Tuesday Letter #28 - Great Books of the Western World
Hey, Happy Tuesday!
I don't have too much personal news this week, except for the one I describe below. So, let's get straight to business. Hope you enjoy this week's letter.
📜 Quote of the week
I take this a step further and limit who I follow to 99 people—not because I want to look cool, but so that I’m ensuring my feed stays high quality. Each new person that I add is removing attention from someone that I’m currently following. So, each time I follow someone new, I remove someone from the list that hasn’t been delivering value. (Location 2561)
Twitter can be a fantastic way of finding great people, learning from other people. However, as with other tech products you have to be very careful with how you use them. It is very easy to get lost in the sea of content. Steph's 100 follow rule is a great way to keep this urge in check and ensure that your feed remains high quality.
It may sound too restricting, but if you are at a 100 and need to add one more, go ahead and do that. After you do that, look through your list and see if there is anyone who does not post, or who changed their content and you don't enjoy it anymore. There is a very high chance someone like that is out there. And if there isn't then, who cares that you have 101 follows 🤷 ? You do you.
Great Books of the Western World
💰 At the end of last year I set a goal to buy the "Great Books of the Western World" collection. The reason I wanted it so bad, is twofold.
🤯 At the end of "How to Read a Book" there is a list of great literature suggested by the author to consume. I started downloading books from this list and giving them a read, but they were a little too difficult for me at the time (around 2 years ago).
😍 Last year though, my wife and I went to a small town not too far from where we live and went to a (Used) Book Store. There I saw it...
I knew I had to have it at some point. The issue is that it won't really fit in our apartment, or I'm not sure where we will even live in a year or two, and so I forgot about it.
👶 Then around December last year, I found myself reading more history and old books again, and then I remembered about this set again. And so at the beginning of 2022, I was looking through eBay and stumbled upon an unbelievable listing. Someone was selling this set for $75!!! I knew I must buy and it doesn't matter we don't have much space, we'll figure something out. They were selling it from Massachusetts, so unfortunately I couldn't pick it up myself, so they had to ship the whole set for another $70. So in the end this set cost me about $160 with tax and fees. Last week it showed up on my doorstep...
🎒 Authors suggest different approaches to reading this set. But the one that made the most sense to me was their 10-year plan. It is well laid out by the Editorial team and is in the order of difficulty according to them. I think this is perfect, as I'm going to be a different person in 10 years and I will be growing together with these books and with you.
🤝 I hope you will join me on this journey. I will be sharing all the learning and interesting things I stumble upon in these great books and we will be learning and improving together.
🐔 Tweets of the week
https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1483347153057554433
As I'm still going through my 2022 goal setting, I was thinking about themes that matter to me. And one of those themes is Finance. I want to earn more this year, to make sure my family always feels comfortable doing whatever it is that they want to do. One way to do that is by getting a raise, but that is not always in your power. So I want to focus on earning with a Side Hustle. Daniel Vassallo is a great example of a person who turned from a traditional employee to an "Indiehacker". He also tweets great stuff often. This list is a great way to think about Side Hustles and how one can easily earn money in 2022.