Welcome to Mindful Monday!

My book, The Price of Becoming, is now 2 weeks old. So far, it is a USA Today National Bestseller, an LA Times Bestseller, a Publishers Weekly Bestseller, and a Southern California Independent bookstore bestseller (did not know that was a thing, but pretty cool!). I think you'll enjoy it. I appreciate your support!

Here are some things from this week...

• A fun conversation with Mark Pincus about coaching
• You should run a book club for The Price of Becoming
• A beautiful essay/visual about ordinary abundance
• Taming The Mammoth
• Some wise words about how hard it is to write well

#701: Mark Pincus - We All Need a Coach

​Mark Pincus is the founder of Zynga, the social gaming company he built from zero to $12.7 billion, pioneering a category that generated over a billion app installs and introduced hundreds of millions of people to online play. He's a serial founder who has started ten companies, taught product development at Stanford, and made early seed investments in Facebook and Twitter. His new book is Life at the Speed of Play. We covered: Why We All Need a Coach, Maintaining High Standards, The Book of Life, Aggressive Ambition, and Why Your Instincts Are Almost Always Right. You can also WATCH our conversation on YouTube.

Run a Book Club For The Price of Becoming​

Book clubs are awesome because they help build community around a set of ideas. They create great dialogue. And there is power in learning useful and entertaining things together. Because of that, we have built a guide to run a The Price of Becoming book club. If you'd like to run a The Price of Becoming book club at your workplace or in your community, let me know, and I'll send you the guide.

Ordinary Abundance

Many on Twitter are saying THIS "is the greatest thing I've read in a long time. It should win a Pulitzer for a category not yet invented." It's all about seeing the beauty in what we have and being grateful for it.

Taming The Mammoth

We share a collective insanity that pervades human cultures throughout the world: An irrational and unproductive obsession with what other people think of us. Evolution does everything for a reason, and to understand the origin of this particular insanity, let’s back up for a minute to 50,000BC in Ethiopia, where your Great^2,000 Grandfather lived as part of a small tribe. Back then, being part of a tribe was critical to survival. A tribe meant food and protection in a time when neither was easy to come by. Our bodies and minds are built to live in a tribe in 50,000BC, which leaves modern humans with a number of unfortunate traits, one of which is a fixation with tribal-style social survival in a world where social survival is no longer a real concept. CLICK HERE to read more about how to handle this. (Thank you to Tim Urban. One of my favorite writers)

Wise Words

"Writing isn’t easy for me. I love it, but it’s hard. When I’m done with something, whether it’s a movie, a play, or an episode of television, I can’t imagine ever being able to write something else." -- Aaron Sorkin​

Mindful Monday is a reader-supported publication. If you enjoyed it, forward it to your friends. Thank you! -- Ryan

Ryan Hawk NEW Book - The Price of Becoming​