Some of my favorite poetry, vol. vi

2023-07-02T00:00:00+00:00

Autobiography in Five Short Chapters

I

I walk down the street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk I fall in. I am lost … I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes me forever to find a way out.

II

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I am in the same place but, it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

III

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it is there. I still fall in … it’s a habit. my eyes are open I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately.

IV

I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it.

V

I walk down another street.

~~

Missing the Boat

Naomi Shihab-Nye

It is not so much that the boat passed
and you failed to notice it.
It is more like the boat stopping
directly outside your bedroom window,
the captain blowing the signal-horn,
the band playing a rousing march.

The boat shouted, waving bright flags,
its silver hull blinding in the sunlight.

But you had this idea you were going by train.

You kept checking the time-table,
digging for tracks.

And the boat got tired of you,
so tired it pulled up the anchor
and raised the ramp.

The boat bobbed into the distance,
shrinking like a toy—
at which point you probably realized
you had always loved the sea.

~~

Do not love half lovers

Kahlil Gibran

Do not love half lovers
Do not entertain half friends
Do not indulge in works of the half talented
Do not live half a life
and do not die a half death
If you choose silence, then be silent
When you speak, do so until you are finished
Do not silence yourself to say something
And do not speak to be silent
If you accept, then express it bluntly
Do not mask it
If you refuse then be clear about it
for an ambiguous refusal is but a weak acceptance
Do not accept half a solution
Do not believe half truths
Do not dream half a dream
Do not fantasize about half hopes
Half a drink will not quench your thirst
Half a meal will not satiate your hunger
Half the way will get you no where
Half an idea will bear you no results
Your other half is not the one you love
It is you in another time yet in the same space
It is you when you are not
Half a life is a life you didn’t live,
A word you have not said
A smile you postponed
A love you have not had
A friendship you did not know
To reach and not arrive
Work and not work
Attend only to be absent
What makes you a stranger to them closest to you
and they strangers to you
The half is a mere moment of inability
but you are able for you are not half a being
You are a whole that exists to live a life
not half a life

~~

Be Drunk

Charles Baudelaire

You have to be always drunk. That’s all there is to it—it’s the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: “It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish.”

~~

Travel and tell no one

Kahlil Gibran

Travel and tell no one,

live a true love story

and tell no one,

live happily

and tell no one,

people ruin

beautiful things.

~~

A Cedary Fragrance

Jane Hirshfield

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water –

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.

~~

For a new beginning

John O’Donohue

In out-of-the-way places of the heart,
Where your thoughts never think to wander,
This beginning has been quietly forming,
Waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire,
Feeling the emptiness growing inside you,
Noticing how you willed yourself on,
Still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
And the gray promises that sameness whispered,
Heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent,
Wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when your courage kindled,
And out you stepped onto new ground,
Your eyes young again with energy and dream,
A path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not yet clear
You can trust the promise of this opening;
Unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
That is at one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure;
Hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk;
Soon you will be home in a new rhythm,
For your soul senses the world that awaits you.

A supposedly fun thing I'll definitely do again

2023-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Last week I did a race and it made me feel pretty good. The race was the Oceanside Ironman 70.3, a “half-Ironman” triathlon.¹

I’ve always found the breadth of areas people are capable of being passionate about so interesting. When I meet someone with a deep love for something that I feel little towards I like to try to understand the mechanics of how they actually experience that passion. Learning how to love things is a skill, since after all it’s much easier to do things that you love than those that you feel ambivalent or antipathic towards.

Publius Terentius Afer said “Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”—nothing human is alien to me. If one person loves or enjoys something any person can love and enjoy that thing. It’s just a matter of finding the right way in.

To me, this is why it’s so important to have friends who are nerds about hobbies, spiritual practices, ways of thinking, etc, outside your own. More important than teaching you how to do them, they can teach you how to love them.

In that spirit, this is my race report. Maybe it will be the right way in for a few more people to the wonderful world of Type 2 Fun and endurance sports.²

tri bois (team aerostache on the left)

Race Report — 2023 Oceanside Ironman 70.3

Lows

Let’s start with what went wrong.

I generally do a good job of preparing for races like this the night before, and getting a good night of sleep. For some reason that didn’t quite happen this time. The house we rented in Oceanside was weirdly hot hours after turning off the heat. I got in bed at 8:30 but got up like seven times to keep opening more windows or take off clothes. I eventually fell asleep around midnight which was less than ideal. Poor sleep is one of the things that really messes with my brain, and when I woke up at 5 AM I was feeling extremely negative about the race. Why the fuck am I doing this? Is there some way I can get out of going? Maybe I can take a covid test, if I see anything there I could say I’m sick and just go back to sleep. I let the thoughts continue in the background and got out of bed and started moving.

I’d prepared my race nutrition the night before and left it out on the kitchen counter, but was so groggy when got up I accidentally washed my water bottle that had the endurance mix powder³ I’d added the night before. I didn’t realize until I got on my bike that I had two bottles of water, instead one of water and one of race mix. I also left all the other race nutrition (a mix of Picky bars and energy Bloks) on the counter at our place instead of putting them in my race bag. Doh. The result was that I wasn’t able to start fueling until about two hours into the race at the first bike aid station, whereas normally I start eating immediately after getting out of the water.

Once I finally got to the first aid station the only food they had was Fig Newtons. I hadn’t actually had a Fig Newton in years and I had no idea how they’d feel on my stomach. The golden rule of endurance races is “nothing new on race day”… whoops. I grabbed like six of them and stuffed them in the back pocket of my tri-suit to start eating. I did the same at the next two aid stations, and was also able to refill a water bottle with gatorade and get half a banana. Overall most of my bike nutrition came from Fig Newtons though—I ate roughly 1500 kcal worth which actually, surprisingly, felt pretty good. Cycling through a Marine Corp bootcamp in the warm San Diego sunshine, stuffing fig-filled pastries into my face, I definitely had a moment where I thought to myself “this is a new and fun experience”.

Highs

One of the peak experiences for me on this race was the drive to T0. In the quiet pre-dawn stillness we played Puppets by Atmosphere and it was a really excellent race vibe. This was inspired by the race video we watched the night before called How To Run 100 Miles, by Brendan Leonard of Semi-Rad. Puppets was the theme song of the documentary, and listening to it before our race let me channel some of the epicness of a 100 mile ultramarathon, even though we were doing something much easier. There is something primal about the pre-dawn journey to the race start with your tribe and I felt that strongly this race…

I’m not much of a swimmer but the water felt jacuzzi-warm after training in the SF Bay, and being in the water with two thousand other people as the sun rises is never not epic. Swimming is my worst tri-sport, but this one felt pretty nice actually.

The ride was fantastically beautiful. We wove in and out of the coast and Camp Pendleton, the sea was a shade of candy blue I’ve never seen before, and the hills were furry and green (plants like rain!) instead of the normal light brown and dark brown that were the predominant landscape colors when I use to live in San Diego.

wheeew

The run was the most enjoyable of any 70.3 I’ve done. I felt super consistent, and ran the second half faster than the first as I got more confidence that I still had plenty left in the tank. The last mile was the best of the race for me. There’s a ridiculous scene in David Goggins’ book Can’t Hurt Me when he does his first ultramarathon, goes home, and basically loses it (in all the ways) from dehydration, exhaustion, and the general unpreparedness his body had at that time to run 100+ miles. His partner wants to take him to the hospital and give him painkillers but he refuses because he wants “feel the pain” that he earned.

The end of my race was nothing like that really, except that I let all the pain in in the same spirit.

Normally when I do endurance races my mind is constantly trying to hide or run away or make all the enduring stop—for example one thing I’ll do to distract myself from fully experiencing the hardness of the race is to constantly think about the percentage I’ve completed, re-calculating every few miles and savoring each minor percentage point gain. I also go through periods of flow where I just feel great, it’s beautiful out, my body is moving well, and each step or pedal stroke feels like magic. But for a long enough race there always comes at least one part (usually many) where I fully want to quit. Why the fuck am I out here? Why am I doing this? I could be laying on a couch eating pizza and watching TV. Why keep doing this? The answer for me is complex, but at the deepest level I think it’s just that I’ve turned into a person who identifies with grit. And perhaps because I use to very much not be this type of person, it feels like an extra special part of me. Endurance races are a crucible to continue reforging my identity into someone who just doesn’t quit when it matters.

Anyhow, for this last mile of the race I let my defenses down and fully embraced all the feelings of the moment: pain, weariness, self-doubt, unease, and the tiredness of a long struggle to simply keep putting one foot in front of the other. And then I kept running. Pride, joy, gratitude, and a rising anticipation of the finish were also there. I sped up and sprinted the last half mile and when I crossed the finish line I teared up a bit with a mix of all these emotions. I’d finished another one.

Something about truly opening myself up to all the things at the end made the race and the accomplishment seem weightier to me too, like my mind integrated that last mile back over the first 69.3 and the sum total was both enormous yet conquered.

I don’t know if I could run a whole race like this but I plan to keep trying.

Aftermath

I finished the race in 6:14:50. Not my best time, but I feel great about it which is all that really matters.

I’ve had a body high for the last week now. My legs feel springy, movement in general feels more solid somehow, and the comforting weight of a hard thing well-accomplished feels warm and good.

I deepened friendships and made great memories with my race friends. And I’ve gotten back to a peak level of fitness that I’ve only had a few other times in my life. Overall 10/10, A+ race!

this picture brought to you by endorphins

Some tactical notes

An assortment of notes and reminders about how to do triathlons better:

Plan out race morning to a tee, including the drive there. Roads near the race are often closed race morning, so plan accordingly.
Watch an inspiring athletics documentary the night before. My go to for this is the Barkley Marathons. Prepare to have your mind absolutely blown by what humans are capable of if you haven’t seen it.
Have coffee ready to brew the night before. Whoever is up first can start it. A good BM is critical to having an enjoyable race. Plan your last pre-race day meals with this in mind as well—I usually have an early dinner the day before the race at ~5 PM that is medium-high in whole foods, carbs, and fiber.
Put sunscreen on in the morning before putting your wetsuit on. It will help you take it off more easily at T1, and it will save you a bit of time with having to re-up more sunscreen during transitions.
Once you get on the bike start eating immediately. Your body will probably not want as much food as you need, so the solution is to keep eating until you’re ~30% past the satiety point. Somewhere in between feeling full and feeling sick.
Whole foods play better with the stomach than liquids or gels. Eat accordingly. I usually bring a few Picky bars and try to eat plenty of fruit from the aid stations.
That said, I usually have one bottle of a sports drink on my bike (and one of water), plus some low-caffeine Bloks.
Have a salt plan! I like this and this.
My rule of thumb for hydrating is that I should drink enough water to have to pee every three hours.
Tri-suits are pretty nice actually. I tried on a bunch until I found a Zoot suit that fit me well.

Do a race with me!

I usually do at least one tri (70.3) and one trail race (usually multiple distances for these, 13.1 and up) every year. I’ll probably do the IM Santa Cruz 70.3 this year as well. I’ve got a great crew of people who do these with me, but just like the ideal number of bikes, the optimal number of race friends is n+1 🙂

Isomorphisms

I’ve written about this before but one last piece of endurance races that I find very special is how they can be isomorphic but compressed analogues of many truly important but hard things in life. That is they let you experience, in a single very intense day, all the parts of doing a hard thing (on any time scale). The excitement, nervousness, fear, suffering, self-doubt, anticipation, and accomplishment cycle. A Hero’s Journey that you can do in one day, but which you can then recall on a gut level during other journey’s you may be on with longer timescales and less consistent feedback. A bone-deep knowledge that if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, in the right direction, you can accomplish great things.

Notes

A full triathlon is 140.6 miles—2.4 mile swim, 112 mile cycle, and a marathon (26.2 miles) in that order. This is a race distance that can quickly become a significant part-time job to train for, so a more popular distance is the 70.3 or “half-Ironman”. ⤴
Doing more endurance sports would be good for most Western humans for a multitude of reasons. Living in the Bay Area a particularly salient example of this for me is the relationship of between longevity and exercise. High-volume moderate + vigorous activity is very likely the safest and most reliable way to extend both healthspan and lifespan, yet very few people max out its benefits. ⤴
Tailwind, citrulline, and a scoop of some off-white powder in an unlabeled mason jar my friend claimed was Accelerade. ⤴

Good thing, bad thing

2023-04-14T00:00:00+00:00

A common piece of willpower advice for breaking bad habits is to insert a short pause in between the arising of the desire to do the thing and actually doing the thing. It’s easier to commit to the pause instead than the full not-doing-the-thing, and it works because, even though it often doesn’t feel like it in the moment, our cravings (taṇhā) are impermanent and often just sitting with them in equanimity for a few moments will allow them to pass on.

I find this can work, but not always super well. Recently I’ve replaced this mental gesture with another tool I’ve been internally calling “good thing, bad thing”. When a craving arises that I wish to avoid (on a System 2 level), I quickly identify an action that is similar in some aspects, but with the key distinction that it’s something good I do wish to do—the “good thing”. I then promise myself that once I’ve done the good thing, I’ll also allow myself to do the “bad thing” should I so choose.

For example I exercised a bunch today and even though I had a big hearty dinner, my sweet tooth was still craving high octane carbs. Instead of immediately giving in to the urge to go out and buy some ice cream, I negotiated with myself that I’d first have a chocolatey but healthy protein shake and then I could go eat whatever sweets I wanted after that. I had the protein shake and the added feeling of fullness, plus probably some overlap in the activation my protein-shake-chocolate and ice-cream-chocolate receptors (some sort of weird GPCRs I’m guessing) meant that my cravings for sweets disappeared completely. In general cravings also seems to disappear in a much more enduring fashion with gtbt (hours to days) than for the pause-only version (sometimes only minutes).

I’ve done this of many other things, and it usually works. One of the keys though is to be ok with doing the “bad thing” too if you actually want to. Self-integrity allows the negotiation between your different IFS parts to be real in some meaningful sense instead of just a sort of mental sleight-of-hand.

I’m now wondering if there’s a similar move possible to enhance the opposite thing of when you want to make doing something hard easier by just spending one minute doing it…

My to-do list addiction as a high leverage meta-habit

2023-03-26T00:00:00+00:00

Over the past 4,093 days I’ve completed 43,736¹ to-do’s.

