Newsletter › #5
Productivity Heat Maps | Long-Term Buying | 17 Books Recommended by World-Class Performers | Don't Want to Go to Work Lab
【What I've been up to】
Hi, Reader,
How was your week?
A quick update: on October 31 I finished the daily writing challenge in the Inspiration Village community. I wrote every day for 45 days.
After the challenge I stopped posting daily, mainly because I've started writing my own book.
The book's content isn't really suited to social media. So even though I'm not posting every day, I still write for at least an hour daily.
A few things I learned about writing every day:
At the start, I got up at 5 a.m. to write.
The idea of writing at 5 a.m. came from Ryan Wu and Yu Wei-chang, because when I listened to their shows, both of them had chosen to get up at five to write.
After three weeks of that, I found my mind was duller and my energy drained faster.
So I moved my wake-up time to 6 a.m., around sunrise.
That's also closer to how our ancestors lived: work at sunrise, rest at sunset.
So in summer I'll consider getting up 30–60 minutes earlier, because the sun rises earlier — something I learned in the army.
After adjusting my schedule, my energy improved a lot and I worked more efficiently.
So no single method suits everyone. You have to experiment, find the schedule that works for you, and manage your energy well.
For energy management, here's a tool I'm using: a productivity heat map. (Thanks to Kim for sharing it.)
This is the heat map I recorded this week. After a week of tracking, you can roughly tell when you're most productive. I call it my "sacred time."
The way I divide my day: I give my most productive hours to the work that takes the most brainpower, like writing and reading.
The rest of the time goes to work that's less demanding, like editing video, making graphics, handling partnerships and email.
The benefit: the most important things are done in the morning, and what's left isn't so important. It doesn't even matter if it doesn't get done.
The idea comes from The ONE Thing.
Three suggestions to finish:
1. Test which schedule puts you in your best state.
2. Record your productivity heat map, find your sacred time, and manage your energy.
3. Do the important things first.
When you design a rhythm of your own,
you're not just raising your productivity — you're building "your own ideal life."
Productivity heat map (make a copy to your own account first; in Chinese)
【Book share】
- Author: Chou Guan-nan (Robin K. Chou)
- Title: Long-Term Buying: 42 Lessons in Self-Disciplined Investing from Finance Professor Chou Guan-nan (Chinese only)
- URL: https://www.kobo.com/ebook/GE3nxQy4PDyrENfEzJAh-A
Of all the books I've read in the past two years, this one taught me the most about long-term investing.
Professor Chou earned the market's average return with a single ETF.
He started buying in 2003; by 2023, his total return over twenty years was 550%, an average of 9.8% a year.
He's best known for buying a Maserati SUV with the license plate "0050."
Besides his own views, the book covers a lot of academic research showing that long-term investing almost never loses.
The book tells this story:
Victor Haghani was once a senior executive in a Wall Street arbitrage unit,
an expert in financial engineering who made huge profits for his firm.
In 1993 he and six other financial experts founded Long-Term Capital Management,
a "dream team" that included a former Federal Reserve vice chairman and two Nobel laureates in economics.
From 1993 to 1997, Long-Term Capital Management performed brilliantly, returning twice as much as the S&P 500 over the same period, and attracted a flood of investment.
An initial US$10,000 investment had grown to US$40,000 by the end of 1997.
More than ten years later, in 2011, Haghani founded another asset management firm,
but this time his method was to spread money across low-cost index ETFs covering global assets. He firmly believed this was the best long-term investment for his clients.
Why such a big change?
Because in 1998 the Asian financial crisis shook the markets, and Long-Term Capital Management's investors got back less than 1% of their money.
That taught Haghani how unpredictable financial markets are — no model can predict them — and he turned to championing diversified index investing.
The lesson of this story: even a former Fed vice chairman and Nobel laureates in economics can't predict the market.
