For all the progress updates in one place:
Progress Update: April 2025
Here are the books I read/listened to for my research during April 2025, and my notes on the progress:
The Wisdom of Life and Consuls and Maxims (Schopenhauer)
Oraculo Manual Y Arte de Prudencia (Baltasar Gracian)
Living With Borrowed Dust (James Hollis)
The Inner Game of Tennis
Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway
Staring at the Sun
The Gift of Therapy
How Emotions Are Made
What the Body Knows About Happiness
The Other Side of Happiness
Notes:
• April was the slowest reading month since I went into heavy research mode a year and a half ago. Life got in the way, and my mind decided it was more interesting to torture itself than work on the project. So that was that.
• The best book this month was “How Emotions Are Made.” Took me a while to get through, but it was worth it. The author knows her subject well and did a good job writing about it—the book could have easily been dry and difficult, given its content.
Books like this are why I’m afraid of missing something important, and the reason my reading list gets out of control. The author’s research presents a significant shift in how to think about emotions—one I would have missed if I hadn’t picked up the book. The new information puts me in a tough spot: I now have to rework a lot of what I had taken as a base for some ideas. But better to find out now that I was wrong than later in the process.
• On a different note, reading Schopenhauer is always fun. He’s such a sharp thinker and engaging writer. Even if I disagree with a lot of what he says, I enjoy seeing him think.
• Most of the month, I had my mind locked into Discouragement Radio Station, playing non-stop greatest hits such as: “You can’t do this,” “The project is too big,” “You are never gonna finish—and if you do, it will take so long that life will have passed you by,” “Is that even worth it?” and “Isn’t it ironic that you are writing a book on how to live and it’s killing you?” But among the noise, I choose to listen to a sadistic demon that whispers, “Get up. Show up. Make progress.”
Okay, maybe that’s over-dramatic, but it’s not far from how I often felt about the work.
• On the positive side, I’ve been working behind the scenes all month creating this Substack, which will be my writing home—and now I finally get to share it with you. I’ve uploaded a few favorite past pieces, plus a full course on habits I originally created for an online academy (you’ll find them in the “Extra” section).
Only one new post is up for now, and I’m currently struggling with another—but I’ll eventually bring it into submission.