Self-Development

Shamelessly inspired by this list of Julien Smith’s.

I seriously ramped up my reading habit in 2012, and this month I successfully stuck with my new goal of 25 pages a day.

The reading list I have slowly constructed over the years is a tome in itself, so I look forward to keeping this pace and making a significant dent in it during 2013.

Here are 24 takeaways from the 12 books I read this year:

How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie

1. Speaking in terms of the other person’s interests is a foolproof way to win them over.

2. This book should be required reading by every person, ever. Every year. For the rest of their lives.

The Flinch by Julien Smith

 

3. Live life so that your childhood self would be proud of you- not embarrassed.

4. Deliberately taking an ice cold shower is an extremely liberating and empowering feeling.

He’s Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt and Liz Tuccillo

 

5. There is no ‘semi-interested’ when it comes to dating. If a man is interested enough in a woman to go on a date with her, he will ask her out. End of story.

6. When a person that is stupidly successful in all areas of their life gives you a reading recommendation that seems exceedingly counter-intuitive, drop everything and go and read it.

The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

 

7. When you wake up in the morning, do your most important thing first– even before you check your email, look at your phone, or surf online.

8. Tim Ferriss has an incredible knack for making difficult things sound extremely simple and easy to accomplish.

Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch

 

9. If there is a God, I want it/him/Him/her/Her to be exactly like the one in this book.

10. The meaning of life isn’t to find yourself, it’s to create yourself. And every action during every second of every day you are in a moment of pure creation. 

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

 

11. How successful a child will be in competitive athletics is heavily influenced by their birth month.

12. Asian children “get” math better than kids in the Western world because their numbers are less syllables (allowing them to memorize more numbers in less time) and their counting system follows a more logical pattern.

The Art of Non-Conformity by Chris Guillebeau

 

13. Writing 1,000 words a day is a lot easier than it sounds, and pivotal in my success as a writer.

14. People, especially close friends and family, are going to think you are batshit insane for pursuing a location-independent lifestyle. It’s important to ignore these people (where appropriate).

Connected by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler

 

15. If you are overweight, you likely have many friends and family members who are overweight, too.

16. In a study of thousands of adults, 68% met their spouses by being introduced by someone they knew, while only 32% met via self-introduction. People rely on introductions to find prospective partners, as there is more information readily available about them from the get-go.

Strong Enough? by Mark Rippetoe

 

17. The closer an athlete is to their genetic potential, the slower their gains and progress will be.

18. Weightlifting gloves are silly devices promoted by fitness magazines that actually make it harder to grip a heavy and fast-moving barbell.

The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky

 

19. It’s remarkable how many people have uncannily similar high school experiences, yet at the time you feel that nobody could ever understand what you are going through.

20. There is no better word than ‘infinite’ to describe the feeling that cruising around with your friends while the windows are down and the music is up gives.

Inverting the Pyramid by Jonathan Wilson

 

21. Soccer tactics are derived from two components: formation (where the players are positioned in relation to each other) and style (how they move with and without the ball).

22. Some of the biggest tactical impacts in soccer came from several surprising sources: Scotland, Austria, and the Soviet Union.

Accidental Genius by Mark Levy 

 

23. Freewriting is much more than a way to produce a large volume of writing; it can be a way to come up with solutions to virtually any problem you face in life.

24. When I read, I need to start highlighting, underlining, and marking the hell out of my books: “There’s too much to read, learn, and do in this life, and unless a volume stands out as particularly worthy, you’ll probably only thumb through it again to consult your highlights.”

I am a to-do list junkie.

When I can check multiple items off of Wunderlist at the end of a busy day, I feel a rush of accomplishment.

The problem with populated to-do lists is that it is all too easy to simply complete all of the easiest tasks first.

While this gives an illusion of getting a large amount of work done, often it is solely the busy work we give ourselves, and not the most important (and often more difficult) things on the list.

A solution to this I learned from reading The 4-Hour Workweek is to do my single most important task first thing in the morning.

Since returning to Ohio, every morning before checking email or social media, I sit down at my laptop and write 1000 words. I also leave my phone off in another room to avoid that distraction as well.

By knocking out the most important items on the agenda prior to doing anything else, it sets a great tone for the rest of the day and gets rid of the “Man, I really need to. . .”s. There is also something liberating about not checking email or social media the second I awake.

So far, the experiment has gone great and I have produced more content in a single week than ever before. In addition to writing more blog content, I am also currently writing an e-book, and for the first time in my life I can actually picture one of the many grandiose ideas I’ve had becoming a reality.

What do you, or can you start doing first thing in the morning?

“A bad hair cut is two people’s shame”

-Danish proverb

—

Call it DIY, call it punk rock, but I haven’t received a haircut from a barber or stylist in over a year.

The obvious benefit of this is of course, saving money. Being someone who especially enjoys the feeling of “new haircut confidence”, I began to place more and more value on feeling and looking my best, and it came to a point where I was wanting to get a trim every two-to-three weeks.

Thankfully I learned from a college roommate that cutting my own hair was indeed an option. Back then this just meant a cheap and unfashionable (on me) buzz or clipper cut, but especially when I was trying to get into the CrossFit gym at the campus ROTC detachment, it was a better option that having a mop on my head.

While this once daunting task saves me an inestimable amount annually, the real value was one that came rather unexpectedly to me.

Just as you would appreciate a physical object manifested out of your own handiwork- a chair, piece of art, or even a meal- exponentially more, the same applies to me when I cut my own hair.

More than just a renewal of confidence, to me it has become a source of pride and and self-expression.

