Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Just keep swimming

Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...And Maybe the World by William McRaven

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I went to the University of Texas, so Admiral Bill McRaven’s 2014 commencement speech “If you want to change the world, make your bed,” has a special place in my burnt orange heart. But the speech has a ton of important and practical life advice applicable to anyone. You can grab an idea or short story to focus on in any given day and it will help you. This short book is based on his speech – a little more fleshed out and with some […]

“Breaking up with your phone means giving yourself the space, freedom, and tools necessary to create a new, long-term relationship with it, one that keeps what you love about your phone and gets rid of what you don’t.”

How to Break Up with Your Phone: The 30-Day Plan to Take Back Your Life by Catherine Price

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In one word: Transformative I was a late adopter of the smartphone, someone who said that they didn’t need or want “all of that” on their phone. In 2010 I started a new job and at the end of my first meeting at my new gig, everyone pulled out their phones to plan the next meeting and I realized I was the only person who was going to have to go back to my office to consult a calendar. I saw then that I “needed” […]

You cannot be anything you want to be — but you can be a lot more of who you already are.

StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath

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The key to human development is building on who you already are. I got this book as part of a team project at work. Each team member took the test to find out what our top strengths are. What’s funny is that I think I took a similar test seven or eight years ago and I have no idea what the results were. I remember thinking at the time that the findings were super interesting and surprising and that I would continue to check and […]

Caps lock fever dream

The Gap and the Gain: The High Achievers' Guide to Happiness, Confidence, and Success by Dan Sullivan with Dr. Benjamin Hardy

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I don’t remember how I first learned about Benjamin Hardy. Not much of his advice resonated with me. However, one medium post in particular did. In it, he describes the concept of the gap and the gain.  “Your future growth and progress are now based in your understanding about the difference between the two ways in which you can measure yourself: against an ideal, which puts you in what I call ‘the GAP,’ and against your starting point, which puts you in ‘the GAIN,’ appreciating […]

Fear, to a great extent, is born of a story we tell ourselves…

The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron

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“Have no fear of perfection – you’ll never reach it.” ― Salvador Dali I got this book early last year when I was trying to be more creative, but in the most structured way possible. One thing I fear, which I think many of us fear, is doing something badly. We fear that we will start something, it will be bad, and that means that we are bad at it so what’s the point of even trying? This book is exactly what I needed. It’s […]

“When we’re anxious, we’re not really living. We’re surviving. We’re holding on, waiting for the anxiety to pass, losing out on minutes, hours, and days of our lives.”

The Book of Moods: How I Turned My Worst Emotions Into My Best Life by Lauren Martin

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In one word: Helpful Cannonball Read Bingo: Self Care Lauren Martin was a woman with a problem. Or a lot of problems, really, but at the crux of them all was the understanding that she was letting her bad moods, the ugliest versions of herself, run her life and ruin her relationships. She began a quest to understand better where these moods came from, how to confront them, and how she could change. This started with “Words of Women,” a blog and online community she […]



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