Below is another Sunday Supplement with a quote worth sharing, a book worth reading, a movie worth watching, brainfood worth consuming, and a spiritual passage worth pondering.
Please take something away from these recommendations that enriches your week ahead!
Quote of the Week:
“Many people resented my impatience and honesty, but I never cared about acceptance as much as I cared about respect.”
In A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson recounts his curiosity about the Appalachian Trail and his decision to traverse it, accompanied by his old friend Stephen Katz.
The pair are not suited to the long journey of the trail and end up discarding much of their starting load.
Their journey includes some history and ecology of the trail, funny encounters with humans and animals, and some honesty about their abilities and the overall outcome of the trek.
I read A Walk in the Woods while I was still in high school. I remember it being one of the first books to make me laugh out loud, almost every chapter.
True Grit tells the story of a stubborn teenage girl, Mattie Ross, as she tracks down her father’s murderer with help from a U.S. Marshall and a Texas Ranger.
Hailey Steinfeld made her feature debut as Mattie Ross, Jeff Bridges played the U.S. Marshall, Matt Damon the Texas Ranger, and Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper the villains.
The film was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor in a Leading Role, and Best Actor in a Supporting Role.
I haven’t seen the original True Grit with John Wayne, but Ethan and Joel Coen’s 2010 remake is one of my favorite Westerns.
Brainfood of the Week:
The Power of Radical Honesty | Dr. Anna Lembke | After Skool
Dr. Anna Lembke is a professor of psychiatry at Stanford University School of Medicine, has published over a hundred peer-reviewed papers, book chapters, and commentaries, and sits on the board of several state and national addiction-focused organizations.
In this video, Lembke focuses on how telling the truth improves our lives. She explains how radical honesty helps limit compulsive overconsumption and can be the core of a well-lived life.
We are wired at an early age to lie. The wiring fluctuates as we grow older, and we can gravitate toward honesty, but the temptations of lying can be exacerbated in modern society.
Lembke explains how radical honesty combats the pitfalls of lying, promotes awareness of our actions, and fosters intimate human connections. I can’t recommend the video more highly.
After Skool is a YouTube channel that animates videos as the backdrop to various life lessons presented by various individuals and texts. I’ve featured them in two other Sunday Supplements.
Closing Spiritual Passage:
“Good medicine tastes bitter.”
– Japanese Proverb
I think this Japanese proverb is pretty straightforward, but I like the reminder that what might be best for you doesn’t always go down well at first.
Advice and honest assessment can be this way. It can be difficult to critique your decisions openly or to take advice that may be hard to follow.
However, I think this proverb has another side that can argue that medicine that will get the job done doesn’t have to be bitter.
I think it’s important to know when to deliver news starkly or with a little cushion to it, but bitter medicine shouldn’t be avoided when necessary.
Take an honest look at your past year, make actionable plans to improve your 2024, and have a blessed year ahead!
Below is another Sunday Supplement with a quote worth sharing, a book worth reading, a movie worth watching, brainfood worth consuming, and a spiritual passage worth pondering.
Please take something away from these recommendations that enriches your week ahead!
Quote of the Week:
“Whatever you do, do with determination. You have one life to live; do your work with passion and give your best. Whether you want to be a chef, doctor, actor, or a mother, be passionate to get the best result.”
It’s been a few months since I featured a Stephen King novel, but since this week’s theme is about passion, I want to highlight Gwendy’s Button Box.
Most people assume King is strictly a horror offer. This novel, written with Richard Chizmar, is a brilliant coming-of-age tale about Gwendy Peterson.
The novel starts with twelve-year-old Gwendy exercising on the local Suicide Stairs of Castle Rock when a mysterious man presents Gwendy with a magical button box.
Gwendy is tasked with protecting the box and must battle the temptation to test the dangerous contents the box holds.
King is a brilliant author and crafts a wonderful small-town tale. His work fires my passion for literature and writing, and I highly recommend his work.
Poker became a mainstream game in the last twenty years, and Rounders was one of the first movies to feature the game and its underground world.
David Levien and Brian Koppelman wrote the script about a young, reformed gambler who must return to playing high-stakes poker to help a friend pay off a debt while trying to balance his relationship with his girlfriend and his commitments to law school.
Matt Damon and Edward Norton star in the film, and the supporting cast features terrific performances from John Turturro, John Malkovich, Martin Landau, and Gretchen Mol.
John Daly directed the film that remains a legacy in the poker world and is still a brilliant story and excellent film.
Brainfood of the Week:
How To Find Your Passion | Improvement Pill
This video starts by debunking the assumption that only one thing can be our passion. The truth is that many things can be your passion. You can have more than one.
