💡 1 IDEA FROM ME
What if reducing the time it takes will still help you hit your goal?
I recently had a conversation with a friend who had started a newsletter in a niche he was knowledgeable about but he couldn’t keep it up consistently. The main reason? It had too many different sections (six in total) and therefore took more effort to write each week than he wanted to give to it.
Instead of quitting it altogether, because he has an audience and he has good things to say, we essentially looked at cutting it in half.
Instead of six sections of the newsletter, we cut it down to three. We took out the sections he didn’t care as much about and weren’t as interesting as the others anyway.
Here’s the point: we often quit things we shouldn’t because we think things have to look like something they don’t.
In my friend’s case, he was overwhelmed by all the weekly content he had to create for the newsletter, but he was the one who was putting pressure on himself to do all of it. His audience will be perfectly content with the shortened newsletter.
In the same way:
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Going to the gym two times a week is better than quitting because four isn’t manageable for you right now
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Practicing to improve a skill one evening a week is better than quitting because you can’t give it three evenings a week right now
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Going on a date with your spouse one time a month is better than not trying because kids and your season of life make anything more than that too hard right now
Every time you put in effort, it counts, even if it’s not as much effort as you envisioned when you started. Increasing a habit later, however small, is much easier than starting a new one from scratch.
So what sections of your “newsletter” do you need to cut to keep it going?
Doing less consistently is better than doing nothing at all.
📖 1 BRIEF BOOK REVIEW
The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy
This book was about the importance of committing to small but meaningful decisions/actions in your life. Over time, these small habits will eventually produce outsized results.
The book itself wasn’t bad, but there was virtually nothing new in it for me as I’ve read a lot in this genre (hence my weekly newsletter on productivity, habit building, and maximizing your life). Granted, this book was written in 2010, so before many of the other books in this genre that have been more recently written. However, other books cover similar ideas but in more depth (though again, many came along after this book). So it is hard for me to give this book a fair rating. It’s a decent book, it just isn’t novel in any way to me.
It is a quick and easy read, but I had a good idea of the principles that would be written in this book. If you haven’t read much about building better habits and hitting goals, this is a good one to start with. If you have, it probably isn’t worth the read.
7/10
1 SPIRITUAL INSIGHT 🙏
What is the best Bible translation to read? This is an often-asked question, especially for English speakers, since we have a lot of available translations.
So is one the best or does it matter which one we read?
Quickly, there are different interpretation styles, from ones that are more literal (i.e. word-for-word = you pick the English word that is the most literal translation of the Greek word, for example).
Or more thought-for-thought. Where while we do have an English word that is a more literal interpretation, it maybe it’s not a word most people ever use. Or it can make reading the phrase or sentence very wooden and choppy, so we use a word that conveys the same or thought idea, even though it’s not the literal translation.
For example, Matthew 5:3 in a more literal translation would read, “Blessed are the poor in Spirit.” In a more thought-for-thought translation it would read, “God blesses those who are poor in Spirit.” The thought-for-thought translation explicitly mentions God as the source of blessing. Though the literal translation doesn’t say explicitly that God is the source of blessing, that is what Jesus is implying in these words.
So some translations are more word-for-word, while some are more thought-for-thought, and others are somewhere in the middle of that spectrum.
So which is better?
The one that you read.
My encouragement? Just read the Word. I personally prefer a translation that is more word-for-word, though not rigidly so. But at the end of the day, pick one you enjoy and run with it.