Four Books That Can Inspire Your 2020 Summer Project
Looking for inspiration, a new routine or a fresh challenge?
Spring is a time to rejuvenate, begin the rebirth process and begin to change our lives. It is also one of the times we find ourselves open to new challenges, and considering ideas that will make our lives better.
We begin to look at routines, looking deeper into our own psyches, and getting life organized. The resulting ideas can lead to projects or challenges for months to come.
The Big Book Of 30 Day Challenges- Rosanna Casper
30 days seems to be the perfect timing to develop a habit- it gets you past the hardest stage of beginning to develop the routine, allows the routine to become engained in your life and cements it.
30 days is also a perfect amount of time to fully try something and see if it works for your vision of change or if it’s something that doesn’t jive with you.
In her book, Casper includes 60 types of 30 day challenges- ranging from organizing you life to trying something different to overcoming fear and more. Some of my favorites in the collection:
- voice record yourself daily- perfect for anyone who wants to work on their public speaking or get better at vlogging, going facebook live, or creating yourube but is camera shy (like me)
- write down 10 ideas every day: using 10 ideas as a starting point, make a daily list. This helps with generating ideas whether you are planning a summer bucket list, deciding what to name your website, writing ideas and more. The thing is, when you regularly come up with ideas, more ideas will generate on a regular basis.
- The rejection challenge: this challenge purposely seeks out daily rejection, but does so in a way that will build up your muscles and make you tougher and help with the fear of rejection
- Watch a TED talk or read a wikipedia entry: this builds your knowledge and allows for research on a vareity of different topics. You’re learning something new every day, many times while being encourgaed (TED).
- Gradual Digital Detox: how to slowly break up with your phone. The way this challenge is laid out seems extremely doable. It starts eaily and builds on itself. If you ever wanted to slowly break up with your phone to have more life and time, this challenge is a good place to start.
These are just a few of the challenges in this book. It’s well worth reading and considering each of the ideas. Each challenge lasts a month and is sure to help get organized and learn new things that will be beneficial to your life.
Morning Miracle by Hal Elrod
This is a book you’ll want to buy or put on reserve immediately. It is an international best seller that promises to completely overhaul your life.
The recommendation is to take an hour to practice the concepts, called S.A.V.E.R.S. which include silence (prayer and meditation), Affirmations (retraining your brain for better outcomes), Visualization (where do you want to be? Picture it every day to help you progress), Exercise (to bring your body and mind to an awake and alert state), Reading (mostly self-help) and Scribing (writing that can be journaling and writing down priorities).
I started doing the Miracle Morning about a week ago. I am noticing some improvement with my energy levels and that I am usually more calm throughout the day. I’m interested to see how this will work out for me long-term. However, others have stated the following results: finding more income streams, paying off debt faster, losing weight and becoming more mindful.
Happiness Project- Gretchen Rubin
Rubin spends an entire year looking for ways to recognize happiness and incorporate happiness in all areas of her life.
She acknowledges that she did this project because she was building happiness against the time in the future where she would receive bad news, not because she was unhappy and depressed.
For anyone interested in studying how to build personal happiness, this book is a good starting point.
Each of our personal paths to happiness will be different but in learning about other’s journeys, we often learn more than any textbook can teach us.
Finally, Rubin suggests ways to build your own happiness project. She walks you through how to decide which elements would be most important and the lists to be considered if taking this project on .
The Bullet Journal Method- Ryder Carroll
The bullet journal has been around for quite a few years. Instagram and Pinterest particularly show off the artistic and beautiful side of the method. However, as artistic and beautiful as these posts are, they can often send a confusing message.
The bullet journal is a science. It’s a way of keeping eveything that we need to keep organized in an easy way. This form of journaling adapts to our needs.
Carroll breaks the process down beautifully as well as giving a few exercises for getting organized for our best life within the pages of this book.
He explains why monthly logs are so important (did you know that they are actually for doing a mental inventory of what is truly important) and how to get the most out of the process.
Personally, I loved the act of creating a bujo but before reading the book, I was always stuck on wondering whether it would just be easier and less time consuming to buy a planner and save artwork for other venues.
Caroll’s explaination of the factors at play while journaling have brought me back and made me a believer.
If you want to get more organized, be more intentional or even just clear mental clutter, I highly suggest bullet journaling.
However, I suggest reading the book to learn the science behind the method instead of just looking at instagram and envying each individual page and how our art work can’t match up to theirs.
Through these books, I have fallen back in love with a process of journaling, scrutinized what a happiness project would look like, started an invigorating morning routine and gathered a few ideas for summer challenges. I hope they will do the same for you.
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoyed this piece on books I loved during May 2020. For more of my writing about books, please see below:
