Category: Books

This is the life story of David Goggins; A retired navy seal that came from hell, and went back multiple times. His life was actual f*cked up, from living in poverty, experiencing insane racism, to being beaten by his dad and working for his dad as a child (at night) in his roller skate disco. Leaving his dad with his mom, he found a nice cozy place to live and his mom even found a new boyfriend, who then got killed (the boyfriend) months after. Ups and down as life goes on.

Years and years after, David found himself spraying for cockroaches, weighing almost 300 pounds (136 kg). His memories of his childhood haunted him; of his dad, of his losses and of the racism encounters. There even was a point where some rednecks held a gun to his head. But something sparked in him, he knew he had to change and show what he was made of. After getting to know the military, David started trying to get in there.

He kept increasing his boundaries. Working, working, working. He learned that there is something beautiful in discomfort. It strengthens/hardens your mind. So he sought discomfort. And he still is doing that. His main motto in the book is: “When you think you’re done, you’re only at 40% of your total potential.” He proved that by doing the hardest races on this planet, like the Badwater Ultramarathon, which is a 135 mile (217 km) course through California’s Death Valley.

This is one of those books that can fuel you at the moment, but can also change your philosophy on life. Just a great book to have at your side when shit is about to go down and you feel like withdrawing. 

I definitely recommend everyone to read this book.

Thanks for reading! 

There are terrific books about habits and small steps, just like a book I have reviewed before (link). But the first version of The Slight Edge was already published in 2005, so it’s quite an OG. The central claim of this book is that you can turn simple disciplines into massive success and happiness. These actions are so simple, that they are just as easy not to do. The image below further explains this. Doing 20 pushups each day seem as the easiest job, but it will be so easy to forget or to just not do.

I finished this book at the start of 2020, and then I decided to automatically transfer some money to my savings. Now I’m still doing it and it is going well. However, if you stop doing them, you will end up back in the failure part of the story. Here is a great quote from the book:

The reason diets and self-help courses and weight-loss programs and other how-to’s don’t work for most people is the same reason most how-to books and courses don’t work for most people. It isn’t that the actions are wrong. It’s that people don’t keep doing them. Focusing on the actions, the what-to-dos and the how-to-do-its, is not enough, because it’s the attitude behind the actions that keep those actions in place. 

 

If we have the wrong attitude, all these self-help works don’t work. You get inspired in the short term. You will feel emotional power at the time, but what if that emotion dissipates the next week? Another nice quote to add to that:

They keep moving; that’s why they’re called emotions and not e-standingstills.

Your philosophy of life is the missing piece of the puzzle. You can find them in the image, but here is another quote:

There are two prevalent types of attitudes: entitled and value-driven. A value-driven attitude says “What can I do to help you?” An entitled attitude says, “What have you done for me lately?” An entitled attitude says, “Pay me more, and then maybe I’ll work harder.” A value-driven attitude says, “I’ll work harder, and then I expect you’ll pay me more.”

So when your philosophy is in check, you can start by doing small tasks. One thing you have to remember is that there is no immediate feedback. You don’t know how long something will take, but you have to give it some time. You just need to stay in the process long enough to give it a chance to win. Patience is key.

There are lots of success stories and how-tos in this book and if you are trying to change something in your life, like losing weight, or learning a language, or becoming smarter, starting a business whatever, this will be a great source of information for you.

Thanks for reading! There is so much more to talk about but I’ll leave that out for now.

One last feel good quote:

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. – Abert Schweitzer

I’ve been quite curious about the fictional book ‘Supermarket’ because it is written by Bobby Hall, also called Logic. Bobby is a highly successful rapper/musician and has always been a creative genius. I admire his music and therefore was curious about him writing a book. It’s a challenging step in his career but he has done a really excellent job. 

Supermarket is about a boy called Finn who lives alone with his mom. He wants to be a writer but isn’t able to land a book deal. After a breakup with his girlfriend Lola, he spirals downward into a depression. But he finds the courage again to start writing again and needs the inspiration to create his main character. So he applies for a job at a supermarket and meets a boy called Frank who he thinks is suitable for his main character. Finn gets a bit obsessed about this character and while working at the supermarket he gets another girlfriend. So life starts to get good. But after a while, Frank isn’t who Finn thought he was and he gets in trouble with his girlfriend because of him. 

The book has hints to self-help which I enjoyed. Also, at first, the book seems a bit normal and you’re kind of waiting for something to happen. The beginning is fun to read, but eventually, something happens that sort of blows your mind. Though I’ll keep that a secret for you to read! Supermarket is a great novel for fun or to improve your English. I think most people have heard of Logic too, so if you like to read or if you want to start reading again, this one is great!

