I'd like to officially welcome you to the second half of 2023.

I started the year with a piece on ways to make 2023 your greatest year to date—your own Annus Mirabilis, a name given for the "miracle year" of prolific discoveries made by a young Isaac Newton during his escape from a plague-ridden London in 1666.

If you've kept up your New Year's resolutions and feel on track, great! If not, that's ok, because even if the best time to start was 6 months ago, the second best time is today.

So far this year, I've written two newsletters per week, every single week, for a total of 52 newsletters. During that time, we've seen the subscriber base grow from 170,000 to over 450,000.

I'd like to share a distillation of my 10 favorite ideas from those pieces. I will cover each idea in concise, simple terms, but you should feel welcome to go deeper with the original piece on any that pique your interest.

Here are my 10 favorite ideas from the first half of 2023...

Overcome Your Fear: The Spotlight Effect

There are two big mistakes in life:

1. Worrying about what other people think about you
2. Believing that other people think about you in the first place

The Spotlight Effect is a common psychological phenomenon where we overestimate the degree to which other people are noticing or observing our actions, behaviors, appearance, or results.

We think everyone is staring and noticing us, but they aren't. Even if they are, they quickly forget about it.

To "dim" the spotlight:

• Awareness: Understand that others are never as tuned into your actions, behaviors, or appearance as you are. Even if they do notice you, they quickly forget about it, as they're mostly just focused on themselves.
• Be Interested: In any public situation, ask questions, listen intently, and engage. This eases your own tension, gets others talking, and builds up your confidence in a new social situation.
• "So What?" Approach: Confront your worst fears about what could go wrong. Ask "So what?" about that worst fear becoming reality. Usually the "So what?" isn't nearly as bad as we think. As Seneca famously wrote, "We suffer more in imagination than in reality."

(For more, read the original piece here)

How to Start Journaling: The 1-1-1 Method

Journaling is an extremely powerful tool for improving mental health and clarity. Unfortunately, it's a positive habit that eludes many people because it feels intimidating to start.

To solve this, I developed a dead simple solution: I call it the 1-1-1 Method.

Every single evening, at the end of your work day, open up your journal (or favorite digital tool/application) and write down three simple points:

• 1 win from the day
• 1 point of tension, anxiety, or stress
• 1 point of gratitude

With a simple structure and a low time burden, the 1-1-1 Method is an easy way to start building a journaling practice that will improve your mental health in the second half of 2023.

(For more, read the original piece here)

The Productivity Tool: The Eisenhower Matrix

Dwight Eisenhower was known for his prolific productivity. His secret? "What is important is seldom urgent and what is urgent is seldom important."

An URGENT task is one that requires immediate attention to complete. An IMPORTANT task is one that contributes to your long-term mission or goals.

Use the Eisenhower Matrix to categorize your current tasks.

The Goal: Spend more time on the important tasks that contribute to your long-term values and goals.

In simple terms:

• Manage top-right
• Spend more time in top-left
• Waste less time in the bottom half

(For more, read the original piece here)

How to Ride the Waves: The Surfer Mentality

When a surfer gets up on a wave, they enjoy the present moment, even though they know with certainty that the wave will eventually end. They fully enjoy THIS wave, with the wisdom and awareness that there are always more waves coming.

The surfer knows that they don't have to ride every single wave that comes their way.

The surfer knows that 90% of the time they won't be riding any wave, but just paddling and waiting. They are aware that patience and proper positioning is all that matters for when the next wave inevitably comes.

Finally, the surfer knows that the only way to live is by putting themself out there in the water. You can't catch any waves sitting on the shore.

(For more, read the original piece here)

How to Learn Anything: The Feynman Technique

The Feynman Technique is a learning model that leverages teaching and prioritizes simplicity to help you develop a deep understanding of any topic.

It involves four key steps:

1. Set the Stage: What’s the topic you want to learn? Starting with a blank page, write the topic at the top and jot down everything you know about it. Read & research the topic. Add any new learnings or insights as you develop them.
2. ELI5 (Explain It To Me Like I'm 5): Attempt to explain the topic to someone without a base understanding of it (i.e. a “child”). On a blank page, write down everything you know about your topic—but pretend you are explaining it to a child. Use simple language!
3. Assess & Study: Reflect on your performance. Form an honest assessment. How well were you able to explain the topic to a child? Where did you get frustrated? Where did you turn to jargon? These are the gaps in your understanding! Read and study more to fill them.
4. Organize, Convey & Review: Organize your elegant, simple language into a clear, compelling story or narrative. Convey it to a few others, then iterate and refine accordingly. Review your new, deep understanding of the topic.

It's easy to overcomplicate and intimidate—we all know people who try to do this. But don't be fooled—complexity and jargon are often used to mask a lack of deep understanding.

