With all the noise overwhelming our lives and our social streams it’s easy to miss the good stuff. Content like tweets, in particular, are especially perishable. That’s why I’ve always been a fan of highlighting some of my favorite posts at the end of each month.

This is  my effort to provide a little signal by curating some of the best/most interesting posts I read during the month of April 2014. Please use the comments section to recommend and share other posts you found useful and/or your best post from April.

[Blog Posts/News Articles]:

The Crossroads of Should and Must – Elle Luna

This is a story about two roads — Should and Must. It’s a pep talk for anyone who’s chosen Should for far too long — months, years, maybe a lifetime — and feels like it’s about time they gave Must a shot. It’s also the best post I read during the month of April. 

How to Use Heroin Legally – James Altucher

The basic gist of this post is that heroin makes you feel better, but with nasty side effects. Instead, try stimulating the release of endorphins to open the floodgates of dopamine, the neurochemical that makes you happy. How? Laugh, play, socialize, have sex, eat spicy foods, less grains, and exercise every day.

Too Busy? 7 Ways to Increase Leisure Time According to Science  – Eric Barker

If you’re feeling overwhelmed and constantly running from thing to thing but never getting it all done, this post is for you. The truth is we probably have more leisure time than ever, but it doesn’t feel like it because our time is so fragmented and we’re so bad at multi-tasking. Read this post to check out the 7 things experts recommend.

The Overthinker’s Guide to Launching Your Next Project Without Wanting to Kill Yourself – Ryan Holiday

It’s impossible to tell whether a launch will be a success or not. And even if everything goes exactly as you hope—the results could still be disappointing. So no wonder it can feel like you’re going to crack up, fall apart and die. Staying sane is hard, but not impossible. This post provides a great list of things to keep in mind as you approach a launch.

[Note: Ryan has a new book out The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph. It’s designed to show you how to turn obstacles into opportunities, adversity into advantages.  I already purchased it and can’t wait to read it.]  

The Holy Grail of Building Communities – Richard Millington

I consider Rich to be the foremost expert at building successful online communities. In this post, he outlines why the sense of community is the missing piece of the community puzzle, the power of a strong sense of community, and how we can use social science to guide us.

Be Agile & Anti-Fragile: How to Find Strength from Chaos – Jenny Blake

The skill you need for the 21st century is NOT to learn how to set bigger or better goals.It is to dive head-first into uncertainty, risk, and insecurity and understand that it is from these experiences that you become Antifragile. It is from these experiences—the ones that rip you apart so that you can rebuild even stronger—that you collect a bank of insights to share with the world.

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In addition to the posts above, there are three other people I want to call out specifically for the great content they’ve been putting out recently.

Leo Babauta is on fire right now (at least for me). I loved the four things that he’s been learning that help him through tough times, his habit action list, and finally his take on the miracle of the self compassion habit. Which, coincidentally is one of the 10 guideposts to living a wholehearted life.

If you’re trying to build or grow a blog right now, you need to be reading the guest posts on Noah Kagan’s OkDork blog.

Here are 3 recent ones I’ve found particularly useful:

• How You Can Create Content That Generates 40,000 Targeted Visitors – Brian Dean
• How to Get Your First 100 E-mail Subscribers – Bryan Harris
• How We Grew OkDork 200% With These Exact SEO Tips – David Zheng

And finally, the content Brian Clark and his team are putting out for their New Rainmaker project is fantastic. I have *pages* of notes from the 10 podcast episodes they’ve done over the last 4 months to introduce their new platform. If you’re a content provider, a small business looking to build leads, or just someone who wants to understand the future of media and marketing, I highly recommend checking it out. Remember: the one who makes it rain makes the rules.

[Long Reads]:

The Confidence Gap – Katty Kay & Claire Shipman

Evidence shows that women are less self-assured than men—and that to succeed, confidence matters as much as competence. This post also explains that infuriating feeling you get when you realize the person at the top is completely incompetent, but got there due to their overconfidence, which someone came across to colleagues as self assurance vs. narcissism.

The Culture of Shut Up –  Jon Lovett

Too many debates about important issues degenerate into manufactured and misplaced outrage—and it’s chilling free speech. 

The right to free speech may begin and end with the First Amendment, but there is a vast middle where our freedom of speech is protected by us—by our capacity to listen and accept that people disagree, often strongly, that there are fools, some of them columnists and elected officials and, yes, even reality-show patriarchs, that there are people who believe stupid, irrational, hateful things about other people and it’s okay to let those words in our ears sometimes without rolling out the guillotines

[Interesting]:

[Visualization]: How Americans Die – Matthew C. Klein

Mortality rate is down 17%, mostly attributed to improved survival prospects for men. Suicide has recently become the number one cause of violent death. People are living a lot longer, but the downside is that it dramatically increases the odds of getting dementia or Alzheimer’s — accounting for about a 40% increase in Medicare spending since 2011. Pretty fascinating data and an excellent format for capturing it.

Americans Think Owning a Home is Better for them than it is – Catherine Rampell

People forget that housing deteriorates over time. It goes out of style. There are new innovations that people want, different layouts of rooms,” he told me. “And technological progress keeps bringing the cost of construction down.” Meaning your worn, old-fashioned home is competing with new, relatively inexpensive ones. Over the past century, housing prices have grown at a compound annual rate of just 0.3 percent once one adjusts for inflation. Yet Americans still think it’s financially savvy to dump all their savings into a single, large, highly illiquid asset.

[Thoughts I’m Chewing On]:

• How do hungry, Type A people practice having more self compassion?
• How can we embrace chaos and become more anti-fragile?

[SlideDecks]:

[Quotes]:

“We all only have 1440 minutes a day. Accept you can’t do it all, focus on what’s important and do that well.” – @bakadesuyo

“You will not always be working on something that makes you proud, but you will always learn something out of it.” – @KounterB

“Ideas are cheap. I have more ideas now than I could ever write up. To my mind, it’s the execution that is all-important.” –  @GeorgeRRMartin_

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If you made it this far and found this post valuable in any way, please let me know in the comments which of these reads caught your attention. Better yet, why don’t you share something you’ve read recently that you think I’d find interesting.

If you like this post, you might also like previous installments:

• January
• February
• March

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