Creating my to-do list habit 11 years ago when I was deeply struggling to understand my place in the world, and then re-committing to it mid-PhD (even more strugs) a few years later was one of the primary moves that pulled me out of the downward spiral I was in and put me on the path I’m on today.

Since then I’ve completed an average of 10.7 to-do’s/day. After switching to Todoist and starting my company ~three years ago, I’ve completed an average of 21.2 to-do’s/day. And over the last three months since going through CBTi (and also doing a round of ketamine therapy + beginning somatic therapy) my daily average has increased to 30.1 to-do’s/day, which is some of the clearest evidence I have of the efficacy of these interventions.

My to-do list is one of my most valuable keystone habits and it plays a pivotal role in nearly every aspect of my life. The reason for this, I believe, is that used correctly a to-do list can become an incredibly powerful meta-habit—i.e. a habit that makes it easier to create other habits.

To-do lists as meta-habits

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

–Alfred North Whitehead

The basic idea here is simple. Habits are a useful tool to complete actions without the use of willpower, other than the initial expenditure necessary to create the habit. To-do lists are a special sort of habit by which we can often easily create certain other new habits with only a nominal amount of extra willpower, by leveraging the habitual nature of completing to-do list tasks.²

This obviously doesn’t always work, but if implemented correctly it can be a powerful strategy to easily kickstart the creation of many new habits.

A few habits I’ve built effortlessly this way

lots of boring logistics stuff like changing my sheets, replacing my tooth brush, checking credit card charges, staying on top of races or conferences I’m interested in, experimenting with various diet/health interventions, replacing air filters, resurfacing books I want to read or podcasts I want to listen to, etc
drinking more water
eating more fruit
doubling my protein intake—went from ~60 g/day -> 120 g/day just by adding a twice daily reminder for protein intake
building a daily gratitude practice
starting a weekly stretching routine
staying in touch with grandparents more frequently
collecting and reviewing writing ideas (like the idea for this blog post!)³
setting up various kinds of personal knowledge base reviews—e.g. a ~bimonthly review of all of the best fundraising or recruiting advice I’ve received
becoming a better friend—e.g. when I know a friend is struggling one of the first things I do is set a twice-weekly reminder to reach out to them for hangs, support, or just check-ins
becoming better at delegation—I keep this quote as a monthly recurring to-do to remind me to prioritize effective delegation: “By working longer hours you can get 20% or even 40% more done, but with effective delegation you can get 10x or 100x more done.” –Jonathan Swanson
sharing my gratitude for others with them
setting aside deep work time to think about important problems
generally fighting entropy
starting a monthly volunteering practice
doing one thing each day that scares me
staying on top of the scientific literature—11 years of browsing my research RSS feeds first thing every morning, then pushing usefully interesting articles to my to-do list to read later has helped me acquire a vast breadth of scientific knowledge
collecting, reminding myself of, and implementing various lifestyle design choices I’d like to try
rereading a handful of my favorite articles, inspired by this Ben Kuhn tweet
checking for new biotech IPO’s to potentially invest in
sharing my Kindle highlights on Goodreads every week (more people should do this plz)
the meta-meta-habit of being more focused with what goes on my to-do list and gets prioritized by setting up a weekly reminder to prune extraneous tasks

My last week in to-do’s

What I’ve done well

Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”

–Bill Gates

“Your mind is for having ideas, not holding them.”

–David Allen

The very best thing I’ve done in regards to my to-do list habit is just to stick with it, using basically the system, for over a decade.⁴ The sum of many small, habits, optimizations, and knowledge intake can accrete into something wonderful over a long enough time period.

I’ve been religious about one of the central ideas espoused by David Allen’s GTD system which is to move actionable thoughts to your to-do list as quickly as possible. I can’t emphasize enough how important I think this is for good mental hygiene (at least for a certain type of brain). For me the ability to move future-actionable thoughts out of working memory quickly has freed up a ton of mental energy for all sorts of more interesting thinking. This, in conjunction with the habit of always writing down and reviewing any ideas I have,⁵ has been the key to my scientific creativity. We all only get a limited amount of thinking energy over our lifespan. Why waste it on remembering things that a computer could do for you?

I’ve also done a decent job of not falling into the trap of only having to-do’s that look exactly “task-like”—e.g. many of my to-do’s are simple open-ended problems such as “spend five minutes thinking about how you can move 10x faster” or “think about first principles approaches to living a good life”.

Finally, this habit has been extremely useful to keep me moving towards the goal when I’m tired, unmotivated, or depressed. In times like these I can almost always find small but useful to-dos with which to retain my forward momentum, and this has helped pull me out of many negative feedback loops more quickly than otherwise.

Obvious pitfalls

The most obvious pitfall is the risk of over-systematization and bias towards completing tasks at the expense of all the joy, romanticism, and serendipity that actually make life worth living. Relatedly, there’s a common “eyes bigger than your stomach” phenomena where having a place to capture to-do’s effortlessly can lead one to creating significantly more tasks than are feasible or worthwhile to complete.

I’ve definitely fallen prey to both of these, and still do to some extent. My best advice here is just have a very high bar about what goes on your to-do list, and to set up a weekly meta-habit to ruthlessly prune ones that don’t spark joy, aren’t truly important, etc.

Another common and related failure mode is to bias towards completing easy, close-ended tasks at the expense of more important, harder, open-ended ones. My solution to this has been to just break down the latter type of tasks into much smaller and more actionable chunks such that they have roughly the same activation barrier as the former. In practice this means that instead of having tasks like “write an executive summary for your company” I’ll instead make a ~daily recurring task to “spend five minutes working on your executive summary”.

Lastly, I’m not convinced that having a to-do list at all is a required ingredient for a happy or productive life. There are plenty of examples of people who have achieved both without anything more than their mind as their productivity tool.⁶ This is only weak evidence, but it does shift my priors away from believing in the power of to-do lists slightly.

My system

My system is pretty simple, I’ll write more about it some day but here are a few of the key pieces:

Every usefully actionable thought I have goes directly and immediately into my to-do list, tagged with a date and a specific project/life area. If I don’t have time to think about how it should be categorized upon entry I just leave the project untagged (defaults to #Inbox) and put the date as today so there is a bias to categorize it correctly soon.
Projects are usually fairly large buckets so I don’t have to think to much about where things go, e.g. Work, Health & Fitness, Things To Do, Learning & Self-Improvement, and Media.
Tasks also get a priority from P1 to P4. P1 = important, urgent, ughy, P2 = recurring reminders, P3 = important but not urgent, and P4 = everything else.
I’ve also started using sections and/or other projects recently in Todoist to put things that I know I want to come back to at some point, but don’t have an exact date for. Usually for things like this I’ll create a ~quarterly reminder within that section to check to see if any of the contents have become relevant.
On desktop I use the quick-add shortcut (for me ⌃⌥A) religiously, and on iOS I have a quick-add widget set up on my home screen. The goal is to be able to add to-do’s as quickly and seamlessly as possible.
I also have an IFTTT integration set up to copy any iOS reminders -> Todoist, so that I can easily use Siri to add to-do’s as well. This is most useful when I’m in bed about to fall asleep and some thought comes up that I want to write down.
Day to day I run my life off the Today view, organized by priority and sorted by project.

Notes

43,737 if you’re reading this :) ⤴
This is related to BJ Fogg’s concept of Tiny Habits which entails using the completion of already existing habits as triggers to start new, easy habits. IE every time I brush my teeth I’ll also do ten push-ups. ⤴
Any idea I have goes immediately into my to-do list for categorization (Roam Research) and later review. You might be surprised how many ideas you actually have if you commit to writing all of them down—my current writing ideas file has 217 entries. Most of them are terrible. But not all! ⤴
I began using Wunderlist Jan 10th, 2012, and kept using it until Microsoft bought and shuttered it, at which point I switched to Todoist which I’ve been using very happily ever since. I got incepted by this quote at a young age and it’s been net positive: “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.” ⤴
Linus Pauling said: “The best way to have a good idea is to have a lot of ideas and throw away the bad ones.” ⤴
Probably lots of counterexamples too though. Sam Altman believes in making lots of lists for example. ⤴

How to sleep

2023-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

Welcome weary traveler…

This is a collection of slightly-less-than-obvious sleep advice that’s actually worked for me.

I had poor sleep for my entire life until figuring out most of the below—the result of which is that I now feel that I have agency over whether or not I sleep well. Which has been life changing.

The basics

Before trying anything new get the basics down

your room is cold, dark, and quiet
you don’t eat 3+ hours before bed
you don’t drink (much) water 2+ hours before bed
you limit intake of alcohol and caffeine

What worked for me

In descending order of effect size.

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for Insomnia (CBTi)

CBTi is the greatest sleep intervention ever created by mankind. Despite its proven efficacy, it’s not nearly as well known or widespread as it should be. It seems to be normally deployed for moderate to severe cases of insomnia, but I think it could potentially be worth doing for all humans, both as a prophylactic and as a sort of “sleep tune-up”. What’s the expected value of getting 10% better sleep for the rest of your life? Seems astronomical¹ to me.

I did Sleep Reset’s CBTi program, which was cheaper than doing it with an actual sleep therapist, but more expensive than some of the other free CBTi programs like Night Owl (which seemed less good). While I think there are actually a lot of ways it could be improved, it was also extremely effective for me and I recommend it highly.

There are three key components of CBTi: sleep hygiene, sleep compression, and various cognitive tools such as CBT, gratitude, visualization, etc, that enable better sleep.

Sleep hygiene is basically all of the things that you know you’re supposed to do in order to sleep well but don’t. The biggest pieces for CBTi are: not getting into bed until you’re tired, only using your bed for sleep, getting out of bed if you wake up/can’t fall asleep and doing something else until you’re tired again, and sticking to a regular sleep schedule.

Sleep compression is exactly what it sounds like: a period of self-induced sleep deprivation in order to reset your relationship with your bed, and to resync your circadian rhythm and homeostatic sleep pressure. For the first two weeks of my CBTi program I was only allowed to be in bed from midnight to 6:30 AM. Which meant that in practice I was getting around 6 hours of sleep a night. For me this was hellish, and I only survived by 2-3xing my daily dose of caffeine. Surprisingly, this didn’t seem to alter the effectiveness of the intervention. I was also supposed to continue for longer than two weeks, and then slowly increase my time in bed until I was back to sleeping ~8 hours/night, but in practice I went back to that immediately after the two week period, because I was basically unable to function at work. Suprisingly, this didn’t seem to alter the effectiveness of the intervention either.

One other thing I’ll say about sleep compression: if you’re going to do it, try to actually commit to it 100% for as long as you can. If you only sort of commit you will got the worst of both worlds: weeks of bad sleep without fixing anything at all in the end. During my program I adhered absolutely to my 12-6:30 AM bed allowance during the two weeks I did it. The effect of this, which I began to notice almost immediately after, was that I began naturally waking up at around (or slightly before) 6:30 AM every day. Which brings me to my next point.

Keeping a consistent wake-up time

This is technically (a big) part of CBTi (sleep hygiene) but I gave it it’s own section here because I think it’s so important not just for CBTi, but also for maintaining good sleep long-term.

I used to believe that I should just try to have a consistent bed time, then wake up whenever my body wanted to get up naturally, but years of experience have convinced me that this doesn’t work. My hand-wavey explanation is that waking up is probably a stronger signal to your circadian rhythm than the time you get in bed.

I now set an alarm for 6:30 AM every week day, but naturally wake up 10-15 minutes before it. On weekends I don’t set an alarm, and sometimes sleep in an hour or so, or sometimes don’t.

One big unlock here is always getting out of bed within a minute or so of waking up. It’s hard in the beginning (although I think CBTi might have made it easier for me), but in the long run, very worth it. I’m also a big believer in never using the snooze button, because sleep after hitting it never actually seems useful. Pro-tip: in iOS you can turn off the snooze button functionality!

Yoga Nidra

I set up an automation to play this specific yoga nidra track in my bedroom starting at 10 PM every night, which has become one of my biggest sleep unlocks. Something about having to get ready for bed early in order to be able to show up for this “event” on time so that I don’t miss any of it has made me much less likely to fail prey to the failure mode of staying up late for dumb reasons. Yoga nidra also does a great job of turning my mind off, which in the past was what often kept me up for hours and hours after getting in to bed.

CBTi (strongly) recommends not getting in to bed until you are tired, but I’ve found this works better for me.

Magnesium

Magnesium definitely seems to help me sleep well. I often take ~200 mg of magnesium citrate² 2x/day (usually once in the morning, once an hour or two before bed, or sometimes just 400 mg two hours before bed).

On a recent trip, some friends³ introduced me to magnesium powder as an alternative by making a “tea” of this for us each night. Low n, but I’ve since found it more effective, and a nice ritual. There’s something wizardy about the steamy hiss and fizzle of liberated carbon dioxide as you pour hot water slowly over the carbonate. I often add an herbal tea or a dash of apple cider vinegar (which others have claimed helps with sleep, and also tastes nice) to the mix as well.

Reduced stimulation two hours before bed

I turn off all the lights in my apartment two hours before bed (8 PM), and do light work or read on my couch while waiting in anticipation of my nightly yoga nidra ritual. I ignore the ‘no screens before bed’ rule for the most part, since I think it’s only a medium-good proxy for the thing that actually needs to be avoided—high stimulation, dopamine-inducing activities. Intimacy is an obvious exception here.

