This Week’s BIG Idea
It’s that time of the year again when I need to order new stationery. I used to buy new items as needed, but some have been hard to find locally. When researching everything I needed, I considered saving money by buying the cheapest items I could find, but I realized something. Buying the right tools sends a clear message about the work that you do. If you’re willing to spend money on the right tools, you’re implying that your work matters and that you mean business. I could get cheaper notebooks and pens than the ones I’m using now, but implicitly, I’m letting myself be cheap and haphazard in my work and that’s not what I want to do.
The setup that I use is nothing special. I have three notebooks: a cheap and disposable spiral notebook where I summarize books, a lined Moleskine-like notebook for journaling, and a dotted Moleskine-like notebook for bullet journaling. In terms of pens, I use Sharpie S-Gels for my bullet journal and a Parker-style pen for everything else. As for my digital setup, I have a Kindle Basic 2019 and a Windows PC. The setup isn’t fancy, but it works. Whenever I’m thinking about adding or replacing something, I spend hours doing it. After all, why would you fix something that’s not broken? I could upgrade to a better Kindle, but the functionality won’t change. I could get more expensive pens, but the return on investment is marginal.
Beginners spend too much time thinking about the tools they use. They want to find the perfect pen or notebook, but that’s not what you need. Those are things that are distracting you from doing the thing in question. At first, you just have to start and you’ll figure out what the right tools are later, once you’ve been using those tools for dozens of hours. So what are you waiting for?
What I’m Working on
I just posted a summary of Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity. I wanted to read the book since Newport announced it and I’m glad there’s a summary of it on the site.
What I’m Listening to
How to Launch a Million-Dollar Business This Weekend: in this episode of The Tim Ferris Show, Tim interviews Noah Kagan. Although the main topic they discuss is Kagan’s new book Million Dollar Weekend, the interview also goes to some unexpected and quite philosophical places.
What I’m Reading
The Gap and the Gain by Dan Sullivan: this was one of the first books I downloaded on my Kindle, but I never read it. Now that I finally gave this book a chance, I’m glad I did. In The Gap and the Gain, Dan Sullivan encourages people to measure themselves against themselves rather than against an external ideal. As simple as that idea sounds, it’s revolutionary because it can be the difference between happiness and unhappiness.
What I’m Watching
Shogun: it’s been months since I watched a television show. While I was doing research for this very article, I found out about Shogun, a new show on Hulu. As soon as I read the description, it was right up my alley. The show is set in 1600s Japan when a European ship is found in a fishing village. As of this writing, I only watched the first episode, but I liked it enough to watch at least one more. I’ve wanted to learn more about Japanese history but haven’t found the right book yet. In the meantime, I’ll give this show a chance.
This Week’s Quote
“One day, you and everyone you love will die. And beyond a small group of people for an extremely brief period of time, little of what you say or do will ever matter. This is the Uncomfortable Truth of life. And everything you think or do is but an elaborate avoidance of it. We are inconsequential cosmic dust, bumping and milling about on a tiny blue speck. We imagine our own importance. We invent our purpose—we are nothing.”
Mark Manson
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