By Colby Kultgen
How To Measure Your Life, A Website Worth Bookmarking, And Something To Grow Into
Read online / Read time: 4 minutes
Hello friends!
We're back with your weekly dose of 1% Better.
If you're new here, this is the newsletter where I share my 5 favorite ideas, lessons, and discoveries of the week.
Let's not waste any time!
A bit of sage wisdom from Twitter
I love it when a Twitter bro manages to sum up an entire shelf of self-help books in one sentence.
Jokes aside, there’s a very useful rule here:
At any given time, have one thing in your life that feels slightly above your current level.
A project you’re not completely sure you can pull off.
A skill you’re still pretty bad at.
A commitment that forces you to get better.
The important word is slightly.
You want something that makes you think, I’m going to have to figure some stuff out here.
Not something that makes you think, I've made a catastrophic error.
If everything in your life feels easy and familiar, pick one area and raise the difficulty a little.
Give yourself something to grow into.
A gargantuan book I’m digging into
Last week, Andrew Huberman released his much-anticipated first book, Protocols.
Huberman hosts the wildly popular Huberman Lab podcast, where he takes very deep dives into health, performance, sleep, focus, and basically anything involving the human body.
And given that his podcast episodes routinely run four hours long, I’m not surprised his book is enormous.
This thing is a TOME.
I don’t really plan to read all 688 pages cover to cover. I’m treating it more like a reference manual I can dip into whenever I want to learn about something specific.
I’m increasingly wary of ‘over-optimizing’ my life, but I still love having a resource like this on hand.
An article that might change your life
Ok, ok, I know I call a lot of things life-changing.
But Clayton Christensen’s How Will You Measure Your Life? deserves that title.
Christensen was a legendary Harvard Business School professor, but this piece is much less about business than it is about what a successful life actually means.
The closing section in particular that really hit me:
This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.
I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.
I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.
If you’re more video-inclined, his TED Talk of the same name is also excellent.
A website worth bookmarking
Speaking of life-changing articles.
I discovered a new favorite website this week.
Read Something Wonderful is basically a giant collection of genuinely great essays and articles from across the internet.
It made me think of this quote from author Ray Bradbury that I love:
“For the next thousand nights, before you go to bed every night, read one short story, one poem, and one essay from various fields. At the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?”
1,000 nights might be a little ambitious.
But for the next month or two, I challenge you to replace 10 minutes of scrolling before bed with an article from this site instead.
A tweet that made me chuckle
A few more things I'm into this week:
📚 Another book I'm reading: The Secret History By Donna Tartt (heard lots of good things about this)
🎥 Insane documentary I watched: Everest: The Other Side
💭 Quote I'm keeping in mind:
"Every pattern in your life repeats until you learn the lesson. The moment you choose differently, the loop ends and growth begins."
👀 P.S. I just wanted to say I love and appreciate you for opening and reading this newsletter every week (you don't have to say it back).
— Colby
