There's a particular sadness in walking past a bookshelf full of stories you once devoured, now gathering dust while you scroll through your phone for the third time in an hour. You remember being the person who read on lunch breaks, who carried a book everywhere, who felt genuinely excited to turn the next page.
Somewhere along the way, your attention got fragmented. Not broken, just scattered into smaller and smaller pieces until sitting with a single story for more than ten minutes feels almost impossible.
Attention comes back when you stop forcing the old version of yourself to return.
HubSpot’s Bold Bets Playbook works from a similar idea for startups: the best move is not always the safest or most polished one. Sometimes progress starts when a team stops waiting for perfect certainty, makes a sharper bet, and gives one bold idea enough focus to prove itself.
The GTM bets that shouldn't have worked, and did
One grew revenue 50x after half his team quit over the strategy. One brought in 50K signups in a single day with no paid budget. One generated 100M+ views from a stunt that took 50 hours to conceive. One asked every prospect to demo the product themselves instead of demoing it for them.
None of them followed the safe playbook. They treated GTM like an experiment, moved before they had proof, and made bets most founders would never get approved.
HubSpot for Startups documented all 6 stories in the free Bold Bets Playbook. The risks they took, why it was risky, and what it returned.
MINDSET📚 From needing perfect focus to trusting imperfect attention
We tell ourselves we'll read again when we have more time, when life calms down, when we can focus the way we used to. This waiting assumes that reading requires the same deep concentration we had at twenty, the same uninterrupted hours we remember from before.
But attention is like a muscle that's been doing different exercises. It hasn't disappeared, it's just trained for quick bursts instead of long stretches. You don't need to fix your focus before you can read again. You need to read again to rebuild your focus.
HABITThe bookmark practice
Choose one book. Any book. Keep it in the same place every day and read just one page before you do anything else with screens.
Not a chapter. Not until you feel satisfied. One page. Then close the book and put it back in its spot.
This isn't about finishing books quickly or hitting reading goals. It's about training your mind to settle into a single story again, to remember what it feels like to follow one thread of thought without jumping to the next thing.
Here is what that can look like in real life:
- One page of a novel with your morning coffee, before checking your phone.
- One page of poetry while dinner cooks, book left open on the kitchen counter.
- One page of memoir before bed, reading lamp already positioned on your nightstand.
- One page of essays during your lunch break, book tucked in your work bag.
After a few weeks, you'll notice something shift. Not your ability to focus for hours, but your willingness to stay with one story long enough to care what happens next. That's where real reading begins again.
Reset question:
What book sits unread nearby, waiting for you to remember who you are when you're reading?
Focus gets easier when the system around you removes the extra friction.
Mintlify feels relevant here because documentation is one of those places where scattered attention shows up fast. When product teams can build cleaner, AI-native docs with fewer engineering resources, they get more room to focus on what actually needs to be explained.
See Why HubSpot Chose Mintlify for Docs
HubSpot switched to Mintlify and saw 3x faster builds with 50% fewer eng resources. Beautiful, AI-native documentation that scales with your product — no custom infrastructure required.
EXECUTIONDo This Today
- Choose one book: Pick something that genuinely interests you, not what you think you should read.
- Find its spot: Keep it in the same place every day so you don't have to think about where it is.
- Read one page: Before you check your phone, before you open your laptop, read exactly one page.
- Close and return: Put the book back in its spot and move on with your day.
The goal isn't to become a speed reader or finish fifty books this year. The goal is to remember that you are someone who reads.
One more thing
Your reading self didn't disappear. It's just been waiting patiently for you to sit still long enough to find it again.
Until the next self-check-in,
