Re Human — Week 2 Recap — Day 14
I’m re-inventing my lifestyle — I’m developing myself in 15 areas at a time. This post is part of my Re Human project.
I believe the most important skill anyone can learn nowadays is the ability to re-invent oneself.
Re think, re design, re define, re human.
I’ve gotten feedback from readers that they like how I’ve kept posts simple and to the point. So although this is a “whole week” recap, I’m going to try to be concise.
Lessons and Overview from each Area
I feel the system has been working pretty well. I’ve been documenting what I do each day in my Re Human Publication, so in this weekly recap I’m mostly going to focus on the lessons, connections, and overview of each area. Feel free to check out each day for more detailed yet concise stories for each area, per day.
Daily Habits
Meditation
I’ve really enjoyed starting my meditation with Breathing Exercises.
I’m currently doing a routine that my dad taught me, that Sadhguru taught him. It’s better described in video or in person but I haven’t found a good video for it online. At some point I’ll record myself and teach it.
Then I do 3 “rounds” of the Wim Hof breathing technique. Short description here:
Then I finish the remainder of my 20minutes (usually around 7-8minutes) with mindfulness meditation (trying to be mindful of my breath, and if any thought comes, be mindful of it but return my attention to my breath).
Writing
Still the habit I’m the most surprised by.
At first I thought one of my biggest problems for writing daily would be finding what to even write about (or that interesting topics would run out fast if I was doing it every day). I was completely wrong. Once I’m looking at my screen with a blank canvas, with the intention to write — a thought, topic, or idea almost immediately comes to mind — haven’t had to wait a full minute, not even a single time.
If you want to practice writing, I wouldn’t worry about thinking of topics to write about (or maybe this is just me). But I’ve found that simply having the intention to write, and staring at a blank text-editor for some seconds is a winner recipe for generating thoughts of things to write about.
My “Daily thoughts” (small practices of writing) here. Some Medium posts I wrote this week here: The Momentous Secret of Happiness and The Meaning of Life is to Live.
Piano
If you want to learn piano (or want your kid to learn piano, a classic parent move), I’d highly recommend checking out Flowkey.
Books
This week I finished Why We Sleep (read most of it last week), and Thinking in Systems. Have like 20more minutes remaining to finish 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. I recommend all of them.
My notes on these books and a couple of more (only started actually taking notes on books I read recently) here.
Amazing hack to get through books faster: listen to them at increased speeds. If you think you’re bad at listening to books, realize it’s the same as how you started with reading to books — practice helps.
Media Influencer
I think today I realized what’s the key insight for this area. Before, I was thinking “I’ll just spend 10mins a day on “becoming an instagram influencer””. But I’ve realized that’s probably not the right / best system. It’s hard to know what to even do in 10 minutes for this.
Today I posted several Instagram stories of my journey to doing the “around the world” soccer trick. Right then, I realized that a better system is to accumulate stories. Accumulating in a practical sense means recording / saving the path. And once you have enough “footsteps” (single pieces: ideas, stories, and lessons), you can put together paths that are valuable and coherent, making them shareable as stories, which is how humans understand things best.
Soccer trick juggling
Having areas in your life where you can feel tangible progress (like actually seeing and feeling how you’re getting better at doing soccer tricks) is an awesome source of motivation.
Fitness
Techniques come from other humans trying things for a long time and realizing what is the best way of doing something. Learning techniques is pretty useful for learning a new skill because you save a lot of time by just standing on the shoulders of lots of people’s times. Save time in learning any skill by learning techniques.
Building and Running a Startup
Been focusing on optimizing all our decisions towards launching. Putting something out there is extremely valuable to know what to prioritize, what is valuable, what is the right market, what can improve, what people think of the idea. Startups are mostly about making something people want, so if you don’t have people giving you feedback or observing people using your product, it’s hard to infer what people really want.
Weekly Habits
Music Production
Splice and their beatmaker webapp are awesome.
Digital Drawing & Painting
Procreate app on iPad is awesome. Some great tips on digital drawing on this day’s documentation.
V.R. Artist and Architect
A-Frame and three.js are great tools to check out. A-Frame is especially good for beginners and people with not much coding experience.
Graphic Design
Just like writing, I’ve realized Graphic Design is a thinking tool. It’s been amazing improving at how to think in a new way (or just make connections between things in new ways — visually).
Salsa Dancing
Very fun and so much progress can be made with just a couple of classes (only been to two 1-hour classes). Also somehow very cheap ($10 per class, in contrast to “fitness” classes charging over $30 per class).
Different & Positive Social Interaction Systems
This week there were at least two people (they told me / tagged me in their posts) that were inspired by my weekly present newsletter and are each starting one of their own. I’ve found having a personal newsletter is an amazing way to interact with and send value to many people you care about, with a single effort.
Topics Deep Dives
Here is my current Systems over goals deep dive. This is mostly what I do in my free time anyway (scouring the internet for juicy information). But it’s been good to have specific directions of things to focus on and take “deep dives” in.
More detailed thoughts, tips, and takeaways about each area, organized by day in my Re Human publication.
Read the next post. Read the previous day’s post.
Receive a free weekly Present here 🎁.
Enjoy stories on my my instagram (@re.human).
Thank You :).
