Howdy folks, below you'll find the most useful resources to help you live better and build a thriving internet business.
It's been a strong start to the year on the agency front closing 3 deals this week. I'm anticipating it to be a busy one so if you know any great designers send them my way 🙌🏻.
I have a new YouTube video coming this Friday and a couple of small projects launching in the next few weeks — if you're interested in learning more about running a freelance webflow business then hit this link and you'll be the first to hear about those projects.
Alrighty, enough housekeeping from me, let's get into the Filter!
Is re-reading books a waste of time?
The number of books you read is largely a vanity metric, the goal is not to read more books but to read good books deeply.
Speed reading and listening to everything at 2x speed is a way to hunt for insight porn, you end up understanding the surface level, but never any deeper. You’re left with the high level insights but those insights don’t hit to the level where you actually make changes in your life.
This year I’m making an effort to re-read more books. I’ve noticed that a book I read 3-5 years ago means something totally different now. Often I’m able to apply the lessons more than I could at 18.
I like to refer to reading books as a software update for your brain, and the way I view re-reading books is that you’re updating using the best software… not just the latest.
What books are so good you’ve read them multiple times?
Here are a few of mine: -
- The War of Art - Steven Pressfield
- Meditations - Marcus Aurelius
- Hell Yeah or No - Derek Sivers
- The Magic of Thinking Big - David J Schwartz
- Letters from a Stoic - Seneca
I.
You don't need to reinvent the wheel to be a successful entrepreneur.
Take an existing idea, improve on it and stick with it for long enough to see results.
II.
"Your life is not something that someone gives you, but something you choose yourself, and you are the one who decides how you live." — The Courage to be Disliked
4 kinds of side-hustle: The way I can tell that I’m more into building a lifestyle business than trying to build a huge venture scale business is that I get way more excited at the thought of creating hands off projects that can generate 2-20k p/month in revenue than the thought of ‘taking over the world’.
This post from Justin Mares does a fantastic job of breaking down the types of side-hustles you can start and how to make them successful.
Want to build a side business? Just buy a great Domain Name: Peter Askew is fascinating, he’s now built multiple successful businesses created entirely from a good domain name becoming available. He runs two websites selling onions(vidaliaonions.com + onions.com), an SEO job board, a ranch work job board and a marketplace to find birthday parties.
The Scientific Argument for Mastering One Thing at a Time: Whenever the new year roles around everyone starts thinking about the areas in their life that they want to change but this article makes a good case for focusing on mastering just one change at a time instead of trying to drastically change your life all at once.
A few simple concepts that will drastically improve your home cooking: Over the last couple of months I’ve been getting deep into cooking and it turns out that cooking good food is way easier than you’d think. The 80 - 20 of cooking is to focus on a few core principles of salt, fat, acid and heat. This thread is a great way to quickly improve your cooking through simple changes.
End Note
The Sunday Filter relies on word of mouth to reach more people, if you’re enjoying the newsletter I’d really appreciate you sending it to a friend or sharing on Twitter.
Have a fantastic week!
- Stephen
