Reading, Watching, Listening – 18th Apr 2014

This year I dedicated a category in my goals to learning. I want to find new sources of information to grow my knowledge. It is often very easy to seek out the same sources of information and stick with what you know.

So instead of just sharing some links to read this year, I am also sharing podcasts I have been listening to and videos I have been watching. You can read past editions here.

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Reading – The Cold, Hard Truth: You’re Overwhelmed Because You Want to Be

Overwhelmed- Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time
I have added this book to my list of books to read. I think I will find it confronting, because I know there is a part of me that loves being occupied, working on challenges tasks and ticking off the to do list.

This article on Inc.com reviews Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time (aff link) and I have been thinking about this ever since I read it:

What is that? Take Robinson’s advice, summed up by Hanna Rosin in her review of the book for Slate:

Robinson doesn’t ask us to meditate, or take more vacations, or breathe, or walk in nature, or do anything that will invariably feel like just another item on the to-do list. The answer to feeling oppressively busy, he says, is to stop telling yourself that you’re oppressively busy, because the truth is that we are all much less busy than we think we are.

Watching – Tina Roth Eisenberg Keynote – SXSW Interactive 2013


{Click here to see the video if you are reading via email.}

In this keynote presentation Tina shares her passion for doing what you love and how taking your side projects seriously will lead to your success. It will make you ask the question – How much do you love what you do?

Tina Roth Eisenberg is also known online as Swiss Miss. Her philosophy on success is that “life is a sum of total choices”. Through out the presentation she outlines the 11 rules she lives by. These were a couple of my favourites:

1. Invest your life in what you love
9. Make time to think and breathe – Wonderful things can happen when your brain is empty. (Maira Kalman)
10. If an opportunity scares you, take it.

Listening – Pursuing A Happy Life – Possessions

This podcast Pursuing A Happy Life – Possessions is only seven minutes long, but it has inspired me to get stuck into one of the rooms in my house when I return from holidays.

The creator of the podcast Rick Coste states that things that own us just as much as we own them. And I think he is right. He is not about minimalism, but keeping only the things that are meaningful and useful. It is about removing the possessions you purchased on a whim and don’t even remember why you did it.

He encourages us to periodically pour over the things you own and get rid of the things that just washed up on the shores of your life!

Coste quotes this from Mother Teresa which I love:

The more you have, the more you are occupied, the less you give. But the less you have the more free you are. Poverty for us is a freedom. It is not mortification, a penance. It is joyful freedom. There is no television here, no this, no that. But we are perfectly happy.

What have you been Reading, Watching, Listening?