn’t evil, greedy, shallow, or vain.

Money isn’t your worth as a human being, or a substitute for love.

Money can represent freedom, safety, experience, generosity, attractiveness, power, or whatever you want.

Your biggest obstacle to getting rich is the harmful meaning you’ve attached to it.

Money is nothing more than a neutral. exchange of value.

Making money is proof you’re adding value to people’s lives. Aiming to get rich is aiming to be useful to the world.

It’s striving to do more for others. Serving more. Sharing more. Contributing more. The world rewards you for creating value.

To get rich, don’t think about what’s valuable to you. Think about what’s valuable to others.

Money doesn’t care about your race, gender, education, physique, family, or nationality. Anyone can be rich. The world is full of money.

So cap

Capture the value you create. Charge for what you do. It’s unsustainable to create value without asking for anything in return.

Refuse the comfortable addiction of a steady paycheck. Boldy jump on opportunities. Take risky action. Create your own business. The world is filled with ideas, yet so few take action and make them happen.

Better to be filled with action than ideas.

📖

3) Create

The most valuable real estate in the world is the graveyard.

There lie millions of half-written books, ideas never launched, and talents never developed. Most people die with everything still inside of them.

The way to live is to create. Die empty. Get every idea out of your head and into reality.

Calling yourself creative doesn’t make it true. All that matters is what you’ve launched.

When most people see modern art, they think, “I could do that!”

But they didn’t. That is the difference between consumer and creator.

Which would you rather be:

• Someone who hasn’t created anything in years because you’re so busy consuming?

• Someone who hasn’t consumed anything in years because you’re so busy creating?

Don’t wait for inspiration. Inspiration will never make the first move. She comes only when you’ve shown you don’t need her.

Suspend all judgment when creating your first draft. Just get to the end. It’s better to create something bad than nothing at all.

You can improve something bad. You can’t improve nothing.

Most of what you make will be fertilizer for the few that turn out great. But you won’t know which is which until afterward. Keep creating as much as you can.

✅ Actionable Advice:

1) Pursue pain:

• Take a cold shower.

• Do a hard workout.

• Pain will make you stronger whereas comfort will make you weaker.

2) To get rich change your beliefs around money:

• Think of making money as a reward for giving value to others.

3) Spend more time creating than consuming:

• Work on your art, business, book, or some other hobby.

💎 Weekly Gem:

Podcast: Calley Means & Casey Means, MD

This is one of the most important podcasts I’ve listened to this year.

Calley is a former food and pharmaceutical lobbyist who reveals the truth about how these two massive industries influence and bride doctors.

His sister, Casey, is a Stanford doctor who explains how doctors are never taught about the benefits of eating whole foods and exercise.

Together, they expose the healthcare industry and explain why trillions of dollars are spent on treating diseases instead of preventing them, how to reverse chronic diseases, and so much more.

This podcast will change the way you eat and view medicine forever.

Thank you for your support, read on everyone!

-Alex W.