This Week’s BIG Idea
One of the mental frameworks I’ve benefitted from time and time again is the 80/20 principle also known as the Pareto principle. I first read about it in The 4-Hour Workweek, but the Pareto principle kept coming back in different books. The idea is that we get eighty percent of the results from twenty percent of the efforts and this 80/20 relationship can be seen in numerous examples. Since I just posted the 100th book summary on the site, I thought it would be a fun exercise to see which twenty books will lead to eighty percent of knowledge.
This is what the Pareto principle looks like in practice:
- The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
- The 5 Love Languages by Gary Chapman
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson
- Anything You Want by Derek Sivers
- Atomic Habits by James Clear
- Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte
- The Bullet Journal Method by Ryder Carroll
- The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
- Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
- Essentialism by Greg McKeown
- Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
- Ikigai by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles
- The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo
- Models by Mark Manson
- The ONE Thing by Gary Keller
- Show Your Work by Austin Kleon
- The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
- The Third Door by Alex Banayan
- Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker
- Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin
What I’m Working on
I’ve been thinking about migrating my notes from Notion to Google Keep. This is a time-consuming task, but there’s a reason for this: I’d like to have all of my notes at my disposal even when I don’t have access to an internet connection. I’m usually connected to the internet, but on some occasions where I’m not, I don’t have access to my notes. This means that I can’t access my list of quotes, movies, books, and purchases, among many others. Best-case scenario, I can’t pick a movie to watch later in the evening, but worst-case scenario, I can’t resurface a quote that I need for an article. This might take a couple of days, but I’m considering moving all of my notes so that I can access them whenever I want.
What I’m Listening to
Although I’m not subscribed to the Huberman Lab podcast yet, I’ve been meaning to listen to this episode ever since it came out. In it, Huberman interviews Tim Ferriss and they discuss a wide range of topics.
What I’m Reading
- Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke: In this book, former professional poker player Annie Duke encourages you to see decisions as bets. This involves separating decisions from their outcomes. Theoretically, you can make good decisions and get bad results or make bad decisions and get good results. Seeing decisions as bets allows us to get comfortable with not knowing, as well as being more objective. If you’re looking for a book on decision-making, this is one of the best ones I’ve read so far.
What I’m Watching
Every Frame a Painting is my favorite YouTube channel and the fact that new videos are no longer released makes me sad. That said, I rediscover the channel every few months and obsess over it. Most people can tell the difference between a great movie and a bad one, but they can’t articulate why. Every Frame a Painting gives you the tools to do so. For those unfamiliar, the no-long supported channel focused on essays that deconstructed a specific scene from a movie.
This Week’s Quote
“Summer will end soon enough, and childhood as well.”
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
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