The two things you need to do to discover your passions. The first is that you must change where you get your dopamine from.
Dopamine is the chemical released by our brain that motivates us to do something. It is accompanied by pleasure and is easy to get from outside substances.
If we receive our dopamine from outside sources, we are less likely to pursue activities that naturally release the chemical in our bodies.
Check out the video to see the rest of the breakdown. And I’ve also featured Improvement Pill in other previous Sunday Supplements. Their videos are excellent sources of knowledge.
Closing Spiritual Passage:
“Beginning is easy; continuing is hard.”
– Japanese Proverb
This Japanese Proverb is a straightforward message that highlights how it’s easy to take the first steps, but it’s challenging to finish the journey.
For me, knowing that the journey is hard allows you to embrace the challenges that come along the way.
If you know something will be hard, you won’t be surprised when you encounter obstacles. Instead, you can expect them and be in the right mind space to take them on when they come.
I enjoy proverbs like these because they remind you what you’re getting into. If you know that and still want to take on the challenges, you’re on the right path.
Pursue your passions, don’t give up, and have a blessed week ahead!
Below is another Sunday Supplement with a quote worth sharing, a book worth reading, a movie worth watching, brainfood worth consuming, and a spiritual passage worth pondering.
I hope you take something away from these recommendations that enriches your week ahead!
Quote of the Week:
“One important key to success is confidence. An important key to self-confidence is preparation.”
Andy Weir’s The Martian is probably most recognizable from the 2015 Ridley Scott movie starring Matt Damon.
The screenplay was adapted from Andy Weir’s bestseller about astronaut Mark Watney being left behind on Mars and his fight for survival using his skills and the supplies left to him.
Weir initially published the book in serial format on his website. He had a small following from his previous self-published stories and comics.
When Weir finished the novel, he listed it on Kindle for $.99. The book’s success and the subsequent film allowed him to pursue writing full-time.
I featured the film version of The Martian in Sunday Supplement #7. If you’re interested, I go into greater detail in the post about the movie and why I love the story.
Studio Ghibli is one of the top animation companies in the movie business. Their films have been continuously recognized by critics and audiences over the years.
While Studio Ghibli’s most famous films often feature a significant setting or background of fantasy, Whisper of the Heart is one of their more grounded films.
The film is based on a manga and follows Shizuku, a young girl who’s an avid reader and wants to be a writer. One day she notices all of her books have been previously taken out by the same boy, and she attempts to find that boy while she navigates her own journey.
There are many lessons from this film, and one of the things I value in Studio Ghibli’s films is that the female characters aren’t solely relying/focused on male counterparts.
I’ve featured Studio Ghibli movies in six previous Sunday Supplement. I highly recommend all their films. Check out the other posts if you want to see more of their catalog.
Brainfood of the Week:
How to Plan Your Week Effectively | The Art of Improvement
In this video, The Art of Improvement breaks down Ryder Carroll’s celebrated book, The Bullet Journal Method.
The principles explained in the video can aid your current planning systems or help you create new ones to maximize how you want to use your days.
An example of one of the tips highlighted in the video is taking a mental inventory of anything and everything you want to accomplish.
This exercise helps combat decision fatigue when we have too many choices of how to spend our time and no organization around what we want to accomplish.
Check out the video if you want to hear the other tips. I’ve also featured The Art of Improvement in previous Sunday Supplements if you want more recommendations.
Closing Spiritual Passage:
“He who doesn’t know where he is going doesn’t know whether or when he will arrive.”
– African Proverb
At first, I thought this proverb was pretty straightforward. Preparing a road map of where you want to go is vital to know if you have arrived.
However, I thought more about the wording of when in the proverb. I thought about how I’ve set goals in the past but haven’t always given myself a timeline for them.
This proverb reminds me of the importance of setting a course and giving yourself a timeline.
That doesn’t mean you have to achieve the goal by that time, but it allows you to check in and see if you need to make any alterations to your plan.
Prepare how you want your life to be, work on those plans, and have a blessed week ahead!
Below is another Sunday Supplement with a quote worth sharing, a book worth reading, a movie worth watching, brainfood worth consuming, and a spiritual passage worth pondering.
I hope you take something away from these recommendations that enriches your week ahead!
Quote of the Week:
“It’s not how we make mistakes, but how we correct them that defines us.”
Ursula K. Le Guin was an American novelist whose career spanned from the late 1950s until her death, aged 88 in 2018.
Le Guin was the first woman to win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel for her work The Left Hand of Darkness.