I can sleep good

Other things one could try

Things that sort of help

having an Eight Sleep—at the very least the super easy sleep tracking has made me care more about my sleep metrics, which has lead directly to better sleep
early morning exercise for resetting my sleep cycle, or just waking me up if I had a night of bad sleep; in the latter case intense exercise is often a stronger stimulant than infinite cups of coffee, and allows me to have a much more productive day than I would otherwise
a few supplements like kava, apigenin, and (low dose) melatonin⁴
having a protein shake within 30 minutes of waking up
being a slightly hungry before bed—this is a feeling I’m working on calibrating and hitting more squarely in the future
ketamine? more on this in a future post
warm showers just before bed
generally eating light and healthy (esp not having fast carbs)
imagining deep darkness, seems to help me fall asleep/back asleep more easily

Things I sometimes do that usually help

sleeping somewhere rural, near the beach, or in (low elevation) mountains, especially in temperate places where I can leave the window open at night and hear only nature—this has such a large effect size for me that I’ve strongly considered moving out of the city for this reason alone

Things I still want to try which supposedly help

feng shui
other yoga nidra or NSDR meditations
wearing socks to bed
Alexander Technique for sleep
An Algorithmic Solution to Insomnia
(Nondual Meditation) Dropping the Ultra Ball
using a worry journal just before bed
sleep dental devices for better breathing, like this
tongue stimulation (?!) for better breathing at night
guided imagery meditation
savoring happy thoughts before sleep
light to moderate exercise an hour before sleep
lucid dreaming? have been meaning to check this out
humming

Things that didn’t work for me

supplements like ashwaghanda, glycine, theanine, zinc, most others that people recommend
completely cutting out caffeine⁵ doesn’t do much for me—reducing total amount and afternoon intake definitely helps though
getting natural or high intensity light within 30 minutes of waking up
getting tested for sleep apnea—could work for you though!
saunaing a few hours before bed—slight decrease in sleep quality for me, probably from dehydration
exercise—I’ve tried a few short and medium term experiments and have never observed differences in sleep quality based on whether or not I exercised that day (I continue to exercise daily though for other obvious reasons though)

Things I haven’t tried and don’t want to

prescription sleep drugs⁶

In summary

My routine

My room is cold, dark and quiet. I rarely drink alcohol, and I stop consuming caffeine after noon. I eat an early dinner (~5-6 PM), and stop eating by 7 PM (except for a small protein shake a bit later some times). I try to drink a lot of water during the day so that I will still feel hydrated when I stop drinking at 8 PM (nocturia is a real cause of insomnia).

Between 7:30 and 8 PM I turn off all the lights in my apartment, light a few candles throughout, and start winding down the evening with light work or reading. Around 9:15 I make magnesium tea, then take a hot shower (I also use a candle as my only light source for this⁷) while waiting for the tea to cool down. After my shower I sit on the couch and drink my tea and either read or meditate. My bed has started cooling down at 9 PM, and my AC turns on at 9:45 PM.⁸ At ~9:55 PM I get in bed, and at 10 PM this yoga nidra track begins playing in my room. After 20 minutes the meditation ends, and I usually fall asleep within another ten minutes or less.

At 5:55 AM my bed starts to gently warm up (except on weekends when I have all alarms turned off). At 6:15 the heat turns on in my room. Around 6:20 I usually wake up naturally, but if I haven’t my bed starts to vibrate gently at 6:25, and at 6:30 an alarm goes off (currently this Jocko Willink clip on gratitude and reframing, which I find very helpful if I happen to have gotten a bad night of sleep⁹). I always get out of bed within a minute of waking up, immediately walk to a coffee shop to grab a coffee, and start working by 6:45 AM.

My new basics

room is cold, dark, and quiet
don’t eat 3+ hours before bed
hydrate well during the day but don’t drink (much) water 2+ hours before bed
start a wind down routine that reduces light and other forms of stimulation and relaxes you (e.g. yoga nidra) 2+ hours before bed
take magnesium before bed
limit intake of alcohol and caffeine
always wake up at the same time every day (some leeway on weekends)
always get out of bed within one minute of waking up
do CBTi

Tactical advice for staying on track

What’s the best way to get back to a good routine if you fall out of the habit? For me, it’s largely about two key pieces: the last three hours before bed, and being extra vigilant about keeping my normal wake-up time.

If I can get my three hour pre-bed time ritual right—no food, light water consumption, lights off, low stimulation—I can usually guarantee a good night of sleep. Which gives me more energy the next day to continue the habit.

And getting up at the same time every day, no matter how late I went to bed, how poorly I slept, or how tired I am, also makes it much easier to revert to good habits. It keeps my circadian rhythm from shifting significantly, and also acts as a natural pendulum—the worse my sleep is one night, the easier it will be to sleep well the following night.

Happy sleeping! 😴

Notes

And multiply this across the population and what do you get? CBTi is safe and easy to adminster. What if every high school and college taught a short course on it? What would our world look like if every was 10% better slept? ⤴
I’m skeptical of the claims that different salt forms of magnesium could have major effects on CNS partitioning as some people say. Much more likely is that certain forms are generally more bioavailable than others, which leads to higher total exposure in the body and thus also the brain. And also to relatively less GI exposure, which likely decreases the laxative effects. Presumably this then allows one to take higher doses of magnesium without having to worry about stomach issues, which is probably helpful. Unless of course the beneficial effects of magnesium on sleep are actually driven through the gut-brain axis, which isn’t a totally unreasonable hypothesis. Biology is complicated. [I have not deeply researched any of the preceding.] ⤴
Cissy Hu and Ryan Trafton! ⤴
I take melatonin infrequently, only when I know I’m going to have a hard time falling asleep for some reason, or when I’m trying to reset after jet lag or a few nights of bad sleep. ⤴
I’m a slow caffeine metabolizer, so I expected this to have some sort of effect at least, but AFAICT, after trying this a few times for 1-2 months at a time, it has no major effect. I do want to try again though now that I’ve fixed some other things. ⤴
As someone who makes drugs for a living. Obviously still worth trying if nothing else works. Also Peter Attia recommends low dose trazodone, which seems slightly less bad than other sleep drugs. ⤴
h/t to Michael Lai for this great tip and starting my candle phase! I really love the vibe of walking around my apartment at night with only a candle for light. ⤴
I’m still trying to figure out what the best combination of temperatures is for sleep if both your room and your bed can cool down. What I’ve currently settled on is keeping the AC at ~68 °F and my bed temp between 75 and 80 °F. ⤴
Didn’t get a good night of sleep? *Jocko voice* good. ⤴

Suffertember VI

2022-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Suffertember VI starts tomorrow!

Suffer V was a rough one for me—I failed at most of my goals.

I did have a few wins though, like reaching the first jhana, successfully not taking any warm showers, and hitting some of my physical goals. In a 21 day period I went for three ultra-marathons and a triathlon, and completed 3/4. I had to pull out of the last of the four, a 50-mile ultra just outside of Berkeley. Four miles in I started cramping and after limping my way through 15 or so miles I pulled the plug. Overall I felt pretty good though, and it was an interesting experience to find exactly where my edge was (and go over). Other than that I was pretty overloaded with work and training and never really found the extra slack that I love about Suffertember.

This year I’m planning to dial it back on the physical stuff a bit and focus more on presence and how I spend my time. This is really one of my favorite parts of Suffertember—getting to be intentional about all the time I get from giving up extraneous parts of my life like news, social media, and snooze buttons (such a time-waster!).

The other two aspects of this month that I love are that it’s essentially a lab for trying out new behaviors, and how it lets me practice equanimity. The lab part is that it’s just much easier for me to try new habits or behavior changes during this month than any other time of the year. The shared camaraderie and community and team goals and peer pressure make it so much less hard for me to stick to things, at least for this bounded period of time. So I can play with parts of myself and find the changes that will actually be easy to make stick in the long run. This was how I became vegetarian; I gave up meat for the first two Suffertembers and after that, once I’d let go of the part of my mind that thought no meal was complete without 60% meat, it became simple.

The equanimity part is that it becomes easier to practice this when you push yourself to do hard things. Cold showers are always my favorite example—they’re a perfect opportunity to practice not reacting to my ego-mind when it tells me (over and over) things that are wrong or even harmful to me. In this case it’s just ignoring it saying “cold water will make you dead and is very scary and don’t go in it”, but I think the practice of not reacting to this is transferable to any emotional or egoistic arising.

New Sufferpals!

Anyways, here are my goals for this year:

Daily Goals

out of bed by 6:31 AM¹
exercise within one hour of waking up²
do the ugh-iest thing on my to-do list first³
cold showers only
30 minute adhiṭṭhāna meditation
10 minutes of metta/loving-awareness or visualization
no coffee, sweets, or fried food⁴
no social media, news, TV/movies,⁵ or dating apps
be as alive and fearless as possible

Month Goals

Donate 10% of my income for the month to charity⁶
Give away half my clothes
Hit Inbox Zero at least once⁷
Do a 48 hour fast
Maybe try to do a one mile wetsuit-less swim in the Pacific?!⁸

Happy Suffering! 😅

Notes

Weekdays only ⤴
Five minute plank, one mile run, 200 push-ups, lifting, or going on a ride ⤴
Start with one (free) hour of morning exercise, spend at least 30 minutes on it ⤴
Except on days when I do 2+ hours of exercise! ⤴
Exception here if I’m doing this as a social activity with friends (1x/week max; mostly for the new LotR show 🧙‍♂️), also social media is ok for work stuff ⤴
See also ⤴
For personal email, work email, and to-do list ⤴
This will be a tough one, going to think of it as a stretch goal ⤴

Some of my favorite poetry, vol. v

2021-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

tags: poetry

O Me! O Life!

Walt Whitman

O Me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

~~

Ozymandias

Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

~~

Sea Fever

John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

~~

Invictus

William Ernest Henley

Out of the night that covers me,
      Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
      For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
      I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
      My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
      Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
      Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
      How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
      I am the captain of my soul.

~~

If

Rudyard Kipling

If you can keep your head when all about you
     Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
     But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
     Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
     And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;
     If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
     And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
     Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
     And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
     And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
     And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
     To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
     Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
     Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
     If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
     With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
     And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

~~

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

~~

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Some of my favorite poetry, vol. iv

2021-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

tags: poetry

Not Anyone Who Says

Mary Oliver

Not anyone who says, “I’m going to be
careful and smart in matters of love,”
who says, “I’m going to choose slowly,”
but only those lovers who didn’t choose at all
but were, as it were, chosen
by something invisible and powerful and uncontrollable
and beautiful and possibly even
unsuitable—
only those know what I’m talking about
in this talking about love.

~~

The Best Time Of The Day

Raymond Carver

Cool summer nights.
Windows open.
Lamps burning.
Fruit in the bowl.
And your head on my shoulder.
These the happiest moments in the day.

Next to the early morning hours,
of course. And the time
just before lunch.
And the afternoon, and
early evening hours.
But I do love

these summer nights.
Even more, I think,
than those other times.
The work finished for the day.
And no one who can reach us now.
Or ever.

~~

The Wild Rose

Wendell Berry

Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,

suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose looming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,

and once again I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.

~~

Habitation

Margaret Atwood

Marriage is not
a house or even a tent

it is before that, and colder:

the edge of the forest, the edge
of the desert
the unpainted stairs
at the back where we squat
outside, eating popcorn

the edge of the receding glacier

where painfully and with wonder
at having survived even
this far

we are learning to make fire

~~

Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)

Pablo Neruda

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another’s. She will be another’s. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that’s certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

~~

Every Day You Play

Pablo Neruda

Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water,
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a bunch of flowers, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind. The wind.
I alone can contend against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here. Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Curl round me as though you were frightened.
Even so, a strange shadow once ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
Until I even believe that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.

I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

~~

Advice

Bill Holm

Someone dancing inside us
Learned only a few steps:
The “Do-Your-Work” in 4/4 time,
The “What-Do-You-Expect” waltz.
He hasn’t noticed yet the woman
Standing away from the lamp,
The one with black eyes
Who knows the rhumba,
And strange steps in jumpy rhythms
From the mountains in Bulgaria.
If they dance together,
Something unexpected will happen.
If they don’t, the next world
Will be a lot like this one.

Suffertember V

2021-08-31T00:00:00+00:00

Amazingly, this is now the fifth year of Suffertember!

Last year was the most successful yet as both Suffertember Co-Founder Westley Dang and I were living in The Archive, and almost two-thirds of the house joined us, including friends of friends like the lead guitarist of Linkin Park(!). We started off with a 6 AM run up a local hill (SF is a fantastic city for masochists) which was made only slightly more difficult by the thumbnail-sized chunks of ash falling from the air. After the run, we did Ab Ripper X in a big circle in the backyard and then made breakfast. It was a great morning.

The rest of the month went nearly as well. Everyone posted printed-out calendar versions of their personal challenges on one of the community fridges and checked off the things they did (or failed to do) each day. This was excellent for motivation and lent that sense of camaraderie that makes shared suffering so much more fun.

It was the first Suffertember where I successfully took entirely cold showers—in past years, this has always been one of the hardest things for me. Maybe something about being from Florida, but day after day of waking up early and immediately taking a cold shower wears me down. It doesn’t help that I usually take two or three a day and get a lot of my best thinking done in the shower (like the idea for my current start-up and about ten future ones).

I also love them, though, because they are basically compressed, isomorphic versions of so many of the other challenges in life: they start off bewildering and wildly uncomfortable, after a while this fades and they become merely unpleasant, then at some unidentifiable inflection point you realize it’s not that bad, and hey, this feels pretty good actually, and then you hang out for a while and get out of the shower feeling super invigorated and ready to conquer the day!

Completing the cold shower loop is nearly the same thing as overcoming a procrastination cycle, except that the reward comes much faster, which makes it much easier to connect cause to effect on a gut level deep enough to make this a habit. And once you’ve done this, you can repurpose the experience of winning a cold shower as fuel for starting longer or more difficult challenges (especially those with a lot of front-loaded difficulty).

Anyhow, last year I successfully completed this, two of my other more physical challenges—a daily five minute plank and fifty pull-ups—and a little over half of the rest of my goals, which felt like a huge success.

Suffer selfie. Suffertember IV, Day One.

This year I’ve chosen broadly similar goals¹ as Suffertember IV, which are roughly split into three categories: adding more free time (slack) to my life, intense physical activity to continue pushing and redefining my limits, and mental well-being.

When Wes and I started this in 2017, I’d never yet done a triathlon or an ultra-marathon. These seemed like monolithic challenges that I had no idea I’d be able to live up to. Starting a company seemed equally impossible.² Now, with four Suffertembers completed, things like this seem so much more commonplace, which I think is a testament to how much Suffertember has changed me.

As Wes likes to say about Suffertember: “you forget the shape of who you are unless you visit your edges once in a while,” and I think that’s true, but also that you re-draw your edges outward each time you visit the borderlands.

One other thing I find interesting is how much I look forward to Suffertember all year round. It has acquired this haloed place in my mind as a time of tranquility, purity, and zen-tinged purpose. I think this is in large part due to the ascetic minimalism I enforce on myself, which results in other, more human activities filling in the empty spaces. Getting rid of news, social media, TV, and websites like Reddit, frees up more time³ than I like to admit. It’s not that I spend a huge amount of time on them, but that I use them to fill in the cracks of the day, and that those cracks add up, and what they add up to is a more stressed, distracted, lower mental well-being life, which forms one of those positive feedback loops of doom.

