Enjoy this week’s curated round-up of articles, podcasts, and more from the web.
Featured Thoughts:
“The Secret To Happiness: A Reverse Bucket List?”
Takeaway: A reverse bucket list is exactly as it sounds, things you strive to eliminate from your life to improve your happiness. There are two ways to view a reverse bucket list:
All of the items you “think” you want to do, but aren’t actually meaningful. As the author writes, these are the bucket list items that are driven by status and comparison to your peers. Certain matters of success, wealth, or other goals that sound great but more often leave you miserable. Work to eliminate this meaningless pursuits to get the most out of the goals you chase.
The second way to look at this is the daily minutiae that cause you a lot of grief, in which eliminating could drastically improve your day-to-day life. For example, I hate to clean. I find no joy in it. But I love living in a clean house. I know it isn’t fair to place that responsibility solely on Katrina’s hands, so we are considering hiring a cleaning company to come regularly for us. If I hate doing it, and she’s hates being the only one to do it, why not make it so neither of us have to do it. I’d rather forgo spending a few hundred dollars a month on clothes or other material goods and put that money toward this service that I know will drastically improve my sense of wellbeing.
So we have two forms of a reverse bucket list: the things we know we want to eliminate from our lives (e.g. cleaning), and things we mistakenly believe we want but should eliminate from our lives.
Of the first, Warren Buffet put it best: “Write down the 25 things you want to accomplish most in life. Pick five of them and cross out the rest. Those remaining twenty goals are merely distractions. Focus on the top five most meaningful ones.
Of the second, look for the small daily actions that you dread having to do: Mowing the grass, cleaning the house, heck, even cooking could be on your list. Then, look for opportunities to eliminate your need to do them yourself.
Chasing the goals that are most meaningful + eliminating the daily hassles = a better sense of wellbeing.
Takeaway: This was a neat article in the NYT shared with me, a compilation from years of their tip column. Let your curiosity flourish with this one. (If NYT gives you trouble, you may be able to access via creating a free account.)
“5 Love Languages: On Love & Relationships — The Vinh & Ali Show” [Podcast]
Takeaway: I first discovered Vinh on TikTok, where he posts great content on communication and public speaking. In this podcast he and his co-host discuss the book, “The Five Love Languages.”
It’s a book I read many years ago, and found it very insightful back then. I found that this conversation helped me revisit topics and ponder them on a deeper level, leading to new insights for myself. Perhaps you might find some worthy insights too.
“The Unspoken Power of Encouragement To Boost Your Performance”
Takeaway: “Yet, without any words exchanged, here we were. Two strangers. I was motivating her to keep going, and her the same for me. For a nearly a half-mile this continued until I had to break rank to travel in a different direction. As I split away I pulled out an earbud and thanked this woman for her motivation. She returned the gratitude. I kept that higher pace throughout the remainder of my run.”
In this article I’m sharing a story about how a stranger, without sharing any words, encouraged me to perform better during one of my Sunday runs.