Pages: 284

Chapters: Five Parts, 28 chapters

Time of Day to Read: Daylight hours

Format Read: Paperback

First Print: 2023

If you haven’t listened to the knowledge project by Shane Parish, do yourself a favour and listen to some of the best episodes. This podcast delves into strategies and how the best of the best get ahead, shared in the form of their knowledge and insights. This book builds on what he has been recording for years. It has manageable bit sized chunks of wisdom littered throughout. Such as:

• If you do what everyone else does, you’ll get the same results everyone else gets. Best practices aren’t always the best. By definition, they’re average

• There are two components to building strength and raising the bar:
  • Choose the right exemplars – ones that raise your standards. Exemplars can be people you work with, people you admire, or even people who lived long ago. What matters is they make you better in a certain area, like a skill, trait or value.
  • Practice imitating them in certain ways. Create space in the moment to reflect on what they’d do in your position and act accordingly.

• If you got some results you didn’t want, the world is telling you at least one of if two things:
  • You were unlucky
  • Your ideas and how things work were wrong

If you were unlucky, trying again with the same approach should lead to a different outcome. When you repeatedly don’t get the outcomes you want, though, the world is telling you to update your understanding.

• You’ve considered the options. You’ve evaluated them. You’ve found the best. It’s time to act. There is no purpose to knowing what you should do and not doing it. If you want results, you need action.

• Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help make the big choices in life. Because almost everything – all external expectations, all pride, all fear, all embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose.

Look if you aren’t much into reading. Give the podcast a go first. I’m certain you will be hooked and then this book is the slam dunk on top.