Rootz's Blog

iTunes  | Stitcher | SoundCloud A Room of One's Own is know for its feminist theme, not it's lessons on minimalism. But it does, in fact, hold a valuable lesson about how to live a happy, contented life. BOOK: A Room of One's Own / Virginia Woolf Never Enough - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKEMBn_JdCE Twitter: https://twitter.com/ruthrootz Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ruthrootz/ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ruthrootz/ Blog: Rootz’s Blog: https://blogbyrootz.blogspot.com Apple Podcasts: https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/better-with-books/id1293449772?mt=2 RadioPublic: https://play.radiopublic.com/better-with-books-WwDRqy Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/s?fid=185181 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc-cBvKXkTgAyDLm7uYQaEQ?view_as=subscriber SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/betterwithbooks email: rootzmacbwb@gmail.com

iTunes  | Stitcher | SoundCloud Individualism sounds like a good thing, right? But our society has forced us to idealize it while, at the same time, being bullied into being like everyone else, into fitting the mold. How do we live a life of true individualism? Listen to find out! BOOK: Fight Club / Chuck Palahniuk Shantell Martin Fight Club How to Do What You Love How the Modern World Makes Us Mentally Ill Global Poverty How much the average American makes a day Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach Living Wage Calculator The World Is CHANGING -- From the CEO of Patreon The Cost of Living Full-Time in an RV Twitter:  twitter.com/ruthrootz Instagram:  www.instagram.com/ruthrootz/ Facebook:  www.facebook.com/ruthrootz/ Blog: Mind Think:  mindthinkbyrootz.blogspot.com Apple Podcasts:  itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/bette…d1293449772?mt=2 Anchor:  anchor.fm/betterwithbooks RadioPublic:  play.radiopublic.com/better-with-books-WwDRqy St...

The original list. . . Welcome to my version of the ultimate classic lit reading list (in chronological order)! I’m not saying read these books in this order. Or in any order at all. Or in fact these specific books. But I think this a handy reference to have, so use it as you will. The time (which is in hours) is the time it takes to read the unabridged audiobook or , if it’s a poet listed, the minimum amount of time I’d spend reading their work, based on the lengths of audiobook collections of their poems. Using these times, the list would take about 2200 hours to read through. I put How to Read Literature Like a Professor on top because I personally want to read it before starting on the main list. Note: If you see something you don’t want on the list or you think there’s something missing, remember this list is biased. I added or removed as I saw fit, using recommendations from the r/books community. Customize it for your own reading adventure. (I got a l...

© Ruth R. Oldja 2018 It's called Better With Books , and in each episode I take a quote or idea from a book I've read and expand on it, essay-style, and show how it can be applied to modern daily life. The best part? You don't have to be a bookworm to enjoy the show! I've purposely made it so you don't have to have read any of the books (or want to read any of the books) in order to learn something new. "Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people." - Eleanor Roosevelt (probably)

There’s a reason Steve Jobs said, “Think different.” He knew that thinking differently, being different,  not  doing what everyone else is doing, is the key to being successful. . . You want a sure-fire way to succeed? I have good news for you: It’s not that difficult. The trick is to do better than the majority of people around you. Even if just slightly better. If your coworkers show up late for work, show up early. If your friends refuse to take good advice, take good advice. If your classmates don’t study for the test, study. If everyone else is selling, buy. If everyone is buying, sell. This method basically guarantees that you’ll end up on top. You automatically have the upper hand. Because, statistically speaking, most people you know (or will get to know) are average people. To be above average, you have to be at least slightly better than them. Slightly harder-working, slightly more diligent, slightly more self-aware, slightly better at public speaking, etc. ...

We all know them. Those people who are always, always, pulled-together. They're on time, look great, never seem rushed, produce great results. And I'm here to spill their secret. Not because I think I am some role-model or whatever but simply because I obsessively use their secret and I don't want it to be a secret anymore. The secret is what I call buffer time. Buffer time is the accumulation of those little moments that usually go undetected in our daily lives. It’s the time you spend walking from your car into the store. It’s the time you spend in line for your coffee or waiting for a friend to show up. These little moments of seeming emptiness— — seemingly unusable time— — in fact add up to a lot , a lot in terms of the amount of time and in quality of time. The trick is to turn those moments into high-quality moments. Let me give you a couple examples. . . Any time when I am walking from one place to another, like to or  from my car, or anytime I'm in some s...

There are two kinds of people in this world. Those who live in what I’ll call “default state” and those who live in “preferred state”. And here’s where I get the tiniest bit geeky and invoke the image of an energy graph for an atom, where the atom can be in one of two states, as shown below. [ image source ] At any given moment, a person can either be in the initial energy state or the lower energy state. He cannot be in both, and he can move from one to the other. But this moving requires two things: energy and time (no quantum tunneling in this analogy). And most of us think we don’t have enough of either. Default state is where most of us exist, as reactants. It’s where we started, probably as soon as we got into high school. It’s where most of the people we know are, and it isn’t so bad, at least not for most of us. The default state is where you stay if you do the bare minimum. You get C's and B's. You do what it takes to keep your job, maybe only just eno...