Personal Development

The Mountain Is You – Brianna Wiest #reading

The Mountain Is You: Transforming Self-Sabotage Into Self-Mastery by Brianna West is probably not a book that I would have picked up to read of my own accord, despite that fact that I am pretty much certain that a lot of the struggles I have in pushing myself into action and gaining the sense of achievement and fulfillment that I crave are driven at a fundamental level by self-sabotage in one form or another. There is just something about the whole mountain metaphor, along with the kinds of words used in the book blurb that I read online (‘deep internal work of excavating trauma’, ‘building resilience’, and ‘adjusting how we show up for the climb’) that instinctively put me off. Why then did I work my way through this book for a few weeks in April and May this year? Because it was voted as the reading matter for the May meeting of The Timecrafting Trust Book Club that I participate in, and so, dutifully, I ordered myself a copy and set to work.

Almost from the start, I realized that there might well be a bit more value for me from The Mountain Is You than I had envisaged. I was immediately stuck with some obvious similarity between some of the content being covered and the ideas of psychotherapist Carl Jung that I found enthralling and thoroughly convincing when I read James Hollis’s excellent The Middle Passage a year or so ago.

Wiest begins her book by describing the various forms that self-sabotage can take along with the underlying reasons why each type of self-sabotaging behaviour occurs. There were quite a few lines in this section of the book that resonated with me…

‘sometimes, we sabotage our professional success because what we really want it to create art‘
‘sometimes, our most sabotaging behaviours are really the result of long-held and unexamined fears we have about the world and ourselves‘
‘human beings experience a natural resistance to the unknown, because it is essentially the ultimate loss of control‘

… because yes, I do increasingly seem to be seeing myself as an artist, yes, I definitely have a lot of fears squashed down into my head that hold me back, and yes, I do tend to get overwhelmed and feel very uncomfortable when I perceive that things are spinning out of my control. But why then, knowing all of this, does nothing much really seem to change? Wiest delivers the killer answer:

‘most people do not actually change their lives until not changing becomes the less comfortable option‘

Wiest goes on to argue that, in fact, we might be better off re-framing self-sabotage because, ultimately, the habits and behaviours associated with it are actually a result of your very clever subconcious ensuring that some unfilled need, displaced emotion or neglected desire is being met – that those actions are, in fact, deliberately designed to provide a positive outcome that some hidden part of your subconscious seeks.

Aand funnily enough, just this morning, quite coincidentally, I wrote in my journal that perhaps I allowed myself to procrastinate and hold myself back from taking certain actions even though I know this will result in an intense wave of frustration and anger with myself, because at least those negative feelings and emotions are something that I am familiar with and are, in some weird and twisted way, somewhat comforting.

The next section of The Mountain Is You describes a long list of different manifestations of self-sabotage, and whilst many of these did not feel relevant to me, some of them certainly did – hello Perfectionism, Worrying About Least Likely Circumstances, Being Busy, Fear Of Failure, to name a few.

The start of the process of overcoming self-sabotage begins, Wiest suggests, with tuning into, and listening to, the negative emotions associated with it – things like anger, jealousy, regret, chronic fear. She highlights a basic need to be able to ‘allow yourself to feel what you feel without judgement or suppression and notes that understanding your needs, meeting the ones you are responsible for, and then allowing yourself to show up so others can meet the ones you can’t do on your own will help you break the self-sabotage cycle’. For example, feel angry, notice that you are angry, understand why you are angry, remember that it is okay to feel angry… and then get on with life.

There are then a couple of chapters with fairly standard fare on building emotional intelligence and on letting go of baggage from the past, but as these progressed I could feel the book moving steadily into the kind of territory that my initial instincts had led me to expect. Then, aargh, I hit a section titled ‘Releasing your past into the Quantum Field‘ and my brain was instantly screaming at me that I was now thoroughly into pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo land… the kind of land where, apparently, ‘You store … emotions, energies and patterns at a cellular level‘. Now, I guess that in some sense everything associated with an individual human is stored at a cellular level, but I am pretty sure that Wiest is suggesting there’s something rather more mysterious and perhaps spiritual going on. I’d be inclined to simply say that statements of that kind are just nonsense!

I guess that from that point onwards, my brain was in a state of high alert, warning me, perhaps unfairly, that much of what I was reading had no real, solid basis. There were lots of nice, almost mantra-like phrases: ‘be willing to be disliked‘, ‘do your inner work‘ and a series of suggestions to ‘create aligned goals, ‘find you inner peace’, ‘detach from worry’, ‘take triggers as signals’, ‘honour your discomfort’, ‘stop trying to be happy’, ‘arrive into the present’ etc., but in the end it was all a bit too much – too many suggestions, too many affirmations, too many challenges to think about overcoming, with the result that I came away confused and somewhat disappointed. After a promising, really very readable first half, everything seemed to have unraveled as the book reached its conclusion. There was just nothing much that was concrete or tangible for me to cling onto.

Late on in the book there was one phrase that I rather liked in a section titled ‘Be aware of what you give your energy’, namely that ‘the wolf that wins is the one that you feed‘ and strangely, on the day that I read those lines some spoke almost the exact same words to me (perhaps that pesky quantum field was doing its thing…). In fact, the whole book is stuffed full of short phrases and sentences that you could lift off the page and incorporate into an inspirational poster or social media post if that is your thing. I may not have warmed to Wiest’s mountain metaphor or felt that the argument in The Mountain Is You hung together in a fully coherent and convincing manner, but she certainly knows how to write what might be called ‘soundbite sentences’. Forget all the gumph about releasing you past into the quantum field and storing emotions at a cellular level, and take this phrase, right at the end of the book… …

‘One day, the mountain that was in front of you will be so far behind you, it will barely be visible in the distance. But who you become in learning to climb it? That will stay with you forever.‘

BOOM!

Square Peg #poem

I am the square peg in the round hole:
jammed in,
stuck fast,
placed by youthful naivety,
forced down by the weight of expectation,
held in place by the pressure of life’s demands,
and hammered home
by the repeated blows of round pegs that,
although appearing far too large
to fill such a seemingly trivial space,
are really too small to even touch the sides.

Yet, even in the tightest grip
it is possible to wriggle and writhe –
tiny movements that, though causing damage, breaks, and pain,
gradually,
imperceptibly,
ease the bind.
The needle must break the cloth to form the stitches of repair.

I am still the square peg,
plugging the round hole,
missing parts of my surface,
diminished,
and wearing hidden scars,
but now I have worked my way loose.
And though I cannot know the planes and slopes
of the land that lies outside,
I have seen it in glimpses,
and I am ready to slide out,
with freshly rounded corners,
ready to roll.

SQUARE PEG: This is another poem that came up on me out of nowhere and very fast. In some ways it is a direct continuation from my poem It Is Time, but whereas that poem is about recognizing that a point of arrival has been reached, Square Peg is more about being ready to start out on the next part of the journey.

The Productivity Diet – Mike Vardy #reading

The Productivity Diet is the latest book written by Mike Vardy. Mike, who is based in Victoria, British Columbia, on the western side of Canada, describes himself as a ‘seasoned productivity expert, writer, coach and podcaster’ (quoting from his own website biography), and it was through the latter, his podcast A Productive Conversation, that I first became aware of his work. I don’t know how I initially stumbled on this podcast but for some years I have been a sucker for consuming content related to productivity (or ‘how we operate’ as I prefer to think of it). At some point, listening to episodes of the podcast led me to signing up for Mike’s email newsletter and then, after he sent out a request for people who felt they had a tendency to get started later in the day to contact him, I ended up chatting with him via Zoom about the productivity challenges that I faced and the approaches to overcoming those challenges that I used. At the end of the call, I politely declined the opportunity to join a coaching course with him (£££!!!) but did sign up as a member of his online community The TimeCrafting Trust. That was in March 2024, and over the last 15 months I have got to know quite a few other members of the community, most of whom are based in North America, and participated in a wide range of online events including monthly Book Club meetings, podcast livestreams, workshops and seasonal planning sessions. I think it’s fair to say that whilst Mike and I have never met in person, I could properly describe him as a friend, albeit of the online variety.

But what of The Productivity Diet itself? Mike’s basic view is that we cannot ‘manage time’ and so, instead, we should focus on managing our attention, in particular taking into account how much energy we have at any moment. To paraphrase the book: Productivity isn’t about managing time. It’s about how we use it, how we relate to it, and how we move within it. Mike argues that we should eschew rigid productivity systems in favour of thinking about productivity as a continuous interaction between Intention, Attention, Reflection and Action. Mike’s approach, which he calls TimeCrafting, involves laying out some broad intentions for our areas of focus, but then navigating the reality of our daily experience with a sense of gentleness and responsiveness to our evolving needs.