Granted, I do style my hair short and messy, and can’t guarantee I’d be saying the same things if I wore a longer style. But, as my skills have improved and I have learned some of the finer points of barbering- blending, feathering, and cutting bangs vertically, not straight across- it has become an unusual creative outlet.

The product is also consistently and considerably better than the majority of haircuts I have received from professionals. If you screw it up- which inevitably happens now and again- you have no one to blame but yourself.

But just as confidence can fade as the hair lengthens, so do the mistakes you make. Then soon enough, you get to try again.

A recent conversation with a friend broached the subject of how a mutual friend’s knowledge of sports, food, politics- everything, really- was intimidating.

We all know this person. The sponges. We all desire (or have desired) to be this person.

For as long as I can remember, I have been a sports fan. Over time, this slowly evolved into me being the “sports guy” of my group of friends. If, at a high school football game someone I was with had a question about the rules or situation, I was the “go-to” person for an explanation.

Unknowingly, I started to put tremendous pressure on myself to know everything. The shame of saying that I simply didn’t know an answer was too much to handle for my fragile teenage ego.

I soon became addicted in trying to absorb every little stat and piece of trivia I could find. My RSS feed was averaging more than 500 new posts a day, and I was determined to read them all. Essentially, I had sports FOMO.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, sports- something I had loved since kindergarten- became a chore. I was so dutiful in trying to give these blogs my undivided attention that I refused to look at posts if I was in a state of mind incapable of doing anything more than just skimming the headlines.

Through this, I hoarded a mass of (relatively) useless information that left me incapable of having a casual conversation about sports with virtually anyone. Every chat turned into a competition in my head to try and “outwit” the other person with a much more poignant fact or observation (which really weren’t observations at all, just lines from blogs I had committed to short-term memory as “ammo”). I needed to make my role, my archetype, clear to all-comers.

The low point of this was when my brother- the person that had nurtured my love for sports to begin with and taught me much of what I know- told me the most hurtful thing someone striving to having all the answers could hear:

“You seriously have no clue what you are talking about. Some people just have “it” to talk sports- you clearly don’t. I am embarrassed, I thought Dad and I would have taught you better.”

To be fair, in this argument I was attempting to cite advanced sabermetrics way over my head, again, an attempt to hold dominion over the discussion and prove myself to possess superior knowledge. Nevertheless, it was crushing. I even remember trying to confide in friends about this, but they didn’t and couldn’t understand. It was just sports, after all.

In retrospect, all I really wanted was to just connect with people. I looked to sports to be my facilitator in this arena, and with the idea put in my head that I didn’t have it, I was lost.

But I didn’t know what else to do. So I did the only thing I knew how- I tried even harder to learn it all.
—
Fast forward- this pressure I put on myself became too much for me to continue. And frankly, I became too busy to even try and read all of the sites I was attempting to on a daily basis.

In my earliest foray into minimalism (although I had no knowledge of this term or lifestyle at the time), I began to prune my Google Reader subscriptions. And it felt really, really good. There were still tinges of embarrassment and guilt when I didn’t have an answer or had no brilliant point to make, but ultimately this allowed me to focus on the few sports and teams that I genuinely cared about.

I soon realized I didn’t even want to know most of the information I was trying to devour daily. I was learning for someone other than me.
—
Now I work in a professional sports office, and am surrounded by some absolutely brilliant people that have steel traps for names, events, and numbers. And it has been one of the most refreshing realizations of my life accepting that I am not one of them.

The important things we remember. It is said we can recall only a small percentage of what we read, which initially makes reading sound like an incredibly inefficient waste of time. However, that fraction we do remember becomes a part of us as more than just a fact to recite, but as an idea to share.

Typically, these small anecdotes take us further and bring in more enjoyment than being an encyclopedia of assorted trivia ever would.

I became a much more enjoyable person to talk with about sports (or anything) when I became honest with myself and others about what I did and didn’t know.

Strangely, admitting when I don’t know something often feels better than knowing the damn thing in the first place.

After I graduated college in June 2011, I applied to around 150 jobs in the sports industry. Of these, I landed around 20-25 phone interviews (and one on Skype).

As you can imagine, these got very repetitive very quickly, however, my confidence became extremely high as the process became routine to me.

My least favorite question I encountered over and over again without a doubt was, “What are your goals? “Where do you see yourself in 5 years? 10 years?”

Of course the ‘company’ line I threw out was always something like “I aspire to be a public relations manager for a college athletic department or professional franchise, and eventually a director of communications.”

In reality though, I had no idea, and didn’t really want to have one. So I started to say so in interviews. While some were turned off and couldn’t grasp the concept, I believe the honesty in my answer ultimately helped land me my internship with Major League Soccer in New York.

Setting goals that far in advance, while admirable in certain respects if completed, carry the danger of becoming self-fulfilling prophecies. That is, something that requires being fulfilled merely for the sake of doing so, even it no longer aligns with a person’s true values or desires. If I set a goal of where I want to be in five years, and when the time comes I am not at that point, I have failed right?

Long-term goals can become distracting and limit personal growth. Our interest, motives, and sometimes even our values change as we age and learn. Having a concrete goal in the distance limits these changes, giving us tunnel vision at a time when we should have our head on a swivel to all the other opportunities around us.

While it’s certainly not wrong to have a few “Someday, I want to. . .”s- hell, my bucket list is full of them- when it comes to your career, it makes much more sense to take things one day at a time and let your life evolve more organically.

Ideally, our short term, more present-minded goals will take care of getting us to where we want to be some time down the road, even if we don’t know exactly where that may be.

The man should shape the goal, not the other way around.