Hi friends,

Happy Saturday. And happy snow day to all those who were hit by the winter storm last night. If you just finished shoveling outside like I did, be sure to reward yourself with some hot chocolate ☕

Today, we're finishing Finish by Jon Acuff.

For January, we'll be re-reading Atomic Habits by James Clear.

— Maneet

Weekly Discussion

Today’s bookmark will be a bit different.

Something new I’d like to try is ending each month with a review and recap of my top lessons from the book we just read. Even though I’m pretty good at reading consistently and writing these weekly emails, I’m pretty bad at having any sort of end-of-book ritual. I’m not too sure what this will look like yet, but I figured this would be as good a place as any to start.

To my surprise, I’d rate this month’s book five stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐.

​Finish by Jon Acuff has been one of those books filled with practical lessons I’ll remember for a long time. I don’t rate every book five stars, only the ones that truly leave an impression. I can confidently say this will be one of those books. The writing style was fun, the insights were novel, and it’s just a random book I stumbled upon, written by an author I’d never heard of before. My favorite kind!

Here are the top three lessons I’ll be taking away from this book.

The different forms of perfectionism.

This book reminded me of another book I recently read called The War of Art. In that book, we learn about a force called resistance and how it stops us from doing the work we’re meant to be doing. In this book, we learn about perfectionism, which, in my opinion, is just a type of resistance. Perfectionism can show up in many different ways. The one that stood out to me the most was the idea that things must feel hard in order for them to count. This really resonated with me. I often have a hard time accepting that my work is of sufficient quality if I didn’t struggle enough while producing it.

Cut your goals in half.

This lesson came early in the book, and rightfully so. It’s a very simple tactic to help us beat perfectionism before it beats us. Take whatever goal you’re thinking of starting and cut it in half right from the beginning. This forces us to be much more realistic about what we’re working on and also allows progress to feel more meaningful. As somebody who is guilty of setting very “ideal” goals, this was an important one for me. I’m much more likely to finish something if the goal is half of what I think it “should” be.

The day after perfect.

Again, this came at the very beginning of the book, but it’s probably the number one lesson I hope to remember. The hardest part of finishing what we start is dealing with the “day after perfect.” This is when life inevitably comes up and we fall off track with the goal we’ve been working on. At this point, we are faced with a crossroads. Do we wallow in our inability to maintain the perfect vision we had hoped for? Or do we accept and embrace our imperfection and keep going anyway, even if the result is a bit messier than we had wanted? To my surprise, I encounter this decision point in my life a lot more than I realized.

What we do on the day after perfect says everything.

Today, I leave you with this question: What were your top lessons from this month’s book? How would you rate it?

Reply and let me know. Though I can’t respond to everyone, I do read everything.

Weekly YouTube Video

​🎬 Amazon brings BACK book downloads…sort of?​

Amazon just announced they’re bringing back Kindle book downloads, but there’s a big catch. I made a video walking through what actually changed, how DRM factors into this decision, and why most books will probably stay locked down anyway. If you’ve ever cared about owning your ebooks or reading outside the Kindle ecosystem, this one’s worth watching.

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Three ways I can help you...

🎬 Check out my latest YouTube video. My channel is all about Book Tech and using technology to live an intentional life.

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📚 Check out the Presently Reading book log. It is a complete list of every book we've read in the book club since I started it.