Weekly Mix #248 - Do you make the most of your time?

Alive Time vs. Dead Time, Ways the World Works & Dance Songs to Start Your Week

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Happy Monday!

One of my close friends was visiting home this week to get married.

She and her husband have been debating whether they want to live in Nova Scotia, or on the West Coast, where they've lived for the past 5 years.

Their biggest question: "what do you do here?"

Nova Scotia can be a quiet place.

But I was reminded of another of my favourite clichés: "only boring people get bored."

Having lived in a number of places, something I've always found is that I'm able to enjoy the place while I'm there.

That place may not be great in hindsight, but I can make the most of it.

A big part of it is what Robert Greene calls "alive time or dead time."​

No matter where you are or what you're doing, there's always a way to make use of the time.

Wherever you live, you can read, or write, or walk, or think.

You can find out what the locals do, and try that.

You can find ways to pursue hobbies you've enjoyed in the past. You can make new friends.

Making the most of the time available to us is a skill, which means you can get better at it.

Next time you think you're bored, ask yourself: do you want this to be alive time, or dead time?

Have a great week!

Graham

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Links

📚 Essentialism - Greg McKeown - Another perennial read for me, Essentialism is all about removing what's unnecessary. I'm not sure I'll ever be able to read this one enough times.

📖 Little Ways The World Works - Morgan Housel - I initially read this for the startup analogy—that those startups that grow slower often last longer—but this is full of little laws and rules that play out all around us, and have implications for humans as well.

📖 Questions - Patrick Collison - A list of questions that Patrick Collison—one of the founders of Stripe—finds interesting. Things like: why have some things become so much more expensive than others? (college textbooks, for example) Why does it take so long for us to build infrastructure now? Why are there so many more successful startups in specific cities?

🎧 200 Greatest Dance Songs of All Time - Rolling Stone - If you're looking to start your week off with a bang, this is the list. Here's the Spotify playlist.​

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