In my perpetually-too-busy-life, getting rid of all the things that I think I want or need, but really don’t, frees me to spend more time doing the real things that make me a better and more complete person.

Despite this, though, I somehow always revert most of the way back to my pre-Suffertember self within a month or two of Suffertember ending. I’ve tried to do other months (Painuary doesn’t quite roll off the tongue as nicely) or mini-Suffertembers both by myself and with friends, but they somehow lack the magic of Suffertember itself; the magic that makes it feel like a real journey or spiritual quest that I can’t leave for an entire month, at the peril of my soul. This is a puzzle I’m still trying to solve.

In the meantime, though, here are my goals for Suffertember V. Happy suffering!

Big

cold showers only
distance run PR
half-Ironman PR
meditate one hour/day
reach access concentration

Medium

start every workday with the most impactful item on your to-do list
out of bed before 6 AM every workday
inbox/to-do list zero every Friday
no social media⁴/news/tv/movies/etc
no work on Sundays

Small

food delivery 2x/week max
no food after 6:30 PM on worknights
read non-fiction only
5 spaced repetition cards/day
50 pull-ups + 5 minute plank/day

Notes

I think next year I’ll keep one big physical goal, but keep the main focus of the rest on things like fasting, meditation, volunteering, and poetry (daily memorization?). ⤴
It’s probably not a coincidence that I moved to SF during Suffertember III to start my company. ⤴
I also get a decent chunk of time back by committing to getting out of bed within a minute of my alarm clock going off. Not only does this minimize the ~30-60 minutes I sometimes spend in bed after my alarm⁵ goes off but before I’ve mustered the energy to exit my covers, it also increases my sleep hygiene by making me more likely to go to bed at a consistent time. ⤴
Except for Important Work Stuff. No browsing allowed though. ⤴
I’m convinced that in general terms of lost human productivity, the snooze button is the worst invention in history. ⤴

Some of my favorite poetry, vol. iii

2021-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

tags: poetry

Eating Poetry

Mark Strand

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.

The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.

The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.

Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.

She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.

I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.

~~

This Is Just To Say

William Carlos Williams

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

~~

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

Brad Aaron Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

~~

Phone Call

Tony Hoagland

Maybe I overdid it
when I called my father an enemy of humanity.
That might have been a little strongly put,
a slight overexaggeration,

an immoderate description of the person
who at the moment, two thousand miles away,
holding the telephone receiver six inches from his ear,
must have regretted paying for my therapy.

What I meant was that my father
was an enemy of my humanity
and what I meant behind that
was that my father was split
into two people, one of them

living deep inside of me
like a bad king, or an incurable disease-
blighting my crops,
striking down my herds,
poisoning my wells – the other
standing in another time zone,
in a kitchen in Wyoming,
with bad knees and white hair sprouting from his ears.

I don’t want to scream forever,
I don’t want to live without proportion
like some kind of infection from the past,

so I have to remember the second father,
the one whose TV dinner is getting cold
while he holds the phone in his left hand
and stares blankly out the window

where just now the sun is going down
and the last fingertips of sunlight
are withdrawing from the hills
they once touched like a child.

~~

Shame: An Aria

Robert Hass

You think you’ve grown up in various ways
and then the elevator door opens and you’re standing inside
reaming out your nose—something about the dry air
in the mountains—and find yourself facing two spruce elderly couples
dressed like improbable wildflowers in their primary color
definitely on vacation sports outfits, a wormy color of one of the body’s
shameful and congealed lubricants gleaming on your fingertip
under the fluorescent lights, and there really isn’t too much to say
as you descend the remaining two flights with them in silence,
all five of you staring straight ahead in this commodious
aluminum group coffin toward the ground floor. You are,
of course, trying to think of something witty to say. Your hand
is, of course, in your pocket discreetly transferring the offending article
into its accumulation of lint. One man clears his throat
and you admit to yourself that there are kinds of people—if not
people in particular—you hate, that these are they,
and that your mind is nevertheless, is nevertheless working
like a demented cicada drying its wings after rain to find some way
to save yourself in your craven, small child’s large ego’s idea
of their eyes. You even crank it up a notch, getting more highminded
and lugubrious in the seconds it takes for the almost silent
gears and oiled hydraulic or pneumatic plungers and cables
of the machine to set you down. “Nosepicking,” you imagine explaining
to the upturned, reverential faces, “is in a way the ground floor
of being. The body’s fluids and solids, its various despised disjecta,
toenail parings left absently on the bedside table that your lover
the next night notices there, shit streaks in underwear or little, faint,
odorous peeblossoms of the palest polleny color, the stiffened
small droplets in the sheets of the body’s shuddering latenight loneness
and selflove, russets of menstrual blood, toejam, earwax,
phlegm, the little dead militias of white corpuscles
we call pus, what are they after all but the twins of the juices
of mortal glory: sap, wine, breast milk, sperm, and blood. The most intimate hygienes,
those deepest tribal rules that teach a child
trying to struggle up out of the fear of loss of love
from anger, hatred, fear, they get taught to us, don’t they,
as boundaries, terrible thresholds, what can be said (or thought, or done)
inside the house but not out, what can be said (or thought, or done)
only by oneself, which must therefore best not be done at all,
so that the core of the self, we learn early, is where shame lives
and where we also learn doubleness, a certain practical cunning,
and what a theater is, and the ability to lie—“
the elevator has opened and closed, the silverhaired columbines
of the mountain are murmuring over breakfast menus in the room full of bright plastics
somewhere, and you, grown up in various ways, are at the typewriter,
thinking of all the slimes and jellies of decay, thinking
that the zombie passages, ghoul corridors, radiant death’s-head
entries to that realm of terror claim us in the sick, middle-of-the-night
sessions of self-hatred and remorse, in the day’s most hidden,
watchful self, the man not farting in the line at the bank,
no trace of discomfort on his mild, neighbor-loving face, the woman
calculating the distance to the next person she can borrow a tampon from
while she smiles attentively into this new man’s explanation
of his theory about deforestation, claims us also, by seepage, in our lies,
small malices, razor knicks on the skin of others of our meannesses,
deprivations, rage, and what to do but face that way
and praise the kingdom of the dead, praise the power which we have all kinds
of phrases to elide the fact that none of us can worm our way out of—
“that no man can evade,” “which all must kneel to in the end”—
praise it by calling it time, say it is master of the seasons,
mistress of the moment of the hunting hawk’s sudden sheen of grape-brown
gleaming in the morning sun, the characteristic slow gesture,
two fingers across the cheekbone deliberately, of the love dreamily
oiling her skin, in this moment, no other, before she turns to you
the face she wants you to see and the rest
that she hopes, when she can’t keep it hidden, you can somehow love
and which, if you could love yourself, you would.

~~

I, Too

Langston Hughes, published 1925

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow, I’ll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody’ll dare
Say to me,
“Eat in the kitchen,”
Then.

Besides, They’ll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed—

I, too, am America.

~~

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front

Wendell Berry

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.

So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.

Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion – put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Some of my favorite poetry, vol. ii

2021-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

tags: poetry

What to Remember When Waking

David Whyte, The House of Belonging

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other
more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.
What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough
for the vitality hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a troubled guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents
you were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now, looking through the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence of everything that can be
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely white page on the writing desk?

~~

The Invitation

Oriah Mountain Dreamer

It doesn’t interest me what you do for a living.
I want to know what you ache for, and
if you dare to dream of meeting your heart’s longing.
It doesn’t interest me how old you are.
I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love,
for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It doesn’t interest me what planets are squaring your moon.
I want to know if you have touched the centre of your own sorrow,
if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or
have become shrivelled and closed from fear of further pain!

I want to know if you can sit with pain, mine or your own,
without moving to hide it or fade it or fix it.

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own,
if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you
to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be
careful, be realistic, or to remember the limitations of being human.

It doesn’t interest me if the story you’re telling me is true.
I want to know if you can disappoint another to be true to yourself;
if you can bear the accusation of betrayal and not betray your own soul.

I want to know if you can be faithful and therefore be trustworthy.

I want to know if you can see beauty even when it is not pretty every
day, and if you can source your life from God’s presence.

I want to know if you can live with failure, yours and mine,
and still stand on the edge of a lake
and shout to the silver of the full moon, “Yes”!

It doesn’t interest me to know where you live or how much money you have.
I want to know if you can get up after the night of grief and despair,
weary and bruised to the bone, and do what needs to be done for the children.

It doesn’t interest me who you are, how you came to be here.
I want to know if you will stand in the centre of the fire with me and not shrink back.

It doesn’t interest me where or what or with whom you have studied.
I want to know what sustains you from the inside when all else falls away.

I want to know if you can be alone with yourself,
and if you truly like the company you keep in the empty moments.

~~

Kindness

Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
How you ride and ride
thinking the bus will never stop,
the passengers eating maize and chicken
will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

~~

You Can’t Have It All

Emily Levine

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam’s twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man’s legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who’ll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can’t bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can’t count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother’s,
it will always whisper, you can’t have it all,
but there is this.

~~

When the Vacation is Over for Good

Mark Strand

It will be strange
Knowing at last it couldn’t go on forever,
The certain voice telling us over and over
That nothing would change,

And remembering too,
Because by then it will all be done with, the way
Things were, and how we had wasted time as though
There was nothing to do,

When, in a flash
The weather turned, and the lofty air became
Unbearably heavy, the wind strikingly dumb
And our cities like ash,

And knowing also,
What we never suspected, that it was something like summer
At its most august except that the nights were warmer
And the clouds seemed to glow,

And even then,
Because we will not have changed much, wondering what
Will become of things, and who will be left to do it
All over again,

And somehow trying,
But still unable, to know just what it was
That went so completely wrong, or why it is
We are dying.

~~

For the Anniversary of My Death

W. S. Merwin

Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless star

Then I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what

~~

Wild Geese

Mary Oliver, Dream Work

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Some of my favorite poetry

2021-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

tags: poetry

Quatrain 36

Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit.
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

~~

Alone With Everybody

Charles Bukowski

the flesh covers the bone
and they put a mind
in there and
sometimes a soul,
and the women break
vases against the walls
and the men drink too
much
and nobody finds the
one
but keep
looking
crawling in and out
of beds.
flesh covers
the bone and the
flesh searches
for more than
flesh.

there’s no chance
at all:
we are all trapped
by a singular
fate.

nobody ever finds
the one.

the city dumps fill
the junkyards fill
the madhouses fill
the hospitals fill
the graveyards fill

nothing else
fills.

~~

The Journey

Mary Oliver, Dream Work

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voice behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life that you could save.

~~

Everything is Waiting For You

David Whyte

Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and to invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into
the conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

~~

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Robert Herrick

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
     Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
     Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
     The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
     And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
     When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
     Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,
     And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
     You may forever tarry.

~~

The Guest House

Rumi (trans. Coleman Barks)

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice.
meet them at the door laughing and invite them in.

Be grateful for whatever comes.
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~~

This is what you shall do

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.

5,376 Healthy Smoothie Recipes

2021-01-10T00:00:00+00:00

I have a healthy protein smoothie for breakfast every morning and often get asked how I make it. It’s super easy!

Here are the ingredients. For each line I’ve put the ones that I use most commonly first.

Base

1-2 scoops of protein powder
- I usually use one scoop of this and one of this or this
- I think plant-based protein powders are probably a bit healthier, but milk-based ones taste better, so I split the difference by doing one scoop of each
- I usually combine the two in an extra empty protein tub so I only have to scoop from one thing every morning
3 tbsps of rolled oats or whole flax seed
3/4 cup of frozen bananas, blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, cranberries, or apples
Two spoonfuls (~3-4 tbsps) of almond or peanut butter
- I like Justin’s honey almond butter and Jif Natural peanut butter
Handful of spinach or kale
Unsweetened vanilla almond or coconut milk
- I don’t drink normal milk, and other plant-based milks like oat or soy don’t taste as good to me
- Fill to 28 oz

Optional

Almond, vanilla, or peppermint extract
Cinnamon, nutmeg, or pumpkin pie spice
Cacao nibs or goji berries

Notes

To me a good smoothie has three key factors: taste (what ingredients you put in), temperature, and consistency. I personally think smoothies that are quite cold and have a consistency somewhere between milk and a milkshake taste the best. You might have to play around with the exact ratios of everything, especially the amount of frozen fruit, to get it perfect.

I buy the frozen fruits once every few weeks. For bananas or apples I buy them fresh and any I don’t eat I cut up and freeze. I also buy a tub of spinach once every week or two and freeze it in a ziploc bag before it starts getting old. The rest of the ingredients I just keep on hand and pull out whatever I’m feeling like any given morning.

The most common way I mess up the smoothie is by adding too many different ingredients, or too much of some of the ingredients. When I’m pulling out ingredients I’ll often think some specific thing is really healthy (e.g. oats), or that that peanut butter looks really yummy, and that I should add double. This almost always results in a thick smoothie sludge that is much less pleasant to drink. This can also happen if you add to much frozen fruit, which will make it too cold and/or thick. Keep things simple and it will taste great.

I have an awesome Blendtec which I love so much. It seems to blend things (especially oats) much better than my old Vitamix. I also like that it has a wider base which makes it much easier to clean. I bought some ear protectors and keep them in the cabinet above my blender because the ~3 HP engine is quite loud and one minute of this every day for the rest of my life seems likely to lead to premature hearing loss.

Some Favorite Recipes

Vanilla Strawberry

Base ingredients with almond butter, strawberries as the fruit and a big dash of vanilla extract.

Mint Chocolate Chip

Base ingredients with almond butter, banana as the fruit, cacao nibs, and a small dash of peppermint extract (be careful not to overdo it).

Peanut Butter Blueberry

Base ingredients with peanut butter, blueberries as the fruit, cinnamon, and almond extract.

If you try every iteration of the ingredients listed above there are at least 5,376 different combinations – meaning you could have a different smoothie every day for ~15 years and not repeat.

Enjoy 😋

How to fix grad school

2020-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

In the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster the increase in cancer incidence rates for the 600,000 inhabitants in the most contaminated areas was estimated to be between 1-5%.¹ People are justifiably still afraid of entering the exclusion zone to this day, even after the radiation levels have greatly decreased.

