Good evening everyone! Happy Friday, here is a photo of me with the two books I am reading right now. By design, ‘The Daily Stoic’ is going to take me a lot longer to get through because it’s a page a day for 366 days!
The school of life
Think of books as the textbooks that you get given for the school of life.
Every aspect of our entire existence has been covered in a text somewhere.
As of 2010, Google says that there is an estimated 129,864,880 books circulating in existence.
If you want to:
learn something new
solve a problem or find a solution
immerse yourself in a fictional world
There will be a book out there somewhere for you to satisfy any one of those needs.
The chances are that somebody else has had the same problem as you, and chances are that they probably wrote an answer for it too!
You are missing out so much if you don’t read
Seriously.
I know that in my case, I didn’t read out of choice from Y6 until Y13, so 7 years! Obviously, I read texts and books in school but that was only because I had to and I didn’t have any real interest in any of it (other than Lord of the Flies, that was a banger)!
In Y13, I wanted to start reading books about economics as I felt that a wider understanding of the subject would give me an advantage during my exams.
I begun to read before I went to sleep in the evening, as opposed to just doom scrolling on TikTok and it reminded me why reading is so god damn important.
Think of it this way. I watched a podcast featuring Luke Belmar and he spoke about how books are the only opportunity we have as humans to live multiple lives.
You can be a roman emperor (if you want)
Some of the greatest minds and the most powerful figures on the planet have spent their time putting all of their knowledge and experience into a book that you can pay £10.99 and get delivered to your door LITERALLY THE NEXT DAY.
How insane is that?
In one of the books I am reading, ‘The Daily Stoic’, a lot of the daily lessons are taken from Marcus Aurelius’s personal diary. This man was the Emperor of Rome, the most powerful man on the planet and you can read his lessons and his philosophy on how to live life.
If you don’t know about Marcus & the stoics, I suggest you read this:
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​What is Stoicism & who are the Stoics?​
2000 years later and the teachings are applicable now more than ever!
What I have read this year
So, recently I have been reading a lot more but in he past year I have read (in order):
‘50 ideas you really need to know - Capitalism’ by Jonathan Portes
‘Capitalism, alone’ by Branko Milanovic
‘12 Rules for Life’ by Dr Jordan B. Peterson'
‘48 Laws of Power’ by Robert Greene
‘How to talk to anyone’ by Leil Lowndes
‘Atomic Habits’ by James Clear
‘The ape who understood the universe’ by Steve Stewart-Williams
‘The power of your subconscious mind’ by Dr Joseph Murphy
‘The Compound Effect’ by Darren Hardy
‘The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari’ by Robin Sharma (current)
‘The Daily Stoic’ by Ryan Holiday (current)
I would say they are all good reads, but an absolute MUST READ for me is ‘The Power of Your Subconscious Mind".
Couple this with the one page a day of ‘The Daily Stoic’ and watch where you are in a months time.
What can you take from this & where you can find your next book
If you are an evening doom scroller, you gotta pay attention and swap that 30 / 45 minutes of scrolling with a book. You will:
sleep better because of less blue light
get smarter
improve your memory
improve your focus
improve your communication skills vicariously
and so much more.
No matter who you are, you will have a subject or an area that you are interested in. It can literally be anything at all.
Order a book, any book. Start reading every day, even if it is just one page, it does not matter!
Anyway, who doesn’t want to be smarter and have a better understanding of the world we live in?
If you don’t want to take my advice, that is fine. Here’s Chris Williamson’s reading list that has 100 life changing books on. That might be a good place for you to start!
​His Reading List & Newsletter!​
That is all for today! CM x