Use the Feynman Technique: Find beauty in simplicity.

(For more, read the original piece here)

How to Get Lucky: The 4 Types of Luck

In 1978, a neurologist named Dr. James Austin published a book entitled Chase, Chance, & Creativity: The Lucky Art of Novelty.

In it, Dr. Austin proposed that there are four types of luck:

1. Blind Luck: Completely out of your control. It includes where you are born, who you are born to, base circumstances of your life, "acts of God", and more. Blind Luck covers the truly random occurrences of the universe.
2. Luck from Motion: You’re creating motion and collisions through hustle and energy that you are inserting into an ecosystem. The increase in collisions opens you up to more lucky events.
3. Luck from Awareness: The result of your awareness and depth of understanding of a specific domain. This depth of understanding within a given arena allows you to become very good at positioning yourself for lucky breaks to benefit you.
4. Luck from Uniqueness: Occurs when your unique set of attributes attracts specific luck to you. It actually seeks you out.

As a useful rule of thumb for your journey, always consider my Luck Razor:

When choosing between two paths, always choose the path that has a larger luck surface area. Ask yourself: Which of the two paths is more likely to lead to me getting lucky? Act accordingly.

(For more, read the original piece here)

Embrace Ordinary: The Trap of the Extraordinary

The Trap of the Extraordinary is that we conflate success with the achievement of the extraordinary. Winners are those who achieve the extraordinary, losers are those who do not.

The two mindset shifts to escape the trap:

1. It’s not about achieving the extraordinary, it's about finding purpose, joy, and fulfillment in the ordinary along the way.
2. The prize is not the achievement you strive for, but the striving itself.

This is about dislocating your happiness from any "ends" you're trying to reach. It's about avoiding the "when, then" psychology that says "when I get [X], then I'll be happy."

Make the ordinary come alive and the extraordinary will take care of itself.

(For more, read the original piece here)

Be the Main Character: Character Invention

Create a character in your mind who can show up in the way you want to and teach yourself to "flip the switch" to become this character when necessary.

Here are a few steps to incorporate it into your life:

1. Identify Situations: Identify the situations where you'd like to show up as the best version of yourself. This can be as big as performing in front of millions or as small as having dinner with your family after a long day. Any situation where you want to be your best.
2. Envision Your Character: Envision the character you would like to embody in each situation. What traits do they possess? How do they appear and interact? What is their mentality and energy level?
3. Get in Character: Nothing works without practice. Get yourself some reps by turning on this character in those situations. See how it feels to show up as your best self in these moments.

Remember: Your daily actions shape your identity. When you embrace this, your whole world can start to change.

(For more, read the original piece here)

How to Unlock New Growth: The Think Day

Free time to think is a "call option" on future interesting opportunities. When you have free time built into your schedule, you have the headspace and bandwidth to dream up and pursue high upside ideas.

Pick one day each month (or quarter) to step back from all of your day-to-day professional demands. Seclude yourself (mentally or physically), shut off all of your notifications on your devices, and put up an out-of-office response.

Six question prompts to guide the day:

1. What are your strongest beliefs? What would it take for you to change your mind on them?
2. What are a few things that you know now that you wish you knew 5 years ago?
3. How can you do less, but better?
4. Are you hunting antelope or field mice?
5. What actions were you engaged in 5 years ago that you cringe at today? What actions are you engaged in today that you will cringe at in 5 years?
6. What would your 80-year-old self say about your decisions today?

Depending on your professional and life constraints, you can scale the Think Day up or down. The point is to force this air and space into your life and experience the unlock it provides.

(For more, read the original piece here)

Your Ultimate Currency: The Time Billionaire

"A million seconds is 11 days. A billion seconds is slightly over 31 years...I feel like in our culture, we’re so obsessed, as a culture, with money. And we deify dollar billionaires in a way...And I was thinking of time billionaires that when I see, sometimes, 20-year-olds—the thought I had was they probably have two billion seconds left. But they aren’t relating to themselves as time billionaires." - Graham Duncan on The Tim Ferriss Show

Time is our most precious asset.

When you're young, you are literally rich with time. At age 20, you probably have about two billion seconds left (assuming you live to 80). By 50, just one billion seconds remain.

Most of us fail to realize the value of this asset until it is gone.

(For more, read the original piece here)

Finishing 2023 Strong

Those were my 10 favorite ideas shared in this newsletter in the first half of 2023.

Pick one and set your intention to incorporate it into your life in the days and weeks ahead. If you do, I guarantee you'll be on the right track for a terrific second half of the year.

Onward and upward, friends!

P.S. You can use my Personal Quarterly Review to conduct a review of your first half of the year and make any course corrections for the second half ahead. I use this exercise quarterly and it has had a huge impact on my life.

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