For the first day I thought it was apropos because reading this book for 10 minutes felt like meditation itself. My AWESOME friend Ben Kenyon gave me this book and I love it. I love that Ben is someone who is always trying to improve himself and help those around him. He knew meditating would help my life. In the book today the lesson that I got from it was, and I quote… “The truth is everyone is great at meditation because it’s our natural state. Saying you’re not good at meditating is like saying you’re not good at breathing. Or a

Today I read from “Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work” In the first chapter, they talk about the 4 villains of decision making: 1) Narrow framing – The tenancy to define our choices too narrowly. 2) Confirmation bias – Developing a quick belief about a situation and then seeking out information to confirm that belief. 3) Short term emotion – When we have a decision to make and our short term emotions cloud our long term effects. 4) Overconfidence – People think they know more than they do about how the future will unfold. I love

Today I read from Benjamin Mathes, a super talented friend of mine, book “You, The Career” Although his book is angled towards actors and those in show business, it’s a phenomenal book about having the right priorities in life. Here’s a small section from his book: How to Know You’re Too Busy Do you turn down a lot of invitations? “Hey! Wanna go watch a play?” “Can’t. I’m busy. Again.” Like you don’t have enough time to enjoy life. Have you bragged about being busy? “How’ve you been lately?” “So busy. Man. I’m so busy. It’s great.” Like it’s the goal

Today I read one of those small, quick reads that have inspirational messages in them. It’s called “How to Be Interesting in 10 Simple Steps. Here are the 10 steps: 1) Go explore. 2) Share what you discover. 3) Do something. Anything. 4) Embrace your weirdness. 5) Have a cause. 6) Minimize the swagger. 7) Give it a shot. 8 ) Hop off the bandwagon. 9) Grow a pair. 10) Ignore the scolds. ————————–————— It’s a fun read. Here was one of my favorite things that I read. It was in the “Embrace your weirdness” section: Keep moving. Every day,

I read from the book, “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up”. It’s soooooo good. It has so many simple, easy and effective concepts on cleaning up your living space AND your life. Here is one concept I really like: We should be choosing what we want to keep, not what we want to get rid of. The best way to choose what to keep and what to get rid of is to take each item on your hand and ask , “does this spark joy?” If it does keep it. If not, dispose of it. What a great way to

I read from the book, “Mindfulness on the Go”. My friend Ben gave me the book and apparently the author lives in the Portland area puts on meditation retreats. I love the format of this book…there are small chapters that give little mini-lessons. It’s starts with an exercise and then goes into how you can implement that practice and then has a section on “deeper thoughts” on the topic and then final words. It’s really simple and powerful. The one I read tonight was on “entering new spaces”. She talks about being mindful when you walk through doors and that

I read from the book, “The Centered Life” written by my amazing friend Esther Jones. It’s a book about how to seek out and find a spiritual life coach that will help you transform your life. I read the first chapter so far and she talked about how with any relationship with a coach you have to have 3 things: TrustRespectFreedom of Expression And then she had “Estherisms” throughout the book. I really liked this one: It’s Never a Done DealJust when you think you have arrived or have completed the lesson, you may have just begun a new journey. We

I read from, “How to Love” by Thich Nhat Hanh. If you haven’t read it, it’s one of those mini-books. You can read the whole book in like 33 minutes. I’ve read it several times. Every time, something new stands out for me. This time it was: What Love Needs to SurviveHe talks about nothing in the world survives without food…and love is no exception. If you don’t know how to nourish and feed love, it will die. There are 4 kinds of food to nourish our love… 1) Edible food (foods that are good for us and nourishes our

Today I read from, “The Power of Habit” by Charles Duhigg. He talks about the habit loop in our brains: Cue>Routine>Reward And in order for us to change habits we have to learn new routines that draw on our old triggers to provide us a similar relief (the reward). His book is loaded with a lot of great case studies. #30dayreadingchallenge