The book also covers many investing myths:
1. If 0050 is so good, isn't the 2x leveraged 0050 even better?
2. Are thematic funds a good idea?
3. Should you voluntarily contribute an extra 6% to your labor pension?
The book explains all of these.
To be clear, this isn't a feel-good book. The author is a finance professor and cites a lot of research. There are plenty of numbers, but it isn't hard to read overall.
I recommend it to two kinds of people:
1. People who lack confidence in investing
2. People who are overconfident in investing
I used to be the second kind — so reading more really does help.
In 2017, Harvard president Drew Gilpin Faust told incoming students:
"The goal of education is to make sure that you can tell when someone is talking nonsense."
A fun saying I like: "We read so we can talk well with people; we work out so people will talk nicely to us."
If you're still hesitating about whether to start investing,
this book will help you see that the market will always swing, but time is always on the side of the steady.
Stop guessing whether the market will go up or down.
First learn to invest regularly and hold for the long term,
and let compounding over time work for you.
The hardest part of investing isn't finding the highest-returning product,
it's "buying for the long term."
【Learning resources】
Last issue I recommended Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers.
It took me 8.8 hours, but I finally finished it. At the end, the author includes a list of the books mentioned most often across all the interviews — 17 in total. Here it is:
- Tao Te Ching (Lao Tzu) | 5 mentions
- Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) | 4
- Sapiens (Yuval Noah Harari) | 4
- Siddhartha (Hermann Hesse) | 4
- The 4-Hour Workweek (Timothy Ferriss) | 4
- The Checklist Manifesto (Atul Gawande) | 4
- Dune (Frank Herbert) | 3
- Influence (Robert Cialdini) | 3
- Stumbling on Happiness (Daniel Gilbert) | 3
- Superintelligence (Nick Bostrom) | 3
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman! (Richard Feynman) | 3
- The 4-Hour Body (Timothy Ferriss) | 3
- The Bible | 3
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) | 3
- The War of Art (Steven Pressfield) | 3
- Watchmen (Alan Moore) | 3
- Zero to One (Peter Thiel) | 3
How many have you read?
I've only read Sapiens. Rather embarrassing.
The ones I'm interested in:
The 4-Hour Workweek, Influence,
Stumbling on Happiness, Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!,
The 4-Hour Body and Zero to One.
What do I do — I'll never get through them all, haha.
By the way, the Tao Te Ching in first place? Seriously?
This week's episode
#49–50 | You can build your ideal life without a job | ft. Lanno of Don't Want to Go to Work Lab
This episode features Lanno, founder of Lanno Photography Academy.
She started out as a freelance photographer, built a YouTube channel with over 180,000 subscribers, and in 2022 founded Lanno Photography Academy, which has taught 15,000 students.
In this episode, Lanno shares how she went from client work to teaching online,
and the idea behind Don't Want to Go to Work Lab: "Build your own ideal life, and stop working for someone else."
We talk about:
• why she sees "not wanting to go to work" not as running away, but as an active choice
• how to turn your expertise into income through a personal brand
• how freelancers balance life and work
• the mindset of starting a business, designing courses and building a brand
This episode is especially for office workers thinking about a career change, starting a business or a side hustle.
If you'd also like to build your ideal life through a personal brand, don't miss it!
PS. This time the YouTube version has video.
Read the English show notes › (the episode is in Mandarin Chinese)
If you enjoy the show, take a screenshot of it,
and tag me in your social stories — I'll respond.
Finally, remember to subscribe, leave a comment and give it five stars!
Listen:
🍎Apple Podcasts
🎧Spotify
🎦YouTube
Deals
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So after finishing it, I approached her about working together to share the course with my listeners, and she kindly offered an exclusive discount:
👉 Course page: eleanorfilmacademy.tw/VlRMg (in Mandarin)
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That's it for this issue of the FIRE Life Weekly.
If you have any questions about the show,
or suggestions for the newsletter,
just write to me at doug@firetw.com.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Have a lovely weekend,
and see you next week.
Doug