Translating reading into action

A few months ago Silicon Valley stalwart VC Marc Andreessen issued a rallying cry to Go Build. That got me thinking. I realised over the last few years, and especially under COVID, that I was consuming a lot of books but was I actually taking any of their knowledge and building anything new? The disappointing answer was a resounding No.

With so much world class learning, from Ted Talks to certified moocs, available now for little or no cost it is so easy to get stuck in a learning loop. A few years ago, social media and streaming video had destroyed my attention span to the point that I couldn’t even finish a book in a year. Now the pendulum has swung the other way, I wonder am I just engaging in a more intellectual form of boxset binging?

Let’s go back a few years to how I got here. I have always bought lots of books. Between an audible subscription, a kindle and one-click purchasing of paperbacks, I have more books than I could read in two lifetimes. Unfortunately, I wasn’t making much of a dent in them. They gradually piled up on my bed side table in a wobbly tower of anxiety. The thing that finally chased off the dopamine monkey was joining Rebel Book Club in 2018. I went from not being able to finish a book in a year to reading one book a week.

What I am trying to do now is take some of the learnings from my favourite books over the last two years and put them into practice for me and for anyone else who wants to use them. 5 of the circa 30 books that I have read since joining the book club have has a particuluar influence and I am going to talk briefly about how each of these books has contributed to my solution.

Atomic Habits
Jan 2019
Impact 9

RBC Review: The best balanced (psychology + practical action) on habits forming and breaking that I’ve read. The kind of book that pushes you to start changing things straight away.

My takeaway: Clear says the most effective way to change your habits is to focus not on what you want to achieve, but on who you wish to become. He introduced me to the technique of habit stacking, building new habits by taking advantage of old ones. For example, start your day with a simple routine like brushing your teeth and use that as the cue to stack another positive habit on top of it such as meditation and so on. He also suggests there is no such thing as will power, we just need to remove negative cues that trigger our bad habits. In my case, when evening rolls around I often feel like a drink to relax. I have distracted myself from this negative cue by choosing to go to the gym at the end of my work day to prevent this. I generally don’t feel like making myself a negroni after coming out of a HIIT class. Finally, he emphasied the power of small gains, good habits compound into incredible results over the long term. The more you do something, the stronger the connections become between the nuerons in your brain.

How to Change Your Mind
July 2019
Impact 9

RBC Review: Take a 60 something who has never tried psychedelics and follow the journey. Wonderful mix of history, science and experiment.

My takeaway: Atomic Habits explained that newborn brains have more neurons than s normal adult. Babies are born with brains that are like a blank canvas. Everything is a possibility, but they don’t have strong connections anywhere. The adults, however, have pruned away a good deal of their neurons, but they have very strong connections that support certain skills. What Michael Pollan shows is that taking psychedelic plants can also create new neural pathways, the so called shaking the snow globe. Psychedelics temporarily increase the plasticity of the brain. This is an effective way to break negative thought processes like addiction or depression. With a therapist or shaman we can delve deep into our pysche and confront any trauma we carry. The “way out is through” or you have to face past traumas to break free of them.

Psychedelics also reduce activity in the part of the brain known as the default mode network which is active when we are not engaged in activity and where a lot of thoughts seem to generate from. At the same time they fire up activity in other parts of the brain. So when under the influence of these substances our thoughts and are ego temporarily disappears and we go deeper into other parts of the brain that connects in unusual ways. As one psilocybin volunteer said “it’s like a defrag for my brain” or a “biological control-alt-delete".

Lost Connections
October 2019
Impact 10

RBC Review: The book that led to our largest ever turnout at an RBC meet-up (270 in Soho) and a topic that clearly resonates with many. Johann’s skill is to tell his painful personal journey exploring recovery from depression without traditional drugs, whilst questioning the industry behind them. A lot of his ‘connections’ seemed blindingly obvious, but maybe that’s the point.

My takeaway: Depression is not the result of a chemical imbalance. Modern medicine is treating the symptoms and not the root of depression and anxiety with SSRIs. Any effectivness of these pharmaceuticals is the placebo effect. Two of the main root causes of this feeling of lost connections is doing meaningless work and having weak human connections. What we need to do to feel better is to work in a career that makes us feel empowered to make a differnce and we need to make sure we foster mutually beneficial relationships in all aspects of our lives. Psychedelic drugs come up again, which Hari says along with meditation can help people dissolve the ego and help us find sympathetic joy.

