MONTHLY MULLING💡
Getting Rid of Boredom and An Anti-Procrastination System
Hi👋
Tapan here.
Monthly Mulling is a bi-monthly newsletter sending the best ideas from the web to your inbox for free. High signal. Low noise.
Happy Sunday y’all!
I am back from my vacation and spent the week organizing my life, work, and emails.
🗄️ I started note-taking December ‘20 using the Zettelkasten system and the Notion database is coming around nicely👇🏽
Currently,
📖 What I am reading: Why Nations Fail, Zurich Axioms (a must-read if you want to understand risk/reward in investing and life - I have listed 3 important lessons below!)
📺 What I am watching: Rocket Boys on Sony LIV, Animal on Netflix
🎧 What I am listening to: Moh Moh Ke Dhaage
Let’s get started🚀
💭MULLING
🥱 Why Your Life Is Boring by Matt D’Avella (Video: 11 mins)
There are a lot of days when my life is in a rut. It’s boring. So, this video resonated a lot with me.
Matt explains that our lives become boring when we stop taking risks.
💭 Think about it. As a kid, you’re always exploring something new without any preconceived notions about the activity.
🛑 But, as you grow old, you create mental blocks for yourself whenever you’re invited to explore something new - what if it is boring? what if I waste my time? what if the person is not interesting? I don’t like doing that!
And what do you instead? Binge-watch YouTube lying on your bed covered in pizza crumbs.
Okay, this is turning into a personal rant now. But you get the point?
⭐ Matt describes that life is about taking risks, taking those leaps of faith to make it NOT boring.
Think of times when your life was interesting? The first relationship, first kiss, your college, making new friends, starting a new job, travelling!
They were leaps of some sort into the unknown.
As we grow old, we stop taking these leaps and settle for the mundane. Boring. Less interesting.
If the caterpillar needs to evolve, it needs to step out to get food among the birds.
Don’t settle for the mundane. Take small risks. Try new things. Make your life less boring.
🙅🏽♂️ How To Stop Procrastinating by Sahil Bloom (Article: 5 mins)
My biggest problem in doing any new activity is procrastination. I am a master procrastinator. Sahil Bloom provides a framework to deal with procrastination.
Let’s start with tasks that cause procrastination:
🥱 Type 1 Tasks: Small & Boring - laundry, emails, and such
😱 Type 2 Tasks: Big & Scary - long-term important projects where we don’t know how to progress
The 5 Steps of the Anti-Procrastination System
Awareness: Schedule a daily assessment of your day-to-day actions. Start by identifying the important long-term projects in your life. A framework by Jenée Desmond-Harris on how to assess and divide your task list:
I started dividing my to-do list into 1) things I have to do, 2) things I want to do, and 3) things other people want me to do. Life-changing! I often don’t get to #3 and I finally realized... this is what it means to have boundaries.
Deconstruction: Large, long-term projects look like a big, black box. Our imaginations tend to fill that box with endless complexity and horrors.
It's critical to deconstruct the big and scary project into small and individually-manageable tasks.
via Alex Plan Creation: Develop a plan of attack to check off the deconstructed task list. The plan for each micro-task should be:
Specific: Exactly what you'll do.
Time-Bound: When you’ll do it.
We tend to overestimate what we can do in a day and underestimate what we can do in a year. When you are setting time bounds, lean towards being less ambitious on the micro-scale. Give yourself easy wins early on with achievable time bounds.
Stake Creation: Create stakes that turn big projects into a “game” for yourself. These mental games can be very effective! A few ideas for stake creation:
Public declaration on social media - I wrote about this in my social media accountability article.
Social pressure - ask your friends to hold you accountable
Penalty or reward - if you don’t achieve the task, you’re punished. If you do, you get rewarded!
Action: A body in motion tends to stay in motion. Create systems that spark the initial movement. James Clear calls it the Procrastination-Action line. The point of maximum pain before you stop procrastinating.
Engineer small wins and they will become big wins over time. The hardest part is getting started.
📈 Risk & Rewards - Zurich Axioms by Max Gunther (Book)
I recently read the Zurich Axioms which is a compilation of lessons from Swiss bankers which are passed on generation after generation. The book is about betting to win and is a must-read for any investor.
Here are my 3 favourite axioms:
🚢 When the ship starts to sink, don’t pray. Jump: when trouble shows don’t wait around. Fear of regret, unwillingness to abandon, and difficulty in admitting a mistake are problems in doing this. Don't pray, jump!
🔮 Human behaviour cannot be predicted. Distrust anyone who claims to know the future: It’s risky to plan risks on basis of forecasts as nobody has the foggiest notion of what will happen in the future.
The successful speculator bases no moves on what supposedly will happen but reacts instead to what does happen.
🎲 Chaos is not dangerous until it begins to look orderly: This axiom warns again of seeing order where order does not exist. Don’t be fooled by randomness. Beware of the correlation and causation. Beware of the Gambler’s Fallacy.
It is characteristic of even the most rational minds to perceive links of cause and effect where none exist. When we have to, we invent them.
The human mind is an order-seeking organ. It is uncomfortable with chaos and will retreat from reality into fantasy if that is the only way it can sort things out to its satisfaction.
Thus, when two or more events occur in close proximity, we insist on constructing elaborate causal links between them because that makes us comfortable.
🎙PODCAST - COLD BREW MONEY
If you’re a listener, thank you so much!❤️ Can I ask you to share the podcast with one friend/family this weekend? It will really help us grow the podcast.
🤯 Elon Musk Stake In Twitter...WHY!?: We discuss the potential reasons Elon Musk bought ownership in Twitter and also, do a quick $TWTR stock analysis.
👨🏽🏫 How To Find Good Stocks Using A Screener?: We share our screening process for Indian businesses.
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