📻 Retro Recommendations & Bookclub in a Box

Anyone else suffering from whiplash?!

After a very relaxed 8ish weeks, everything suddenly flipped back ON a couple of weeks ago. Work! Gigs! Catch ups! Workshops! Study! Going places! Planning things! Things definitely seem to have a sense of optimism about them for the first time in a couple of years, which feels pretty good.

I’ve settled into a bit of a rhythm of evening reading, which is something I’d fallen out of the habit of in recent months. It’s nice to create a habit that genuinely feels like a treat at the end of each day. It’s also been a good accompanying habit to wanting to read longer books this year. I’m now 35% through Patrick Radden Keefe’s ~500 page exposé into the Sackler family and their central role in America’s opioid crisis. It’s very good, I’ll be talking about it on next month’s podcast.

Here’s a few other things I’m excited about, into, or simply enjoying right now…

• Podcast - Hard Fork: I should be on commission for how much I’ve recommended this NYT podcast. It’s an equal-parts funny and clever conversations on the latest tech news. There’s been a heap of chat about GPT3 and GPT4, and what’s happening behind the scenes at Microsoft, OpenAI, and Google as this tech battle heats up. Highly recommend listening to this episode featuring a teacher talking about how she’s embedding ChatGPT into her classroom. Spotify | Apple

• Collage: A couple of days ago, I went to a very fun, and very wholesome collage / cut and paste workshop with the folks at That Paper Joint. Such a nice, brain-soothing way to spend a Sunday morning. Get sticky.

• Trains: Late review, but trains are pretty great. As part of my year of experiments, I recently took the 11-hour train journey to Sydney from Melbourne. If you’re baulking at the idea, stay with me, because it was pretty good. You can read more about the highs (zero stress) and lows (toilet) here.

• Working from… I spent a week working from Sydney as the first of my working experiments for 2023. In a moment of procrastination, I also decided to revamp my personal website so that I can write about my experiments. Here’s the Sydney write up.

• The radio: That’s right, I’ve rated trains and now I’m going to talk about how good radio is. I listen to *a lot* of music (65,641 minutes to be precise in 2022), but sometimes the algorithm just feels a little repetitive. So I’ve added radio back into my listening, and returned to one of my all-time favourite DJs, Steve Lamaq. He now has a show on BBC 6 Music which is a wonderful dose of nostalgia (I used to sneakily listen to Lammo and Jo Whiley on Radio 1’s Evening Sessions from when I was about 12, well past my bedtime).

• Excited about - SXSW Sydney: The lineup has started to be announced, and I am very excited to see what else will be included in this first non-Austin SXSW event.

• Music - Always Centered at Night by Moby: Moby’s new label is a big pot of collaborations. Transit, Ache For, and On Air have been on heavy rotation.

• LNDR activewear: I am a complete convert to this active wear brand. It’s slick, buttery soft, washes well, and dries quick. Get some.

ICYMI, I’ve collated all the tech tools I use across the podcast and my business right here, in case you’re looking to refresh your stack in 2023.

Furiously scribbling things on my 2023 calendar,

Steph

PS. To borrow from Austin Kleon (and everyone else who borrows this from Austin Kleon), this newsletter and the podcast are 'free but not cheap'. You can support their ongoing creation and keep me in books by buying me a coffee as a one off 'thank you', or leaving giving the podcast a (five 😉) star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Thanks!

Want to start your own team bookclub?

If starting a work (or social) non-fiction bookclub has been on your list for a while, but the effort of curating the list of books and discussion topics feels way too hard, Bookclub in a Box is for you.

I ran a virtual session with my buddies at StoryTail last week called Budget Friendly L&D, and the idea of internal bookclubs got some conversation going. The thing that seemed to be the barrier for people was the time and effort required to pick the books to get the bookclub off the ground.

In your Bookclub in a Box download you’ll receive…

📚 12 book recommendations
📚 A set of discussion questions for each book
📚 A suggested calendar of reading for the year
📚 A DIY calendar option, if you want to decide your own order

PS. I’ve used an honesty pricing model for this resource, based on how many people will be using it in your team / organisation. This is an attempt to make it accessible for different audiences, whilst also recognising the value when it’s used at larger scales.

ICYMI, recently on the podcast…

What I read in January 2023: five books on life, food, and the future of work

It's 2023: what I'll be reading this year, and a year of experiments