If you’re anything like me you leave the buying of Christmas presents to the last minute, as in Christmas Eve. This inevitably leads to panic buying, which is turn is never cheap.
So, similar to last year, we’ve got your back, and have selected a range of books you might like to gift a special someone (or gift yourself, you deserve it).
Don’t fool yourself into thinking you’ve got loads of time however. At the time of this post, Christmas is less than 4 weeks away. To help – each of the books has a quick link to The Book Depository, and of course you can also support local independent book sellers in your area.
As I re-kindled my obsession with reading a few years ago, I discovered that after devouring a great book and learning a bunch, my goldfish-like memory failed me. Other than the title of the book, or perhaps the colour of the front cover, I retained almost none of the learnings. I’d lost all the nuggets in the sluice water. Enter Tim Ferriss, his advice on indexing, and sticky tabs. Mine is a simple process, and comes down to a few quick steps.
Perhaps there’s a lesson here already. “Do the easy questions in an exam first, so you get your mind warmed up”. Maybe the lesson is that “You’re destined to fail as you’ve only aimed low!” Perhaps there’s no secret author’s meaning at all and it’s just the last book I read since starting the blog.
If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, check out my previous post titled What’s it all about? for some context. When you’ve done that, come back and we’ll continue.
I first heard of Hal Moore while trail walking at the back of the Cherrybrook Rural Fire Brigade station. I’m a member of the brigade and when I can, I walk the fire trails and single track around the station, partly to better learn the trails that we may one day need to fight fires from, but mainly just for the exercise and the momentary solitude. Hal Moore was not on the trails that day. Hal Moore is in fact, quite dead. He did a lot of living though. A decorated member of the US Army, he was considered one of the countries’ finest fighting commanders and spent just over 30 years in service. No, Hal Moore was not on the trails that day.
I was listening to my favourite podcast, Jocko Podcast, by a guy named Jocko Willink. We’ll cover more on what I’ve learned from him in the coming weeks.
Blackwattle Trail
The sound grab that quite literally stopped me in my tracks was “If there’s doubt in your mind, there’s no doubt at all”. I rewound 30 seconds and listened again. “If there’s doubt in your mind, there’s no doubt at all”. I rewound 30 seconds and listened again. I couldn’t quite get my head around it, so I listened again – you get the picture.
It wasn’t that the hills of the Blackwattle Trail had given me an aneurysm, but when I stood there and thought about it, it’s simplicity and elegance was startling. I had to know more.
churchill.live 