Hardly Smart — Part 2— Quotidian — 476
(Transcript of video originally posted on 07 Jun 2023)
Work SMART, not just HARD! Just yesterday, in 475, we saw four examples, from four domains. How to work SMART in those, not just HARD. How to STUDY smart, how to WORK smart, how to FIGHT smart, as well as how to INVEST smarter! Four more are pending! Shall we look at those today?!
Namaste! Four hundred and seventy-six is PART TWO of Hardly Smart. How to be SMARTER rather than just working HARDER. We have seen four already. Four more, we are going to see! And, don’t fall asleep! Wake up! We are going to see how to SLEEP Smarter!
They talk about a simple rule. 6–3–2–1–0. What’s that all about?! Six hours you plan to go to bed, you stop coffee. They talk about it at length, and explain it beautifully with a chemical equation. Whatever the body does to keep us awake, coffee simulates it with its caffeine. And, unfortunately, the half-life of caffeine? How fast it deteriorates in your blood, in your body, is very slow it seems. So, six hours.. oh, wait, first up, the effect of the coffee to even be apparent, it takes an hour! After that, slowly only, it fades away. So, if you drink coffee just a couple of hours before going to bed, it is still fighting for attention in your blood. So, six hours before you go to bed, let that be the last cup of coffee. Three? Three hours before you go to bed, finish that last meal. For, the food that you have taken is going to demand attention. There might be indigestion, there might be acid reflux.. basically, that is a full-blown machinery happening in your stomach and your intestine. If you are going to try sleeping during that time, it is going to be next to impossible. So, three hours, give it that time, before you go to bed. What’s Two? Two hours before you go to bed, stop working! I don’t know how this is even possible..! But, that’s the advice. And, it is not the physical exercise kind of work. It is not the dull and boring administrative kind of work that they are concerned about. What they are more concerned about is the work that gives you stress. The phone call with the boss. An interaction with a customer or a client. Things that it does to your mind.. Irreversible things that you can’t take off your mind when you go to bed. That escape valve is needed! And, so, two hours before bed, let that be the last moment of work! One hour before bed? Screen Time! And, that screentime warning too.. is not about not seeing the blue screen.. not getting eye-strain.. not getting headache.. not interfering with your alpha-beta waves of your sleep cycles.. etc. They are more concerned about.. these scientists.. who do sleep research.. who stay awake doing sleep research.. they say, it is about the notifications. It is about the unknown, the unexpected.. that can ruin your sleep.. So, that one hour, keep the phone away. Shun those notifications. 6, 3, 2, 1, 0! That zero? It is about AFTER you sleep. After you have finished your sleeping, do you wake up without having to hit snooze? In fact, do you wake up without having to depend on alarms? If you are not able to wake up approximately at the same time of the morning every day, without the help of an alarm, without sometimes or most of the times, smashing the snooze button, you are not getting enough sleep.. 6.. 3.. 2.. 1.. 0! Hey! Zero plus One plus Two plus Three = Six! One multiplied by Two multiplied by Three = Six! Six is the PERFECT NUMBER. Remember, 63210 if you want the PERFECT SLEEP!
One more advice they give about sleeping smarter, is from this book. Smarter, not Harder. Biohacking, they call it. And, this is what I learned from this book. All of us try this trick, don’t we? Eye patch.. Eye mask.. Once we wear it, we say, wherever we are, airport, lounge, classroom, travel, I don’t care.. I just…! Don’t we say that all the time? WRONG! It seems, light doesn’t enter the body through the eyes alone! It seems the skin has it! The skin has the sixth sense of light perception! So, if you really want a sound sleep, you should be in a dark place. You shouldn’t just close your eyes and assume things are dark. It was quite an interesting revelation!
Eating Smarter! We have seen this earlier. In one of our previous Quotidians. Do you remember? This Japanese / Chinese text? Yes! Hara hachi bun.. sometimes wrongly pronounced as hara hachi bu.. is that Okinawan practice. An island in Japan. Many very old people live there. This is the island that gifted us the word “Ikigai”. They eat only 80%. They fill their plate only with eighty percent of what they think their stomach will need to get full! Before they are full, they eat only eighty percent, and then they leave. Stop! This practice,.. not just in eating, but even in accumulating, even in winning, even at work, .. when you are eighty percent done, go home today.. come back tomorrow. Enough. Live and let live. Share. Care. I think that is a beautiful lesson we can take from there. Eighty percent. Come again tomorrow. Eat the next meal. Eighty percent.
I read this book recently. Called Burn. “New research blows the lid off how we really burn calories, stay healthy, and lose weight”. My God! This guy has researched so much.. Has spent many years of his life in deep Africa, as well as in a dense jungle in Russia, somewhere in Siberia, analysing people of various tribes. American, African, Russian. American in a city, African in a jungle, Russian in a snow-covered area. After detailed analysis, he explodes many myths. He talks about the Hadza. They are a warrior clan. A tribe. Hunters. In Tanzania. He explains in detail about their diet. They don’t eat processed food. They eat a lot of fiber. Their food mostly does not include sugar. And, they don’t get diabetes, heart disease, they don’t die early, they don’t have hypertension.. Is there a connection? Of course there is! There is nothing called THE IDEAL HUMAN DIET. He doesn’t get into professing what is allowed and what is not, in a human diet. But he is stressing that you cannot really eat processed food. Too much sugar. Eat what is available in that place on that day. Eat what you need for that meal. Hunt. Work. Then, reap the benefits of your work. That is their lifestyle. We need to see what can be learned by observing a lifestyle such as theirs.
