As you may know, I am planning to add a paid tier to Val Thinks when the service becomes available in my region. Paid subscribers will get—on top of the Friday posts which will always remain free—periodical “Top Read” recommendations, sneak peeks into my book “The Bipolar Mind,” and more personal life updates.
While we’re waiting for Stripe to get its act together, I wanted to start offering the paid perks for free to all my subscribers, which is why you’re receiving this email. Enjoy.
August 2022 Top Read
I originally envisioned these Top Read recommendations to be sent out at the end of every month, using them as a push for myself to read more. But if you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you’ll have noticed that I’ve been absent since my first Top Read in May. This break was intentional. I decided to ditch the monthly cadence for two reasons: a) monthly recommendations are probably too frequent for my readers to keep up with, and b) there is no guarantee that whichever book/article I’m reading now will make the cut.
I want to make sure I only recommend the reads that really resonated and that I think can add concrete value to your life, so I’m opting to send these out only when I’ve found something that truly caught me.
Having said that though, the book I’m recommending this month didn’t so much catch me as give me a kick in the butt. Reading it did not grip me the way my favourite reads do. I didn’t particularly enjoy the writing, the humour, or even large parts of the content.1 But I think it’s an important book for most—if not all—of us.
The book is, drumrolls, Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. You might be misled into thinking this book is only relevant to those involved in the arts. After all, the book is subtitled “Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles.” But don’t be fooled.
In the book, Steven talks about something he calls “Resistance,” which will “tell you anything to keep you from doing your work,” and which every person with a dream to accomplish anything—creative or otherwise—is in an eternal struggle to overcome. He goes into tremendous detail of the lengths to which Resistance will go, its myriad manifestations (of which procrastination is one), and—importantly—how we can overcome it.
I disagree with a lot of what he says, but over the course of 165 pages, he managed to succeed where countless others have failed: he made me realise that I need to take my book project seriously, that the Resistance I’ve been succumbing to for ten years should be taken as an indication of how immensely important the book is to—what he calls—my “soul’s evolution.”
Thanks to those 165 pages, I finally made a private and public commitment to write my book for an hour every weekday, come rain or shine, to work for inspiration rather than wait for it.
The fact that Steven’s short book got me to start working on the project of a lifetime is why I’m recommending it to you as this month’s Top Read. Whether you’re a writer, an artist, a corporate bee, a manager, a doctor, a wife, a student—surely you have that one thing you’ve always wanted to do but for a million different reasons have persuaded yourself not to. This book is for you.
Until the next great read,
Val
Previous Top Reads
May 2022: “The time we have left” by My Sweet Dumb Brain
This is shaping up to be a bizarre book recommendation, but bear with me.