Hi there,

Happy Saturday! I hope you had an absolutely fantastic week 🥰

Thank you for being part of the Presently Reading community with 2,317 bookworms from around the world.

​For the month of July 2025, we're reading ​Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World​ by Anne-Laure Le Cunff.​

Enjoy!

Warmly,
Maneet (pronounced muh-neet)

Weekly Bookmark

What if we believed in people, even when they let us down?

One of the most powerful ideas from The Courage to Be Disliked this week was the difference between trust and unconditional confidence.

Trust usually comes with conditions. I trust you if you pay me back. I trust you as long as you keep your word. It’s something that can be earned or broken. But unconditional confidence is different. It’s choosing to believe in someone, even when things don’t go perfectly.

And that idea hit home for me when I thought about friendships.

I’ve always found it easy to connect on a surface level. I can talk about books, hobbies, life stuff, but going deeper has always been harder. I think part of it is fear. Fear of being let down, or opening up and not being received the way I hope. So I end up keeping people at a bit of a distance.

But the truth is, even the best friendships will have messy moments.

Someone might forget to check in, or say the wrong thing, or simply drift for a while. If I expect those bumps, but still choose to believe in the person and in our relationship, things feels more hopeful. Believing in unconditional confidence helps friendships get through those challenging moments.

It’s not about perfection. It’s commitment.

And I want more of that in my life.

Another idea from the book that’s been reshaping how I see people is the difference between vertical and horizontal relationships.

A vertical relationship puts people in a hierarchy. Someone is better, smarter, more successful. Someone else is less. A horizontal relationship, on the other hand, is about seeing the other person as your equal. Not above or below you. Just beside you.

Once I noticed this pattern, I saw how often I default to vertical thinking.

The goal is to see everyone as a horizontal relationship.

This is easier said than done. As a YouTuber, I find myself looking at people like Ali Abdaal or Marques Brownlee and thinking they’re on another level. It’s easy to feel like they’re way ahead and I’m just trying to catch up. But when I shift my perspective and see them as peers on their own path, that comparison softens. I don’t feel small. I feel grounded. I can apply this mindset at my day job, too, with the leaders at my company.

However, the same thing applies in the other direction.

When I talk to someone who’s just starting their YouTube journey, it’s tempting to fall into the expert role. But that creates a gap that doesn’t need to be there. There’s always something to learn from someone else, no matter where they are. Seeing everyone as an equal makes everything feel more human.

Discussion Highlight

Every week, I'll select a comment from our community discussions and highlight it in the following week's email.

Last week, our discussion question was: Is there an area of your life where you’ve been choosing external approval over internal alignment? What might freedom look like instead?

Scott shared:

Want to be featured in a future email? Participate in today's discussion over on Patreon (free, just create an account) and I'll select one every week!

My Favorite Things This Week

💡 App: This week, I got invited to try a new web browser called Dia. It is made by The Browser Company, the same folks who developed Arc. It feels like a minimalist version of Google Chrome, but built with AI from the ground up. I love how the AI can see the page I'm viewing and answer contextual questions. I have a few invites available, let me know if you'd like one.

🌌 YouTube Video: I really enjoyed this YouTube video by Cleo Abram about black holes. The animations in the video are amazing, and it's such an interesting topic to talk about. Defintely reminded me of the movie Interstellar while watching it.