Talking about the Hadza, we move to Exercising. Even in exercising, you can exercise smarter. In that book, while researching about the lifestyle of the Hadza, they track even the water they consume. They use something called a “doubly-labeled” water, which has some radioactive traces in it so that they can track how soon the water comes out as sweat, as urine, how much are they actually using it in their body, etc. After that, after this wonderful piece of research, a revelation happens. This man, this author, tells us. They exercise harder, their lifestyle is thus, but they spend almost the same number of calories as an American settled in a couch. That was shocking! The lesson he learns, the lesson he teaches us from that is, “Your body is a habit machine. Every day, if you do nothing, your body eventually adjusts to that lifestyle. Every day, if you keep exercising, sorry, your body adjusts to that lifestyle too, and very soon, you will not be reaping benefits. He is not asking us NOT TO exercise. He is saying, you have to mix them up. You have to shock your body. Surprise your body. The best way to exercise is..? Go out in the open. Don’t try to walk in a treadmill or run on an elliptical.. No, that’s not the thing. Do you want to climb? Climb a mountain. Do you want to run? Chase this pig and go on a hunt! Because an element of surprise is added to it, your body doesn’t know that it is exercising, and gets the best kind of exercise.
One more thing about exercises is.. these are the images that we typically get one month after New Year. On New Year’s Eve, everybody will fill out a gym membership. But, one month later, that is when you realise.. this is not for me. I am not cut out for this. This is boring. This is too much. This is tiring. If you really want to benefit from exercise, that effort you put after you feel like you can’t put any more effort, is the only effort that counts. Studying too, is like that. The reading effort that you put in after you feel like you have had enough, bored, tired, dulled, drained, .. that is what is going to stick. It is the same everywhere else too. If you want to really exercise steadily, consistently, do what I did. I have tried all this. I have a gym at home. I have tried the treadmill. I have tried morning walks. I have tried mindless running. None of those worked.
But..? This seems to have worked. Right from childhood, it was a passion that drove me. Whether I am a good player or not, is another story altogether. But, I WANT TO play well. An abiding passion to do well. A motivation to improve. This is a team game. But, if you give me the ball, and ask me to go at it alone, I will happily do that! So, find something you love. When you do that.. again, like I said earlier, your body forgets that you are exercising. You push your limits. If you go to the gym, it is some hazy and vague vision you have about a muscular body or a fit physique that drives you. Very difficult to motivate yourself like that. Here? Will I win the next game? That’s what drives me! There is competition built in. There is surprise built in. You don’t know what’s going to happen next. I have done the treadmill while also reading a book. I have gone on a run, while listening to audible podcasts. Your mind and body and spirit is elsewhere. How will it even work? Here? Can you read a book when playing a game? You are fully invested, and you reap much higher benefits. Do you recognise the Aasaami standing next to me, by the way?! To us, he is Saami!
The next chapter we go into is about Living itself. We saw a handful of domains. Living is nothing but a coming together of all those domains, don’t you think? Do you remember this scene from the Men In Black movie? There would be a two-headed person. An alien. Remember him? It is almost an alter-ego. One head would crack jokes about the other. Pick fights. This person will go unconscious and the other person would try doing CPR! No! I am not talking about this second head! But, yes, you need a Second Brain.
What is this second brain? Well.. If you take the internet, it is a unidirectional linkage. A page takes you to some other page. It is a pointer. But, the new page doesn’t know that this is where the visitor has come from.
But, bidirectional linking is a new concept. A page links to another page, and that page knows that this is where the linkage came from. And, when you start creating a new piece of content, a big brother is watching, and then says, “This content you had stored long ago? That might be relevant here, shall I create a link!” A tool like this is vital for your work kit. If you want to live and survive and thrive in this sea of information that we are all trying to keep head above water in, you can’t do it with one brain. This brain is already overloaded. The memory, the remembering, the recalling, you need to offload it. Let an AI tool, a bidirectional, socially aware, environmentally aware tool, take over.
There are many such tools and I will just list a few. A tool called Obsidian. Logseq, I haven’t used it but I encountered it recently. RoamResearch is a techie tool, and that is where I first saw the true power of bidirectional linking. Notion is a big favourite among many prolific note-takers. They get all ticked off though, if we even call it a note-taking tool! It is far beyond all that, they quip. And finally, my personal favourite, it is called My Mind. And, even for Quotidians, I depend on it heavily! You need a second brain. Get one!
The second, and probably the most important lifelesson that I would want to share with you if you want to Live Smarter is about goalsetting itself. We all set goals, and when we do that, I want us all to remember this lady hero in the movie Incredibles. Elastigirl. She taught us two lessons. She said, “Bend, don’t break!” “Stretch, don’t strain!” That magical midpoint between these two zones, that is where learning happens, improvement happens, benefits come, thriving happens. If you don’t stretch at all ever, that is worthless. If you strain yourself, that’s wrong too. If you don’t bend even a little, that’s useless. But, if you break, you have already lost. Stretch, don’t strain. Bend, don’t break. That should be your goalsetting. Tantalisingly close. Just beyond reach. Too far, you will lose interest. You will feel flabbergasted. Too easy to achieve? You will choose not to bother about it. It is almost like an IPL game. If the target is too high, the chasing team will lose two wickets in the first over itself. For, they have already lost half the game, and are like the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. If the target is too low, the chasing team may still lose two wickets in the first over. For, the chasing team may try something silly to finish the game with a flourish..! It is the last ball, two runs to get, that is interesting. Make your life also equally interesting.
The closing thought is from Stephen Covey. He says, “There is only one main thing. The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing..” Prioritise. Choose. Obsess over it. Ignore the rest of it. Push on! See you soon. Namaste!