#NewPower
March 2020
Impact 8

RBC Review: A live interview with Jeremy Heimans, we reflected on the draconion lockdown measures and whether anyone other than Old Power government could have delivered something so impactful for widespread public safety… But then again, what would we do without the New Power influencers? Community helpers springing up with Facebook + Whatsapp networks to help those in need, companies like Smile Direct switching from teeth aligners to face masks, or the Italian engineers turning Decathlon style snorkling masks into ventilators… Is it one or the other when it comes to Old vs. New Power, or do they work best in partnership?

My takeaway: Our access to power used to be restricted but today’s digital connectivity has empowered us all. There are five key steps for building a crowd with new-power (find connected connectors, brand, flatten the path, move people up the participation scale, create a storm). A new-power community has three key actors: platform owners, participants and super-participants. New power requires three new leadership traits: signalling to make others feel like they are active participants, structuring more participation, and shaping focus away from leaders and toward the communities they help build.

21 Lessons for the 21st Century
August 2020
Impact 9

RBC Review: One WTF moment was the chess anecdote — learning how AlphaZero demonstrated superiority to Stockfish 8 after teaching itself for a mere four hours, by playing itself and with no historical chess input regarding strategy, etc. Really brought home just how much faster the brains of computers are than all of our collective human intelligence. Quite frightening in some respects!

My takeaway: AI, robotics and cynbernetic augmentation are all coming. There won’t be enough jobs. The future is either a dystopian zero sum game where the 1% keep all the spoils or we band together and provided Universal Basic Income/Services for all. Harari says the key is learning to think and the best way he has found to do this is not be reading books or writing them. It is by going inward. Meditation that the deepest source of suffering is in the patterns of our own minds. Meditation is not an escape from reality. It is getting in touch with reality. Harari did a 10 day vipassana silent retreat 20 years ago and now meditates for 2 hours a day and once a year goes on a 2 month retreat. He says without the focus and clarity provided by this practice, he could not have written any of his best selling books.

The 5 key takeaways for me where:

1. Habits
2. Psychedelics
3. Connections
4. New Power
5. Meditation

Habits — Since reading Atomic Habits I have created a 7 day planner in Google Calendar which I keep on a single purpose iPad which I have attached to my desk on a goose neck so it is always visible. I have then create a day long habit stack in 30 mins blocks. Blocks are colour coded and have emojis indicating what group they are related to. Marc Andreessen does something similiar to this and I also learned from him to also schedule in unstructured time where the mind can wander and syncronicity can blossom.

Psychedelics — Due to the repeated positive mention of psychedelics (Pollan, Hari, Harai) I went on a 9 day Ayahuasca retreat at the Temple of the Way of Light in Peru in October 2019 and now I microdose 0.2g of dried cubensis according to the Fadiman protocol which makes me noticably more creative.

Human Connections — to foster more human connections, under lockdown I volunteered as an Action for Happiness 10 Key Group facilitator where I co-hosted meetings over Zoom.

New Power — As digital connectivity has empowered us all, I decided to fully embrace technology and invested in Zoom Pro to host meetings, an Oculus Quest where I was able to do things like virtually explore the playa in Burning Man VR and set up a proper ergonomic home office with a standing desk, gaming chair and podcast mic for long sessions online.

Meditation — I was so inspired by Yuval Noah Harari that I signed up to a 10 day Vipassana silent retreat at the same centre that he went to in Herefordshire 20 years ago on 30th September.

Our forefathers and foremothers built roads and trains, farms and factories, then the computer, the microchip, the smartphone, and uncounted thousands of other things that we now take for granted, that are all around us, that define our lives and provide for our well-being. There is only one way to honor their legacy and to create the future we want for our own children and grandchildren, and that’s to build.

— Marc Andreessen

With Andressen words ringing in my ears I decided to bring all this together to create something new. I’ve always struggled to get out of bed before I have to. I can get up at anytime for someone else. But I always let myself down. So I have created a system for me that I will make available to others in a new power way. It is basically an early morning habit stack of positive habits over Zoom with community and group accountabiliy.

We come together at 7am BST on weekdays with a glass of warm lemon water to hydrate and restore alkaline balance to the body. We then begin with 15 minutes of Morning Pages to clear all the unconscious junk out of our minds. We continue with 12 minutes of Breathwork via the Wim Hof method to connect to our bodies. I then open a meditation app like Waking Up and we do 10 minute meditation together which changes daily to quieten that pesky default mode network. Finally we finish with some human connections. I split the group into breakout rooms of 3 people and everyone has 9 minutes to chat. We start with the following prompt I modified from Action for Happiness:

Right now I’m feeling…
Something I feel grateful for is…
My intention for today is…

Then we finish out lemon water and get on with our day.

It is a holistic approach, like a daily multi-vitamin. Using the new power philosophy I hope other people will take up the system and host it at other times and in other time zones.

If you want to try it out then sign up for next week here.

✍️ Written during Writers’ Hour.