In contrast, being enrolled in a graduate school is associated with a 500% increase in the incidence of depression and anxiety,² and yet people are rarely seen fleeing universities in terror.

While the above comparison isn’t exactly apples to apples, and the research on graduate school mental illness is still in its infancy, it’s clear that graduate mental health is a major problem³ with a significant public health burden. These numbers also match my personal experience – of my friends in grad school about half were depressed at any one time (myself included), and one ended her life.

The reasons for this are multifarious and have been written about before, but as a quick summary:⁴

Unbalanced Power Dynamics. In a PhD programs one typically spends 5-7 years working for a single individual, whose subsequent recommendation letter is then the sole arbiter of job prospects post-graduation.

Lack of Structure. Much of grad school work (again, especially in PhD programs) can drag on for years without positive results. Projects, as well as entire programs, often have ambiguous goals and finish lines.

Poor Management. PIs are selected primarily for their scientific acumen. Ability to lead or manage seems to be a secondary consideration and also rarely taught. Workplace culture is often poor, with long hours expected for little pay.

Disillusionment. Science is really hard. Reality has a surprising amount of detail. Many people enter grad school with grand goals such as curing cancer and instead end up spending their entire PhDs elucidating a single novel function of a single protein that is associated with, but not necessarily causative of, a single sub-type of cancer. Other fields have similar problems.

Lack of Prophylaxis. It’s (probably) much harder to cure someone’s depression or anxiety than it is to prevent them from getting it in the first place. Yet the systems in place are almost entirely focused on reacting to mental unwellness, rather than preventing it.

Uncertain Career Prospects. I don’t know exactly what causes this except for maybe the fact that people often don’t get a clear impression of just how much competition there is for the most coveted jobs until after they’ve begun their program.

What might be done?

Make mental health counseling opt-out rather than opt-in. It should be the norm for graduate students to check in with their mental health counselors at least once a quarter.

Take other preventative measures. It would be great to see research on how teaching new graduate students the basics of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or helping them build a regular meditation practice, affected their graduate school careers.

Put together a mental wellness workbook specific to graduate school. Mental wellness workbooks are surprisingly effective,⁵ despite feeling strongly reminiscent of 4th grade homework. It would be nice if one existed specifically for grad school and covered things like Impostor Syndrome and The Feeling When All Your Experiments Explode.

Relatedly, bibliotherapy is an effective and low cost form of therapy that would be very easy for graduate schools to implement. Many schools nominally have this, in that they have libraries of therapy-type books in the counselor’s offices, but I doubt this is the optimal solution. A better approach might be to have a large Bibliotherapy-only shelf placed prominently in the front of the library, with individual (handwritten?) book recommendations (like the kind good bookstores often have). The typical graduate program could easily implement this for under $2000, and a dozen or so people-hours.⁶

Do a better job of promoting healthy culture⁷ and work/life balance.⁸ Awareness of the problem and intentionality to fix it from all parties involved could go a long way here. Encouraging hobbies that have consistent positive feedback in proportion to the effort you put in them is a great way to fight burnout. Increasing the amount of consistent positive work-related feedback that students receive with programs such as LabScrum could be very useful too.⁹

Encourage graduate programs to adopt a Mental Health Bill of Rights. If you’re a member of your progam’s Graduate Student Council, drafting and adopting one of these for your school could be a great way to generate engagement with this topic.

Make graduate programs a better place for women and minorities. There are many ways to do this that have already been covered by many people more qualified to write about the topic than myself, but one simple thing that everyone can do is to be an ally.

Strategic restructuring of PI incentives. A friend told me that Tufts University’s grad program has an interesting rule to the effect that PIs who have had some number of students leave or rotate out of their labs for negative reasons are not allowed to take any rotation students for the following year. There are likely a number of other useful actions that could be taken in this space.

Decrease the rate of incoming graduate students. I think this is one of the more important things that could happen. Fewer students, and more time/money/resources per student could do a lot to change the dynamics of the system. The overall caliber of researchers would increase, job prospects would be better, and it would help equalize the power imbalance between graduate students and professors.

Build a Graduate School Mental Health Index (GSMHI). Globally track graduate student mental wellness in granular detail: at the level of field, graduate school, program/department, and maybe even research lab. Propagate this information to prospective students. If graduate schools were forced to compete for prospective students who used the current mental health quality of a school as a discriminating factor things would likely change much more quickly.

This last point is something I’ve been thinking about for a while. The GSMHI (name is a work in progress!) would basically be the equivalent of the “US News & World Report – Best Colleges” ranking, but for graduate mental health. I’m (slowly) working on setting up a system that would allow grad students to confidentially take mental health surveys, collate the data, and display it in a useful fashion. If you have expertise in this area and would like to help, or just have thoughts on how this could be done better,⁹ please shoot me a message!

The last thing I want to say is that despite the apparent negativity in this post, my grad school experience was on balance very positive.¹⁰ These problems seems mostly structural and overall the scientists, administrators, counselors, and fellow students that I interacted with in my program were wonderful, if sometimes rather complicated, people. I think there are many good reasons to expect graduate mental health to improve in the medium-term future, and I strongly believe this will be positive sum for all involved.

Notes

Estimates vary but it seems clear that the cancer incidence rate for this population increased by less than 10%. ⤴
“We surveyed a total of 2,279 individuals (90% PhD students and 10% Master’s students). Respondents were from 26 countries and 234 institutions (Supplementary Tables 1 and 2) and represented diverse fields of study including, biological/physical science (38%), engineering (2%), humanities/social sciences (56%) and “other” (4%) […] Our results show that graduate students are more than six times as likely to experience depression and anxiety as compared to the general population.” Evidence for a mental health crisis in graduate education. Evans et al. Nature Biotechnology, 2018 🔗 — see also: Work organization and mental health problems in PhD students. Levecquea et al. Research Policy, 2017 🔗 ⤴
Graduate students are one of the major drivers of sociological and technological innovation. How much progress is our society leaving on the table if most of them are depressed? ⤴
Much of this is written from the perspective of Life Science PhD programs, which is what I have experience with (as a white male). Most of the points are applicable to non-scientific and/or Masters programs too though. ⤴
Guided Self-Help Cognitive Behavioural Therapy for Depression in Primary Care: A Randomised Controlled Trial. Williams et al. PLOS ONE, 2013 🔗 ⤴
AFAIK there are no studies on prophylactic bibliotherapy which is a shame, because it’s such an easy method to implement. ⤴
One of the most important principles of building a good workplace culture is cultivating an environment of psychological safety. One good way to capture this is with a “No Asshole Rule”. ⤴
See “Counting the costs of casualisation in higher education” (🔗) for a good review of a related topic, workforce casualisation. In the words of one of my friends currently doing her PhD at Cambridge: “I’m doing a lot of extremely time consuming and poorly compensated teaching. In practice, this also means hearing a lot about my students’ struggles, including with mental health. The whole system relies on the fact that we care about our students and will do unpaid labor because we believe teaching/education is important. But I think it takes a toll to know that you’re being taken advantage of.” ⤴
I don’t think we should underestimate how useful something like this could be – getting graduate students early on into an environment rich in short positive feedback cycles could have a massive compounding effect. ⤴ ⤴²
80% Type II fun (my favorite kind), 10% Type I fun, 10% Type III fun, and an additional 10% awfulness. ⤴

Highlights: Can't Hurt Me

2019-10-23T00:00:00+00:00

Continued from Book Review: Can’t Hurt Me.

You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.

Repetition will callous your mind.

So I sought out pain, fell in love with suffering, and eventually transformed myself from the weakest piece of shit on the planet into the hardest man God ever created, or so I tell myself. Odds are you have had a much better childhood than I did, and even now might have a damn decent life, but no matter who you are, who your parents are or were, where you live, what you do for a living, or how much money you have, you’re probably living at about 40 percent of your true capability.

You aren’t missing out on opportunities, making shit money, and getting evicted because of America or Donald fucking Trump or because your ancestors were slaves or because some people hate immigrants or Jews or harass women or believe gay people are going to hell. If any of that shit is stopping you from excelling in life, I’ve got some news. You are stopping you! You are giving up instead of getting hard! Tell the truth about the real reasons for your limitations and you will turn that negativity, which is real, into jet fuel. Those odds stacked against you will become a damn runway! There is no more time to waste. Hours and days evaporate like creeks in the desert. That’s why it’s okay to be cruel to yourself as long as you realize you’re doing it to become better. We all need thicker skin to improve in life. Being soft when you look in the mirror isn’t going to inspire the wholesale changes we need to shift our present and open up our future.

From then on, I brainwashed myself into craving discomfort. If it was raining, I would go run. Whenever it started snowing, my mind would say, Get your fucking running shoes on. Sometimes I wussed out and had to deal with it at the Accountability Mirror. But facing that mirror, facing myself, motivated me to fight through uncomfortable experiences, and, as a result, I became tougher. And being tough and resilient helped me meet my goals.

Living with purpose changed everything for me—at least in the short term. During my senior year in high school, studying and working out gave my mind so much energy that hate flaked from my soul like used-up snake skin. The resentment I held toward the racists in Brazil, the emotion that had dominated me and was burning me up inside, dissipated because I’d finally considered the fucking source. I looked at the people who were making me feel uncomfortable and realized how uncomfortable they were in their own skin. To make fun of or try to intimidate someone they didn’t even know based on race alone was a clear indication that something was very wrong with them, not me. But when you have no confidence it becomes easy to value other people’s opinions, and I was valuing everyone’s opinion without considering the minds that generated them. That sounds silly, but it’s an easy trap to fall into, especially when you are insecure on top of being the only. As soon as I made that connection, being upset with them was not worth my time. Because if I was gonna kick their ass in life, and I was, I had way too much shit to do. Each insult or dismissive gesture became more fuel for the engine revving inside me.

Only one-third of the men who begin BUD/S make it through Hell Week, and in all of my time in Pararescue training, I couldn’t remember feeling as awful as these men looked. They were swollen, chafed, sleep-deprived, and dead on their feet, and I was jealous of them. The longer I watched the more certain I became that there were answers buried in all that suffering. Answers that I needed. More than once the camera panned over the endless frothing ocean, and each time I felt pathetic. The SEALs were everything I wasn’t. They were about pride, dignity, and the type of excellence that came from bathing in the fire, getting beat the fuck down, and going back for more, again and again. They were the human equivalent of the hardest, sharpest sword you could imagine. They sought out the flame, took the pounding for as long as necessary, longer even, until they were fearless and deadly. They weren’t motivated. They were driven. The show ended with graduation. Twenty-two proud men stood shoulder to shoulder in their dress whites before the camera pushed in on their Commanding Officer.

. . .

“In a society where mediocrity is too often the standard and too often rewarded,” he said, “there is intense fascination with men who detest mediocrity, who refuse to define themselves in conventional terms, and who seek to transcend traditionally recognized human capabilities. This is exactly the type of person BUD/S is meant to find. The man who finds a way to complete each and every task to the best of his ability. The man who will adapt and overcome any and all obstacles.”

When depression smothers you, it blots out all light and leaves you with nothing to cling onto for hope. All you see is negativity. For me, the only way to make it through that was to feed off my depression. I had to flip it and convince myself that all that self-doubt and anxiety was confirmation that I was no longer living an aimless life. My task may turn out to be impossible but at least I was back on a motherfucking mission.

When I was done, I’d swim a mile or two, then head to a pond near my mother’s home. Remember, this was Indiana—the American Midwest—in December. The trees were naked. Icicles hung like crystals from the eaves of houses and snow blanketed the earth in all directions, but the pond wasn’t completely frozen yet. I waded into the icy water, dressed in camo pants, a brown short sleeved t-shirt, and boots, laid back and looked into the gray sky. The hypothermic water washed over me, the pain was excruciating, and I fucking loved it. After a few minutes I got out and started running, water sloshing in my boots, sand in my underwear. Within seconds my t-shirt was frozen to my chest, my pants iced at the cuffs. I hit the Monon trail. Steam poured from my nose and mouth as I grunted and slalomed speed-walkers and joggers. Civilians. Their heads turned as I picked up speed and began sprinting, like Rocky in downtown Philly. I ran as fast as I could for as long as I could, from a past that no longer defined me, toward a future undetermined. All I knew was that there would be pain and there would be purpose.

The first step on the journey toward a calloused mind is stepping outside your comfort zone on a regular basis. Dig out your journal again and write down all the things you don’t like to do or that make you uncomfortable. Especially those things you know are good for you. Now go do one of them, and do it again.

. . .

This is not about changing your life instantly, it’s about moving the needle bit by bit and making those changes sustainable. That means digging down to the micro level and doing something that sucks every day. Even if it’s as simple as making your bed, doing the dishes, ironing your clothes, or getting up before dawn and running two miles each day. Once that becomes comfortable, take it to five, then ten miles. If you already do all those things, find something you aren’t doing.

Everything in life is a mind game! Whenever we get swept under by life’s dramas, large and small, we are forgetting that no matter how bad the pain gets, no matter how harrowing the torture, all bad things end. That forgetting happens the second we give control over our emotions and actions to other people, which can easily happen when pain is peaking. During Hell Week, the men who quit felt like they were running on a treadmill turned way the fuck up with no dashboard within reach. But, whether they ever figured it out or not, that was an illusion they fell for.

I was running with a log on my shoulders, vomiting blood. Bloody snot streamed from my nose and mouth, and the instructors periodically grabbed me and sat me down nearby because they thought I might drop fucking dead. But every time they turned around I was back in the mix. Back on that log. Kenny kept hearing the same refrain over the radio that night. “We need to get Goggins out of there,” one voice said. “Roger that, sir. Goggins is sitting down,” another voice crackled. Then after a beat, Kenny would hear that radio chirp again. “Oh shit, Goggins is back on the log. I repeat, Goggins is back on the log!”

So I deployed a process that I now call “Taking Souls.” I turned to Brown. “You know why I call you Freak?” I asked. He looked over as we lowered the boat, then lifted it up overhead like creaky robots on reserve battery power. “Because you are one of the baddest men I’ve ever seen in my damn life!” He cracked a smile. “And you know what I say to these motherfuckers right here?” I tipped my elbow at the nine instructors gathered on the beach, drinking coffee and talking bullshit. “I say, they can go fuck themselves!” Bill nodded and narrowed his eyes on our tormentors, while I turned to the rest of the crew. “Now let’s throw this shit up high and show them who we are!” “Fucking beautiful,” Bill said. “Let’s do it!” Within seconds my whole team had life. We didn’t just lift the boat overhead and set it down hard, we threw it up, caught it overhead, tapped the sand with it and threw it up high again. The results were immediate and undeniable. Our pain and exhaustion faded. Each rep made us stronger and faster, and each time we threw the boat up we all chanted. “YOU CAN’T HURT BOAT CREW TWO!” That was our fuck you to the instructors, and we had their full attention as we soared on a second wind. On the toughest day of the hardest week in the world’s toughest training, Boat Crew Two was moving at lightning speed and making a mockery of Hell Week.

