Minute With Mallon: The Masters and Mindset!

Apr 15

Welcome to Minute with Mallon!

Something I Taught:

I was able to go to the Masters Tournament for the first time this year! A dear friend of mine named Brian invited me as a pre-birthday present, and I couldn't be more grateful.

There were two other men with us. We started the day by meeting at 4:15 in the morning and didn't get home until around 7:00 P.M, so we had plenty of time for conversation.

At some point, Brian asked me to tell the others how many books I'd read last year. The number is not important, but they were both curious as to how I did it.

So I gave them an interesting fact I learned from a video recommended to me by another friend named Alin Dragu: Bookstores: How to Read More Books in the Golden Age of Content.

If you sleep 8 hours a night, that means that you're awake 16 hours a day. And if you break it down, that ends up being

32 half-hour time slots every single day!

If you only took one of those time slots and devoted it to reading, you'd have

31 half-hour time slots left!

When you look at that you see that almost everyone can find 30 minutes!

I went on to explain to my new friend that I find time to read around 30 minutes a day and have for years. He really got pumped when he thought about what this could do for him!

One of the keys to making this habit something you'll stick with is to read widely.

Reading widely just means stretching yourself beyond your usual go-to genres. Instead of sticking with just business books or leadership stuff, it’s intentionally exploring different kinds of reading—fiction, biographies, poetry, science, history, even topics you don’t normally gravitate toward. It’s about hearing from different voices, seeing from new perspectives, and letting that shape how you think, lead, and live. Reading widely helps you:

● Broaden how you see the world and what you know.

● Grow in empathy by understanding people with different experiences.

● Sharpen your thinking, spark creativity, and become a better communicator.

● Start connecting dots you didn’t even know were related.

It’s like cross-training for your brain! 💪🏻🏋️🧠

A few tips to help you get started:

Rotate categories. For example:

● Week 1: Fiction (e.g., a novel or short stories)

● Week 2: Biography or memoir

● Week 3: Science or history

● Week 4: Spiritual or philosophical text

Follow your curiosity.

● Ask yourself, "What's something I've always wanted to understand better?"

Choose voices different than your own.

● Read books by authors from different cultures, belief systems, or life experiences. It’s a great way to build empathy and broaden your thinking. For instance, at the moment I'm reading a book called Native Son, which was written by Richard Wright back in 1940. This book has forced readers—then and now—to face uncomfortable truths about race, justice, and what life was really like back in the 1930s. As I read it, it's opening up a whole world that I never had the opportunity to live in. Not to mention, it’s a very entertaining story!

So here’s my challenge to you: carve out just one 30-minute slot each day for reading—just one. And don’t just stick to what’s familiar. Stretch yourself. Pick up something you wouldn’t normally read and let it shape the way you think, see, and live. You never know what insights might be waiting for you on the other side of a page.

And if you can't do 30, do 10! It will change your life for the better!

Something to Ponder:

"Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will."

Kevin Kelly

Something I Learned:

I was recently reading Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris. In the book he interviews a man named Pavel Tsatsouline, who was talking about a speech he had heard by Rorke Denver, a former Navy SEAL commander:

"A master chief, the senior enlisted rank in the Navy—who was like a god to us—told us he was giving us an invaluable piece of advice that he'd learned from another master chief during the Vietnam War. He said, 'This is the best thing you're ever going to learn in SEAL training.' We were excited to learn what it was, and he told us that when you're a leader, people are going to mimic your behavior, at a minimum … It's a guarantee. So here's the key piece of advice, this is all he said:

'Calm is contagious.'"