Hey Reader!
Today marks the start of a new year, 2025. And well, that got me thinking.
In recent years, I have struggled with content creation. I felt like I always had a great start to a story or video, but never enough that was worthy of your (my audience's) attention. I can’t tell you how many podcasts, videos, and blogs have gone in the recycle bin in the last year, solely because I felt like I was wasting your precious time. My goal has always been to provide value in exchange for the moments you are giving up for me. The problem was I always wanted it to be a home run. I started to realize that it does not have to be life-changing or a polished novel to provide value. It must be authentic and something that I believe in. I read Rick Rubin's book “The Creative Act: A Way of Being” (Amazon Link). His book profoundly impacted how I wanted to move forward with all my creative outlets like this newsletter, podcasts, vlogs, and blogs. I was trying to create my art for everyone else, which is not where my true happiness comes from. It comes from making it for me. That may sound selfish, but the truth is, when I started to focus on what I thought people wanted or needed, it was no longer my art. I realize I am at my best when producing and creating works that inspire and drive me. I hope some of you will enjoy and value what I am making. I also realize that not everyone will, and I am ok with that.
So, what's the deal with the “It Got Me Thinking” or IGMT newsletter? As I was searching for a theme or topic for a weekly newsletter, I was on the struggle bus. Do I do one on mental performance, coaching, or life in general? One day, someone posted a question in a Facebook group, and I told my wife, “It got me thinking.” That is when the lightbulb went off. I don’t need a theme. People want to read something entertaining (eh, I will do my best) and informative. That is what I hope to bring each week. I will not spam you; you most likely won’t get more than an email once a week. I may send you a special note when my next book comes out or special events like webinars and such, but that will all be limited. So that is the back story on the mailing list. I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to share it. Since this is the start of the new year, I thought I would share the best books I read in 2024. I will always do my best to share links to the books.
I hope you have an excellent 2025, and I am glad you are taking this journey with me. If you have any questions or thoughts, please send them to me. My email is dan@danmickle.com or across all social media channels as @RealDeanMickle.
Thanks for riding along!
My Top 6 Books of 2024
The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Caused an Epidemic of Mental Illness
Jonathan Haidt
Link
In The Anxious Generation, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt lays out the facts about the epidemic of teen mental illness that hit many countries at the same time. He then investigates the nature of childhood, including why children need play and independent exploration to mature into competent, thriving adults. Haidt shows how the “play-based childhood” began to decline in the 1980s, and how it was finally wiped out by the arrival of the “phone-based childhood” in the early 2010s. He presents more than a dozen mechanisms by which this “great rewiring of childhood” has interfered with children’s social and neurological development, covering everything from sleep deprivation to attention fragmentation, addiction, loneliness, social contagion, social comparison, and perfectionism. He explains why social media damages girls more than boys and why boys have been withdrawing from the real world into the virtual world, with disastrous consequences for themselves, their families, and their societies.
Subtract: The Untapped Science of Less
Leidy Klotz
Link
We pile on “to-dos” but don’t consider “stop-doings.” We create incentives for good behavior, but don’t get rid of obstacles to it. We collect new-and-improved ideas, but don’t prune the outdated ones. Every day, across challenges big and small, we neglect a basic way to make things better: we don’t subtract. Klotz’s pioneering research shows us what is true whether we’re building Lego models, cities, grilled-cheese sandwiches, or strategic plans: Our minds tend to add before taking away, and this is holding us back.
Look Again: The Power of Noticing What Was Always There
Tali Sharot
Link
Have you ever noticed that what is exciting on Monday tends to become boring on Friday? Even passionate relationships, stimulating jobs, and breathtaking works of art lose their sparkle after a while. As easy as it is to stop noticing what is most wonderful in our lives, it’s also possible to stop noticing what is terrible. People get used to dirty air. They become unconcerned by their own misconduct, blind to inequality, and are more liable to believe misinformation than ever before.
Now, neuroscience professor Tali Sharot and Harvard law professor (and presidential advisor) Cass R. Sunstein investigate why we stop noticing both the great and not-so-great things around us and how to “dishabituate” at the office, in the bedroom, at the store, on social media, and in the voting booth.
This Is Not Normal: The Politics of Everyday Expectations
Cass Sunstein
Link
This sharp and engaging book by leading governmental scholar Cass R. Sunstein examines dramatically shifting understandings of what’s normal—and how those shifts account for the feminist movement, the civil rights movement, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the founding itself, political correctness, the rise of gun rights, the response to COVID-19, and changing understandings of liberty. Prevailing norms include the principle of equal dignity, the idea of not treating the press as an enemy of the people, and the social unacceptability of open expressions of racial discrimination. But norms can turn upside-down in a hurry. What people tolerate, and what they abhor, depends on what else they are seeing. Exploring Nazism, #MeToo, the work of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, constitutional amendments, pandemics, and the influence of Ayn Rand, Sunstein reveals how norms change, and ultimately determine the shape of society and government in the United States, Europe, and elsewhere.
Upstream: The Quest to Solve Problems Before They Happen
Dan Heath
Link
Upstream probes the psychological forces that push us downstream—including “problem blindness,” which can leave us oblivious to serious problems in our midst. And Heath introduces us to the thinkers who have overcome these obstacles and scored massive victories by switching to an upstream mindset. One online travel website prevented twenty million customer service calls every year by making some simple tweaks to its booking system. A major urban school district cut its dropout rate in half after it figured out that it could predict which students would drop out—as early as the ninth grade. A European nation almost eliminated teenage alcohol and drug abuse by deliberately changing the nation’s culture. And one EMS system accelerated the emergency-response time of its ambulances by using data to predict where 911 calls would emerge—and forward-deploying its ambulances to stand by in those areas.
Night
Elie Wiesel
Link
Night is Elie Wiesel's masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie's wife and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author's original intent. And in a substantive new preface, Elie reflects on the enduring importance of Night and his lifelong, passionate dedication to ensuring that the world never forgets man's capacity for inhumanity to man.
Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz and Buchenwald; it also eloquently addresses many of the philosophical as well as personal questions implicit in any serious consideration of what the Holocaust was, what it meant, and what its legacy is and will be.