This blog post is a quick summary of the book “The Book of Do - A Manual for living”

Context

I have read a few of “Do” series books and liked them. This book is a 10 year anniversary edition that comprises a collection of articles culled out from various “Do” series book. Do books inspire action ?

Here is the editor, Miranda West, saying what books can do: Miranda’s Do Lecture: How Books Can Inspire Action

This book is divided in 10 themed sections and has over 50 photographs, 30 illustrations, 8 lists, 6 recipes, 4 diary entries, and hundreds of ideas around 10 section. In this brief blog post, I will try to put in three ideas that resonated with me across each of the 10 sections

Prepare

  • Finding your purpose is not a race: One has to spend time in experimenting with a range of stuff before figuring out something that one might do, even if someone doesn’t pay. There is no specific age limit by which one has to find one’s purpose. It can happen at an early age, middle age or even in late 50s. However one needs to have an open mindset to experiment, learn, fail in order to find something worthwhile doing. Depending on whom you ask, the answer to “purpose of your life”, the answers might vary. If you ask Sadhguru, you might get a very blunt answer - “There is no purpose to human life”. So, what are we supposed to do in our life? Live a hedonistic life. That’s not what Sadhguru advocates. He suggests to immerse oneself in any activity that gives maximum impact to the people in the society.
  • Limiting beliefs: Some of us carry limiting beliefs through out our lives that stifles our life’s potential. Realizing that one is operating on limiting beliefs is the first step in getting out of it. The next crucial step is to do something about it. There are nice hacks mentioned in “Clear Thinking”

Time

  • Importance of pause in one’s life: A books is a medium that lends itself to pausing - you get to choose when to dwell on something, when to re-read a sentence or when to put down
  • Ballad of Willie Nelson: Willie Nelson has made 250 albums, and is still touring in his eighties. He did not a get a break until he was 40
  • You will only regret the things that you don’t do.
  • Prompts to think about on a periodic basis
    • What am I proud of ?
    • Does my life have meaning and purpose?
    • Am I content ?
    • Am I doing what matters to me?
    • Do I spend quality time with and appreciate those I love ?
    • Am I the person I want to be ?
    • Do I live a life for myself or what others expect of me?
    • What can I learn ?
    • Am I using my time wisely ?
    • Do I help others?
    • Am I a giver ?

Change

  • Begin before you are ready
  • One-nighters to work on one micro-project. Work each day
  • Turn the internet off on a periodic basis

Ideas

  • Don’t worry about being original. Be honest.
  • Ideas work like Velcro

Velcro works like this: On one side is a series of hooks going in lots of random directions. On the other side is a series of loops going in lots of random directions. When a hook meets a loop, they connect. It is in the connection business.

It is the randomness of the hooks and the loops that make Velcro work, but they are also important to us if we want to be interesting. We need to have lots of random hooks and loops. If we read the same old books, we get to know more about the thing we know lots about already. We need to subscribe to magazines that we wouldn’t normally subscribe to; we need to go to places that we wouldn’t normally go to, eat at places that may not be our kind of place.

We stay interesting by stepping outside our groove. We keep pushing; we leave what we know behind for a bit.

This is important from the point of view of coming up with ideas. If your reference points are different to others, then guess what, your ideas are going to be different. To think different: do different, read different, travel different, eat different etc.

Velcro goes in many different directions in order to make a connection. If we are interested in new ideas, so should we.

Work

  • CARE : Collect, Arrange, Reflect and Execute
  • Work need not be endured, it can be enjoyed

Hugo and Fred build motorcycles. They build them from discarded older motorbikes, curating their builds using the frames, engines, petrol tanks and handlebars from machines of another time. They call their company Blitz — as in giving new life, new energy, new purpose, to old motorcycles.

Possessed with an aesthetic vision of how these motorcycles could be reclaimed, then reborn as something new and exciting to ride, Hugo and Fred laboured their love. For them, motorcycles, and motorcycle mechanics, are a passion. The preservation of a time of motorcycle engineering became their quest. Kick-started from the place that makes the heart beat a faster — the sound motorcycles make, the way they feel riding through Parisian streets or through the dusty back roads of another country — wherever they are, Blitz motorcycles speak to the soul. If the existentialist poet Thom Gunn was alive today his poetry would thrum to an engine hanging in the heat of a Blitz motorcycle and the leather-jacketed riders directing their trajectory forwards.

Hugo and Fred taught themselves about motorcycle mechanics, learning through trial and error. It took a little time, as it always does to become a master of your craft”. They persevered, knowing that time is earthed. You can’t rush to greatness, you can’t guarantee it — you can only work towards it by practising your craft” every day, directed by your passion, by your purpose.

Sacrifice can involve money, and time doing other things, but that all adds up to realising a purpose which gives much greater rewards. The reordering of happiness, work and play. Hugo and Fred speak of working joyfully together, they speak of the joy of continuously learning. Surely this is the true mark of the pursuit of craftsmanship, the revelation of beauty and its rewards. And they speak of taking an autonomous position, a place where one can live and work without debt and the many life challenges debt can create.

Simply, these machines take time to build, as each one is unique; there are no timesheets, only love as the arbiter of good work and a day’s toil. Fred and Hugo say they have met more interesting people in the few years they have been working as Blitz than in the previous ten years: ‘They are more interesting, because they have a passion like us.’ They treasure every day.

Watch people who love what they do. Feel their passion. Listen to how they describe their work. Investing in loving what you do always costs time, money, and sometimes the odd scar and bruise. It repays that love with personal satisfaction, and in turn it inspires, guides and nurtures the spirit in others. If we invested in more things that give us a meaningful life, our world might feel a little different. And our work might even outlive us.

As a good friend said to me, “Invest in love, it pays well in the end.”

Team

  • Hire Slowly. Fire quickly
  • Leadership is helping any group of two or more people achieve their common goals
  • Muhammad Ali’s best poem - “Me,We”
  • Trust breeds magic

Creativity

  • Importance of pause: When you press the pause button on a machine it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings, they start
  • Slow hunches don’t develop if you work relentlessly on a problem

You

  • All walking is discovery. On Foot, we take the time to see things whole
  • If one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right
  • We should take wandering outdoor walks, so that the mind might be nourished and refreshed by the open air and deep breathing

Regenerate

  • We are stuck in habits that have started to feel like dead-ends. Nature blows a way through and leads us to age-old healing practices like the acceptance of change curiosity, interdependence, resilience and patience. We can all be more like the bulb in winter, accepting and respecting the seasons and trusting that new and beautiful like will come

Sustain

  • Instructions for living a life - Pay attention, be astonished, tell about it
  • Paying attention to what you seek, to what catches your eye and to what makes you happy are all steps to a fuller life. If you always remember to keep looking and keep trying, your home will undoubtedly reflect your efforts. Living a creative and considered life starts with paying attention and with caring

Epilogue

Takeaway

The book is a nice collection of essays from “Do Series” books. The entire collection can be read in less than 2 hours and it was worth my time as there were more than a dozen thoughts and visuals that I found appealing.