Today I read from, “Choosing Happiness”. It’s a compilation book from many authors on how they chose their happiness. My beautiful friend Linda Bard wrote a chapter on letting go. It was so fantastically written and these words struck me… As the Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu said, “When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” Her journey was about learning to let go of the loss of her father at 10 years old and then listening to “Little Linda” to explore and find what she truly wanted in life. I was so inspired reading this and

Today I read from, “The War of Art”. It’s a short read with some powerful lessons for all of us. But especially for those who practice and/or work in the creative world. Here are 3 cool things I took from this book today: 1) I was reading a section called “The Magic of Making a Start”. In this section the author talks about how when we conceive something in our minds and commit to it despite our fears, something wonderful happens. It’s as if we cracked the shell of an egg from the inside. 2) Of course the next section

Today I read from a beautiful friend of mines book (Yes, I know a lot of people who have written AMAZING books!) “I Dare Me”‘ by Lu Ann Cahn is a book everyone should read. Lu Ann took on a challenge by her daughter to do 1 new thing every single day for a year. The things she did were incredible. Today I was reading a part in the book where she decided to sign up for a 10K mud run because she saw a flyer for it in the gym. She showed up in race day and realized that she was

Today I read from a book that my sister Karin got me, “I Can’t Make This Up” by Kevin Hart. I was reading from the chapter “Life Lessons From the Grind”. And no one grinds more than Kevin Hart. He was talking about one of his first “big breaks” where he took over a club call Sweet Cheeks (hahaha) to host for $175/week. Financially at the time, it was HUGE. Comedians just don’t get a lot of money when they are starting out and so to stay in the game you have to be DETERMINED AF. He told the story of his

Today is the half way point! I was at my brother’s house for family day so I had to go through his books to find one to read. I picked, “Eat to Live” by Joel Fuhrman. M.D. The whole premise of the book is that your diet is your first line of defense for your health and longevity when you aggressively eat in a highly dense nutrient way. He said that high-nutrient, low-calorie eating results in dramatic increases in lifespan as well as prevention of chronic illnesses. He uses a term in the book of “nutritarian” is someone who follows

Today I picked up one of the many books in my office that probably belongs to Lou Radja! The book is “Emotional Intelligence” by Dr. David Walton. The first chapter is on self-knowledge. Understanding yourself is the starting point for emotional intelligence. It’s about understanding ourselves and know what pushes us and why. Our past and self-image play a large part in how we choose to interpret other people’s behavior and it also determines the way we act and the effect we have on others. I love when I read information and it clicks with me but it’s even better when

Once again this is book from a friend. Eldridge J Broussard III wrote an AMAZING book called “The Challenge to Change”. He gave me the youth edition because it’s a workbook. It has a powerful quote for each week and then daily exercises that are related to the quote in a section he calls “Making It Work For You”. I read all 52 weeks of quotes and decided to highlight this one because it’s very relevant and it reminds me to be aware of being live and in-person with people around me in real-time. Week 40: “You can’t upload love, you can’t

Today I read but it was strictly for fun. I read through this book that one of my friends gave me a couple of years ago because he knows how much I love rap. The book is “Understand Rap: Explanations of Confusing Rap Lyrics You and Your Grandma Can Understand” I don’t really have any lesson from what I read as it was pure comedy. I do love how the author took rap lyrics and made them extremely over-analytical and technically descriptive. 😂 See the page I posted below… #30dayreadingchallenge  

I read from “Hard-Won Wisdom: True Stories from the Management Trenches”. It’s written by my friend Jathan Janove, whom I met in my mastermind group and has now become my relationship coach. He uses a lot of the principles in this book and other tools to coach me. One of those tools would be this: don’t leave people wondering. Or as he put it in his “Moral of the Story” section: When employees don’t know, they speculate. And for employers, their speculation is always worse than reality. I call this Law of the Employee. Speculation, arises whenever management fails to share

