The Commonplace Book
I’ve been keeping a “Commonplace Book” for a decade or so. Whenever I come across something I like or want to remember, I pop it in. Roughly 85% of stuff in the pod comes from my CB.
It used to be physical but now it’s digital. I use Readwise as a quick way to save anything digital that I read and like (web or kindle). Everything not from a book or article gets written down in a giant, scrolling Notion doc.
I look through the Notion doc a few times a week and set up Readwise to send me an email with a couple of random passages I’ve highlighted each morning.
I can’t recommend this enough.
As an easy way to start, here are a few things from the top of my CB:
(If you download Readwise and add the Chrome extension, you can highlight any of these you like and click “Add to Readwise” and boom — your CB is started.)
The Munger Operating System: How to Live a Life That Really Works, Charlie Munger
It’s such a simple idea. It’s the golden rule so to speak: You want to deliver to the world what you would buy if you were on the other end. There is no ethos, in my opinion, that is better for any lawyer or any other person to have. By and large the people who have this ethos win in life and they don’t win just money, not just honors. They win the respect, the deserved trust of the people they deal with, and there is huge pleasure in life to be obtained from getting deserved trust.
How to Get Startup Ideas, Paul Graham
The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing.
Expectations Debt, Morgan Housel
An asset you don’t deserve can quickly become a liability.
You Have No Idea How Much Better You Can Feel, Nat Eliason
Do things you think are stupid but other people swear by. Maybe you’re the stupid one.
40 Lessons, Nat Eliason
Bad things happen fast, good things happen slowly.
Beware of shadow careers. This idea comes from Steven Pressfield: “Sometimes, when we’re terrified of embracing our true calling, we’ll pursue a shadow calling instead. The shadow career is a metaphor for our real career. Its shape is similar, its contours feel tantalizingly the same. But a shadow career entails no real risk. If we fail at a shadow career, the consequences are meaningless to us.”
You only need to make a few great decisions per year. You only need to get a few big things right each year and follow through on them. Your life will be shaped by surprisingly few big choices.
3-2-1: Losing time, perspective, and a more poetic way to say I love you, James Clear
“The most invisible form of wasted time is doing a good job on an unimportant task.”
The Dip, Seth Godin
People don’t have a lot of time and don’t want to take a lot of risks.