6 Reflections on 2019: Rituals, Intentionality, and What’s Wrong with the World
Here in Phu Quoc for a week. Nice to have the early mornings to think and write before the little ones wake up. Sorry nothing very deep this year.
1) Rituals, not just habits
There are a lot of books on building habits. Read some more of them this year. Atomic Habits was not bad. The Power of Habit was okay when I read it a couple years ago. Couldn’t get myself to finish Nudge so like most non-fiction books that I end up in this place with, I just read skimmed the rest of it. Most of these books aren’t really that fun to read nor are they that non-obvious — suggest reading summaries of them or just skimming them. Time better spent getting the main ideas and focusing on application.
One thing that occured to me, prompted by a chat with my buddy Chris, was that there are just some things that will always suck to have to do no matter how long you do them. Yes, building in subconscious habits are great if you can do it and if it’s applicable but I’ve found that just having momentum is great. A ritual of doing something everyday is powerful. Having done that ritual for a year and not wanting to break the streak is even more compelling as irrational as that seems.
I remember a conversation I had with Chris Jarvis, who was in the lead position to win a Silver Medal in the 2004 Olympics for rowing had his partner’s oar going off sides not disqualified them (the team they were ahead of by two boat lengths got the Silver). I asked him what made him awesome and his simple answer was that he just practiced twice as much as most other people. 60 km of rowing every day. Asked him how he did it. He said that by the time he gets to 20 km, his muscles start to hurt. 30 km he wants to stop. But he remembers that he did 60 km the day before as well as everyday for many months before that. So he knows he can do it again. So he does. And apparently he has this conversation with himself nearly every time he practices. Oh, and he’s a person with type 1 diabetes. Hero.
2) Being intentional is more important than ever
Life is not that short. There’s plenty of time to do what we need to do. And now, we should have more time than ever with many of us possibly living until a ripe 120+ years. I think we have more time than we might knee-jerk impulsively assume in this day of hyperconnectivity/obsession on productivity.
This should mean then that we need to be more intentional and selective about how things like — what we read, how we invest in relationships, how to manage communications (email, etc.). Get rid of distractions. Productivity and self-improvement books are a drag to read but ones like indistractable had some nice tips. A couple good life hacks I got from it were: 1) timebox stuff that would otherwise distract you from the task at hand. Email, reading random blogs, social media. Been trying that with some success. 2) pre-schedule recurring social time with friends. I kind of do that already but now doing that a lot more so I never have to remind myself to call someone up or schedule a get together with someone since it’s already done.
Practice Perfect was pretty useful too — not overly meta even if it is about getting better at getting better.
I could use a reading room like this.
3) What’s wrong with the world today?
Echoing the words attributed to G. K. Chesterton, I’ll say “I am.” Sorry no deep lesson here. Just a realization this year. Psalms 139:23–24 is definitely the verse / theme for this coming year.
4) Better living through chemistry
Well everything is supposed to be chemistry right? Discovered a few things along these lines that were pretty helpful this year. Wrote a bit about this in my previous post.
Allulose. Been experimenting with the various “natural” sugar substitutes. And the winner is….Allulose. It has nearly all the sugary goodness of sugar, unlike the overly sharp sweetness of Monk Fruit extract or Stevia (never mind aspartame, saccharine, Equal, etc.) without most of the glycemic index-raising badness. About 90% less. Quite similar taste, texture and proportionality to sugar. Not like Stevia where if you accidentally put in a few extra milligrams into your drink you’re screwed.
Baobab. The newest, baddest superfruit out apparently. Packed with all sorts of highly bioavailable vitamins (tons of C), minerals, fiber, and lots of antioxidant goodness. Mix it in with the morning shake and you’re good to go. Quite tart so unless you just chug your shake like I do, suggest adding a sweetner to balance. Good stuff.
Many thanks to Cameron Sepah for both the allulose and baobab recommendations.
Fasting. I guess this is chemistry-related. Though I must be the last person in the world (or at least in my tech bubble) to have discovered fasting. My excuse is I live in Vietnam, not Silicon Valley. Anyway, one thing that I’m betting will not work for me is intermittent fasting. I don’t know too many people who have been able to sustain this for a long time (like over 5 years) — nearly all of them relapse in some form. So I’m going to skip that experiment. My approach this year has been to just do straight up water-only fasting for five days at a time, once every couple months. Worked great. Wasn’t nearly as tough as I thought it would be. Hours 24–60 are the toughest, then it gets easier. Was not too much of a drag nor was it anti-social. Down net 6 kg (99 kg to 93 kg) for the year without any change to my diet, activity level or travel.
Many thanks to my friend Andrew for the inspiration and camaraderie for this!
Next experiment might be this fast mimicking diet (FMD) thing where you can achieve similar results to fasting without actually fully fasting. Apparently it’s supposed to be better for you. Learning about this from my friend Dr. Will Hsu. Though I kind of enjoy the hardcoreness of the five day fast thing…
5) Scams?
This is a bit random but there are a few things I’m trying to figure out whether they are scams or not. Curious what people think.
HiFi music. Super high-end headphones that cost thousands of dollars. Vacuum tube amplifiers. 24-bit / 192k Hz music formats. Ultra-high end music streaming. Dedicated digital audio players. Custom listening rooms. Gosh that’s a lot of money, overhead and intellectual resources (and marketing) that’s gone into something audiologists and otolaryngologists say can’t be heard and audiophiles swear they can. Gave it a shot this year…and I guess I could hear something but what do I know. Not an audiophile by any stretch of the word. But it’s still a pain to acquire hi-res music.
All that said, I did end up springing for a digital audio player which I really like because it frees up my iPhone (storage, battery, UI) for other stuff. Doubles as a music and an audio book player. After a reasonable amount of research, spring for the iBasso DX160 which I have not been disappointed with.
Speedreading. There seems to be a lot of fuss around this. And like fasting, reading seems to be the thing these days. As if we aren’t more buried in content than ever before. Well I’m a really slow reader, but I’m convinced it’s about picking what you read, spending time thinking about it, and diligently applying — and not just how fast you can read. Another person’s take on why it’s not just about quantity. And then there’s this bionic reading thing. I guess it could work — kind of like reading Hebrew without the dots and dashes.
6) Favorite Book: Factfulness
Speaking of reading, while I think most business books aren’t worth reading, one did stand out (though I guess it’s not really a business book but it is non-fiction). I kept reading about this book and finally got around to reading it. In a chance, micro-conversation, I had the opportunity to ask Bill Gates for one book recommendation — and he came back with Factfulness. Delivers. Talked (Slush) about how environmentalism could use more factfulness. The book is not really as boring as it sounds.