Nine months earlier, I had topped out at 297 pounds and couldn’t even run a quarter mile. Back then, when I was dreaming of a different life, I remember thinking that just getting through Hell Week would be the biggest honor of my life so far. Even if I never graduated from BUD/S, surviving Hell Week alone would have meant something. But I didn’t just survive. I was about to finish Hell Week at the top of my class, and for the first time, I knew I was a bad motherfucker.

Time stood still as I realized for the first time that I’d always looked at my entire life, everything I’d been through, from the wrong perspective. Yes, all the abuse I’d experienced and the negativity I had to push through challenged me to the core, but in that moment I stopped seeing myself as the victim of bad circumstance, and saw my life as the ultimate training ground instead. My disadvantages had been callousing my mind all along and had prepared me for that moment in that pool with Psycho Pete.

You can tolerate doubt as a backseat driver, but if you put doubt in the pilot’s seat, defeat is guaranteed. Remembering that you’ve been through difficulties before and have always survived to fight again shifts the conversation in your head.

Physical training is the perfect crucible to learn how to manage your thought process because when you’re working out, your focus is more likely to be single pointed, and your response to stress and pain is immediate and measurable. Do you hammer hard and snag that personal best like you said you would, or do you crumble? That decision rarely comes down to physical ability, it’s almost always a test of how well you are managing your own mind.

. . .

The reason it’s important to push hardest when you want to quit the most is because it helps you callous your mind. It’s the same reason why you have to do your best work when you are the least motivated. That’s why I loved PT in BUD/S and why I still love it today. Physical challenges strengthen my mind so I’m ready for whatever life throws at me, and it will do the same for you.

I was rejecting my past and therefore rejecting myself. My foundation, my character was defined by self-rejection. All my fears came from that deep-seated uneasiness I carried with being David Goggins because of what I’d gone through. Even after I’d reached a point where I no longer cared about what others thought of me, I still had trouble accepting me. Anyone who is of sound mind and body can sit down and think of twenty things in their life that could have gone differently. Where maybe they didn’t get a fair shake and where they took the path of least resistance. If you’re one of the few who acknowledge that, want to callous those wounds, and strengthen your character, its up to you to go back through your past and make peace with yourself by facing those incidents and all of your negative influences, and accepting them as weak spots in your own character. Only when you identify and accept your weaknesses will you finally stop running from your past. Then those incidents can be used more efficiently as fuel to become better and grow stronger.

Yes, it was miserable, but I fucking loved it. I thrived off of the barbaric beauty of seeing the soul of a man destroyed, only to rise again and overcome every obstacle in his path.

“People have a hard time going through BUD/S healthy, and you’re going through it on broken legs! Who else would even think of this?” I asked. “Who else would be able to run even one minute on one broken leg, let alone two? Only Goggins! You are twenty minutes in the business, Goggins! You are a fucking machine! Each step you run from now until the end will only make you harder!”

Again, the average person thinks 2,000–3,000 thoughts per hour. Rather than focusing on bullshit you cannot change, imagine visualizing the things you can. Choose any obstacle in your way, or set a new goal, and visualize overcoming or achieving it. Before I engage in any challenging activity, I start by painting a picture of what my success looks and feels like. I’ll think about it every day and that feeling propels me forward when I’m training, competing, or taking on any task I choose. But visualization isn’t simply about daydreaming of some trophy ceremony—real or metaphorical. You must also visualize the challenges that are likely to arise and determine how you will attack those problems when they do. That way you can be as prepared as possible on the journey.

. . .

You can’t prepare for everything but if you engage in strategic visualization ahead of time, you’ll be as prepared as you possibly can be. That also means being prepared to answer the simple questions. Why are you doing this? What is driving you toward this achievement? Where does the darkness you’re using as fuel come from? What has calloused your mind? You’ll need to have those answers at your fingertips when you hit a wall of pain and doubt. To push through, you’ll need to channel your darkness, feed off it, and lean on your calloused mind.

. . .

It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day, but if you do, you’ll find that at the other end of that suffering is a whole other life just waiting for you.

I asked Kate to grab some Motrin and anything she thought might be helpful from John Metz. And when she was gone, my body continued to decline. My stomach rumbled and when I looked down I saw bloody piss leak down my leg. I shit myself too. Liquefied diarrhea rose in the space between my ass and a lawn chair that would never be quite the same again. Worse, I had to hide it because I knew if Kate saw how bad off I really was she would beg me to pull out of the race. I’d run seventy miles in twelve hours with no training, and this was my reward.

I remembered as a kid, no matter how fucked up our life was, my mother always figured out a way to stock our damn cookie jar. She’d buy wafers and Oreos, Pepperidge Farm Milanos and Chips Ahoy!, and whenever she showed up with a new batch of cookies, she dumped them into one jar. With her permission we’d get to pick one or two out at a time. It was like a mini treasure hunt. I remember the joy of dropping my fist into that jar, wondering what I’d find, and before I crammed the cookie in my mouth I always took the time to admire it first, especially when we were broke in Brazil. I’d turn it around in my hand and say my own little prayer of thanks. The feeling of being that kid, locked in a moment of gratitude for a simple gift like a cookie, came back to me. I felt it viscerally, and I used that concept to stuff a new kind of Cookie Jar. Inside it were all my past victories. Like the time when I had to study three times as hard as anybody else during my senior year in high school just to graduate. That was a cookie. Or when I passed the ASVAB test as a senior and then again to get into BUD/S. Two more cookies. I remembered dropping over a hundred pounds in under three months, conquering my fear of water, graduating BUD/S at the top of my class, and being named Enlisted Honor Man in Army Ranger School (more on that soon). All those were cookies loaded with chocolate chunks.

. . .

From then on, the Cookie Jar became a concept I’ve employed whenever I need a reminder of who I am and what I’m capable of. We all have a cookie jar inside us, because life, being what it is, has always tested us. Even if you’re feeling low and beat down by life right now, I guarantee you can think of a time or two when you overcame odds and tasted success.

. . .

If you don’t have any big accomplishments to draw on yet, so be it. Your small victories are your cookies to savor, and make sure you do savor them. Yeah, I was hard on myself when I looked in the Accountability Mirror, but I also praised myself whenever I could claim a small victory, because we all need that, and very few of us take the time to celebrate our successes. Sure, in the moment, we might enjoy them, but do we ever look back on them and feel that win again and again?

. . .

The Cookie Jar became my energy bank. Whenever the pain got to be too much, I dug into it and took a bite. The pain was never gone, but I only felt it in waves because my brain was otherwise occupied, which allowed me to drown out the simple questions and shrink time. Each lap became a victory lap, celebrating a different cookie, another small fire. Mile eighty-one became eighty-two, and an hour and a half later, I was in the nineties. I’d run ninety fucking miles with no training! Who does that shit? An hour later I was at ninety-five, and after nearly nineteen hours of running almost non-stop, I’d done it! I’d hit one hundred miles! Or had I? I couldn’t remember, so I ran one more lap just to make sure. After running 101 miles, my race finally over, I staggered to my lawn chair and Kate placed a camouflaged poncho liner over my body as I shivered in the fog. Steam poured off me. My vision was blurred. I remember feeling something warm on my leg, looked down and saw I was pissing blood again. I knew what was coming next, but the port-a-potties were about forty feet away, which may as well have been forty miles, or 4,000. I tried to get up but I was way too dizzy and collapsed back into that chair, an immovable object ready to accept the inevitable truth that I was about to shit myself. It was much worse this time. My entire backside and lower back were smeared with warm feces.

. . .

I came to, on the kitchen floor, a few minutes later. My back was still smeared with shit, my thighs caked in blood and urine. My feet were blistered up and bleeding in twelve places. Seven of my ten toenails were dangling loose, connected only by tabs of dead skin. We had a combination tub and shower and she got the shower going before helping me crawl toward the bathroom and climb into the tub. I remember lying there, naked, with the shower pouring down upon me. I shivered, felt and looked like death, and then I started peeing again. But instead of blood or urine, what came out of me looked like thick brown bile.

What am I capable of? I couldn’t answer that question, but as I looked around the finish line that day and considered what I’d accomplished, it became clear that we are all leaving a lot of money on the table without realizing it. We habitually settle for less than our best; at work, in school, in our relationships, and on the playing field or race course. We settle as individuals, and we teach our children to settle for less than their best, and all of that ripples out, merges, and multiplies within our communities and society as a whole. We’re not talking some bad weekend in Vegas, no more cash at the ATM kind of loss either. In that moment, the cost of missing out on so much excellence in this eternally fucked-up world felt incalculable to me, and it still does. I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.

I loved waking up at 5 a.m. and starting work with three hours of cardio already in the bank while most of my teammates hadn’t even finished their coffee. It gave me a mental edge, a better sense of self-awareness, and a ton of self-confidence, which made me a better SEAL instructor. That’s what getting up at the ass crack of dawn and putting out will do for you. It makes you better in all facets of your life.

This being my second race, I was starting to understand the rhythm of ultra. It’s a constant dance between competition and camaraderie, which reminded me of BUD/S. Luis and I were both racing the clock and each other, but we wanted one another to make it. We were in it alone, together, and he was right. We were a couple of fucking idiots.

By now, I’m sure you can tell that it doesn’t take much for me to become obsessed. Some criticize my level of passion, but I’m not down with the prevailing mentalities that tend to dominate American society these days; the ones that tell us to go with the flow or invite us to learn how to get more with less effort. Fuck that shortcut bullshit.

Sadly, most of us give up when we’ve only given around 40 percent of our maximum effort. Even when we feel like we’ve reached our absolute limit, we still have 60 percent more to give! That’s the governor in action! Once you know that to be true, it’s simply a matter of stretching your pain tolerance, letting go of your identity and all your self-limiting stories, so you can get to 60 percent, then 80 percent and beyond without giving up. I call this The 40% Rule, and the reason it’s so powerful is that if you follow it, you will unlock your mind to new levels of performance and excellence in sports and in life, and your rewards will run far deeper than mere material success.

I understand the temptation to sell short, but I also know that impulse is driven by your mind’s desire for comfort, and it’s not telling you the truth. It’s your identity trying to find sanctuary, not help you grow. It’s looking for status quo, not reaching for greatness or seeking wholeness. But the software update that you need to shut your governor down is no supersonic download. It takes twenty years to gain twenty years of experience, and the only way to move beyond your 40 percent is to callous your mind, day after day. Which means you’ll have to chase pain like it’s your damn job!

First, a quick reminder of how this process works. In 1999, when I weighed 297 pounds, my first run was a quarter mile. Fast forward to 2007, I ran 205 miles in thirty-nine hours, nonstop. I didn’t get there overnight, and I don’t expect you to either. Your job is to push past your normal stopping point. Whether you are running on a treadmill or doing a set of push-ups, get to the point where you are so tired and in pain that your mind is begging you to stop. Then push just 5 to 10 percent further. If the most push-ups you have ever done is one hundred in a workout, do 105 or 110. If you normally run thirty miles each week, run 10 percent more next week.

The race started at 4 a.m. on a Saturday, departing from the city of Leadville, a working-class ski town with frontier roots, and traversing a network of beautiful and harsh Rocky Mountain trails that range from 9,200 feet to 12,600 feet in elevation. When I finished at 2 a.m. on Sunday, a teenager from Denver who attended a school I’d visited a few days earlier was waiting for me at the finish line. I didn’t have a great race (I came in 14th place, rather than my typical top five), but I always made sure to finish strong, and when I sprinted home he approached me with a wide smile and said, “I drove two hours just to see you finish!” The lesson: you never know who you’re affecting. My poor race results meant less than nothing to that young man because I’d helped open his eyes to a new world of possibility and capability that he sensed within himself. He’d followed me from his high school auditorium to Leadville because he was looking for absolute proof—my finishing the race—that it was possible to transcend the typical and become more, and as I cooled down and toweled off he asked me for tips so he could one day run all day and night through the mountains in his backyard. I have several stories like that. More than a dozen kids came out to pace and crew for me at the McNaughton Park Trail Race, a 150-miler held outside of Peoria, Illinois. Two dozen students trained with me in Minot, North Dakota. Together we ran the frozen tundra before sunrise in January when it was twenty below zero!

. . .

Wherever I went, whether the students were interested in a military career or not, they always asked if they had the same hardware I had. Could they run a hundred miles in one day? What would it take to reach their full potential? This is what I’d tell them: Our culture has become hooked on the quick-fix, the life hack, efficiency. Everyone is on the hunt for that simple action algorithm that nets maximum profit with the least amount of effort. There’s no denying this attitude may get you some of the trappings of success, if you’re lucky, but it will not lead to a calloused mind or self-mastery. If you want to master the mind and remove your governor, you’ll have to become addicted to hard work. Because passion and obsession, even talent, are only useful tools if you have the work ethic to back them up.

Evaluate your life in its totality! We all waste so much time doing meaningless bullshit. We burn hours on social media and watching television, which by the end of the year would add up to entire days and weeks if you tabulated time like you do your taxes. You should, because if you knew the truth you’d deactivate your Facebook account STAT, and cut your cable. When you find yourself having frivolous conversations or becoming ensnared in activities that don’t better you in any way, move the fuck on!

“Goggins,” my OIC said after giving me the good news, “you are the type of motherfucker who wishes you were a POW just to see if you have what it takes to last.”

In BUD/S I’d always lead my boat crews, often with tough love, but in general I didn’t care how the guys in the other boat crews were doing or if they quit. This time, I wasn’t just putting out, I was also looking after everybody. If I saw someone having trouble with navigation, patrolling, keeping up on a run, or staying awake all night, I made sure we all rallied together to help. Not everybody wanted to. The training was so difficult that when some guys weren’t on the clock being graded, they did the bare minimum and found opportunities to rest and hide. In my sixty-nine days at Ranger School I didn’t coast for a single second. I was becoming a true leader.