Thanks for reading,

~Wouter

Although the title seems a bit spiritual and wavey, the book is truly a helpful read. Ryan Holiday wrote the book and the main point of this book is how to find this stillness and why it’s important. I think everyone can feel busy sometimes, even anxious. Some find it hard to just be at peace and enjoy life as it is. And stillness is needed to fulfill these needs. This book is a great guide to help you on this journey. 

The book is split up into three sections: Mind, Soul, Body. All the chapters are diverse with helpful tips and some overlapping fun to read stories. The stories are valuable in understanding the advice.

Here are my main takeaways divided over the sections from the book. I wrote them in my own words so some things are influenced by myself. There are also quotes directly from the book.

Mind

• People don’t live in the moment; we try to get out of it. For example by buying a phone so we’re never bored. We try to chase things in the hope the endpoint will make us happy. However, when arriving at an endpoint, we celebrate a bit but then we are disappointed because it isn’t as great as we thought it would be and we don’t have an endpoint anymore so we set a new one. This constant loop keeps on proceeding. Why not enjoy the process? Focus on that instead of your end-goals. 
• “The less energy we waste regretting the past or worrying about the future, the more energy we will have for what’s in front of us”. This quote is important to me because I am stuck sometimes in the future or past but there is no reason to be there. It’s great to think about goals and to learn from past mistakes, but keep it at that.
• Literally every day could be our last, so try to enjoy every one of them.
• Ryan also talks about inputs and outputs. We have so much garbage input (oversensationalized news, over the top social media posts, gossip stories, porn) that our output (creativity, what we do, our focus, etc)  suffers from it. Blocking notifications and unfollowing people can help. Spending less time on your phone too.
• Giving your mind rest by just sitting in a room, thinking or meditating, helps to slow down and focus too.
• Start journaling, put your feelings on papers helps going through them. It also helps you clear your mind. I’ve been journaling for a while now, but I’ll save that for a different article.

Spirit

• Our inner child or our feeling brain (as Mark Manson described it), which is the voice in your head talking you down, tries to get you off your path. We need to heal that inner child by telling it that it’s okay and that we will take care of it.  We have to work together with that voice because it’s impossible to get rid of it.
• Be aware of your jealousy and desires, they can ruin you. Why do you desire to be rich? Some problems will vanish but new ones arise. And when rich people feel depressed about their problems, the scariest things can happen.
• “The need for progress can be the enemy of enjoying the process.” Constantly wanting to see progress is a bad habit. Just keep focusing on the process and eventually, you will see progress AND you’ll be more likely to enjoy what you are doing because you will get better at the process, which will lead to better progress. See where I’m going?
• Being satisfied and telling yourself you have/are enough can be powerful. Sometimes (well, most of the time) you just don’t need extra clothing, or a faster car, or a bigger house.  By applying this rule, you will stop wanting more and more (which will never get you satisfied), and start actually be happy with what you got, which will make life more enjoyable.

Body

• By just going for a walk we can give our minds some rest. Bill Gates plans a think-week twice every year. In this week he is alone in a cabin without any distractions, to seek solitude and to be by himself. This way he comes up with new ideas, often his best ideas. Usually, the mind comes up with the best ideas when we’re not doing anything. If you don’t know what to do with your life, it can also be helpful to just do nothing and sit down with a pen and paper. Eventually, something will pop-up in your head and then you can plan out how you will do this.
• By building a routine, for example, the same sleep schedule and morning routine every day; the same activities around the same time, we make sure we don’t have to constantly think what to do. There are so many choices to be made each day that it can be great to get rid of some to create space for more focus on the important things.
• Don’t treat yourself like an overworking machine that needs to continually perform at it’s best and has to do something useful constantly (that’s me a lot of the times), treat yourself as a human being. 
• “A 2017 study found that lack of sleep increases negative repetitive thinking. Abusing the body leads the mind to abuse itself.” There are too many studies to count that show sleep is super important, so just get your 7-9 hours of sleep.
• We tend to try to escape from ourselves by drinking, watching porn, diving into our phones, smoking, constantly wanting to do fun stuff, etc,  but you can’t continuously escape from yourself. I mean, you can, but then you ignore the ability to fix yourself and you’ll ruin your life and the life of the people around you. 
• Act brave when help is needed.

Every time I feel busy and the need to perform and feel like I’m not doing enough, it’s good to take a step back and reflect. Turn your phone off for a couple of hours, that’ll feel strange. Just take it slow and maybe grab a book and read for a while. Today was such a day for me, I felt like doing nothing. But after turning everything off and playing the piano for a while I felt refreshed to write this article. There are a lot of tips in the list that are very true and will make your life better. I hope I changed your view on certain things and that you got influenced to improve yourself by applying some of these tips. I didn’t go through everything from the book, so if you got interested in reading the book, go for it!

