Holiday Season Recommended Reading 2019
I am a huge advocate of Owning your Time off – this festive season, ditch the socials and rather energise, inspire and reinvigorate yourself with some good quality reading. Be it audio books, Kindle or old faithful paper books.
I want to share with you some of my favourite books over 2019 with some key nuggets I took away from them. This list is quite diverse so hoping there is something that resonates with you or you can even challenge yourself to read something a little outside of your normal comfort zone.
Chase Jarvis is an award winning artist, entrepreneur and an extremely influential photographer.
Chase has created ads for Nike, Apple, Red Bull, received an Emmy nomination for his documentary Portrait of a City. Chase is the founder of CreativeLive where more than 10 million students learn various creative skills. He is also the author of Creative Calling, a new book about being creative and finding your calling.
Key insights from the book:
‘Creativity is the process of learning to trust oneself. When pure creativity is flowing through you, judgment can’t grab hold. It’s impossible. Everything you need is inside you right now.’
‘Creators create. Action is identity. You become what you do. You don’t need permission from anybody to call yourself a writer, entrepreneur, or musician. You just need to write, build a business, or make music. You’ve got to do the verb to be the noun.’
‘Be the hero of your own life. Walk your own path. When obstacles arise, go over, under, or around them. When you lose your way, listen for the call. Your heart will always lead you.’
‘One of the simplest and most effective ways to get unstuck and start making the best work of your life is to let go of all the negative labels you’ve attached to yourself.’
‘Who wants to be an extra in someone else’s movie?’
‘Forget better or even different. Think only. There’s only one of you. Only you have lived your life. Only you have your point of view. Figure out how to share it with the rest of us. Your point of view is the highest value you can bring. Once you can create work with a distinctive and recognizable personal style over and over again, the world will unlock itself.’
‘Little did I know at the time that I was developing a rare but powerful tool: quitting stuff I wasn’t meant to do. This is a tool you must wield to create the life you want.’
‘Your job is to figure out which behaviours feed your soul and which leave you running on empty.’
‘Pursuing small, imperfect, playful habits today—having a regular creative practice—is far more important than chasing a long list of perfect things you want to create tomorrow.’
‘What you’re really struggling with is the willingness to value as-yet-unmade work.’
‘The best antidote to negative thinking is creative doing.’
David Goggins is an American ultramarathon runner, ultra-distance cyclist, triathlete, motivational speaker and author. He is a retired United States Navy SEAL and former United States Air Force Tactical Air Control Party member who served in the War in Afghanistan and the Iraq War.
Key insights from the book:
‘But the truth is we all make habitual, self-limiting choices. It’s as natural as a sunset and as fundamental as gravity. It’s how our brains are wired, which is why motivation is crap.’
‘The reason it’s important to push hardest when you want to quit the most is because it helps you callous your mind. It’s the same reason why you have to do your best work when you are the least motivated. Physical challenges strengthen my mind so I’m ready for whatever life throws at me, and it will do the same for you.’
‘Whenever I could claim a small victory, I would take it because we all need that, and very few of us take the time to celebrate our successes. Sure, in the moment, we might enjoy them, but do we ever look back on them and feel that win again and again?’
‘It’s not the external voice that will break you down. It’s what you tell yourself that matters. The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself. You wake up with them, you walk around with them, you go to bed with them, and eventually you act on them. Whether they be good or bad.’
‘We are all our own worst haters and doubters because self doubt is a natural reaction to any bold attempt to change your life for the better. You can’t stop it from blooming in your brain, but you can neutralize it, and all the other external chatter by asking, What if? It silences negativity. It’s a reminder that you don’t really know what you’re capable of until you put everything you’ve got on the line.’
In The Surrender Experiment: My Journey into Life’s Perfection, Singer tells his extraordinary story of what happened when after a deep spiritual awakening in his twenties, he decided to no longer let his personal fears and desires dictate his life but to simply surrender to what life had in store. This radical decision to follow life’s flow led Singer to both the pinnacle of success and the brink of disaster.
In The Surrender Experiment, Singer leads readers through a life filled with a seemingly miraculous flow of events. From his years as a young spiritual seeker living alone in the woods, to his amazing success as a self‐taught computer programmer and corporate CEO, to a massive raid by the FBI that led to unfounded accusations by the U.S. government, Singer leaves no part of his story untold.
Key insights from the book:
‘What would happen if we respected the flow of life and used our free will to participate in what’s unfolding, instead of fighting it?’
‘Am I better off making up an alternate reality in my mind and then fighting with reality to make it be my way, or am I better off letting go of what I want and serving the same forces of reality that managed to create the entire perfection of the universe around me?’
