🎯 Get a Competitive Edge with this Month's Best Resources

👋🏼 Hello friend

💬 In this week's issue:

• Find flow even in noisy environments with white noise
• A one-minute article on why poor execution is better than the best idea
• My current favorite podcast by Derek Sivers. Simple, quick, and easy-to-recreate tips.
• A heart-wrenching story: "Frame is more important than content." Find your frame in life that allows your talents and character traits to shine.
• How to evoke creativity at the touch of a button
• My method for making progress visible and being more motivated as a result
• Shortform makes the world's best guides to non-fiction books. They're like book summaries on steroids.

🦎🥚 Look carefully; there are quotes, like easter eggs, to be found between the lines.

Get a Competitive Edge with this month's Best Resources

🔊 Tech- Tip: Too loud on the bus or train? White Noise helps to get into the zone and stay there.

Enter "White Noise" on Spotify.

The pleasant noise "drowns out" outside noises. White noise contains all frequencies across the spectrum of audible sound. If you switch on white noise, with or without noise-canceling headphones, you have continuous sound without interruption.

🧖🏼‍♀️ Relaxed and undisturbed. More on white noise @sleepfoundation.org

🥚 If opportunity doesn't knock, build a door. - Milton Berle

📝 Favorite article: "Ideas are just a multiplier of execution" by Derek Sivers | Why poor execution is better than a great idea.

In this 1-minute article, Derek Sivers presents a unique scoring system on how you can calculate your company value.

Ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. - Derek Sivers

🎧 Podcast: Derek Sivers

Most episodes are no longer than 2 minutes, with one idea each.

I love Derek Sivers's ideas because they are simple, quick, and easy to recreate.

Writing Idea from a Podcast Episode: Write one sentence per line.

This leads to:

• Better overview
• Optimization of each sentence, line by line
• Simplicity of language

🥚 Don't be on your deathbed someday, having squandered your one chance at life, full of regret because you pursued little distractions instead of big dreams. - Derek Sivers

🐧 The Penguin Principle: "Frame is more important than content." - Find your frame in life that allows your talents and character traits to shine

The penguin principle explains one of the most important wisdoms of our time:

Don't constantly strive to be like others. Stop comparing yourself with neighbors, colleagues, and friends.

There are already enough others.

• We should be the way we are.
• We do not have to change.
• We need to change the environment in which we live.

For that, we have to deal with ourselves and get to know ourselves.

🥚 Obvious to you, amazing to others. - Derek Sivers

🎬 Netflix Movie The Social Dilemma: Tech Designers control how we think, act, and live.

“There are only two industries that call their customers 'users': illegal drugs and software” - Edward Tufte

Leaders and employees of Facebook, Google, and other big tech companies give an insight into what goes on behind the scenes. The brightest minds work day and night on apps to get users hooked.

📱 The Data Detox Kit: Take control of your digital privacy, health and overall wellbeing

This page shows you how to use your cell phone and computer safely.

The category "Escape Defaults: To enhance your digital well-being" made me create this wallpaper. Whenever I look at my phone, I ask myself: Why now? To prevent mindless scrolling.

Download your free Digital Detox Wallpaper:

Get easy-to-understand summaries on their download page or a collection of privacy-conscious tools, apps, and services.

🥚 All things are difficult before they are easy. - Thomas Fuller

🚨 Creativity at the push of a button

Creativity is not created on push and press.

To be creative, create an environment that allows creativity. Sitting in front of a desk staring at a screen is not quite a creative environment.

“All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking" - Friedrich Nietzsche

Exercise and let your thoughts run free. Then creativity comes "all by itself."

🥳 Increase your motivation by making progress visible

The Ironman 70.3 consists of a 1.9km (1.2-mile) swim.

That's 38 x 50-meter swim lanes. During training, I encountered an obstacle. I couldn't give it my all and count the lanes I swam simultaneously. I counted myself wrong again and again.

1. Take two cups.
2. Put 19 marbles into one jar.
3. Leave the other jar empty.

Whenever I swam 2 lanes (50 meters there, 50 meters back), I put one marble out of the full into the empty jar.

I killed two birds with one stone. I no longer miscounted. The progress of filling the jar with marbles motivated me to keep going.

Do you have any ideas for what else to use this method for? Send me your ideas and I will publish them in the next newsletter anonymously if you wish.

Have a great week! 🌞

xx Lukas

💉 Shortform makes the world’s best guides to non-fiction books. They’re like book summaries on steroids. 

I've been using Shortform for a while and have partnered with them as an affiliate! Use my link for a 20% discount on the annual subscription. That’s about 2 and a half months of the service for free.

🕳 Use small gaps in the day to get to know new genres on Shortform

Net time: No extra time. This is the time between the daily work blocks.

• When riding the bus or train
• in the doctor's waiting room.

I used to be bored during this time.

Now, I use that time to read Shortform summaries of new genres.

Why I love Shortform:

• They’re super detailed, so you get the book’s key points at a deep level. 
• They have interactive exercises to help you apply the ideas you just learned so you don’t forget them like I do when I read a book.
• They add smart insights, like connecting what one author thinks about another. You end up understanding the ideas at a super deep level and building awesome connections between ideas.

You can even download PDF versions of the book guides, print them out, or read them offline on your device.

With no task switching, you can focus only on what's in front of you.

Learn more than ever from important non-fiction books and receive 5-days of unlimited access and an additional 20% discount on the annual subscription. 🤩