The Productivity Diet was the subject of a Kickstarter Campaign that Mike started before I got to know him. I think there were a few hiccups along the way, but the book was launched successfully earlier this year. The launch included Mike making appearances on a number of other productivity-related podcasts, and when he announced that he was going to focus an episode of his own podcast on the book I thought it would be fun to offer my services as a stand-in ‘host’ so that rather than it being Mike Vardy having a productive conversation with himself, the episode had a more normal host-author format. A little to my surprise, and despite the fact that I have pretty much no experience of working in broadcast communications, Mike thought this was a good idea and we went ahead and had a lot of fun recording the episode. You can pick it up here if you’re at all interested: A Productive Conversation Episode 603.

There are three major pillars to TimeCrafting as set out in The Productivity Diet: Time Theming, Attention Paths and Reflection.

Mike is big on the first of these pillars, Time Theming, suggesting that it can be beneficial to designate different kinds of themes to act as guide-rails as you decide, in the moment, exactly what to do next. These themes are time-based, for example, daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal or what are termed ‘horizontal’ themes where you select to focus your attention on a particular type of activity at the same time each day. At an even longer timescale, it is suggested that you adopt an ‘Annual Axiom’ – essentially a very short (e.g. three word) description to guide your overall approach to the year ahead. In the world of TimeCrafting, one might decide to group administrative tasks together to tackle on, say, Thursday, or to designate Friday as a day to consider finance-based activities, Tuesday for ‘creating’ etc. One might decide that the focus for the week ahead is, say, ‘rejuvenation’ or ‘correspondence’, or that the next month is for ‘growing contacts’ etc. A key aspect of Time Theming is that the themes are not meant to be a way to rigidly enforce a particular regime of action, but serve more as beacons to guide you back to an intended path if you move away from it. In addition, it is perfectly fine to do tasks and activities that do not match the current intended theme if there is time and space to do so.

The term ‘Attention Path‘ relates to a factor that will influence what you choose to, or can, focus your attention on at any given moment. The Productivity Diet introduces the acronym TREAT as a way to separate out five different types of attention path. TREAT stands for Time-based, Resource-based, Energy-based, Activity-based and Theme-based. The idea is that when selecting tasks to work on next, one considers the options in relation to each of these attention path types, asking questions like: Can this task be accomplished in the time I now have available? Do I have the resources I need to hand? Do I have the energy for this? Does it make sense to do this alongside some other similar task? Does this fit within my intended theme? I know from my interactions with him, that Mike is a firm believer in designating tasks as being low, medium or high energy so that, for example, when you hit a point in a day where you feel fatigued and might otherwise grind to a complete halt (as we all do…) you can glance at your list of possible tasks and pick one or two low energy tasks to accomplish. In this way, time which might otherwise be lost to the void of the internet (for example) can still result in some useful outcome.

The third pillar of TimeCrafting is Reflection. This is the key to continuous evolution and improvement. By reflecting on your actions, for example by writing in a journal, you can identify adjustments that can be made, obstacles to overcome, approaches that can be reinforced or extended. Without meaningful reflection there is no evidence base to use to help inform the decisions you make about what to do when and how etc., and so everything just unfolds somehow in a rather haphazard manner.

I will admit that in my own day-to-day operations, I have not had a great deal of success in using daily, weekly or monthly themes. I think my work days are too variable and I do not have sufficient control over exactly what needs to be done when, for them to work in a very consistent manner. But I think that having the general approach in mind is still helpful, especially at the longer timescales (‘this week/month I will focus on finishing X’). I have had more success with horizontal theming, but the variability of my days (sometimes I have classes to teach, other days I have a meeting etc) means that my attempts to impose order on my day through horizontal themes is generally most successful during the earlier and later (non-work hours) parts of each day. Similarly, I do consider attention paths to some extent, but I find that once my day is underway I tend to forget my plans and just go with the flow. It doesn’t help that I am not very good at checking in with myself to consider whether I would benefit from re-directing my attention (even setting reminders to do this doesn’t work very well – I just ignore them much of the time!). It’s not that I think the ideas underlying TimeCrafting are not valid, quite the reverse really, but I just seem to revolt against any attempt to constrain or direct my attention even though I would very much like to be able to do so!

