Read Me, Baby, One More Time

Why you shouldn't always look for new content

Hey Life Examiners - I know you were all eagerly awaiting a post last week so I’d like to apologize for letting you down. I’ve been locked in on Write of Passage, learning from the best, getting to meticulously flesh out ideas and really spend the requisite time to write a certified banger. Believe me, you won’t be disappointed.

In the meantime, I want to give you something to noodle on.

Weekly Wonderings and Wisdom

The content we consume be it books, blogs, or tweets - all play a huge part in how we think. How we think shapes how we perceive the world. And how we perceive the world affects who we are.

You are what you read.

But there’s an incomprehensibly large amount of content out there. And we often end up reading whatever our friends recommend or we see on our feed without really giving the content selection process the attention it deserves.

I’ve talked about our recency bias and how we should read more things by dead people.

Yet there’s another important, often neglected portion of content.

And we don’t consider it because we’ve already read it.

Yes, that’s me telling you to go reread something. It could be a chapter in a book, a blog post, or a tweet thread but chances are there are a dozen or so pieces that come to mind that have made an outsized impact on your life. The kind that resonates with your very soul. That speaks to you as if the writer has been watching your life unfold from on high and bestowed upon you the precise words you needed to hear at that exact moment.

You may think, well, what’s the point I already know everything in it.

And to that, I say, yeah but read it again.

Because even if you do remember all the concepts, it’s not the intellectual understanding worth revisiting but how it made you feel. Think back to the moment you finished when you were sitting there in awe with your mind blown by some fresh perspective or inspiration to enact change in your life. It’s that we want to reignite.

I bring this up because I recently thought back to a blog post I read years ago (Rick and Morty and the Meaning of Life, even if you don’t watch the show, give it a read). I’ve since recommended hundreds of times but I hadn’t thought to read it again.

I generally remembered where it was going with every idea but I still felt that same fire being lit inside me, that same excitement to go out and move through the world with this knowledge top of mind.

It’s in that feeling where the value in reading lies, not merely the words themselves.

Thought of the day

As much as I like to hate on banking, living a fulfilled life has nothing to do with whether you're working in corporate or a startup or are self-employed.

You can feel liberated in a suit and miserable as your own boss.

What matters is your relationship to the tasks themselves and how you derive meaning from them.

Check out these wise words from my friend Marc.