The Best of @BJMendelson - Issue #6

Hey Hey!

Welcome to another edition of The Best of @BJMendelson.

This is a weekly email wherein I attempt to entertain you in ten minutes or less.

(Hopefully less. We all got shit to do, you know?)

In case you missed it: Evangeline Lilly (who plays The Wasp) and Letitia Wright (who plays Shuri) are both anti-vaxxers. In Lilly’s case, she was at an anti-vax protest in Washington, D.C. And Shuri. Well, that one takes a bit longer to explain.

This news was a bummer on so many fronts. Go get vaccinated. The pandemic doesn’t end until 1) Everyone dies (not likely, thankfully) 2) Everyone on Earth gets COVID. This one is bad, because it means a whole lot of people will continue to die. Or 3) Everyone gets vaccinated.

So, go get vaccinated. And bring anyone you know who hasn’t got their shot too.

(For more information on how the pandemic ends, I refer you back to issue #2 of this very newsletter where I was reading “Apollo’s Arrow”. Highly recommended book. Especially by the people at the CDC.)

Once a year, I read (or listen) to “Deep Work” by Cal Newport. It’s that good.

Why?

Because the way we live and work isn’t great.

Everyone has a different chronotype, and that means everyone has a different set of “prime time” hours in which to do their best work each day.

For me, I do my best work between 10 am and 2 pm. After that, everything I produce is shit. Unless I’m high, of course, but we’re talking about work here, people! We do not get stoned during the workday!

I mean, unless your stomach hurts…Then you have a legit medical excuse to get high. (That’s how I got my medical marijuana card here in NY! Thanks, Overly Sensitive Jew Stomach! I’m just pissed it took me twenty or so years to figure out I just had to smoke weed to calm you down.)

Thanks to “Deep Work”, I was able to figure out when I do my best work. Now I guard that time like I’ve possessed the One Ring for the last sixty years and don’t want to give it to my dumbass nephew.

I can’t recommend this book enough. Read it. Then power through Why We Sleep and put the two together. It’ll change your life.

My sister is bad with money. I’ve started a new personal finance series to help her. Maybe it’ll help you too?

Not sick of me yet? This week on the backstage blog, I show you all the stuff I’m working on that you’ll have over the next year or so to be entertained by.

Here’s something you can do to support this project: Forward this email to a friend.

The only way any of us succeed is through the support of our audience.

And there is no better way to do that than to help tell people that we exist.

See you next Wednesday.

-BJ