I like the general approach of TimeCrafting that is set out in The Productivity Diet. I’ve tried to implement what might be called ‘heavier’ systems – things like time-blocking/time-boxing – and whilst they seem to offer an attractive level of control, I always (and quickly) end up revolting against them as my feelings in the moment take over. TimeCrafting offers a more gentle, sensitive, approach to keeping yourself on track, or at least somewhere close to being on track. To use a travel analogy, TimeCrafting is like having a traditional map, understanding what all of the symbols mean and knowing generally where you want to end up, but allowing yourself flexibility to move around the terrain, informed by the map, in the way that feels most appropriate at the time. This seems to me to be a much better way to travel than to switch on the SatNav and following it blindly to the selected destination, even when the road you have just been instructed to turn down is clearly little more than a rough and ever-narrowing track heading to an almost inevitable dead end and a ton of frustration as you try to turn around or back-up, surrounded by a herd of angry cows. Give me the map and my intuition any day!

Tiny Experiments – Anne-Laure Le Cunff #reading

I read Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s debut book, Tiny Experiments, just a month after it was released in March 2025. However, this was not my first sight of the key ideas that the book contains, because I was lucky enough to be chosen as one of 300 people participating in a series of four, weekly online workshops, led by Le Cunff, that took place in February, in the lead up to the book’s publication. These workshops and the online community that accompanied them was called The Curiosity Collective, the name giving prominence to what is perhaps the key theme running Le Cunff’s work – the exhortation to live life in ‘curious mode‘, always willing to explore and experiment with your approach to life, and how you operate in the world. My experience attending those online workshops, showed me that Le Cunff is a highly skilled communicator and excellent teacher, and so I approached reading Tiny Experiments with high expectations. As an added bonus, the book had been chosen as the April pick for The TimeCrafting Trust Book Club.

As noted above, curiosity lies at the heart of Le Cunff’s ideas, and this is most obviously seen in her simple, four-part model for exploring and implementing change in your life. This model is rather neatly captured by the word sequence: PACT > ACT > REACT > IMPACT. At the start of the book, Le Cunff encourages the reader to adopt the mindset of a ‘self-anthropologist’, observing how they act in the world and the outcomes of these results, and then asking questions in relation to these observations. Le Cunff then structures the bulk of the text around her four-step model, stressing the importance of moving away from a Linear Mindset (X leads to Y leads to Z – end of story) towards the adoption of an Experimental Mindset based on the implementation of continuous experimental loops. My own feeling is that the key message here is not really about the distinction between linear v looping but, rather, one of ongoing adaptation and experimentation. The experiments one conducts don’t need to be thought of as loops (in fact they probably won’t bring you back to near your starting point) but they should take you somewhere, and in the process provide valuable evidence to help you work out what you might experiment with and where you might go next.

In the PACT phase of her model, Le Cunff presents a really neat (because it is simple) template for setting up what she refers to as a Tiny Experiment (an exploration of what happens when you make some small, realistic and manageable shift in the way that you operate). This template – a PACT – takes the following form:

“I will [action] for [duration]”

The key here is make sure that the action is purposeful, actionable (something that you can reliably perform), continuous (i.e. repeatable and not changing from day-to-day) and trackable. It is also important to be specific about the duration of the experiment (or else the number of repetitions). This ensures that the experiment is set up so that it provides a large enough dataset for meaningful conclusions to be drawn, but does not continue for so long that the action becomes tedious, or redundant or of little continued value. Essentially, the whole point of the PACT is to provide information that can then be used to adapt future behaviour and experiments, and not as a means to try to establish new habits.

In the ACT phase, you set about completing the activity specified in the PACT. This section of the book has some interesting material exploring the powerful forces of procrastination and, associated with this, perfectionism, that can so easily derail progress towards a goal.

The third phase of the model, REACT, occurs once the action described in the PACT has been completed for the specified duration. At this point, the goal is to look for, and then consider, evidence of the results of the action. Le Cunff highlights that it is important to look for evidence from within/internally (reflection) and externally (feedback from others, evaluation of results). Here, she presents what I suspect will become the most significant legacy of Tiny Experiments, namely her simple PLUS- MINUS-NEXT framework for reflection: what went well, felt good – what challenges or obstacles you faced, what was difficult, what negative feelings emerged – and then how the insights gained can shape future actions. [But whilst this framework is neat and seems to be catching on in the productivity community it might be noted that it is not so very different from the well-established ‘plus-minus-interesting’ framework.]

