For all the progress updates in one place:
Progress Update: June 2025
Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during June 2025, and my notes on the progress:
A Short Guide to a Happy Life
Everyday Ubuntu (Sections)
Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking (Sections)
How to Get Rich
The Millionaire Fastlane (Sections)
Psycho-Cybernetics (reread, sections)
Rise Above
Fear, Hope and Carnage
Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain
Reasons to Stay Alive
Notes:
• June was a month of slow reading but fast living. It’s been a great adventure living in Florence and studying Italian.
Learning a new language takes several hours a day, which has cut into my reading and writing. But I keep reminding myself that engaging with the world and living an intentional life are what my book is about. In that sense, I could say I’ve been living my book more than working directly on it.
• This past month, I read some business books I had on my reading list for a long time. They aren’t part of my research for my next book, but I picked them up because I’m planning a major change in my business and wanted to get back into the business mindset before making those decisions. Despite the terrible title, “How to Get Rich” was a good book full of honest wisdom from a businessman who went through it all. As for “The Millionaire Fastlane,” I can’t understand how it’s so popular (maybe just good marketing?). It reads like a sales letter, and I found nothing new in it. This book is in serious need of a good editor. I ended up skimming a big part of it; it should have been half the size.
• The best read of the month was “Fear, Hope and Carnage.” It’s a series of interviews with the musician Nick Cave about his music and life. It’s the best account of an artist talking about their art that I’ve ever read.
When many artists talk about their art, you feel that it is important to them, but when Nick talks about his art, you feel it’s beyond important: it is essential. It’s part of his life in the same way breathing is. Art is not an activity he does—it’s part of his being. I’m not even a fan of his music, but fuck, I could listen to him talk about his process and the way he thinks about music all day. Amazing.
Here’s a sample:
“For me, vulnerability is essential to spiritual and creative growth, whereas being invulnerable means being shut down, rigid, small. My experience of creating music and writing songs is finding enormous strength through vulnerability. You’re being open to whatever happens, including failure and shame. […] I think to be truly vulnerable is to exist adjacent to collapse or obliteration. In that place we can feel extraordinarily alive and receptive to all sorts of things, creatively and spiritually. It can be perversely a point of advantage, not disadvantage as one might think. It is a nuanced place that feels both dangerous and teeming with potential. It is the place where the big shifts can happen. The more time you spend there, the less worried you become of how you will be perceived or judged, and that is ultimately where the freedom is.”―Nick Cave