Hi there,

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

Thank you for being part of the Presently Reading community with 2,068 bookworms from around the world.

​For the month of September 2025, we're reading ​Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves by Alison Wood Brooks.​

Enjoy!

Warmly,
Maneet (pronounced muh-neet)

Weekly Bookmark

In January 2020, I made a pact with myself that would change my life.

“I will publish one new YouTube video every week.”

This was just a few months before the pandemic officially began. I had always flirted with the idea of becoming a YouTube creator, but it wasn’t until this moment that I decided to commit. I didn’t have any specific rules or guidelines other than the goal of publishing a new video each week. This led me to making videos about random topics I was interested in.

Around the same time, I was upgrading my home office setup.

I got this new ergonomic chair and standing desk, so I naturally decided to review them.

By sheer coincidence, I was about one month ahead of everyone else when it came time to work remotely. This allowed me to publish these home office videos at the exact time people needed them most. My YouTube channel instantly skyrocketed from a few hundred subscribers to a few thousand in a matter of days.

As the weeks went on, I kept publishing new videos and adjusting my strategy accordingly.

For a while, I realized home office videos were performing exceptionally well, so I kept making more of those. I eventually began experimenting with other topics to see what else might work. One of those topics happened to be a review of my new Kindle that I had just purchased. A few weeks after posting the video, I noticed how well it was doing compared to my other videos, so I decided to start creating more Kindle content.

The rest is history.

Five years later, I’ve been fortunate enough to carve out this little Book Tech niche for myself.

Even though I had no idea I was doing this at the time, it turns out I was following the exact strategies suggested by Anne-Laure Le Cunff in her book Tiny Experiments. Setting a pact with yourself to try something new is the first step in building momentum. The next step is to reflect on what’s working and adjust accordingly. She calls this Plus, Minus, Next journaling.

Today, I’m at a point where I need to reintroduce these tactics.

I’ve been posting Book Tech videos for several years now, and I’m looking to unlock the next level of my growth. This is going to require experimenting with new topics again, some of which might be outside my comfort zone. As I go through these experiments, it will be important to reflect regularly on what’s working, what isn’t, and what I can do to improve each week.

Funny enough, this process can be applied to all areas of life, not just work. I’m thinking of incorporating the Plus, Minus, Next method into my weekly review.

👀 Weekly Poll