Because the whole point of Tiny Experiments is to encourage the adoption of an Experimental Mindset towards life, the REACT reflection should lead to a decision being made in relation to the area being investigated by the PACT. Le Cunff suggests that there are three possibilities: PERSIST – prolong the pact, or PAUSE – quit the pact or put it on hold, or PIVOT – modify the pact or shift the focus of a subsequent pact.

The final section of Le Cunff’s framework, IMPACT, focuses on the idea that it is helpful to be open/public about what you are setting out to achieve with your PACT and/or to work with others when pursuing it. This is largely a matter of gaining a useful chunk of external accountability, and also valuable feedback, but having seen many ‘public’ statements of Tiny Experiments PACTs in Le Cunff’s online community Ness Labs and on social media more generally, it is clear that it also serves as a powerful tool to market and promote Le Cunff’s ideas.

I enjoyed reading Tiny Experiments, and I feel pretty sure that it will be the kind of book that continues to have presence in the market for some time. It is well written and nicely structured, and the core ideas are simple (which is a good thing) and neatly presented, such that they have every chance of ‘sticking’. I think the phrase ‘Tiny Experiments‘ will likely become part of the productivity lexicon in similar fashion to James Clear’s ‘Atomic Habits‘. I also think that the “I will [action] for [duration]” statement for a PACT, the ‘PACT-ACT-REACT-IMPACT‘ model (or at least the ‘PACT–ACT–REACT‘ part of it) and, in particular, the ‘PLUS-MINUS-NEXT‘ framework for reflection, will all end up having a healthy existence outside the printed pages of the Tiny Experiments book…

… but in the end, my enthusiasm for Tiny Experiments waned. I had several goes at defining pacts and conducting experiments, but I wasn’t able to make myself see any of them through to a satisfactory conclusion. Life got in the way, and I found myself ignoring my pacts and carrying on with my usual scattergun approach to trying things out. This, of course, probably says more about me than it does about the potential efficacy of Le Cunff’s ideas, but my experience was that despite the simplicity and neatness of the Tiny Experiments model, it did not possess enough power to persuade me to go all in with it. I have also felt that most of the Tiny Experiments that I have seen others setting out to pursue would really be much better described as ‘tiny habits’ (a phrase already coined by the author B.J. Fogg and, of course, rather similar to James Clear’s ‘atomic habits’), rather than tiny experiments, and to put it bluntly, many of them read like tiny morsels of misty-eyed, wishful thinking…

So, in the end I congratulate Anne-Laure Le Cunff for writing a really nice book that captures some neat ideas and makes some good general points, but despite the fact that I am still indulging in some daily ‘plus-minus-next’ reflection, I can’t say that it has turned me into a Tiny Experimentalist.

Poetry #poem

I do not know if my poems are any good,
but it seems they help my essence to be understood,
whether by others or simply by myself,
this last, of course, itself essential for my health.

I do not know if my poems are enjoyable to read,
but it seems that crafting them fulfils some vital need,
and that allowing thoughts and feelings to gush forth
provides a compass I can use to find my north.

It seems as if through searching for each rhyme
I’ve stumbled on a way to slow down time,
and that now, through sculpting syllable-istic rhythm,
I see the world in multitudinous ways –
split infinite like sunlight passing through a prism.

And so, once more, I drop into the mine,
to chip away and work the line,
to trace the seam right to its core,
and scrape out all the mineral ore.
I hammer hard to split a rock,
in hope it is a nugget-bearing block,
in hope it might just be the one to hold
a precious, piece of sparkling gold.

I do not know if my poems hit the mark,
but certainly they’ve lit a spark.
So now the flames inside me roar,
and I can ask for nothing more.

Here goes…
First, time slows,
an idea flows,
like water spurting from a hose.
The seedling grows.
The petals unfurl upon the rose.

I take my chance…
Falling deep into the trance,
where visions glance,
words prance,
and rhythms dance.
And then I emerge, life enhanced.

In those moments, my whole world collapses onto a single spot.
So much energy compressed into a tiny dot-
freezing cold yet furnace hot.
I do not know if my poems are any good.
I do not know if my poems are enjoyable to read.
I do not know if my poems hit the mark.
It matters not.

