Little adventures during tennis + content

I guess Boston was my “big adventure” for the week (though maybe I’ll have another this weekend, we shall see!). But a fun little adventure was my walk + bookstore trip during tennis yesterday.

Normally my 11-year-old and 14-year-old have tennis back to back on Thursdays (at least during the summer). So I’m shuttling one there or home. But since my daughter is gone this week, it was just the 11-year-old. I drove him there at 4, and elected to stay there through to 4:45 pick up.

My original plan was to run but, um, it was 92 degrees out. And smoggy from the wildfires. So I decided to walk to downtown Narberth (cute little town center). The 12-minute walk there was reasonably shady, so it wasn’t so bad. And then I stopped at the bookstore in town to browse because it was a bookstore and because it was air-conditioned. Bookstore browsing is always something of an expensive activity, but I figured hey, I was only paying for one tennis lesson not two! I left with a cute little notebook, a short history book and a narrative science book. Right up my alley! Then I walked the 12 minutes back. I won’t be able to do this during every tennis lesson but it was more fun than driving home, sitting there for 20 minutes and then driving back.

In them meantime, here’s this week’s content:

Over at Before Breakfast I interviewed Jia Jiang about “Easy discipline” — the title of his new book. While we discuss pursuing goals, we also talk about his previous book, Rejection Proof. Jiang became well-known for filming himself trying to get rejected doing things. The trouble was that people kept going along with his requests! Years ago, he reports that he actually moved the stock price of Krispy Kreme after one of the workers agreed to make him Olympic ring-shaped donuts and he posted a video of the results. Please check out our conversation.

In the short episodes, I talked about how “Fewer dishes are easier to clean”, and “Even a busy day has downtime.”

Over at Vanderhacks, my Substack newsletter, I wrote about “How I make the family schedule” and “If you’re going to say yes, just do it” (it’s better than teaching kids that whining works!). Behind the paywall I wrote about how to “Build a life where you can leave.” Even if you’ve got a family, even if you run a business, it’s good to set up systems so things don’t fall apart without you. I also wrote about how to “Make the most of a low-energy day.”

I’ve got a blog post over at Norton Learning about Big Time!

If you haven’t picked up a copy of Big Time yet, please do! And if you do, I’d love to see a picture of the book out in the wild. You can always email me at Laura at lauravanderkam dot com.