October 2024

Hey there –

It always seems to me that the official start of seasons, don’t line up with the actual feeling of the seasons. To me, summer starts in May once school is out, not on June 21 — by then summer is half over, in my mind. And winter starts sometime around the end of November – maybe around Thanksgiving – when it starts to get cold and people put up their Christmas decorations – not December 21!

However, fall started on 9/21 – and that seems about right. Even though we’re still having some really hot days – football is on TV, we’re drinking pumpkin spice coffee, and now we’re in October – it seems like fall.

I do wish fall lasted a little longer – it’s a great season. But speaking of the feeling of the seasons, fall seems to get shortchanged a bit. Like I mentioned, winter starts in just a month and a half! 😀 …to me anyways.

📕Books I finished reading

The Last Rung on the Ladder by Stephen King ★★★★☆ How short can a book be to still be considered a book? Does 10 pages still count? 🙂 One of my daughters brought this home and said she read it in school. It was good and worth the short read and by the end you can tell at the end that Stephen King wrote it.

“So I didn’t call. And I had no one I could tell. . . a thing like that letter, it’s too personal to tell anyone except a wife or a very close friend. I haven’t made many close friends in the last few years, and my wife Helen and I divorced in 1971. What we exchange now are Christmas cards. How are you? How’s the job? Have a Happy New Year.”

The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom ★★★★★ Mitch Albom is one of my guilty pleasures. I like these easy-to-read simple, but emotional, books. This is a re-read for me and one of my favorites.

“Love, like rain, can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive.”

Finding Ultra by Rich Roll ★★★★☆ I listened to this as an audiobook. The Foreword, the Preface, and the first Chapter were all very good and pulled you into his story. The story was good and there were some nuggets of wisdom along the way. The audiobook ends with Rich trying to entice you to follow your dreams and get you motivated to “sing your song”.

“I crested a small hill to see a fellow runner coming my way. The first person I’d seen all morning. As he passed, he gave me a quick nod and a gentle thumbs up. There was just something about this tiny gesture that was profound. It was barely noticeable yet, it was everything. Some kind of message from above, perhaps, touching my soul. It let me know, not just that I’d be okay, but that I was on the right track. But in fact, this wasn’t just a run, it was the beginning of a new life.”

Deep Work by Cal Newport ★★★★☆ Another re-read… I wanted to see if it was as good as I remembered it. It was. And it inspired me to want really want to take notes on the books I’m reading. I have often taken notes in the past – but once I’m done reading, they go into the book and back on the shelf – never to be looked at again. Now I’m developing a system for not only writing them, but storing them, and hopefully referencing them.

“The deep life, of course, is not for everyone. It requires hard work and drastic changes to your habits. For many there’s a comfort in the artificial busyness of rapid e-mail messaging and social media posturing, while the deep life demands that you leave much of that behind. There’s also an uneasiness that surrounds any effort to produce the best things you’re capable of producing, as this forces you to confront the possibility that your best is not (yet) that good. It’s safer to comment on our culture than to step into the Rooseveltian ring and attempt to wrestle…”

🎸Music I’ve been listening to

S P E Y S I D E by Bon Iver I’m not the biggest Bon Iver fan out there… but I tend to listen to a lot of what I call, emo music — not sure if that’s the correct term or not – but sad, acoustic songs – and his/their(?) first album For Emma, Forever Ago fits that bill very well. Some of their other albums, not so much. But, I read a YouTube comment on the official S P E Y S I D E video that read, “Bro went back to the cabin” – and that made a lot of sense to me, given that For Emma, Forever Ago was written in a cabin in Wisconsin and this song certainly likens back to that first album.

🎧Podcast episodes I thought were interesting

Seth Godin on Discovering True Productivity and Significance in Modern Workplaces, Beyond The To-Do List It had been awhile since I read or listened to anything from Seth Godin, and this was a good refresher. Like the interviewer mentioned, a lot of his current book, The Song of Significance, as well as this interview echoes his other book Linchpin… where if you do great work and treat your work as art and as a craft and then you’ll become irreplaceable.

🎥Videos I thought were worth watching

The BON IVER Iceberg Explained, Alex’s Head After listening to the new single, S P E Y S I D E (see above), I went down a Bon Iver rabbit hole a bit – but this one video seemed to satisfy most of my questions. I always knew that I pronounced their name incorrectly, but this video did a great job of explaining where the name originated, and much much more.

🎬 My new YouTube videos (September)

🖋 Quote I’ve been thinking about

“That idea that we can become passionate about our work as opposed to expecting our work to give us passion makes us way more flexible, gives us way more leverage, allows us to move forward.”

– Seth Godin, How to Be A Linchpin on Impact Theory