My next book, Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review, comes out Nov. 3. And I put together a fantastic bundle of bonuses for anyone who pre-orders it now.
Buying just one copy gets you chapters 1 and 2 as well as an invite into our private Circle community immediately. You’ll also get the recording of the Annual Review Virtual Summit taking place on Nov. 4.
Buy 2 to 4 copies, and each one earns a seat in the Annual Review 2027 program (a $249 value). Buy 5 or more, and you add a Premium seat on top of that ($997 value).
Pre-orders make a real difference for a book's launch, so if you've been meaning to grab a copy, now's the time.
I’m so tremendously excited to share with you the fruits of 17 years of conducting annual reviews, 7 years of teaching others how to do them, and 3 years of intensive work on this book.
Seats are capped, first come, first served.
The Story Behind Life in Perspective
I've completed an annual review every December for the last 17 years. Reading them back feels like getting to know my younger self, and I'm so grateful to him.
Twenty-three-year-old me feels like an entirely different person to who I am now.
I can picture him, and sometimes I even talk to him. He made plenty of mistakes, but he also knew what he wanted and took the first tentative steps toward it.
The surprising part is what this did to how I see my future self. I trust him now too. We have a relationship, and we collaborate across time as if we had a time machine at our disposal. I want everyone to have access to this kind of experience, of feeling a deep coherence and continuity across long spans of time.
In this video, I share the story behind Life in Perspective: The Art and Power of the Annual Life Review and why I think this practice deserves a place next to goals and habits.
Have Claude Design Your Ideal Week
Inside Cohort 2 of The AI Second Brain, one member ran his own experiment: could Claude design his ideal week?
Rusty gave Claude his Master Prompt (the document that captures how he works and what matters to him), then asked it to interview him: when he's sharpest, what eats his time, what he keeps meaning to protect and never does.
Fifteen minutes later, Claude handed him back a full week's schedule, built entirely from his own answers.
This is what I love about our community. People don't stop at the homework. They test ideas, then share what they found.
Your Master Prompt already holds the context AI needs for this. It doesn't have to invent your priorities. It just has to ask good questions.
Take it further: if you've connected Google Calendar, ask Claude to block time for your ideal week on your calendar.
Action step: ask Claude, or ChatGPT, to interview you about your ideal week. Reply and tell us what it got right, and what it got wrong.
Book Recommendation: Conversation by Vanessa van Edwards
Vanessa sent me an early copy of her new book, and I tore through it faster than I expected to.
She demystifies why some conversations click, and others fall flat. All backed by research on things like "signal amplification bias," the gap between how warm you think you're coming across and how warm people actually read you.
My favorite bit is her fix for "what do you do?" as an opener. It's a small swap, and it makes people want to keep talking to you. If you've ever left a conversation replaying it in your head, put this one on your list.
Start Writing Online This October
I've been writing online for 13 years, on multiple platforms, in different styles, and with a variety of goals in mind.
Even with all the change and turmoil we've seen on the Internet in recent years, sharing my writing has remained an island of certainty and a beacon of learning.
It's the one medium that doesn't go out of fashion, that you can always turn to to develop your ideas, test new products or business ideas, and expand your social network far beyond what would be possible in the analog world.
It took me years of stumbling in the dark to find a model and a process that was repeatable and gave me an ROI on my time, which is why I'm so glad that there's much better options now, and prime among them is Ship 30 for 30.
I've seen so many people in my network start writing consistently and share it in a way that attracts the right kind of attention by taking this course. I recommend it 100% as the best available gateway to becoming a productive and profitable digital writer.