A Wizard of Earthsea is the first novel in her classic Earthsea Cycle series. It tells the story of Ged, the greatest wizard in the archipelago of Earthsea, when he was a reckless youth known as Sparrowhawk.
In his quest for knowledge and power, the young Ged meddles with dangerous dark secrets and releases a wicked shadow upon the land.
The novel then follows Sparrowhawk as he journeys forward to master the words of power and eventually face the shadow he loosed upon Earthsea.
There are other novels in the series worth reading, but the first one can be read as a standalone and is worth checking out.
Ridley Scott came out with two films in 2021. While House of Gucci received more attention at the box office, The Last Duel came and went without much notice or praise.
The movie tells the story of Sir Jean de Carrouges’s duel to the death with his squire Jacques Le Gris after Carrouges accuses Le Gris of raping his wife, Marguerite.
The Last Duel gets broken up into three chapters. The first tells Carrouges’s version of events, the second tells Le Gris’s, and the third tells Marguerite’s.
Oscar-nominated writer Nicole Holofcener and Oscar-winning writers Ben Affleck and Matt Damon penned the script for this medieval tale.
Adam Driver, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck all put in brilliant performances, and Jodie Comer stole the show in the final chapter as Marguerite.
While this film didn’t make much of an impression upon its release, it was one of the best films of the year, in my opinion. It told a simple story in a clever way.
If you’re interested in a lengthy period piece, put the film on your to-watch list.
Brainfood of the Week:
This is How to Overcome Your Fear of Failure | The Art of Improvement
The Art of Improvement is a YouTube channel that makes videos on self-care and self-improvement techniques. I’ve previously featured the channel’s videos in Sunday Supplement #30 and #34.
In this video, the topic is how to overcome failure. The video starts with a story about Picasso sketching on a napkin. A woman sees him about to throw it away and says she’ll pay for it.
When Picasso says the napkin will cost her $20,000, the woman protests how can he charge that much for something that took him two minutes to draw. Picasso responded that it took him 60 years to make.
The lesson of the story is that mastery takes time. The video then explains how we need to be able to make mistakes without giving up to move forward with a practice.
Failure ultimately becomes something people can fear. The comfort of the known becomes a safety net that we adapt to avoid trying new things that could prompt failure.
The video later explains the Stoic philosophy around the sphere of choice. Broken down, it falls into the categories of things we can control (internal) and things we can’t control (external).
We must learn to focus exclusively on the internals and let go of all things we cannot control.
There are more tidbits in the video that I do not cover here. It’s only seven minutes and worth the watch to pick them up.
Closing Spiritual Passage:
“For the righteous fall seven times and rise again.”
– Proverbs 24:16
This bible passage makes me think about how we respond to our mistakes. I think it’s easy to view the quote as a simple reminder never to give up, but it can say much more.
I’m drawn to the word rise when I read this verse. When I searched the meaning of the word rise, I found the definition of moving from a lower position to a higher one.
For me, I think that means more than getting up when you fall. It means to rise above where you were before you fell.
I think that we can learn much from our mistakes. Even if all we can do is move on, not worry about the past, and look to the road ahead, we have made progress and have risen.
How we handle our falls shapes our perception of our lives. I’m working on seeing the opportunities to rise when I encounter my trip-ups.
Find the opportunity to rise from a perceived fall, and have a blessed week ahead!
Below is another Sunday Supplement with a quote worth sharing, a book worth reading, a movie worth watching, brainfood worth consuming, and a spiritual passage worth pondering.
I hope you take something away from these recommendations that enriches your week ahead!
Quote of the Week:
“Don’t wait for everything to be perfect before you decide to enjoy your life.”
I usually recommend a single book for this portion of the Sunday Supplement, but I’m recommending a Young Adult series this week. The Chronicles of Prydain consists of five books set in Prydain, a fictional country ruled by a High King who oversees several smaller kingdoms. Lloyd Alexander wrote the novels, and in the introductions of the books, he tells how he was inspired by Welsh folklore he became immersed in while receiving army combat intelligence training in World War II.
The first book, The Book of Three, follows Taran, an “assistant pig-keeper,” as he loses charge of caring for Hen Wen, a magical pig, and follows it into the forest, beginning his hero’s journey. On his adventure, he meets Prince Gwydion, son of the High King of Prydain, who is in pursuit of Hen Wen to consult the pig’s prophetic visions. The two team up, and after befriending a creature called Gorge, Taran gets captured by the “Cauldron-Born,” the undead warriors of the Horned King. While imprisoned, Taran befriends a princess held hostage, Eilonwy, and they escape captivity. They find the legendary sword Dyrnwyn in their retreat and later meet up with the rest of Taran’s group. Ffleeddur Fflam, a kind by birth who chooses to be a bard, joins their troop, and together with the companions (later joined by the dwarf Doli), determines to stop the plans of the Horned King and his maser Arwan.
