Applying Books in My Life

2024-08-14

• 13 min read

I read a couple of books last year and this year and I finally decided it's time to use and apply them in my life. In this piece, I want to share how I am applying ideas, concepts, and principles from books in my life and I hope you can grasp some of the ideas and try to apply them in yours too. Or at least be inspired to read more interesting books.

I didn't go over all the 47 books I read this year. This is the process I took and am still experimenting with:

Make a list of the best books I've read
Write the key takeaways down on my commonplace book
Write questions that will drive actions
Write actions and habits I want to cultivate daily
Act, reflect, and review the impact of those ideas on my life

Making the list was not an easy task as I read a bunch of great books and the fact that I wanted to start with just a couple of them made it even harder. But this is the list of the books I went through:

The second step was writing down the takeaways, ideas, and principles in my commonplace book. Most of them already have their own page on my website.

Writing them in my commonplace book helped to separate them into different topics. I came up with: Goals, Habits, Health, Discipline, and Focus.

Having this concept of a commonplace book has helped me whenever I need an idea in a specific situation. A couple of days ago, I was having some issues with focus and attention. I went through the Focus topic on the commonplace book and it drove me to some conclusions and I immediately started acting on this specific issue.

The main reason to have it is to improve the quality of my life and I can see how it is already helping me.

I also have a digital bookshelf where I take notes for each book I read. These notes turn into posts and I publish them on my website.

The third part is the most fun of this whole process. It is all about asking questions to drive actions and habits. The questions not only help me with driving actions but I also use them to reflect on if I'm really putting habits into work and how they are improving my life.

Then comes the action or execution phase where I put every idea into practice in my day-to-day life.

Goal Setting & Planning

When it comes to goal setting, I learned interesting ideas from Atomic Habits and 10x Is Easier Than 2x. Instead of going 2x, why not set an impossible, bigger, 10x goal?

I do this because I want to give my mind the necessity to think differently, to think hard about it, and to come up with possible pathways. When I set an impossible goal, I like to say "Impossible, unless.." and ask "Unless what?". And then I keep exercising my problem-solving skills.

Thinking big also helps narrow down the paths I can take: focus on the 20% and weed out the 80% that won't help me reach my 10x goal. It becomes simpler because most of the paths won't take me to this huge goal. I need to cut out 80% of the things because they won't work out.

Another interesting concept to apply in goal setting is to think about your future self, set new identities, and most important, start acting like these new identities.

Instead of writing down “I want to be a runner”, I wrote “I am a runner”, so this is part of my identity now, I'm committing to it, and it influences my habits: how I eat, exercise, and sleep. This is interesting because it really influences how I plan the week to eat better, what food I should buy and prep, the time I need to go to sleep to wake up feeling energized, and what type of exercises will help me get in shape, healthy, and achieve my goals.

Then I went deeper into this goal. I wanted to make it more specific so I could measure it.

I'm running 6 times a week, 40 minutes of training, with a leg and back workout before or after. I need to go to sleep at 10 pm to wake up at 6 am feeling energized for the day and have a quality sleep time. And I need good protein (fish or chicken, usually), vegetables, and 3L of water every day. I allow myself to have junk food for 1 meal per week tops.

I do this process for every goal I have. If I want to be a Machine Learning Researcher, I reframe it as I'm already one, and then, I just need to break down how I should act like it. Focus on the foundational knowledge I should have (math, python, algorithms), schedule time to read research papers, and research a specific (domain) problem I'm interested in. If I want to be a professional writer, I reframe myself to act like one and write every single day, publish my work, and grow my audience.

Reframing is a powerful tool.

Another powerful tool is to 10x your goals. What if instead of living for 80 years, I want to live a quality life for 150 years? What if rather than having $1 million, I want $10 million, or “financial freedom”?

10x your goal will make you use the constraint theory, where only a few paths will lead to the 10x goal. All the other paths that would make me achieve the 1x goal won't help me and are merely distractions now.

It's important to remember that a 10x goal is not about quantity but about a tremendous increase in quality. It's so much bigger in quality that it requires a “new you” to achieve it. Things that got you here won't get you there.

This tool helps with reflecting on the goals and asking important questions like:

What are the minimum standards that you’re focused on and committed to?
How do you distinguish the 20 percent that matters and the 80 percent that doesn’t?
What is your 20 percent that if you went all-in on, you’d become 10x more valuable and impactful?

Day and Week Planning

This is a plan I do every week and day. On Sunday, I schedule some time to plan the whole week, especially the next day. This is an important part of my execution phase because it connects my goals to the actual actions.

There are 3 main goals I set for 3-months: Learning, Health, and Writing.

After doing the “Goal Setting & Planning”, most of the actions are already there digested for me, so I just need to block some time to execute them in my week.

Specifically for the learning goal, I use the principles I learned from reading “The Art of Learning”. There are some insightful concepts book talks about mastery like “start with principles” and “number to leave numbers”, where you focus first on mastering the fundamentals and filling the knowledge gaps to master the topic as a whole. You discover these fundamental pieces using first principles, where you break down the concept into many smaller pieces that are the foundation.

For example, after setting the goal of doing ML research in the field of biology and healthcare, I broke down the goal into manageable tasks and actions I could work on to achieve that.

For my Machine Learning journey, I've been learning mathematics (more specifically linear algebra, statistics, and calculus), basic ML algorithms, and an introduction to genetics and bioinformatics as the first steps to achieve this goal. With that, I just needed to schedule them in my week and measure the progress on each front.

