♖ Max Holzheu's Newsletter - Issue #11
Hello friends! Oh man, how time flies in these quarantine times. I hope you’re starting to get used to the confinement 😆
Thanks to everyone who responded to my last email, I’m so glad to have rekindled conversations with many of you. I have a lot of free time, so feel free to reply with whatever is on your mind when you read this email 🙂
Onwards!
Quote(s) of the Day 🔑
“He who jumps into the void owes no explanation to those who stand and watch.”
Jean-Luc Godard
What I'm reading 📖
I’ve found it impossible to read any non-fiction these past few weeks, so I picked up the sci-fi novel Dune by Frank Hebert. I’m halfway through it and I’m loving it.
Here are two passages that I liked a lot. The first one is about dealing with fear:
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
The second one is a simpler one:
“Such a sure hand does my son have with his people.”
This one needs a bit more explanation. When I read it, it moved something within me very deeply, and I was caught by surprise. It’s such a simple phrase! Upon examining it, I noticed that this resonated a lot with my Personal Values. As a leader, I want to lead with a steady hand. This is how I’d want people to talk about me, my work and my past, present, and future employees. I want to be seen as reliable and trustworthy.
What I'm listening to 👂
This past week, I was gifted a premium subscription to Blinkist, an app that sends you summaries of books. In general, I’m skeptical of book summaries because most of the value is captured by the person writing the summary, not the people reading it.
However, I do have an interminable reading list of stuff I’ll probably never get around to reading, so I picked a few books at the bottom of the list and added them to my collection.
I have to say…I’m pleasantly surprised! The summaries are really high quality and I’ve been able to extract value out of them. The summary also serves as a proxy to decide whether to read the full book or not, so overall my experience has been very positive. Highly recommend it! Click here if you want to try it out.
What I'm working on ❤️
I am taking my friend Tiago Forte’s Building a Second Brain course on productivity and knowledge management. It’s truly fascinating how much you can accomplish if you know how to organize yourself. I am getting tremendous value out of it. It’s incredible how effective an online course can be if it’s designed to be taken online.
Online learning can be incredibly effective.
Taking your lectures, recording them, and putting them in a MOOC is not very effective.
One day we'll learn that they're not the same thing.
12:49 PM - 13 Apr 2020
Meanwhile, I am also working on a synchronization tool to import my bank transactions into my favorite budgeting tool, YNAB. Currently, this only works with US based banks, so I’m hacking something together to make it work with my Mexican bank.
Thanks for reading, and have a fantastic week!