TWH#S13: What I Read This Week

The Sunday Edition #13

Welcome to another TWH Sunday Edition. 👋

Iterating again on the format as per Alex Ewerlöf’s comment to last week’s edition. Alex is a fellow Substack writer and I recommend checking out his newsletter, too:

Meanwhile, here are my top five reads of the past week. I hope you enjoy them. And if that’s the case, please consider hitting the ❤️ button and sharing this issue. It’d much appreciated. 🙂

(Total reading time: 14 min)

✍️ Stop trying to change your habits and start playing with Deliberate Patterns instead

(Sam Spurlin • 5 min read)

So much has been written about habit change and creation that when something comes along challenging that being the holy grail, I perk up. I love Sam’s “deliberate patterns” because they are a clear and easy to implement way to intentionally experiment in small ways with different things in your life. Some may turn into habits, but the goal is to learn more about yourself and what works for you.

“The reason non-habit Deliberate Patterns are worth exploring is because every time you try one you learn more about yourself. They are little tests, challenges, or inquiries that knock you a little bit off of equilibrium. They poke you. And in that poking you have an opportunity to watch how you respond.”

✍️ Adaptive Moves: Small Changes, Big Results

(Aaron Shields • 2 min read)

I read the late Ed Schein’s book “Humble Consulting” a couple of years ago and the concept of “adaptive moves” stuck with me. It’s another example of the complexity-conscious mindset of small steps to explore and learn, rather than big-bang, high-risk change. This short article is a good primer on it.

“In doing so, you get to constantly iterate: you make a move and analyze the results. Eventually, all these small moves will add up to a big response. This will put you in a better position to navigate the crisis than if you just tried to implement a response from the start and hoped that the original plan worked perfectly.”

✍️ The neurochemicals of productivity and procrastination

(Anne-Laure Le Cunff • 2 min read)

The more I learn about neuroscience and how our brain works, the more bewildered I get about how we work against it. But it doesn’t have to be that way, as long as we get curious, learn, and bridge our knowledge gaps. Anne-Laure Le Cunff explains in simple terms, with good examples, the neuroscience of individual productivity—and the roles fun, fear, and focus play in it.

“Understanding these mechanisms won’t magically allow you to achieve your goals, but it will help you be kinder to yourself when things don’t seem to go as planned, and you struggle to focus on your goals.”

✍️ The Need to Read

(Paul Graham • 2 min read)

This timeless short-piece by Paul Graham argues for the deep value of reading, writing, and thinking—and how these all relate to each other. And it does so through what is a top example (for me, anyway) of what great, concise writing looks like.

“But if you need to solve a complicated, ill-defined problem, it will almost always help to write about it. Which in turn means that someone who's not good at writing will almost always be at a disadvantage in solving such problems. You can't think well without writing well, and you can't write well without reading well.”

✍️ How I extract maximum value from non-fiction books

(Kahlil Lechelt • 3 min read)

Connected to Graham’s article above, Kahlil Lechelt has recently launched a management-centric newsletter and this week’s issue was precisely about how to increase the value you get from reading non-fiction. I still have FOMO that compels me to finish books cover-to-cover. But I no longer have a problem buying books and not reading them for years. Changing how you relate to books is, in my opinion, essential, and Kahlil’s thoughts here are helpful for that.

“Non-fiction books are still one of the best sources of knowledge available. They don't cost much and often contain decades of wisdom in compressed form.

Some of them have a super high density of substance and information per page; some have a very low density and come with tons of fluff; but many of them, with or without fluff, contain ideas that could be life-changing for you.

You just don't know which one.”

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That’s it for this week’s Sunday Edition. Thanks for reading! Until the next edition, I wish you a great week ahead. 🙌