Because I already set the goals, doing the breakdown helps with focus on the important topics and remove the rest. This is an important step because “the rest” in this case are the distractions, the things that doing won't help me make progress toward my real goals.

This is something I learned from reading “Eat That Frog”, “The One Thing”, and “Essentialism”: how to prioritize the most important task to reach the established goals. All the rest are distractions and somewhat a form of procrastination.

Here are some prompts and questions so you can build a better planning process:

Did you write a plan for the week? Did you prioritize your plan's tasks?
What's the number 1 thing you need to work on?
Are you scheduling and planning deep work time?
How do you know you finished the activity or accomplished the goal? How do you measure the progress?

Execution

For someone who loves the journey and the craft, the execution phase is the most fun of all the processes. Because of the daily planning, I have most of my day figured out. This is an important step. As I learned from “Atomic Habits”, I should be very specific about a habit, so I write down which habit, when (the specific time block in my calendar), and where (usually in my office for knowledge work).

This helps me remove all the uncertainty about doing it. There's no excuse, I just need to execute it. For me, procrastination comes when I don't have a specific plan, so I keep scrolling, opening tabs, and doing all the things that I shouldn't be supposed to do. With certainty, I cut off the procrastination from the root cause.

I have a To-Do/Calendar to manage the actions I need to execute in the day, so all the tasks are scheduled on the calendar and have a specific time block. This is whole I schedule deep work.

Thinking about focus and energy, the 2 hours of my day are the most important time. It's when I feel recovered, refreshed, and full of energy to do my best work. It's not a coincidence that most people talk about doing the most important work in the morning, and this is what I do. For me, they are related to writing and learning ML and mathematics. To learn complex topics and to produce high-quality work requires a ton of energy and focus, and I try to use that in my favor as much as possible.

The morning is also a crucial time because it has less distraction. Most people are still waking up.

Distractions are an important part of deep work. Here are some questions that helped me drive some actions:

What are the common distractions in your day?
What do you think impact your concentration when doing important, essential activities?

It requires intense focus and to be interrupted from time to time breaks the focus and your attention. Distractions have many forms: email, phone notifications, slack, social media, people around you, etc.

Whenever I’m working, I shouldn't be opening social media tabs. It just breaks my flow and focus, especially when I get caught up in constant scrolling. That's why I use browser extensions to block social media and email, like Work Mode.

Slack is also a source of distraction, so most of my channels are muted and I only receive notifications when people DM me.

I also use the MacBook Focus time to block any notification that would distract me in a period of (deep work) time.

The whole idea here is to list all the main distractions and try to remove them as much as possible. As learned from “Atomic Habits”, make it very difficult for you to act on bad habits.

Doing it and removing distractions will tremendously improve your focus, but it's not enough.

Another tool to avoid distractions and procrastination is habit stacking. One example I do every single day is my “health cycle”: 4:50 pm triggers my alarm → I put my running clothes on → I do leg exercises → I do abs exercises → I go to the gym or for an outside run → I take a cold shower → and I finish my health cycle with body and facial cream and lotion.

After building this routine for a long time, it feels like it's just one big habit and not multiple habits together. That's the power of habit stacking.

Focus management is another challenge I have to handle to deeply enter my flow.

One important lesson I learned from reading the “The Art of Learning” is about training the ability to concentrate hard. There's a concept of tension and release, or focus and recovery. For a period of time, train yourself to concentrate deeply on the habit, the learning process, or your performance. Finishing this period, use the time to release the tension and recover. Go all in on the execution and the relaxation.

The book “A Mind For Numbers” talks about the concept of diffuse mode and how taking breaks helps to solve challenging problems and learn difficult topics. Specifically for the learning process, relaxation is crucial to building learning patterns and storing them as memory. So, just as you make learning habits part of your routine, it's equally important to take breaks seriously and part of your daily schedule.

One tool I've been using for a long time is a Pomodoro timer. I set 30 or 45 minutes of focus with 5 or 10 minutes of relaxation and recovery. This not only helps me take breaks and recharge my energy but also, allows me to take breaks when I'm stuck on a problem. Breaks and walks are usually great tools to unstuck me on challenging problems.

As I said before, the execution phase is the most fun of all parts. But we're humans and I feel lazy and not up to do things sometimes. That's normal and expected. Being a disciplined person is about choosing “discipline now, and freedom later. The labor will pass, and the rewards will last”. Using the regret minimization framework makes me intrinsically motivated to work on my craft and push myself to do the work I love.

As learned from Discipline is Destine:

Self-discipline is the ability

to work hard
to say no
to practice good habits and set boundaries
to train and prepare
to ignore temptations and provocations
to keep your emotions in check
to endure painful difficulties.

This is what I aim for myself.

Final words

People seem very interested in following the behind-the-scenes of your craft and how things are made. This is what I've learned from reading Show Your Work! and I'm in the act of focusing on the process and documenting every part of it. This post is an example of it.

It took me some years to write this post, collecting ideas from more than 80 books, but I wanted to write them down and show how I've been applying those ideas and let you steal some of them too to use in yours.

Books improve me and I have so much fun reading and applying them in my life. This piece is a way to express how important and valuable they are to me.

Documenting my thoughts, projects, and ideas is my way of expressing myself on the internet. I've been doing this for a long time now, about 10 years now. It's crazy how time flies when you're just enjoying life. I hope you enjoy this piece.

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