(c) Tim O’Hare, July 2023

POETRY: I had some nice feedback on the first few poems that I wrote, but as this all came from people that knew me well it was impossible not to feel that it must be biased, even if only subconsciously. I began to think about whether my poems really were any good. This is the kind of thinking that usually drains my motivation and stops me in my tracks. But I have changed a bit in recent months, and pondering this a little more, I was able to acknowledge that whether or not anyone else liked my poems, I enjoyed the process of creating them, and was learning about myself as I did so.

Liminal Thinking – Dave Gray #reading

Liminal Thinking: Create the change you want by changing the way you think by Dave Gray is a book that I have toyed with reading for some time. I remember the occasion, quite a few years ago now, when, sat in a presentation at a Teaching and Learning Conference at work, I first encountered the concept of liminal spaces – transitional spaces or places that sit, rather fuzzily, between two different states, spaces or places. Since then, I have become rather fascinated by the concept of limnality, especially where this exists between one state or space that is very familiar and another that is largely, or even wholly, unknown. It’s a concept that I leaned on when writing my poem It Is Time (which should appear on this site in the not-too-distant future, as long as I am able to navigate the liminal space that is wedged between now and then…). So it was not that surprising that when I was looking for a new audiobook to listen to on my way to and from work, Liminal Thinking pushed its way to the head of the queue.

Unfortunately, my ‘reading’ of Liminal Thinking was something of a disappointment.

First, I don’t think Gray’s book is really about limnality at all. Instead, I think it’s a book about how bias creeps into the development of a personal world-view, and how being aware of this can help us to challenge our instinctive thoughts to develop a more robust and accurate set of beliefs. I’m inclined to think that the introduction of the word ‘liminal’ into the title of the book was primarily a case of the author trying to find a distinctive ‘buzzword’ in the hope that it might catch on and become associated with him in similar fashion to ‘atomic’ (Atomic Habits by James Clear) and ‘tiny’ (Tiny Habits by B.J.Fogg). But perhaps that my natural tendency towards cynicism coming into play…

Secondly, my experience listening to this audiobook reinforced a feeling that has been growing inside me for a while now, namely that it doesn’t really work to listen to certain kinds of non-fiction and hope to get much out of the experience. I am thinking here of books that are in any way a bit how to-ish in character. This is because unless you are prepared to be constantly stopping to bookmark segments or to rewind to listen again so as to catch details fully, it’s just not possible to come away from the listening experience with anything tangible (such as some kind of notes), and with no physical, print version available either, there is then nothing to refer back to later on. Still, if nothing else, this does mean that Liminal Thinking taught me one good lesson: that I’m not going to waste my time listening to this kind of book any more.

My experience with Liminal Thinking wasn’t entirely negative. Gray does a nice job of succinctly capturing six ‘principles of beliefs’, namely that:

beliefs are models
beliefs are created
beliefs create a shared world
beliefs create blindspots
beliefs defend themselves
beliefs are tied to identity

These principles are designed to highlight how the things we believe are not necessarily true reflections of reality but are, instead, built on thoughts that we have, mostly automatically, as we process our interactions with the world around us through our unique, personal, and mostly unconscious, set of biases and filters (things like ‘confirmation bias’ or ‘spotlighting’). Gray argues that with the right practice, it is possible to develop the ability to challenge one’s beliefs, and modify the way that we respond to inputs, so that what we come to believe about the world is a more accurate, or at least more reliable, model of our reality. He does this by introducing a number of so-called ‘liminal thinking practices’. These are:

assume that you are not objective
empty your cup
create safe space
triangulate and validate
ask questions, make connections
disrupt routines
act as if in the here and now
make sense with stories
evolve yourself

Most of these practices are pretty much self-explanatory, but if you asked me to explain what it means to ’empty your cup’ (in this context) I’m afraid that I would fail the task… You see, I have developed a belief that when it comes to trying to retain the knowledge and ideas conveyed in non-fiction writing, listening to an audiobook doesn’t work, and that means that whatever ’empty you cup’ is referring to went in one ear and out of the other. What’s more, I am pretty much convinced that no amount of questioning, safe space, routine disruption, story-telling or personal evolution is going to change my mind…

Build A Second Brain #poem

Build a Second Brain they said,
it will help you stay on top of your life.
It will help you manage your personal knowledge,
and keep you from informational overload strife.

Build a Second Brain they said,
it will definitely be something you’ll want to pass on.
It even comes with a fancy name.
It will be what they call a Zettelkasten.

Build a Second Brain they said,
it will be much more useful than note-taking.
It will help you organise all kinds of content,
while developing your skills in note-making.

Build a Second Brain they said,
it will help you make connections.
It will join up all of your different ideas,
rather than keeping them separate in sections.

Build a Second Brain they said,
it’ll stop your mind being like a sieve.
It’ll help you solve problems and find new solutions,
by helping you be more creative.

Build a Second Brain they said,
it will allow you to keep track of all your tasks.
It will help when you’re not quite sure what to do,
and not say ‘yes’ when ‘no’ is the best response if anyone asks.

Build a Second Brain they said,
it will lead to all kinds of digital high-jinks.
It will make you think about graphs and blocks,
and connect up your notes with links.

Build a Second Brain they said,
it does not matter which software you use.
It won’t eat up hours and hours of your time,
as you try out each one and can’t choose.

Build a Second Brain they said,
it really will be loads of fun.
It will give you so much more mental bandwidth,
than you have with just brain number one.

Build a Second Brain they said,
but I am really not sure.
I’ve enough problems working the brain that I’ve got,
that I doubt I could cope with one more!

(c) Tim O’Hare, July 2023

About the poem: I had been reading a lot about an area that is known as ‘Personal Knowledge Management’ (PKM) which is based on an older system of keeping discrete notes on index cards in slip boxes (in German this is called a ‘Zettelkasten’). One recent book on the topic (Building A Second Brain by Tiago Forte) has popularized the idea of a PKM-system as being like a ‘Second Brain’ and all kinds of claims are made by many authors about the usefulness of building a Second Brain for information storage and retrieval, creativity, task management etc. Me being me, I threw myself into building my own digital second brain and then (also me being me) I became a bit obsessed with making it perfect, consistent, all-encompassing etc. It rather took over my life for a bit.

Now It All Makes Sense – Alex Partridge #reading

A few weeks ago, I completed my seventh book of the year: ‘Now It All Makes Sense’ by Alex Partridge. This was one that I consumed in audiobook format, narrated by the author.

I decided to listen to this book after my wife drew my attention to it. I’m not sure where she came across it being mentioned, but it’s clear that Partridge currently has a pretty massive media presence with social media channels (with millions of followers), a podcast called ADHD Chatter (with 500,000 listeners) and now this book (an ‘instant Sunday Times bestseller’ apparently). From a bit of searching online, it seems that, in the world of new media he is viewed as one of the experts on adult ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). His background is in social media content creation – he founded UNILAD and LADBible at the age of just 21, two social news and entertainment companies that, according to his biography, were followed by 300 million people. I guess it is not surprising then that after being diagnosed with ADHD at the age of 34, he has come to be a dominant figure in the online adult ADHD media space but I’d never heard of him.

You might think that as a fellow late-diagnosed ADHDer (albeit more than 20 years later in life than Partridge), I would have found plenty in ‘Now It All Makes Sense’ that resonated with me, but that wasn’t the case at all.

I’ll come straight to it… I didn’t much like this book. Partridge clearly writes from his own experience, which is, obviously, a sensible thing for him to do… except that throughout the book he refers to ADHD only in terms of his own particular expression of it. He writes/says things like “Those of us with ADHD will be familiar with…” and “As anyone with ADHD will know…”, and then he describes how he is forgetful, how he loses things, how he is completely disorganized, how he is entrepreneurial etc. Well, I have ADHD and I am not (generally) forgetful, I don’t (generally) lose things, I am probably one of the most organized people around and would hardly describe myself as entrepreneurialanything…, so no, actually, I am not “familiar with” and don’t really “know” the ADHD that is described by Partridge, not in myself at least. And if I am not familiar with it then I am sure that there are plenty of others in the same boat. ‘It’ might now all make sense to Alex Partridge, and I am sure that ‘it’ will now also make more sense to some readers of his book, but if I had read or listened to the book a few years ago it would simply have reinforced the inaccurate understanding of ADHD that I then held… and who knows, that might have prevented or delayed me from being able to make sense of my own ‘it’ in the way that I have been able to since my diagnosis.

There’s nothing wrong with Partridge’s account of his ADHD, the impacts it has had, and is having, on his life, and the advice and tips that he provides in the book… provided, that is, that you have an ADHD presentation that is similar to his (or are seeking to understand ADHD in relation to someone you know who is like him). But many people don’t have that ADHD presentation like his and so are not that much like him… that’s one of the peculiarly frustrating but also, dare I say it, interesting, things about ADHD – the challenges it creates can be very different for different individuals. What is wrong… no, perhaps ‘wrong’ is too strong a word here, let’s say ‘potentially unhelpful’ is that Partridge doesn’t really seem to recognize this variation in the diverse challenges that ADHD presents for different people enough. In this way, I think that Partridge misses the opportunity to really broaden out his readers’ understandings of the challenges of living with ADHD, and given his huge online audience and social media status, I think that’s rather disappointing, Maybe instead of ‘Now It All Makes Sense’ the title of the book ought to have been ‘Now I All Make Sense’ (forgive the mangled grammar) to reflect the rather personal nature of Partridge’s narrative.

The Wisdom of Groundhog Day – Paul Hannam #reading

I first read Paul Hannam’s ‘The Wisdom of Groundhog Day’ (TWoGD) back in October 2022. It was one of a number of occasions when I have listened to an episode of a podcast on my walk home from work and been so taken with the content being discussed that I placed an order for the book as I walked along and before I had even arrived home. In this case, the podcast episode was an interview with the author about his book from the ever excellent ‘Art of Manliness’ podcast (Episode 828: The Groundhog Day Roadmap for Changing Your Life).

In the 2.5 years that have passed since that reading, I have held a really positive memory of TWoGD. I was drawn to the way in which Hannam teases his message out of the story of the ‘Groundhog Day’ film – ostensibly just a routine comedy about a grouchy weatherman who gets stuck in a small town having to live the same day of his life again and again and again. The heart of the message is that to find happiness and fulfilment in life it is necessary to change yourself on the inside and this happiness can only arise when you are fully present and focused at all times on being true to yourself, open to experience, and appreciative of the world and the people around you. Based on this memory, I breifly mentioned TWoGD at the end of a meeting of the Book Club associated with Mike Vardy‘s Timecrafting Trust Community and with others intrigued by the idea of the book, it was chosen to be our February read.

So, I came back to TWoGD for a second reading with high hopes and also a little trepidation… What if everyone else hated the book? As I worked my way through it for a second time I found myself with very mixed feelings. I could still see, and appreciate, the cleverness that lay behind it, but I also couldn’t help feeling that it was all a bit forced – a neat idea stretched out to a length many times greater than necessary. I found that there were certain stylistic aspects about the writing that I really disliked – the way that it was written in what seemed to be a series of ‘sound bite’ paragraphs one after the other with not much flow when read together, and the fact that at every turn the example given for how such and such a principle idea had made an impact on someone was taken from Hannam’s personal experience.

As it turned out, most other members of the book club community had fairly similar issues with TWoGD as I did, but the message of the book was well received and we had a lively and interesting discussion nevertheless.

If I was going to sum up the message in TWoGD in one phrase then I think I would struggle to do better than to use the same quote that Hannam uses in the book’s conclusion, taken from the second volume of Marcel Proust’s epic ‘Remembrance of Things Past’ (1924):

‘We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.’

Free To Focus – Michael Hyatt #reading

The third book I read (or in this case, listened to as an audiobook) was Michael Hyatt’s ‘Free to Focus’. I had listened to a podcast interview with the author one morning (an episode of A Productive Conversation with Mike Vardy) and, although much of Hyatt’s advice on productivity and getting things done was common fare, I liked one or two of the descriptions he gave to some of the ideas that were spoken about and thought I would follow up by listening to his book to see whether there was a bit more meat to put on the bones.

I found the book rather dry, with little content that was at all original, and little further depth on the elements that had piqued my interest in the podcast episode. I did like his way of thinking about areas of activity through an analogy with acting – that we do some of our work on the front-stage (the parts we do for public consumption, the locations of our performances and outputs), some on the back-stage (behind the scenes work preparing, rehearsing, grafting away in private) and some on the off-stage (the other activities in our life not directly linked to our main, professional work). Sadly, that’s nowhere near enough for me to suggest that this is a book that anyone else might benefit from reading/listening to.