It has been quite a while since I shared a weekend reading post. If you follow me on Facebook you may have seen some of them, although with the way the Facebook algorithm works who knows! Below I share some stand out pieces of content I have come across recently.
Watching – The Price of Gold
The Price of Gold from Folke Rydén Production on Vimeo.
This is a Swedish documentary by Folke Rydén. It looks at what it takes to become an Olympic athlete in Sweden. I found the doco fascinating. The drive of these athletes is amazing, but for many of them winning does certainly comes at a cost. The doco made me think about how much emphasis we put on sporting competitions and how much money goes into them and whether or not we take a long term view of what success looks like.
Running time is 59:25 and you can read more about the film here.
Listening – The Scarcity Trap: Why We Keep Digging When We’re Stuck In A Hole
The Hidden Brain podcast is part of the NPR podcast network. It is an incredibly well produced podcast and covers a diverse range of topics. I have listened to this episode a number of times and tried to analyse my own behaviour to see where a scarcity mind set might be leading me to make poor decisions.
And scarcity doesn’t just relate to physical items, in this episode they share examples of time scarcity and friendship scarcity.
Have you ever noticed that when something important is missing in your life, your brain can only seem to focus on that missing thing?
Two researchers have dubbed this phenomenon scarcity, and they say it touches on many aspects of our lives.
“It leads you to take certain behaviors that in the short term help you to manage scarcity, but in the long term only make matters worse,” says Sendhil Mullaianathan, an economics professor at Harvard University. {source}.
Listening time is 36:40 and you can see the show notes here.
Reading – How to 80/20 your life
Understanding and applying the 80/20 principle to make life easier is something I teach in Planned & Present. Using the 80/20 principle was an absolute game changer for me, enabling me to turn my life from a state of constantly feeling I was rushing from one thing to the next to a state where I have space to breathe and actually enjoy the family I have created and love so much.
Mark Manson shares in his post, How to 80/20 your life, what his key learnings from his 80/20 analysis was:
When I first considered how the 80/20 Principle applied to my own life, I instantly realized a few things.
- A few of my hobbies (television shows and video games) accounted for 80% of my time, but only brought me 20% of my fulfillment.
- I didn’t enjoy a few of my friends who I spent 80% of my time with (hence I was not happy in my social life).
- 80% of what I spent my money on was not useful or healthy for my lifestyle.
You can read the full post here.