I’m in NYC right now and today my sister Karin joined me here. She brought a book with her called, “The Little Black Book of Workout Motivation” by Michael Matthews. I chose to read a section called “Do the Work” and Michael talks about you can fight resistance now or hate yourself later. And he describes “Resistance” as an evil entity that is insidious and impersonal. It can’t be seen, but it’s swirling in you right now, and it can be felt. It will tell you ANYTHING to keep you from doing the work. It will lie, argue, bluster, seduce, and bully

My sister Karin Kusumakar and I are in New York and we decided we were going to go to the great City of New York Library (yes, the one that Ghostbusters was filmed at!) to find a book to read. This library is HUGE! There are 3 floors and a basement. We found the non-fiction section in Room 67 in the basement area. We grabbed a bunch of books and took a vote on which book we would read because we both were going to read the same book and give our own summary. Let me preface this post by saying that

Still in New York with my sister Karin, this time Crystal joined us. We went back to the main City of New York Library, grabbed a bunch of books and a table and read for a few hours. I read from the book (actually I read the their book), “101 Things I Learned in Advertising School” If you read the book, it’s almost like getting a degree in advertising, just from a drive-through car wash. All the info was right and was good. I knew most of it but loved the refresher course! Karin and I decided that we were going to pick

Today was a treat for me because I LOVE psychology. I took a Psychology 101 class in high school and have attributed that to me getting into marketing. I just loved the idea of trying to figure out why people do what they do. That absolutely fascinated me. So, I love psychology books. I have been reading them since high school. And I have a bunch of them but this one is by far my favorite. The book is laid out in a very cool way. There are major sections (Behaviorism, Psychotherapy, Cognitive Psychology, Social Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and Psychology

I read “This Idea Is Brilliant: Lost, Overlooked, and Underappreciated Scientific Concepts Everyone Should Know” by John Brockman. I got this book at a book store heading out on vacation over the summer because I loved how the author took ideas and tied them to scientific concepts. They whole book is enlightening and I read about things that I never really thought about before. Here are the 2 concepts I read about: 1) Decentering: decentering is the activity of taking the perspective of another person. When we look into the past, we try to explain or understand why the person

If you’ve been following my reading challenge you know that I love books that have psychology in them. This book is loaded with psychological framing. The book talks about how there are always “frames” and only one frame can be the alpha frame at a time. Someone will be alpha and someone will be beta. He talks about how there are all kinds of “beta traps” that people throw at you to keep you as the beta. For example, he explains that Walmart’s world headquarters is set up that way. If you have a product you are trying to sell

I read “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth. It was given to me as a gift by Adley Wong. Thanks Adley! I love this book so much. I read the book when Adley gave it me but re-read chapter 3, “Effort Counts Twice”. She talks about how we have a bias towards what we believe is “talent”. But she quoted sociologist Dan Chambliss, who completed a study of competitive swimmers and observed that the most dazzling human achievements are, in fact, the aggregate of countless individual elements, each of which, is, in a sense, ordinary. He said

Today I read “How We Decide” by Jonah Lehrer. It’s a book that explores how our brains make decisions. Chapter 3, “Fooled by a Feeling” talks about how we make decisions emotionally and not rationally. Here are some of his points: – The only people who are immune to making emotional mistakes are neurologically impaired people who can’t feel any emotion at all. In most situations, these people have very damaged decision-making abilities. And yet, because they don’t feel the extra sting of the loss, they are able to avoid the costly emotional errors brought on by loss aversion. –

Today I read the classic book, “The Four Agreements ” by Don Miguel Ruiz. It’s a such a simple but powerful book way to navigate life. Here are the 4 agreements: 1) Be Impeccable with Your Word 2) Don’t Take Anything Personally 3) Don’t Make Assumptions 4) Always Do Your Best Oh these agreements. So wonderful. So powerful. I love to re-read this book every once in a while. #30dayreadingchallenge

Once of the things I decided to do was to read a different book every day. I wanted to re-read some books that I had read before and start new ones that I wanted to start. My night stand had over 40 books stacked up when I started a month ago. Today to close out the challenge, I decided to read from my own book. This isn’t a shameless plug of any kind. It’s really just me not having read my own book in years and deciding it was time to read it again! It’s also a great time to