‘This experiment would not be about dropping out of life; it would be about leaping into life to live in a place where we are no longer controlled by our personal fears and desires.’
‘But surrender did give me clarity in one essential area: my personal preferences of like and dislike were not going to guide my life. By surrendering the hold those powerful forces had on me, I was allowing my life to be guided by a much more powerful force, life itself. By that stage of my growth, I could see that the practice of surrender was actually done in two, very distinct steps: first, you let go of the personal reactions of like and dislike that form inside your mind and heart; and second, with the resultant sense of clarity, you simply look to see what is being asked of you by the situation unfolding in front of you.’
‘My formula for success was very simple: Do whatever is put in front of you with all your heart and soul without regard for personal results. Do the work as though it were given to you by the universe itself—because it was.’
‘Challenging situations create the force needed to bring about change. The problem is that we generally use all the stirred-up energy intended to bring about change, to resist change.’
‘Life was moulding me each day to become who I needed to be in order to handle tomorrow’s tasks. All I had to do was let go and not resist the process.’
No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviours that lead to remarkable results.
Key insights from the book:
‘Making a choice that is 1 percent better or 1 percent worse seems insignificant in the moment, but over the span of moments that make up a lifetime these choices determine the difference between who you are and who you could be.’
‘Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy.’
‘The implicit assumption behind any goal is this: “Once I reach my goal, then I’ll be happy.” The problem with a goals-first mentality is that you’re continually putting happiness off until the next milestone.’
‘It’s hard to change your habits if you never change the underlying beliefs that led to your past behaviour. You have a new goal and a new plan, but you haven’t changed who you are.’
‘There are three levels of change: outcome change, process change, and identity change. The most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become. Your identity emerges out of your habits.’
‘Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.’
‘Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting temptation is an ineffective strategy.’
‘Your actions reveal how badly you want something. If you keep saying something is a priority but you never act on it, then you don’t really want it. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motivations.’
The first sleep book by a leading scientific expert—Professor Matthew Walker, Director of UC Berkeley’s Sleep and Neuroimaging Lab—reveals his ground-breaking exploration of sleep, explaining how we can harness its transformative power to change our lives for the better.
‘Sleep is the single most effective thing we can do to reset our brain and body health each day—Mother Nature’s best effort yet.’
‘Caffeine has an average half-life of five to seven hours. Let’s say that you have a cup of coffee after your evening dinner, around 7: 30 p.m. This means that by 1: 30 a.m., 50 percent of that caffeine may still be active and circulating throughout your brain tissue. In other words, by 1: 30 a.m., you’re only halfway to completing the job of cleansing your brain of the caffeine you drank after dinner.’
‘Other questions that can draw out signs of insufficient sleep are: If you didn’t set an alarm clock, would you sleep past that time? (If so, you need more sleep than you are giving yourself.) Do you find yourself at your computer screen reading and then rereading (and perhaps rereading again) the same sentence? (This is often a sign of a fatigued, under-slept brain.)’
‘Sleep has proven itself time and again as a memory aid: both before learning, to prepare your brain for initially making new memories, and after learning, to cement those memories and prevent forgetting.’
‘Sleep six hours or less and you are short-changing the brain of a learning restoration benefit.’
‘Practice does not make perfect. It is practice, followed by a night of sleep that leads to perfection.’
‘Sleep is not like a credit system or the bank. The brain can never recover all the sleep it has been deprived of. We cannot accumulate a debt without penalty, nor can we repay that sleep debt at a later time.’
‘Stick to a sleep schedule. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day. As creatures of habit, people have a hard time adjusting to changes in sleep patterns. Sleeping later on weekends won’t fully make up for a lack of sleep during the week and will make it harder to wake up early on Monday morning.’
‘Set an alarm for bedtime. Often we set an alarm for when it’s time to wake up but fail to do so for when it’s time to go to sleep.’
‘Avoid alcoholic drinks before bed. Having a nightcap or alcoholic beverage before sleep may help you relax, but heavy use robs you of REM sleep, keeping you in the lighter stages of sleep. Heavy alcohol ingestion also may contribute to impairment in breathing at night. You also tend to wake up in the middle of the night when the effects of the alcohol have worn off.’
‘Don’t lie in bed awake. If you find yourself still awake after staying in bed for more than twenty minutes or if you are starting to feel anxious or worried, get up and do some relaxing activity until you feel sleepy. The anxiety of not being able to sleep can make it harder to fall asleep.’
So there they are – my top 5 picks of 2019. Wishing you a restful and recharging festive season. Please take this opportunity to give yourself some special and much needed ‘me time’.
Warm wishes
Lori