Thanks for reading.

It’s insane how old books can still be valuable and that applies to this book as well. Dale Carnegie was born in 1888 and is famous for his self-improvement courses and books. I was quite surprised to read that self-improvement was already at such a level during the time. 

After reading “How to Win Friends and Influence People” by Dale, I had high hopes for this one. Both books are great and aimed at completely different topics, depending on what kind of help you need. If you worry about worrying too much, read this book.

Don’t cry over spilt milk

Excessive worrying can have bad consequences. Worrying can break you, drastically impact your lifespan, cause cavities, cause stomach aches and other health-related problems. Dale greatly describes the outcomes of worrying throughout the book. They are great reminders that cause more motivation to continue reading. There is a broad variety of tips in this book about conquering worry. All tips are explained with stories of people, which is why the book is so fun to read. If the book only handled straight facts, it would’ve been shorter and lifeless.

We can think too much about past events that negatively impacted us. Or about our future and how we might be afraid. But why not live in the moment? As Dale put it: ‘Don’t try to saw sawdust’ or ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk’. You can continuously look at your past but you won’t get any better from that. Unless you subjectively look at your mistakes and improve upon them. Once you’ve done that, there is no reason to keep playing past scenarios in your head. 

Other tips include trying to be as nice as possible and help out family and friends. This way you move the attention from yourself to the people around you and you forget to worry. Or you can keep yourself very busy with hobbies, work or other passion projects. You will not have the time to worry if you are too busy to even worry. 

The last tips seemed to be more about avoiding worry than conquering worry. Which is good because eventually, you may fully forget worry. But I think you should look at the root of your worries as well. What is the reason you’re scared of the future? Why do you go crazy over your looks or over how you spend your time? These questions are hard to answer and when you know the root, you can truly improve. 

At the end of the book, stories are given of people who conquered worry, which was a nice addition to the book. Although the book is quite old, the tips are still relevant to this day. This is probably the best book about conquering worry out there, so why not try it out?

Although I’ve read this book a couple of months ago, there are still valuable and helpful things that I wanted to share from this book. While doing another book haul, I stumbled upon this book by Robert Maurer which caught my attention. 

The title is one of those titles that we might get offended by. “Yeah buddy, how in the world can one small step change my life. Robert, get out of here”. But I remembered reading about Kaizen, which is a method of continuously improving all functions and processes in business in small steps. So using this method on your personal life sounded interesting to me. 

Slow change is better than no change.

Ever wondered why so many new years wishes go down the drain? We start off strong in January with a full plan, February gets a bit tough and in March it’s over with our new healthy habits. Of course, these “new year new me” challenges are well-meant but they don’t last. 

In the book, Robert discusses how the brain reacts to big changes. Small changes are more pleasing to the brain and gives time for the brain to get used to the new habit. Big changes will scare the brain and your decision making brain will try to flee from the situation. 

There are a lot of examples of people who had certain disorders, which could be bypassed by doing the smallest exercises. One woman tried all sorts of fitness programs to lose weight and nothing worked, so Robert came up with the idea to let her do some high knees when there was an advertisement on television.

Her reaction was, of course, great. She didn’t get scared because it was that small and she got hope again.  After trying the exercises for a while, the exercises stuck to her and she began doing other exercises. As you can see, the little exercise caused a chain reaction. 

You can apply this to other goals as well. Quitting smoking, writing a novel or meeting the love of your life. I’m currently using this method with writing. Every day I’ll write for 20 minutes. This is very do-able, and most of the time I write more than 20 minutes because I get in a flow state. 

There are more examples and useful tips in the book and it is definitely worth reading them. The book is pretty short and kept fairly short which I liked.

If you’re currently going through something you would like to change, or a goal you would like to pursue, then I recommend this book to you. Try it with small steps instead of big ones. 

Walter Isaacson has done it again. Being known for his incredibly well-written biographies about Steve Jobs and Einstein, Walter may have had the toughest challenge yet. Especially since Leonardo lived 500 years ago. You might wonder how Walter could write 524 pages about him in such detail. That’s because Leonardo kept thousands of notes and journals and little scribbles for us to figure out. Writing something personal on a note about the anatomy of a horse wasn’t odd for him. Revisiting old notes to write new experiences on them without any date was also common. Luckily researchers across the world have been solving the puzzle. This includes figuring out dates, locations and more with diverse techniques. 

