How Not To Waste The rest of Your Summer

I hate to break it to you but we are almost halfway through the summer and I think you've been wasting yours. There's only a month and a half until September and I think you're pretty familiar with the feeling of getting to September and thinking, wait what did I actually get done with my summer? And that's not necessarily because you did nothing with your summer, it's because you didn't do anything that is legible to your future self. That is the difference between you wasting a summer and you having a really super productive one. But a month and a half is more than enough time to get you back on track and help you actually take steps that are moving you closer towards doing whatever it is that you're setting out to do. So here are a couple of things that you should be doing this summer, things that I am doing that I am actually starting doing from today because I've realized that I too am wasting my summer and I'm not about to continue doing this. First up, the biggest return on time investment that you are ever going to engage in in your life whatsoever is reading. Reading is the best thing ever. Think about the kind of person that you want to become. Think about the most intellectual version of you. Think about how much they read. Now add on an hour and that is how much you should be reading a day and that's going to seem like an extortionate amount but trust me, reading is how you learn anything. Reading is how you take on the human emotion. Fundamentally, humans should be reading. Humans should be talking and interestingly actually if we go back in the past, philosophers did argue that actually the transition from spoken word to written word would cause us all to be dumb and lose our minds and not be as intellectual as they were and you can make arguments forwards and backwards about that but still reading is the best thing that you can be doing right about now and talking about what you're reading with your friends. So these are four books that I want to get through in the next four or five weeks. I've picked up randomly whilst I've been here in San Francisco. I've got Antifragile. I've got Life at the Speed of Play. The Antifragile one I got from an event at the cursor office. This one and Incorruptible I got at Y Combinator and then Principles. My co-founder got me this one and the important thing is not that I'm trying to get through these books and you should never be trying to get through books for the sake of getting through them, for the sake of reading x number of pages a day, x number of words a day. That is not the point because if you optimize for how many pages can I complete, you're not optimizing for how much can I learn, how much can I understand. These are the richer portions of reading and these are what you should be focusing on. So whilst I'm reading, I've not started any of these yet but what I do is I will kind of go in and I annotate. I think the worst thing you can do, unless it is a library book, unless it is somebody else's book, please don't go around writing in somebody else's book. I've got a solution for you in just a moment but if it's your book, highlight, write, add your additions. Why? Because the point of the book isn't the stuff that's written inside it, it's what you take away and if you're actively engaging and thinking, okay what does this mean for me? How do I feel about this? That is how you're going to make the most out of the books that you're reading and if it is like somebody else's book and you don't want to write directly inside it, then what I also do, I don't have my notepad next to me right now but I will take out a notebook and whilst I'm reading, I just drop my thoughts into the notebook and then if I'm thinking, oh I remember I read that really cool book that one time and it taught me something about xyz but I can't quite remember it, I don't go back to the book, I go back to my notes and what I took away. That is the most important thing. The second thing that you can be doing is probably the most important thing. So if you only do one thing that I suggest in this video, make it be this. Do something that is fundamentally out of your depth, that makes you scared and that is hard, genuinely hard. So for me, I'm currently doing Y Combinator and as part of this, I need to learn how to do sails and this is hard. It does not come naturally to me. I am genuinely struggling with this every single day. That I'm watching videos that will help me, I'm reading articles that help me, I'm trying things out myself that will hopefully help me be able to do this in future, in the long term. It's difficult and it feels genuinely tough but having that, I am deliberately challenging myself, I'm deliberately trying to better myself, to learn this skill, to do something new, to just be outside of my comfort zone. That is where your brain thrives. That is where your brain is making these neural connections. It is building and it is actively shaping you into a more skilled individual. It's the magic of neuroplasticity. But if you're not doing things that are outside your own depth, you're not unlocking that magic and you're limiting your own potential. So don't do that. The third thing, we've gone through consumption, we've gone through skill acquisition. If you're consuming things, you also need to be producing things. Production is the only thing that makes consumption legible because consumption has no bounds. You can be reading, reading, reading, reading, watching, watching, watching, watching, doing everything all the time and taking in loads of information. But if you don't have the time to distill that information, then you don't know what it means to you. You don't know what you've actually learned. So whether you're learning a new subject, whether you're reading a new book, whatever it might be, always produce something. Even if it is just a couple of post-it notes with your thoughts jotted down after a 30-minute session of reading. Whether it is literally you just speaking into your phone for a little bit. You could produce a video, you could produce an essay, but it doesn't have to be that structured. It can just be notes in a journal. Whatever it is, you always want to be producing some sort of output. Again, because that's what makes the inputs legible. This also comes back to this principle that's known, the purpose of a system is what it does. Whereby, if all you're ever doing is consuming, all you're doing is consuming. You're not learning, you're not understanding, you're not developing. All of those things require outputs. But if you're constantly just doing inputs, then your system has just built the inputs and that's all that's ever going to come out of it. But probably my favorite unlock for this summer comes from that wall over there. All you need is a wall. And that's because I want you to have a deliberate boredom principle. I think the most radical thing that you can do to protect your brain and to develop those skills that are really important at the moment around critical thinking, around originality, articulation of your own ideas, is to give your brain time to actually make connections. This comes back to if you're constantly inputting loads of information, you're not getting the time for that information to be sort of put away and integrated into the networks in your brain. Boredom is when that happens because your brain shifts from domination of your prefrontal cortex, which is involved in reasoning, decision making, complex ideas, to your default mode network. Your default mode network is when you're ideating, when you're bored, when your mind is wandering. But it allows you to be creative. This is the creative unlock. This is the unlock that allows you to think, oh, this idea and this idea over here, they connect. And I can think of something cool and interesting and something to explore. So what if my wall come in? This is going to sound utterly ridiculous. But 15 minutes in the morning, I will literally stand here and stare at the wall. And it's zero stimulation. It forces me to just think, to just use my brain. And it's going to sound ridiculous. And it's going to feel ridiculous the first time you do it. But I'm telling you, the unlock is going to be absolutely crazy. So genuinely do it. And if you can do those four things throughout the rest of the summer, there's no way you're going to waste it. You're going to be able to actually move towards your goals and you're going to get to September and feel like, my goodness, I've actually accomplished something. So good luck. And I really hope this video has helped. If you enjoyed it and want to see more videos like this, then please do subscribe to my channel. And as always, I will see you in the next video. If you have any questions, let me know in the comments.