My July: Unpacked
A newsletter geared towards revisiting my most valuable learning and progress from each month
Life:
Brief Highlights:
Started the month off right w/ a couple small trips to Lake Cushman and Green River Gorge with friends … extremely underrated spots if you’re looking for some great swimming / cliff jumping that isn’t too far from home.
Broke my foot playing basketball, but still got to hit the Watershed country music festival (w/ a huge black boot) about a week later. Super fun … initially I had my doubts about the music there, but warmed up to it quite a bit. Thomas Rhett and Dierks Bentley did it best.
Completed the 28 day mindful meditation introductory course on Sam Harris’s “Waking Up App” … the app has already had an excellent impact on my life and I don’t plan on dropping it anytime soon.
Two great quotes: The quality of your mind is the quality of your life” - Naval Ravikant & “Your mind is the basis for everything you experience” - Sam Harris … it’s safe to say your mind is pretty damn important, and the great thing is that it can always be worked on and improved upon.
Thanks largely to Harris, I’ve become much more present in my day to day life and much less inclined to let poor emotions persist whatsoever, simply by looking deeper into the true nature of these emotions.
The mind - just like any other muscle in our body - can literally be trained through mindful meditation, but most of us never learn this and simply go through our day to day lives with our minds running on “auto pilot”. We end up needlessly suffering in many ways that aren’t only making us less happy moment to moment, but less productive as well. The deep importance and practical value of this practice has frankly blown my mind… and if you’re interested, Netflix does a great job further explaining it here on the mindfulness episode of The Mind, Explained
Education:
Reading:
The Price of Tomorrow by Jeff Booth
This book does an excellent job of describing the fundamentals of the US macroeconomy, and it takes a contrarian stance by explaining why inflation and other US monetary policies are crippling our country more and more, despite the world of abundance that science and technology are bringing us. Booth (also a strong proponent of bitcoin) grounds all his reasoning in logical first principles and makes many interesting predictions on where the future’s technologies will bring us … crazy time to be alive.
I highly recommend this book if you’re into economics, new/disruptive technologies, or just business in general.
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
Most valuable book I’ve ever come across … the Naval rabbit hole is the best rabbit hole (IMO of course)
Read it once already, so this time around I’ve just been refreshing my mind with his great thoughts and insights … props to you if you can fully absorb all of Naval’s wisdom in just one sitting cause I know I can’t.
Podcasts/blogs:
Sahil Bloom’s twitter threads / blogs. Bloom is a former pitcher at Stanford who shows an impressive level of understanding among many different topics - pertaining to business, economics, logic, and just life in general - that he simplifies very well in his writing. Here are a few of my favorites:
Other places I generally like to browse:
Thanks for reading through to the end! I hope you enjoyed my first newsletter.
I plan on sending out a new “monthly update” on the first Sunday of each month throughout my gap year with more examples of the stuff I’ll be doing (i.e. creating videos, side projects, separate articles, adventures, etc.) and learning.
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Until next time … keep exploring, and have a great week!
This is awesome! Keep it up
Jack, great project! I wish you an interesting, fun, educational gap year.