No matter who you are, life will present you similar opportunities where you can prove to be uncommon. There are people in all walks of life who relish those moments, and when I see them I recognize them immediately because they are usually that motherfucker who’s all by himself. It’s the suit who’s still at the office at midnight while everyone else is at the bar, or the badass who hits the gym directly after coming off a forty-eight-hour op. She’s the wildland firefighter who instead of hitting her bedroll, sharpens her chainsaw after working a fire for twenty-four hours. That mentality is there for all of us. Man, woman, straight, gay, black, white, or purple fucking polkadot. All of us can be the person who flies all day and night only to arrive home to a filthy house, and instead of blaming family or roommates, cleans it up right then because they refuse to ignore duties undone. All over the world amazing human beings like that exist. It doesn’t take wearing a uniform. It’s not about all the hard schools they graduated from, all their patches and medals. It’s about wanting it like there’s no tomorrow—because there might not be. It’s about thinking of everybody else before yourself and developing your own code of ethics that sets you apart from others. One of those ethics is the drive to turn every negative into a positive, and then when shit starts flying, being prepared to lead from the front.

A true leader stays exhausted, abhors arrogance, and never looks down on the weakest link. He fights for his men and leads by example. That’s what it meant to be uncommon among uncommon. It meant being one of the best and helping your men find their best too.

Sure, all the guys I worked with over the years were relatively hard guys and highly skilled. They enjoyed the challenges of the job, the brotherhood, and being treated like superstars. They all loved being SEALs, but some weren’t interested in starting at zero because just by qualifying to breathe rare air they were already satisfied. Now, that is a very common way of thinking. Most people in the world, if they ever push themselves at all, are willing to push themselves only so far. Once they reach a cushy plateau, they chill the fuck out and enjoy their rewards, but there’s another phrase for that mentality. It’s called getting soft, and that I could not abide.

“We are a bunch of good ol’ boys,” one of them said, “and we need to know how you’re gonna handle hearing black jokes, bro.” Most of their questions were a variation on that one theme and through it all, I smiled and thought, How are you white boys gonna feel when I’m the baddest motherfucker in here?

After seventeen hours of pain, around 3 a.m. on January 20, 2013, I did my 4,020th and 4,021st pull-up, and the record was mine. Everyone in the gym cheered, but I stayed composed. After two more sets and 4,030 total pull-ups, I took my headphones out, stared into the camera and said, “I tracked you down, Stephen Hyland!” In one day, I’d lifted the equivalent of 846,030 pounds, nearly three times the weight of the Space Shuttle! Cheers spread to laughter as I pulled off my gloves and disappeared into the back room, but much to everyone’s surprise, I was not in the mood to celebrate. Does that shock you too? You know that my refrigerator is never full, and it never will be because I live a mission-driven life, always on the hunt for the next challenge. That mindset is the reason I broke that record, finished Badwater, became a SEAL, rocked Ranger School, and on down the list. In my mind I’m that racehorse always chasing a carrot I’ll never catch, forever trying to prove myself to myself. And when you live that way and attain a goal, success feels anti-climactic.

Think about your most recent and your most heart-wrenching failures. Break out that journal one last time. Log off the digital version and write them out long-hand. I want you to feel this process because you are about to file your own, belated After Action Reports. First off, write out all the good things, everything that went well, from your failures. Be detailed and generous with yourself. A lot of good things will have happened. It’s rarely all bad. Then note how you handled your failure. Did it affect your life and your relationships? How so? How did you think throughout the preparation for and during the execution stage of your failure? You have to know how you were thinking at each step because it’s all about mindset, and that’s where most people fall short. Now go back through and make a list of things you can fix. This isn’t time to be soft or generous. Be brutally honest, write them all out. Study them. Then look at your calendar and schedule another attempt as soon as possible.

. . .

And if you fail again, so the fuck be it. Take the pain. Repeat these steps and keep fighting. That’s what it’s all about.

The Buddha famously said that life is suffering. I’m not a Buddhist, but I know what he meant and so do you. To exist in this world, we must contend with humiliation, broken dreams, sadness, and loss. That’s just nature. Each specific life comes with its own personalized portion of pain. It’s coming for you. You can’t stop it. And you know it.

In response, most of us are programmed to seek comfort as a way to numb it all out and cushion the blows. We carve out safe spaces. We consume media that confirms our beliefs, we take up hobbies aligned with our talents, we try to spend as little time as possible doing the tasks we fucking loathe, and that makes us soft. We live a life defined by the limits we imagine and desire for ourselves because it’s comfortable as hell in that box. Not just for us, but for our closest family and friends. The limits we create and accept become the lens through which they see us. Through which they love and appreciate us.

But for some, those limits start to feel like bondage, and when we least expect it, our imagination jumps those walls and hunts down dreams that in the immediate aftermath feel attainable. Because most dreams are. We are inspired to make changes little by little, and it hurts. Breaking the shackles and stretching beyond our own perceived limits takes hard fucking work—oftentimes physical work—and when you put yourself on the line, self doubt and pain will greet you with a stinging combination that will buckle your knees.

Most people who are merely inspired or motivated will quit at that point, and upon their return, their cells will feel that much smaller, their shackles even tighter. The few who remain outside their walls will encounter even more pain and much more doubt, courtesy of those who we thought were our biggest fans. When it was time for me to lose 106 pounds in less than three months, everyone I talked to told me there was no way I could do it. “Don’t expect too much,” they all said. Their weak-ass dialogue only fed my own self doubt.

But it’s not the external voice that will break you down. It’s what you tell yourself that matters. The most important conversations you’ll ever have are the ones you’ll have with yourself. You wake up with them, you walk around with them, you go to bed with them, and eventually you act on them. Whether they be good or bad.

We are all our own worst haters and doubters because self doubt is a natural reaction to any bold attempt to change your life for the better. You can’t stop it from blooming in your brain, but you can neutralize it, and all the other external chatter by asking, What if?

What if is an exquisite fuck-you to anyone who has ever doubted your greatness or stood in your way. It silences negativity. It’s a reminder that you don’t really know what you’re capable of until you put everything you’ve got on the line. It makes the impossible feel at least a little more possible. What if is the power and permission to face down your darkest demons, your very worst memories, and accept them as part of your history. If and when you do that, you will be able to use them as fuel to envision the most audacious, outrageous achievement and go get it.

Whatever failures and accomplishments pile up in the years to come, and there will be plenty of both I’m sure, I know I’ll continue to give it my all and set goals that seem impossible to most. And when those motherfuckers say so, I’ll look them dead in the eye and respond with one simple question.

What if?

Book Review: Can't Hurt Me

2019-10-22T00:00:00+00:00

“It takes relentless self-discipline to schedule suffering into your day, every day, but if you do, you’ll find that at the other end of that suffering is a whole other life just waiting for you.”

-David Goggins

The strength of this book is its simplicity. Goggins’ magic formula for mastering yourself is to do lots of hard things to “callous your mind”, and optimally to do these things when you least want to. He applies this to basically every problem in life; he doesn’t exactly ignore structural problems or systemic inequalities, but the only axis these things have any meaning for him is in how much he can use them as fuel. No matter what life throws at you – for him personally it was racism, a learning disorder, an incredibly abusive father, and being born with a hole in his heart, among other things – the answer is always to work harder at callousing your mind.

Doing this gives you a reason to do hard things besides just doing the thing itself: because every time you choose to do a hard thing, it makes it easier for you to do hard things in the future. Under this framework, every task, no matter how dreary, can be integrated into the overarching goals of your life and imbued with a sense of greater purpose. If you can learn how to reframe hard things, or other various types of suffering, as opportunities for growth, you can flip the polarity of the part of your brain that responds to them – instead of being immediately repulsed by hard things, you can embrace the pain and give it meaning. It doesn’t exactly make you enjoy suffering¹ but it does make it feel more rewarding.

Goggins takes these beliefs to their absolute logical conclusion (well, one possible conclusion). He fully embraces the idea that the race never ends: “we’re either getting better or we’re getting worse.” I’m not sure how I feel about this. On one hand it allowed him to transcend mental limitations in all kinds of absurd and ridiculous ways.² On the other hand, he doesn’t really seem like a happy person. Immensely accomplished? Yes.³ Living a life of meaning? Also yes. Able to enjoy normal human pleasures? I’m not so sure.

Maybe he is on to something though. The unending rat race has always been a source of pervasive dread for me. The knowledge that no matter how well I do in anything there will always be another hurdle to overcome, another self to transcend, another goal to achieve. If there is no real finish line, what’s the point? Goggins answer is to rejoice in this fact. He spits in its face. He allows himself to be vulnerable to it, to feel everything it entails about the existential angst many of us experience at one time or another, and then goes out there anyways, raging against the void. It’s inspiring and bleak at the same time.

I’m not convinced this is the best approach. It seems like having clearly defined goals that you go after Goggins-style, followed by allowing yourself a period of well-deserved respite, would be preferable. Overall though Can’t Hurt Me⁴ is an incredible book, and I think the message – that you can achieve meaning, mastery, and self-transcendence by embracing deliberate suffering – is worth heeding.

Notes

Goggins has claimed several times that he is not in fact a masochist, despite some of the insanely painful experiences he has put himself through. ⤴
Check out this great podcast interview for a preview. ⤴
The book jacket description – “A retired Navy SEAL and the only member of the U.S. Armed Forces ever to complete SEAL training, U.S. Army Ranger School, and Air Force Tactical Air Controller training. Goggins has competed in more than sixty ultra-marathons, triathlons, and ultra-triathlons, setting new course records and regularly placing in the top five. A former Guinness World Record holder for completing 4,030 pull-ups in seventeen hours, he’s a much-sought-after public speaker who’s shared his story with the staffs of Fortune 500 companies, professional sports teams, and hundreds of thousands of students across the country.” – captures maybe 30% of the extent of his exploits. ⤴
See my book highlights here. ⤴

Updating System 1 Beliefs

2019-10-03T00:00:00+00:00

Part 1 of us1b.

Most people don’t maximize their utility functions. There is a gap between the things we know are good for us and the things that we actually do. But why is this so? If utility is really so… utile, shouldn’t it be easy for us to maximize? If we get utility from things that make us happy, or give meaning or pleasure to our lives, shouldn’t we just naturally tend to drift in those directions?

There are lots of reasons why we fail to do so, but most of them seem to boil down to the fact that we aren’t perfectly rational agents; we have all sorts of evolutionary baggage and cognitive biases that skew our decision making. This has brought about a lot of literature focused on updating our mental models, the idea being that our imperfect mental models cause us to make imperfect decisions, and so the more accurately we can get our models to reflect reality, the better our decisions will be.

The purpose of this series of posts is to argue that this strategy is incomplete, and to show that the most effective way to become a better agent¹ is not just to learn better mental models, but also to learn how to integrate them deeply enough into your consciousness so that you can actually feel their rightness in everyday decision making, and they become effortless and natural do to.

Thinking Fast & Slow

Our mental models of the world can be split into two categories: System 1 and System 2.² System 1 contains our fast/instinctual/emotional models, whereas System 2 has our slower/deliberate/“rational” ones.

System 1 is responsible for our apprehensiveness towards touching hot stoves. The thought of touching a hot stove is viscerally associated with a feeling of burning, which happily makes it very easy for us to choose to not touch hot stoves.

System 2 is responsible for complex decision making. When we decide to take action in a situation where many bystanders are present, we are using our System 2 model that says “the more bystanders there are in a situation, the less likely people are to act, therefore you should override your natural disinclination to act and do something”.

When System 1 and System 2 are in agreement and both accurately reflect reality, everything is great. However when they disagree, and/or one does not reflect reality accurately we begin to make poorer decisions.

Almost all of the mental model optimization literature seems focused on giving us better System 2 models. Cognitive biases like the planning fallacy and hyperbolic discounting are System 2 mental models that you invoke when trying to make more rational decisions. In contrast, there is comparatively little information on how to update your System 1 mental models.³

Updating System 1

There are two main things I mean when talking about updating System 1:

Transferring accurate System 2 models/beliefs to System 1, so that they become more natural and easier to implement.
And/or updating our current System 1 models to maximize utility.

It seems obvious that we are capable of transferring System 2 beliefs to System 1, thus making them natural. Your model about not touching hot stoves probably started out as System 2, and then at some point you accidentally touched a hot stove, or saw someone else do it, resulting in a hard System 1 update. Almost all skills (e.g. chess, tennis, driving a car, interacting with other people) start out as pure System 2 and then transition to some mixture of System 1 & 2. In fact, skill transitions towards System 1 are (for the most part⁴) a mark of progress. So it seems not only possible, but useful to perform System 2->1 transitions.⁵

For example, we all know we shouldn’t eat too many sugary foods (System 2), but at the same time donuts are delicious (System 1). The conflict between these two systems not only wastes precious mental resources, but all too often results in a System 1 victory with its attendant negative health consequences. In an ideal world our System 1 would not be attracted to donuts to the extent that they are bad for us.⁶ When making decisions about what to eat we would not only know (System 2), we would also feel (System 1) the wrongness of eating (many) donuts.

The following posts are about a few possible ways to update our System 1 beliefs so that they more accurately model reality and thus potentially allow us to live more fulfilling, utility-maximizing lives.

Notes

Better at doing the things you want to do or know you should do. ⤴
Popularized by Kahneman & Tversky. This isn’t exactly the way the terms are usually used, but I think it makes sense. ⤴
Put another way, this is about habit formation via optimizing how your System 1 feels about the action. This seems to be different from most of the habit literature which is usually about overcoming or outsmarting System 1 in some way. I definitely haven’t read every book on habit formation though, and I am not any sort of psychologist, so I reserve the right to be wrong about this statement. ⤴
The OK Plateau is a phase that most people go through or end up in at some point. In this model, when you first begin learning some skill it’s very hard and you have to exert lots of deliberate practice and System 2-iness to improve. Then, at some point it becomes System 1 and habitual, and you can just coast without putting any effort into it to get by. I’ve been writing for quite some time now, but my handwriting has unfortunately not measurably improved since probably second grade. ⤴
Some System 2 mental models are incompatible with System 1. While summing 2+2 is probably System 1 for most people, factoring a thousand digit number will probably never be. ⤴
Ok fine, in an ideal world donuts would actually just be good for you. ⤴

Vote with your reviews

2019-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

“People will forget what you said
People will forget what you did
But people will never forget how you made them feel.”

-Maya Angelou

People often mention the importance of “voting with your dollars” or “voting with your feet” but in our increasingly connected online world there’s another way to vote: with your reviews.

Have a good interaction in a normally painful place like the DMV or a UPS store? Rate them on google and mention the person who helped you by name and what they did that made your interaction so pleasant. Find a good artist on Soundcloud? Tell them they are great! Did someone on Twitter graciously admit they were wrong after being presented with overwhelming contradictory evidence? (jk, this would never happen.)

It’s easy to do – it takes two minutes to pull out your phone, navigate to the reviews tab for some person or business, give them five stars, and write a thoughtful note. And it’s arguably a more powerful way to affect your immediate environment than traditional ways of voting. It’s easy rise above the noise too. The reviews section on most websites are almost entirely a combination of long, whiny, complaints, or two-word positive or negative feedback. It doesn’t take all that much effort to do better than this.

It’s also good practice for the real life habit of complimenting people. It teaches you to notice your appreciation¹ of good actors, formulate a response that conveys your appreciation, and then give that response before the moment passes. It will make both of you feel good, incentivize prosocial behaviors, and is also just a nice way to go through the world.²

Go forth and compliment!

This made me feel warm and tingly inside. As of this writing this is the only rating or review NeuraCache has on the App Store. It will likely increase the probability that this app I love will still exist in ten years.

Notes

When you practice noticing goodness in the world you shift the balance of your mental life towards positivity. As William James said “my experience is what I agree to attend to.” I think this is probably why gratitude journaling works. ⤴
The first bit of feedback I got for this blog from someone I didn’t know (from Alexey Guzey) was hugely motivating for me to keep writing. ⤴

How to survive grad school (and do other stuff good too)

2019-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

A friend asked me for tips on how to survive grad school. Rather than send her a response I decided to commodify my experience into a blog post. Enjoy!

Get good at the standard self-care package: eat healthy, exercise at least a little bit every day, go out into nature often, learn how to fast, sleep well¹, and practice gratitude.
Meditate. I’m not sure I would have survived grad school without a good meditation practice. Start at five minutes a day. Sit somewhere quiet with your eyes closed and focus on your breath. When you get distracted notice this and return to your breath. That’s all. When you’re ready to move on to more you may find some of these books useful. Try to go on a meditation retreat as soon as possible.²
Find hobbies that give you frequent and consistent positive feedback. This is so important because often in grad school you will work on projects that go for months or even years without giving you positive results. Having some other aspect of your life that does give you regular positive feedback can go a long way towards making up for this. For me these were rock-climbing, working out, training for endurance races with friends (race camaraderie!), and taking singing lessons.
Find other hobbies that just allow you to relax completely and not think about work.
Read this: Richard Hamming: You and Your Research.
And this: Upgrade your cargo cult for the win.
Blogs and twitter feeds can be an invaluable source for the informal sort of knowledge about your field that you’ll never get from journal articles or textbooks. Spend some time finding good ones. RSS is your friend!
Hard work is a skill. Learn how to put in a 16 hour day if you really need to, but be very deliberate about not succumbing to the standard masochistic “more hours is more better” mindset. Tasks expand to fill the time you allot them. Slack is important. Plan carefully and don’t forget Hofstadter’s Law.
From time to time do a “compression day” where you give yourself a strict six hour or less limit to get all your work done. Observe how much you still get done.
Make silly groups with friends in your program. At one point I was part of yogurt club, fiber club, lifting club, suffer club, bird club, and club club (among others). Have a slack channel or messenger group for your club and send each other dumb gifs at least once a day.
Do things that scare you.³ This might be your last chance to take many worthwhile risks before you get into the “real world”.
If you’re not getting any work done learn how to just drop what you are doing and go have some guilt-free fun.
Start a blog. Write about what you’re doing on it even if you don’t think anyone will ever read it. It will make you smarter.
It feels really good to be curious and productive and creative. If you can learn how to associate this feeling with the hard work, drudgery, or anxiety that sometimes precedes it you will only rarely need to use willpower.
It’s ok to feel like shit sometimes. Your reaction to feeling bad will often be worse than the feeling itself (because it results in a self-perpetuating cycle). If you feel like shit all the time though, go talk to your mental health counselors. They’re there to help, they’re nice people, and they’ve seen it all.
You’ll probably get impostor syndrome at some point. Try to reframe it positively as “the feeling you get when you are learning a ton of things”. Practice being comfortable with the feeling of being overwhelmed by simply trying to accept it and not react to it. Eventually you will learn that if you can just sit with this discomfort for long enough, and not let it distract you from plugging along with your reading, researching, thinking, and questioning, you will suddenly start to feel like you know what the hell is going on.
Grit is vastly more important than speed.
```
S P A C E D  R E P I T I T I O N.
```
Be a giver (the right way). Be on the lookout for people to help or befriend always, not just with work but with their lives⁴ too. All of this will be more worth it than you think.
Realize that the most important meta-lesson you are there to learn is how to efficiently manage yourself. Figure out a good productivity system. Get a good to-do list and calendar app. Use them religiously. Start a journal and practice writing a little in it each day. Perform a self-audit on yourself from time to time. Write about areas you could improve in and figure out a way to track your progress.⁵
https://xkcd.com/1205/.
Practice having good ideas.⁶ Write them down in your notebook immediately whenever you do. Revisit them from time to time. Have a group of friends that you text wacky or interesting ones to.
Remember that you are on the forefront of some area of human knowledge and that that’s a pretty dang cool place to be :)

Notes

Keep your room as dark, quiet, and cold as you can get it. Use good earplugs if you need them. Don’t drink caffeine in the afternoon. Don’t eat before going to sleep. You get the point. ⤴
One of my biggest regrets is that I waited until my last week of grad school to go on a meditation retreat. ⤴
“Panic at the thought of doing a thing is a challenge to do it.” -Henry S. Haskins ⤴
Depression and anxiety have skyrocketed in the graduate student population. You may not realize how badly someone is struggling until it’s too late. ⤴
I use Wunderlist, Fantastical, and Evernote, respectively, for these. They are wonderful but YMMV. ⤴
“The best way to get a good idea is to have a lot of ideas.” -Linus Pauling. I’ve also found this Paul Graham article useful; it’s about startup ideas but I think it generalizes pretty well. ⤴

Make stillness cool again

2019-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

“Everybody should be quiet near a little stream and listen.”

-Ruth Krauss

I was out canooeing on a quiet lake the other day. The day was warm and the water was cheekily reflecting little blue dimples of the sky. I decided to stop paddling and just enjoy the moment. After a few minutes though a boat full of tourists on a cocktail cruise came by and I immediately felt the palpable urge to begin doing something again. Sitting in a canoe in the middle of the lake staring sightlessly into the distance was weird. Paddling a canoe was not. And now that there were people around I distinctly felt the urge to be doing the latter.

I embraced my inner weirdo and stayed how I was, but it made me think that our society has no concept or word for: taking a moment of stillness to enjoy the present.

Normally if we saw someone stop in the middle of a subway station to appreciate the roar of the train or the eclectic passengers we’d just think it was strange that they had suddenly paused with an odd half smile on their face to enjoy their surroundings.

Upon seeing a friend or colleague’s gaze unoccupied by any specific object of attention (such as the social default action for ‘I’ve got nothing to do right now’, the smartphone) the first response people usually have is to ask “is everything all right?”. As if any moment in which we aren’t actively “doing things” is wasted and a sign of inner turmoil. (What does this say about our society?)

Perhaps, though, if we had a word for “stillness in order to appreciate” that we could adopt, this practice might become more common and we would miss out a bit less on all the little wonders of our world.

Suffertember: Like Regular September But More Suffery

2019-08-27T00:00:00+00:00

“Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’ It is in times of security that the spirit should be preparing itself to deal with the difficult time; while fortune is bestowing favours on it then is the time for it to be strengthened against her rebuffs.”

-Seneca

“Be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved.”

-William James

In the spirit of Seneca, William James, and Type 3 Fun, my friend and I do a thing every year called Suffertember. The idea is to give up some of our comforts, mindless addictions, and rote habits, and replace them with things that are harder, better, and most importantly, more suffery.

It’s a misogi; what it lacks in intensity it makes up in duration.

It’s a hard reset on things we take for granted in our daily lives. Is eating meat every day truly a necessity for your happiness, or just something you’re used to doing? Do you really need to check twitter every six minutes? Does the daily news media actually make us more informed and better citizens? Or do anything useful for us at all?

The point is to force yourself to go without these things for (at least) a month, so you can attain a true perspective of how they actually affect you – something that’s not so easy to see from underneath the blanket of habit. When you’ve gone without something long enough, it starts to lose its roots in you. You can then choose to add the thing back in to your life, or to instead leave it behind you. If you never do this, you will just end up living a life on default settings; i.e. if you don’t deliberately design your life, someone else will design it for you.

A drawing of the first attempt by Suffertember co-founder @WestleyDang. It went… ok.

Here’s what I’m doing this time around:

Every Day

wake up at 5:30 AM
gratitude journal
100 push-ups or pull-ups
5 minute plank
a random act of kindness
one hour of meditation

All Month

cold showers only
no social media
no news
no TV/movies
no meat
no sweets
no caffeine¹
IF 5x/week
one 40+ hour fast
publish four blog articles
bike 300 miles

This may seem like a silly list of things to do, but as it turns out I’ve been looking forward to this month quite a lot. One of the biggest things I realized in past years was just how much time I spent on things that, on balance, provided so little reward.

When you don’t drink coffee, you don’t have to spend time making it and (once you acclimate) you feel awake as soon as you wake up. Cold showers have a wonderfully abbreviating effect on average shower duration (and also help with the waking up thing). We all know that we spend too much time on social media, but it never really hits you just how much time you waste until you go a month without.

If it wasn’t for Suffertember I’d never have experienced the pre-dawn eeriness of a swim in the Pacific Ocean with two of my friends, and then the mutual hilarity we shared when one of them nearly levitated out of the ocean after being scared by a pack of leopard sharks. I would never have realized that every meal doesn’t have to be based around meat as the main dish for it to be satisfying. I would never have done a triathlon. I would still be wasting time on Facebook instead of deleting it for good.

And that’s just the tangible benefits. One thing I’ve found is that the best way make something hard easy, is to try to do something much harder first. Putting yourself outside your comfort zone for a month at a time accomplishes that. It stretches you. It expands the bounds of the things you will consider fun, meaningful, and within your agency. It teaches you the meaning of “homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto”.² So I’m very much looking forward to the upcoming month, to regaining all those moments that I fritter away so easily, and using them for things that actually matter.

One last note: there’s obviously a lot of privilege involved in doing something like this. Most people don’t have the luxury of a life comfortable enough to think of giving up such things, or the spare time to waste on them in the first place. Does that mean this isn’t worth doing though? I don’t think so. Suffering is an unavoidable part of growth, and in this comfortable world we live in it’s increasingly becoming a skill to not only seek out discomfort, but also to learn to enjoy it.

Here’s a few more pieces of inspiration, in case you are thinking about doing your own (personalized)³ Suffertember:

“If you adherents of this religion actually have the same sentiments towards yourselves which you have towards your fellows, if you are unwilling to endure your own suffering even for an hour, and continually forestall all possible misfortune, if you regard suffering and pain generally as evil, as detestable, as deserving of annihilation, and as blots on existence, well, you have then, besides your religion of compassion, yet another religion in your heart (and this is perhaps the mother of the former) — the religion of smug ease. Ah, how little you know of the happiness of man, you comfortable and good-natured ones! — for happiness and misfortune are brother and sister, and twins, who grow tall together, or, as with you, remain small together!”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

“Complete abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.”

-Augustine of Hippo

“You are in danger of living a life so comfortable and soft, that you will die without ever realizing your true potential.”

-David Goggins

Happy suffering! 😄

Notes

I’m considering decaf coffee to be “caffeine-free” because I don’t want to go completely insane. ⤴
Terence: “I am human, I consider nothing that is human alien to me.” For any sufficiently difficult activity, there is some human, somewhere, who has learned how to enjoy it. When we expand the scope of the things we find comfortable, we expand the scope of the possible. ⤴
Modify the goals in any way you see fit. Don’t make them too easy though: the point is to have to try really hard for something that there’s a good chance you’ll still fail at. ⤴

Why Blog? (Because Smart People On The Internet Said To)

2019-08-22T00:00:00+00:00

“As he practiced his writing, Jijingi came to understand what Moseby had meant: writing was not just a way to record what someone said; it could help you decide what you would say before you said it. And words were not just the pieces of speaking; they were the pieces of thinking. When you wrote them down, you could grasp your thoughts like bricks in your hands and push them into different arrangements. Writing let you look at your thoughts in a way you couldn’t if you were just talking, and having seen them, you could improve them, make them stronger and more elaborate.”

-Ted Chiang

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

-André Gide

“It takes courage to look inside yourself. And even more courage to write it for other people to see.”

-Captain Benjamin Sisko

I was going to write a long-winded post about why I decided to publicly inflict my thoughts upon the internet, but then I realized lots of smart people, who are better writers than I, have already done a much better job of this.

So without further ado I present:

Why you should start a blog according to Smart Internet People

Tom Critchlow – You’re Not Blogging, My Friend & Small b blogging
James Somers – More people should write
Alexey Guzey – Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now (also this incredibly useful advice)
Zvi Mowshowitz – You’re Good Enough, You’re Smart Enough, and People Would Like You
Derek Sivers – Show Your Work by Austin Kleon (book review)
Ben Mann – Why I write

Bonus! Writing advice from Internet People

Devon Zuegel – Advice on writing
Scott Alexander¹ – Nonfiction Writing Advice
Paul Graham – How To Write Usefully
Chuck Wendig – Three Truths About Writing, And How The Writing Gets Done (& also this tweetstorm)
Slava Akhmechet – Writing well
Ray Bradbury – Greatest Writing Advice (or just go read this wonderful book)

That’s it. I’ve started this blog as an exercise in strengthening my communication skills, improving my clarity of thought, and connecting with like-minded people. I hope you enjoy!

Notes

I once asked Scott Alexander at a meetup how he was able to be such an amazing and prolific writer. His answer was: “Try so many things that you eventually find something that you do without any willpower or exertion.” ⤴