Reading journal: Someday Is Today

Hey!

Here is a new reading journal! It’s about the book Someday Is Today by Matthew Dicks. It’s the first book I’ve read in 2023 (actually I started to read in 2022, but finished in 2023). It was an interesting, easy read. It was a bit overwritten for me. Sometimes it was saying the same things again and again. Other times the topics were loosely coupled. However it contained some valuable opinions and ideas and I really enjoyed reading it. I’m sure I’ll read some more books from this author. Acutally “Storyworthy” is already on my reading list from him.

Here are the top quotes from the book.

Whenever I need to make a decision — monumental or minuscule — I no longer rely upon the current version of myself to make that decision. I have discovered that I am an unreliable, ineffective decision maker in the moment, because I often base my decisions upon my feelings, thoughts, and desires in that moment. I do the thing that makes me happy now — which is sometimes perfectly acceptable and advisable — but is oftentimes shortsighted and counterproductive.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.

“Life is not lost by dying; life is lost minute by minute, day by dragging day, in all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.” — STEPHEN VINCENT BENÉT

The one commodity that we all share in equal amounts is time: 1,440 minutes — 86,400 seconds — per day. I want you to stop thinking about the length of a day in terms of hours and start thinking in terms of minutes. Minutes matter.

“I didn’t have enough time” actually means it wasn’t important enough to you.

“I didn’t have enough time” means it wasn’t fun, distracting, profitable, gratifying, pleasurable, or urgent enough to place it at the top of your to-do list.

Starting your morning by tackling challenges head-on will help encourage similar behavior throughout the day. And, it turns out, there’s a wealth of research to back up this idea as well. People who do hard things first tend to procrastinate less and get more done.

Science has shown us again and again that the more information we process in a day and the more decisions we must make, the less effective we are as the day proceeds. Decisions wear us down.

Dress for the job you want, not the job you have.

The spotlight effect: a phenomenon in which people tend to believe they are being noticed more than they really are.

Your time can be accounted for in dollars, but the way you spend your time should also mean something to you. Ideally, it should be something that will always mean something to you, even decades later.

Remove all the games from your phone immediately. Find a more productive use of the time you spend with your face in your phone.

Load a book onto your phone. Find news sources that appeal to you. Use the time spent on your phone to make a grocery list, respond to an email, review your bank statement, or answer a question that you have always been curious about.

Negative people will bring you down. Positive people will lift you up.

Sometimes we have to ask ourselves the hard questions. When others aren’t daring us to exit our comfort zone, we have to be willing to step into that discomfort ourselves. We must demand it of ourselves.

Create another terrible thing until you make a not-so-terrible thing. Maybe even something great.

We assume that we will make our dreams come true someday, but then we run out of somedays, and we die.

I have been posting my yearly goals on my blog and on social media as a means of holding myself accountable. I repost my goals monthly along with my progress so far.

This is why I started to do the same, post my yearly goals and evaluate it every month. We’ll see how it works in practice.

This will work only if you establish goals correctly, meaning they should be measurable, effort based, and attainable absent the necessary approval or actions of others.

Our unconscious brain, therefore, is paying attention to what we see and do at all times and responds accordingly, even if we don’t actually mean what we say.

In essence, we can alter our mood by simply pretending that our mood is different than what it truly is.

The making should be ordinary. The results should be extraordinary.

If you can then make your something into something else, or allow your something to become the inspiration for something else, then even better.

As creators, we cannot afford to push people away. We need as many people as possible on our team. We need help. We need support. We need allies. We can’t afford a single enemy if it’s avoidable.

If you don’t have time to learn something new, you don’t have time to make something new.

“Throwing my present to the future” is based upon the assumption that many of the problems we face today are temporary, fleeting, and ultimately forgettable, but in the moment, they can feel awful, momentous, and painful. In these cases, I try to avoid those negative feelings by acknowledging that the problem will be irrelevant in a day or a week or even a month and then pretending that the next day, week, or month has already arrived.

Make a list of your friends, colleagues, and anyone close to you. Beside their name, list their skills. Update the list frequently as people enter and exit your life and add to their own skill sets.

Complete a worksheet like the following for each of your creative pursuits. Be open to adding to this list as you consider additional reasons for your pursuits. Oftentimes the reasons for your motivations aren’t immediately obvious and are multitudinous.

Establish the collection place for all future compliments.

This basically says that you should save every compliment you get to a document to read it later when you’re feeling down.

The book is mostly about being conscious, being productive and also about writing and storytelling. So, I recommend it to everyone who is interested in at least one of these topics.