Read Wild

a book club for brave humans

For some reason, sharing ideas on substack feels lightweight. Maybe the automatic email to share a post helps me escape the overthinking of trying to build large digest emails. Maybe the empty post feed makes me feel like anything is possible. Maybe I just like trying new things.

Whatever the reason, I think Substack is where I’ll try new ideas on for size, to keep them lightweight, hope-fueled, and fun.

December’s new idea is an informal book club open to anyone who wants to have a little more community and more ease in using and enjoying new ideas. I’m going to run it through Stubstack, so just do a free subscription here to get Book Club updates, quotations, and easy-to-use insights pulled from the books we’re reading.

This Book Club is For Humans Who:

• like new ideas

• want more positive community

• want to be reading more in a lightweight way

• want to use what they already know more

Vote for Books:

Pick what you want us to read, and select all that you’re interested in so I can get a sense of what books might best serve the group. (Please use the “other” option to let me know about any other book you’re reading that you think I should check out! I’m always excited to get book recommendations!!)

Here are the books I’m considering at the moment:

Teams: Getting Things Done with Others by David Allen and Edward Lamont

The Upside of Stress: Why Stress is Good for You and How to Get Good at It by Kelly McGonigal

How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times by Chris Bailey

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It by Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

The Secret Pulse of Time: Making Sense of Life’s Scarcest Commodity by Stefan Klein

Emotional Agility: Get Unstuck, Embrace Change, and Thrive in Work and Life by Susan David

Start With Purpose

As I prepare to invite friends to read with me, I’ve got Teams: Getting Things Done with Others front of mind. I’m currently reading this book which applies David Allen's classic work Getting Things Done to a multi-person setting (any family, partnership, or professional team qualifies). As I work through Teams, I’m reminded in each chapter how PURPOSE guides the whole productivity process.

So, as I start this book club — however informal — I want to start with purpose.

The Purpose of the READ WILD BOOK CLUB:

• I want to make it easier to get value from what we already know

• I want to build on old information with new, easy-to-use ideas.

• I want others who see things differently to broaden my thinking and chip away at my blind spots.

• I want more community…and to take action together.

Truly, creating community can be tough. Not only are we all busy, there’s something unnerving that happens when we try to make time for others: we become consumers of community.

The consumer mindset seems to be creeping into a lot of our relationships. When we feel time scarcity, we tend to scrutinize where our minutes are going to try to optimize our return. ROI — Return on Investment — is top of mind for us when we’re feeling the pressure of time. But that leads us to a cost-benefit analysis focusing on short-term returns instead of long-term effects.

We all have things that impact our cost-benefit ratio of time investment. So for me, a book club helps us get more value with low-intensity, no-stress approach to connecting more and thinking together.

It’ll be an experiment, and hopefully we’ll all have some fun with it.