The subsequent four novels follow Taran and each of the main characters established in the first book. Taran starts as a disgruntled young teenager who slowly learns to challenge and reframe his perceptions and thoughts about the world as he grows in each book. Each character has their own journey and contributes to each other’s growth in unique ways.
While this series is found in the Y/A or children’s sections of most libraries and stores, there is much to learn and enjoy from these books. I’ve read it in the last year, and it is one of my favorite ventures away from my usual reading patterns. I can’t recommend it more highly.
Good Will Hunting tells the story of Will Hunting, a 20-year-old South Boston janitor and unknown maths genius who becomes the patient of a therapist and student of a renowned advanced mathematics professor as a part of a deferred prosecution agreement after he assaults a police officer. The movie delves into his relationships with the therapist, the professor, his girlfriend, and his friends and how he starts to face the task of confronting his past and thinking about his future for the first time in his life.
This film is a brilliant story that shook up Hollywood at the script stage. Matt Damon (Will Hunting) and Ben Affleck (Will’s friend Chuckle) wrote the screenplay early on in their acting pursuits, and it was this movie that launched their careers. At first, it was hard for the young actors to get the film made because they were adamant they would be playing a couple of the lead roles in the movie. Finally, the script got into the hands of Robin Williams (Dr. Sean Maguire), and he signed on, which gave them the star power to get the green light for production.
After the long wait for the movie to get made, the outcome was Oscar glory for Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. They both won the Academy Award for Best Writing – Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen. The film was nominated for seven additional Oscars, including Best Picture, and won one other category, Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Robin Williams.)
In an interview with Graham Norton, Damon talked about the experience of winning the Oscar at 27 years old and how he had the grateful realization that he didn’t screw over anyone to get the award. He explained how much he appreciated that he didn’t pursue the award his whole life trying to fill a hole. It’s an interesting perspective given that resonates with a message in the film about intimacy. I encourage you to watch the movie and find the link. It’s a brilliant story and sits high on many top film lists for a reason.
Brainfood of the Week:
Hugh Jackman Interview on The Tim Ferriss Show
I’ve featured an interview from The Tim Ferriss Show in four other Sunday Supplements (#1, #5, #9, and #12.) Each interview is worth checking out, and this will be another brilliant one from the massive catalog of interviews conducted by Tim Ferriss. While the guests are the highlights from the podcast, Tim is a superb conductor for creating a fantastic flow and excellent dialogue with his guests.
In Sunday Supplement #1, I cover a brief background on Tim, so I’ll focus on Hugh Jackman and his interview for this post.
Hugh Jackman is an Academy Award-nominated actor, Golden Globe and Tony Award-winning performer, and philanthropist. He is often touted as one of the kindest people in Hollywood and makes an impression as much off-screen as he does on-screen.
In this episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, Tim asks questions about Jackman’s past and how he got into acting, his morning routine with his wife, and his faith and meditation practices. The interview takes a journey that paints a wonderful picture of Jackman’s life and how he got to the point where he is today. There are so many brilliant nuggets of wisdom to pick up from the interview, and it is also highly entertaining.
Check it out. It certainly won’t be a waste of your time.
Closing Spiritual Passage:
“Be master of mind rather than mastered by mind.”
– Zen Proverb
This quote reminds me of how the mind can be one of the most powerful tools in our arsenal if appropriately utilized. At our best, our minds can guide us and help us along the journeys we set for ourselves and the paths we want to explore. The experiences we encounter can be scary or exciting entirely depending on how we view the situation. Our thoughts and beliefs can all be our conscious decision if we learn to choose that way.
On the opposite side is an uncontrolled mind that directs our thoughts without our conscious input. I’ve noticed these reins most when I’ve come out of a funk or a binge and realized I had been in a hole for a certain amount of time without realizing I was there. Micheal Singer, who I highlighted in Sunday Supplement #12, discusses how we are like moviegoers at movie theaters in his book The Untethered Soul. We can get caught up in an emotional scene and get lost in the narrative, but if we pull back, we realize that we are conscious beings in control of how we view the picture.
This control is something I’ve worked on over the past few years of my life. It’s an interesting habit to build and one that has brought some amazing experiences. The Zen proverb above reminds me of the two relationships you can have with your mind. I believe the former is the experience we are meant to have.
Choose something next and exciting to do, and have a blessed week ahead!
