A life ordinary by Amit Sarkar - Issue #6

Hello friends,

Welcome to another edition of my newsletter.

This week was very busy towards the end for us. We met a lot of friends, some at our home and some at others. There is always something to learn, something to think about, or something to know.

At work, I made some good progress by communicating the problems facing my team. When you are responsible for people, you need to value their time and effort and make sure they don't burn out.

Also, our son turned 8 months this week. He has started sitting by himself, crawling around the house and trying to stand by himself. It's incredible how humans grow so quickly from a baby. And it always brings a smile to my face seeing our son laugh with joy.

I also had a good long conversation with my college friend about his field of work, which is studying congenital heart diseases. The amount of progress humans have made, simply by thinking about solving a small problem and then moving on to the next one, is the one that most amazes me. It's like building a bat mobile from thousands of Lego pieces. Baby steps, every generation, has helped us reach where we are today.

đź“š Atomic Habits

The most important ideas in your typical 300-page book can usually be distilled into several pages. These several pages are the thinner book. The smaller the difference in size between the actual book and the thinner book, the better the book. 

Atomic Habits by James Clear is a very popular book and has been on The New York Times Best Sellers list for 135 weeks now.

Packed with self-improvement strategies, Atomic Habits will teach you how to make the small changes that will transform your habits and deliver remarkable results.

But if you don't want to read the whole book and simply want a summary, then the below post by Chris Behan is what you are looking for. It's an amazing summary of an incredibly popular book.

A summary of the best ideas from Atomic Habits by James Clear

When used effectively, habits empower you to become whoever you want in life. A habit of daily reading will eventually make you knowledgeable, a habit of daily exercise will eventually make you strong. The difficult part is sticking with the habit long enough to reap the benefits. You won't develop a wealth of knowledge from reading one book, and you won't get jacked after going to the gym for a week. Only after years of reading will you be able to compare and build upon ideas from different disciplines. Only after months of workouts will you be able to fully activate all the muscles associated with a lift. A 1% improvement every day for a year results in a 37x improvement from where you started. The initial 1 percent improvements are difficult to notice, but after a while they become astronomical. All big things come from small beginnings.

I am building a habit of

  • creating YouTube videos every week

  • writing a newsletter every week

  • recording a Podcast

  • exercise at least 3 times a week

  • listen to a podcast

Some habits I want to sustain are

  • reading a book for 30 mins every day

  • having a skincare routine

  • read more about science

  • use less social media

  • learn create share...learn create share

🧠 Grammarly

I recently started using Grammarly, and it has improved my writing style a lot.

This is an example where AI is helping people to write amazing emails, articles, etc. Now we don't need to worry about the grammar of our content. Instead, we can focus on creating content.

Grammarly for Chrome improves grammar, clarity, and more as you write on your favourite sites.

Below is an example snapshot of how Grammarly works inside Gmail.

It actually works anywhere inside the web browser where there is an input field for text. Like social media apps, documents, messaging apps, email apps, etc.

I have started using it regularly now to write my newsletters, compose emails, Word documents and PowerPoint presentations.

They have a desktop app as well which is quite useful.

But given that it's powered by AI and is constantly learning, sometimes the recommendations may not be accurate. So always use your own judgement before accepting any recommendations.

🎙️ Man vs Wild

This week, me and my wife saw an episode from the podcast The Diary of a CEO by Steven Bartlett. Steven interviewed Bear Grylls, from Man vs Wild, in this episode.

Bear Grylls is an extraordinary person and I have followed his Man vs Wild TV show.

In this podcast, he comes across as a regular guy who has regular struggles like all of us. This is quite intriguing because that's not what the picture you get from his TV shows.

One of the quotes that really stuck with me was

Do your best not be the best

It's always about giving your best in whatever you do and not caring much about the outcome. Whenever you give your best, you will always come out learning a few things that will help you later in life.

He kept mentioning about being resilient, being kind to others, and being helpful during his conversation with Steven. It's very important to not give up (give up when it's needed though, like a smoking habit) in life and keep moving forward no matter what. There are many cruel people in the world so being kind helps. And helping others, encouraging them is what makes life more meaningful.

You are who you are because of all the people around you. Never take that for granted. They support us, influence us, motivate us, guide us, advise us and are with us.

🔑 Password manager

Nearly every website you visit, from dating apps to hyper-secure banking sites, insists you create a user account and think up a password. The problem? Human memory can't keep up with dozens upon dozens of passwords. Some people get the bright idea to use the simplest possible password, like "123456789" or "password." Others memorize one superbly random password and use it for everything. Either strategy is likely to make you the latest victim of identity theft.

This is the reason why we all need a password manager. But what does a password manager really do?

A password manager is essentially an encrypted digital vault that stores secure password login information you use to access apps and accounts on your mobile device, websites and other services. In addition to keeping your identity, credentials and sensitive data safe, the best password managers also have a password generator to create strong, unique passwords and ensure you aren't using the same password in multiple places (password generation really comes in clutch when you can't come up with yet another unique password on the fly for the latest must-have iOS app). With all the recent news of security breaches and identity theft, having a unique password for each location can go a long way to ensuring that if one site gets hacked, your stolen password can't be used on other sites. You're basically using multiple passwords to create your own security features.

There are a lot of online password managers, which have excellent features and are easy to use.

But one of the biggest concerns I have about using them is that my passwords are still stored on some external server which I do not control. If that server gets hacked, which is so common these days, then my passwords get leaked.

That's why I use KeePass. It's an open-source offline password manager that helps me keep track of all my passwords in one single database file, which is protected by a master password/passphrase. I then store this database file on either Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive. It's an easy way to

I recently created a YouTube video on How to use KeePass, especially for my wife as she always uses Forgot Password? feature to log in.

Below is how I have categorized all my passwords in my own KeePass database.

Hope you find it useful and start using some kind of password manager.

🧵 Twitter thread

I recently came across this Twitter thread from Sahil Bloom, a fund manager becoming Twitter's most-followed finance guy.

This thread covers the following topics -

Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. - Jim Rohn

  • The advice paradox

  • Intellectual sparring partners

  • The regret razor

  • Identity capital

  • Question-action matrix

  • The brakes paradox

  • Creative boredom

  • Darkest hour friends

  • Luck surface area

  • The writing knife block

  • 30-for-30 plan

  • The rooms razor

  • Build vs Sell

  • The Feynman technique

  • Memento mori

  • Personal board of advisors

  • Anti-goals

Thank you so much once again for reading my newsletter this week. Please feel free to Buy me a coffee if you are enjoying what I am sharing.

Until we meet again next week, please take care, learn more and stay happy.

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