Growth

It's been a while. The last time I published here was a little bit more than a year ago, so it makes sense to reintroduce myself. Two types of people will receive this e-mail: folks who know my nickname (friends, colleagues, SEOs), and dear readers who found me by reading my experience writing on Ghost, my book reviews, or my thoughts on tools for thinking. It is not that I totally abandoned writing for the past year. Six years ago I started blogging in Hungarian. This blog you are currently reading was a pivot to challenge me to write in English and also to explore more "professionally relevant" topics besides books and productivity. In short: I didn't want to harass my readers in Hungarian with articles about content marketing if they signed up for reading about productivity books. ...

Even one narrow field is too complex to comprehend, let alone the whole world around us. We generalize, we make little rules, and playbooks to make our everyday more fluid. We can call them principles, assumptions, big theories, guiding stars, or beliefs. I have my own set of beliefs. They changed, some of them proved false over the years, and I am sure some of my current ones will be obsolete soon. But that means I will learn something. ...

During the weekend I watched a movie that sparked some thoughts worth exploring. "The Menu" is the story of an extraordinary fine dining experience. The guest arrives by boat on an island where they are presented with better and better courses. All the ingredients are grown on the island and everything looks exquisite with some strange twists. There is one guest who is particularly relevant to our topic. Tyler. Tyler is a fine-dining fanboy. He knows all the processes utilized for making the dishes, the history of the restaurant, and more. He watched every episode of the cooking TV Show featuring the chef. ...

I love reading. Books are my preferred medium of choice. A good old paperback helps me eliminate distractions when engaging with great ideas. The are no distracting links and memes I have to look up. Books are one of the most thought-through and idea-rich mediums. But you need to dedicate more time to a book than for a random video or a movie. So if the ideas of books are invaluable and you want to invest time into getting through a book, then you should be interested in remembering the takeaways. ...

I am not a follower of movements like minimalism or simple living, but I am encountering the WHY behind these schools in more and more areas of my life. We are thinking always in addition. We throw money at problems too many times. If we want to lose weight we buy the trendiest supplement. To do better marketing we buy new tools. We make new year's resolutions to make our life better.We rarely think about the upsides of removing, while the root cause of our problems is lying in having already too much on our table. ...

I tried to "play by the rules" most of my life. Getting good grades, picking extracurricular activities, getting into university, and securing a job looked like a solid plan. For a long time, I did the same when it comes to marketing and writing online. I studied competitors, reverse-engineered their playbook, learned & implemented best practices of trending traffic channels, and waited for success to kick in. They almost never delivered the promised results. ...

Nowadays we have software for every use case we can just think of. I myself am a big advocate for productivity apps and tools for creating beautiful docs, but when it comes to using them on a day to day, it comes with shortcomings. I sit before a screen for at least 8 hours a day. I tried just changing gears after work and taking my personal productivity hat on, but it didn't work. My eyes were burning and I needed a context switch to close the nine-to-five part of my day. ...

I live and breathe apps that can help me to prioritize better, get more done and think better. I have a pretty advanced Notion setup which transformed with me over the years. I use Notion for quick capturing and for managing my goals and tasks following GTD. At the same time, the home of my ideas is sitting in Obsidian based on the Zettelkasten method. I was happy with this setup, but from time to time I got the same recommendations from my friends and the readers of this blog: ...

Books are a personal preference for me. Since touching my first hard-cover encyclopedia I knew that I am getting much more out of books than other mediums. I acquire knowledge faster, I immerse myself in new worlds and I am entertained sometimes at the same time. But reading without a goal (or in our case: a list) in mind can leave you astray. If you don’t have a plan, others will make one for you. You can read about how television and social media are influencing our choices. But the same is present and sometimes amplified in the world of books. ...

For me, the experience of flow means arrival. In flow, I feel I am where I am supposed to be and doing what I am meant to do. An activity in flow can be writing an article, running, doing a puzzle, or doing the dishes. The positive experience is not affected by the type of activity, but the skill in the activity is. According to flow theory, the best moments occur when a person's mind is deliberately pushed to its limit to achieve something difficult and valuable. ...