Comes a question from long-time reader Illya Shapovalov, on the trail of my email yesterday:
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Hey John,
Slightly off topic:
You always find some curious and interesting things to share in your emails. Can I ask you what publications do you read or are subscribed to? I really struggle finding just interesting things to read on the Internet, something that’s not sensationalistic or opinionated like most news outlets.
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The only non-work publication I’m subscribed to is the New Yorker. It’s a print magazine that arrives to my physical mailbox with the frequency of a baby panda birth in captivity.
As for interesting things to read on the Internet, I find most of those via Hacker News.
That’s a kind of bulletin- or news-board, curated by lots of smart people and moderated by a few, specifically to not be sensationalistic or opinionated. Much of what’s on Hacker News is tech news and articles that I frankly don’t care about, but there’s other interesting stuff always.
But why limit yourself to things on the Internet?
In my experience, books are the greatest repository of human insight and funny stories, better than courses, better than coaching programs or communities, and certainly better than blogs or websites.
Nobody asked about my book reading habits. But I’ll tell ya.
I read books in four categories, one book at a time in each category:
1. “Something from a previous century.” Currently, I’m finishing up the fourth and final volume of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, which I started back in December 2021, almost three years ago.
2. “Religion.” This can be about actual religion, or about the human mind, or the nature of reality. I just started A Life of One’s Own, by Marion Milner.
3. “Fiction.” I’m reading David Copperfield by Charles Dickens.
4. “Work.” (Copywriting, marketing, psychology, etc.) I’m reading I’m Okay, You’re Okay by Thomas Harris, since it’s one of the upstream sources of both David Sandler’s sales system and Jim Camp’s Start With No.
Bigger point:
You can combine the enjoyable and the useful.
I read these things because I find them interesting… but also because they can provide fodder for these emails and for other projects I’m working on.
Combine the two, enjoyable and useful, and you can have something you can stick with for the long term.
Smaller point:
There are lots of places to get possible ideas for daily emails.
I personally feel it’s more important to have a way to decide among those many ideas, a litmus test to help you decide if an idea is a good topic for your email today.
If you’d like to find out what my personal litmus test is, the test I recommend to coaching students who have paid me thousands of dollars for the advice, and to hundreds of people who have bought my courses, you can find that inside my Simple Money Emails program. For more info on that: