MNTS #14
MNTS #14
[Week 33/ Year 2023] Altman, Cluster Dextrin, Bonner, Clear, Simmons, Kadavy, Glass, Iatrogenics, Kruse, Huberman, Rubin, Notion
Mainly, Notes To Self - my weekly attempt to compress everything noteworthy I read, watched, listened to, and discovered during the past week.
Reading
Halfway through Straw Dogs but took a detour to listen to the Kruse/Huberman/Rubin podcast (see below).
How to Be Successful by Sam Altman - 13 bits of advice worth reviewing
Cluster Dextrin (video)- novel Carbohydrate source for endurance training/racing. Probably not much better than consuming a banana pre/intra-workout, but I’m always up for an experiment.
Is progress real? Historian Michael Bonner on civilization and how the past can renew our present by The Hub Staff - interesting companion reading for both Straw Dogs and the Jack Kruse/Huberman podcast mentioned below.
The Science of Developing Mental Toughness in Your Health, Work, and Life by James Clear - “for 95% of the circumstances in life, toughness simply comes down to being more consistent than most people.”
The 100-Hour Rule: Forgotten Study Shows How You Can Become World-Class In 100 Hours by Michael Simmons - do your best to disregard the click-bait titles of this article and instead reflect on how many skills you’ve dedicated 100 hours of deliberate practice to. Reflecting on my own experience, I don’t know that I’ve ever spent, let’s call it, an hour a day consecutively for 3-ish months working on a specific skill. I will start experimenting with this and use the 100 hours as a benchmark to compare progress to my usual meandering style of skill acquisition.
LM #224: Quit without a plan by David Kadavy - I dig his TOM (Time, Optionality, Money) acronym.
Ira Glass on the Taste Gap - “your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this.”
Iatrogenics: Why Intervention Often Leads to Worse Outcomes by Farnam Street - a concept I’m revisiting first introduced to me by Nassim Taleb in Antifragile and continues to be highly topical.
Listening
I’ve finished these two monster episodes, and all I can say is DAMN. The ideas laid out in these two episodes consumed my mind for the majority of the week. There is a mountain of information to unpack, and I will be relistening to these to work through grasping the concepts with greater fidelity. My first introduction to Dr. Jack Kruse was several years ago through my chiropractor. He gave me a burned CD of an interview where Kruse explains the importance of building a solar callus, amongst other sunlight-related protocols (highly fringe at the time). I followed Kruse and his work for a while, but fast forward a couple of years, and Kruse got heavy into Bitcoin, and I all but wrote him off as a quack. There is no question he is wicked smart, but it’s also apparent if you follow him on social media he’s a bit of a screwball, so to see him willing to go head-to-head with Huberman was highly intriguing. What differentiates this interaction from others is that Kruse lays out the whole narrative of how he came to understand these paradigms, something he is notorious for being highly vague about in the past. I’d also like to mention that Rick Rubin (giggles and all) is an absolute gem of a human for mediating this type of podcast, where two people with somewhat opposing agendas get together and hash it out. I’m genuinely delighted by these two episodes, and I hope you take the time to listen and explore some of these ideas yourself. If you are curious about human potential, these episodes are required listening.
Here are a couple of quotes from Kruse that have infiltrated my consciousness:
“Nature doesn’t make mistakes”
“Make like the Sphinx”
Random
I finally got fed up with Evernote and made the switch to Notion. Not only is Notion a third of the cost, but it’s also a dramatic upgrade aesthetically. Also, Notion seems to have a vibrant community of enthusiasts, making finding tutorials, explainers, and templates for anything and everything a breeze. I wish I had pulled the plug on Evernote earlier, but being late to the Notion party has its perks.
Until next week.
Stay spirited, stay resilient.
Andrew