While doing research for this article, I came across the Dutch version of the book, which I might have preferred. But this book definitely helped me improve my English vocabulary. The book is masterfully written and the vocabulary of Walter is exquisite in ways that defy description. It seems that every word has been thought-through. I used the Google Translate app on my phone to translate difficult words and the list saves automatically. So I got a nice list of words for you (this list is small compared to my full list).

paroxysm – rites – gregarious – lascivious – inculcated – bevy – happenstance – papal – fovea – phyllotactic – menagerie – dilettantism – duchy (this isn’t a curse word) – aphorism – salacious – tumultuous – flotilla – sodomy – trompe l’oeil – androgynous – pugnacious – sfumato

There are lots of terms in this book about drawing, nature, religion and the human body. Quite often I didn’t understand the terms in general so it forced me to learn them. 

Insatiable polymath 

Leonardo is a … well let’s use Walters’ description: 

Leonardo was a genius, but more: he was the epitome of the universal mind, one who sought to understand all of creation, including how we fit into it. 

Leonardo may have been born 300 years too soon. Living in the 15th century, he achieved historic breakthroughs that had not been proved and touched upon hundreds of years later. The cause of these breakthroughs was his immense curiosity. Always questioning the most random things. One note in his notebook was to ‘describe the tongue of the woodpecker’. First of all, why did he want to know this? That’s because the tongue has a very important function. The tongue of a woodpecker works as a cushion, shielding the brain from shocks made by smashing trees with its beak. But what made him think that the tongue had an important function? His curiosity for everything. 

The book

Walter wrote the chapters relatively chronological. From the young starting years to the elderly years of Leonardo. It includes all of Leonardo’s drawings and other pursuits like dissecting humans/animals, designing flying machines, dissecting rivers, designing military devices like tanks and a lot more. Leonardo’s personal life is 

Sometimes the current time could be unclear because there was so much information about his pursuits. Also, the collection of projects Leonardo worked on, had a wide timespan. If one work of art took 5 years, and during those years changes happened in Leonardo’s life, Walter explained the work of art in one chapter and the life changes in another. This was an obvious thing to do. However, the switch in timespans can be a challenge to the reader because it happened quite often. As a consequence, the reader has to be concentrated while reading.

Therefore I wouldn’t recommend this book as a fun, easy read for your beach vacation. The book is super interesting and informative, so you should approach the book with the intention to learn. It wasn’t an easy read and it took a while to finish. At the end of the book, there is a list of things to learn from Leonardo and it’s nice to revisit the list. The list includes, for example, the fact that being curious makes life more exciting. 

I would definitely recommend anyone with an interest in masterminds, art, and history to read this book. It is a great way to improve your English as well. 

Thanks for reading!

I listened to this book as an audiobook because I wanted to make better use of my time. Listening to podcasts sparked interest as well to give audiobooks a try. I was working at my dad’s place, which doesn’t require a lot of thinking. So this was a great moment to choose an audiobook on Audible. 

Educated: A Memoir is written by Tara Westover. The book has been reviewed and recommended by Bill Gates and Barack Obama. This fact alone made me immensely curious. The audiobook is read by Julia Whelan. I didn’t like the voice at the start, but as I went further the voice became familiar, likable and recognizable.

Massive props to her for telling the story credibly because the story is one of a kind and has a special emotional feel to it.

The summary written by the publisher

My thoughts

This is one of these stories that one can’t imagine happening in real life. Tara was being manipulated for years by her family and violent brother Sean. She was abused by Sean multiple times and her parents would not believe her. So she thought she was wrong and her parents right. Meanwhile, she was being grappled to the point where she heard her bones crackle. Her father constantly said that there was no evidence so the abuses had not happened. She started to believe them instead of herself. She began having thoughts like: “Maybe the abusing wasn’t that bad, or was it?”. Eventually, everyone turned against her except her brother Tyler. Tyler encouraged her to study and so her study journey started with lots of ups and downs. One time in class she asked what the holocaust was because she was homeschooled and the question generated a lot of mean faces. Everyone thought she must have been joking because obviously everyone should know about the holocaust by then.

The book has 352 and the audiobook is approximately 12 hours. Sometimes during the book I had a feeling like: “Now the mistreatments must be over, she won’t get back to her family and she will continue with her study”. But the second half of the book is filled with recurring events like returning to her home, being abused by her brother, try to convince her parents that he is violent, failing to get their trust, and almost quitting school to help her parents. At times it was even hard to listen to her falling in the same traps over and over again. 

That being said, I liked the book very much. The book is unique and reminds one should be grateful for what one has. The story is inspiring for everyone, especially ones that can recognize themselves in Tara. This might not be a fun read while laying on the beach with a cocktail in your hand, so you decide when to read it.

Thanks for reading my post. 

Here are links to the book. You don’t have to use the affiliate link if you don’t want to. 

Amazon.de (affiliate link)

Amazon.com (affiliate link)

Bol.com