Author: Craig Constantine

Root of modern disease?

Published February 1, 2018  ·  All posts on Feb 1  ·  

… the microbes are holding the reigns to a lot of what’s going on. If we were not doing a good job at passaging them around to additional culturing flasks — specifically other humans — they would undoubtedly discover ways to make us better at doing that.

I think a more optimistic, or different way to frame this, is just that we’re composite organisms. I think we traditionally think of ourselves — the human body — as a collection of human cells. And what we really are is an ecosystem. We have microbial and human parts that come together to work in a concerted fashion to make up this
super-organism. And we can’t forget about the microbes because they’re really an important part of our biology.

~ Dr. J Sonnenburg from, Is a Disrupted Gut Microbiome at the Root of Modern Disease?

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If you haven’t heard much about how important are all the teeny little microbes living in your digestive track, this is a good podcast to get started.

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Master the day

Published January 31, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 31

The big umbrella for me is this idea of “master the day.” The whole idea is that life doesn’t change — wether it’s weight loss, success, happiness, marriage. It doesn’t change until something today changes. And that by itself is a huge revelation. Because most of us, we may have heard that idea. But if all we did was change something today, then that would already put us on the path we want to be on. And that, again, right there, there’s a philosophical change. Because if we knew that it just took changing small things, and that by changing something small today it would be easeir to change something small tomrorrow, a lot of us would have a much easier time reaching our goals.

So how do you change on a daily level? When you think about it, the average person only reflects about what needs changing, once a year. Right? The New Year we write our resolutions and that’s the only time we reflect on what’s working and what’s not working. One time in 365 days. Imagine if you did that every day. Imagine if you did that 365 times now. Imagine how quickly you could iterate on your behavior and your habits.

~ Alexander Heyne from, «https://becomingasuperhuman.com/habit-mastery-weight-loss-the-secrets-of-success-w-alexander-heyne/»

I sure wish I’d read, (or heard,) this about 10 years ago. Took me an embarrassingly long time to discover this on my own. This is literally the it’s-not-actually-a-secret to all of my success. Small daily changes. Even in the face of catastrophically stupid, self-imposed set-backs. Small daily changes. Every day, one step forward.

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Taste the soup

Published January 30, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 30

In your career, you’ve had a lot of soup. You’ve had tomato, chicken noodle, potato leek, and countless others. More importantly, you’ve had different variations of each soup. Big huge noodle chicken noodle. Some amazing type of cream on that tomato soup. This soup journey has taught you a lot about soup. Now, when presented with a new bowl of soup, the moment that counts is the first taste. You taste a bit and wonder, “What is going on with this soup?”

~ Rands, from Act Last, Read the Room, and Taste the Soup

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I don’t intentionally read the room when I’m interacting with a group. (That may very well be a great thing for managers to do. I am not a manager.)

In the last few years however, I have learned to shut up more, and listen more. I feel this has been a huge part of my success at . . . maybe “success” isn’t the right word.

Somewhere in my brain I have the ideas from an article that described interactions between people as boundary/border negotiations between countries; some have walls, some have armed forces, some are open, some are dividing waste-lands, and some have a frequent exchange of ideas. The people on either side of the border can be soft marshmallows (they shape easily to their borders), malleable (they can be shaped by sufficient outside force), etc. I digress.

By learning to listen, I feel people now put up less razor-wire-topped walls to protect their border with me. Less walls means more interaction, and that interaction has been a driver of my progress of self-improvement.

…and reading that linked article from Rands, now I see that it — reading the room, listening, being a person with an open border — is a widely useful skill.

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Eternal return

Published January 29, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 29  ·  

If you stay with your past regret, you’ll break through. You’ll realize that every moment spent in remorse is another regretful moment for eternity. You’ll finally understand, in your bones, the truth of Nietzsche’s wise advice: “Never yield to remorse, but at once tell yourself: remorse would simply mean adding to the first act of stupidity a second.”

~ Kyle Eschenroeder, from Your New, New Year’s Resolution

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We don’t literally live this exact same life over and over, as encapsulated by the idea of “Eternal Return”.

But it IS an interesting thought experiment. It is exceedingly difficult to break outside of my own self-perspective — arguably, it impossible to break out since what perspective do I have, other than MY own. But trying to think of things from new perspectives . . . it’s like trying to catch a glimpse of the back of my own head in a fun-house of mirrors.

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Do calories matter?

Published January 27, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 27  ·  

In a word, yes.  But, technically this is the wrong question.  The correct question is probably closer to, “What is the impact of the calories I consume on my body’s ability to store fat versus burn fat?”
…
Conventional wisdom, perhaps better referred to as Current Dogma, says that you gain weight because you eat more than you expend. This is almost true! To be 100% true, it would read: when you gain weight, it is the case that you have necessarily eaten more than you expended. Do you see the difference? It’s subtle but very important — arguably more important than any other sentence I will write. The first statement says over-eating caused you to get fat. The second one says if you got fat, you overate, but the possibility remains that another factor led to you to overeat.

~ Peter Attia, from «http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/do-calories-matter»

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All of the success in the last (roughly) five years boils down to the following strategy. Notice that “excercise” does NOT appear…

1) realize I would like to improve my health

2) read something (anything) about health, diet, metabolism… anything that piques my interest. But it has to be something I think is TRUE. No crazy “fad” stuff. Something sane like, “yogurt seems to be good for me to eat.”

3) reduce friction to lead to that change. NOT, “force change by making rules.” I want to eat more yogurt? …make sure it’s on the grocery list so it ENDS UP IN THE HOUSE. I want to stop eating Doritos? EAT LUNCH BEFORE GOING TO MARKET, DO NOT BUY DORITOS.

There is no step 4. Everything else happens automatically. There is NO CURE for curiosity. Each thing I read and adjust leads to more, interesting questions. And along the way, more activity just happens automatically as my health improves.

Yes yes yes. I’m personally interested in movement and Art du DĂ©placement, etc. So I’m also doing this process in that realm. Forget about that. The success with my health, came all from my diet.

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Gymnastic Strength Training

Published January 26, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 26

The Secrets of Gymnastic Strength Training

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This is an insane, 3-hour-long interview. Which I listened to twice. (So far.) Christopher Sommer ( https://www.gymnasticbodies.com/blog/ ) is an Olympic Gymnastics coach and this interview has broadened my horizons– about training, about strength, about recovery, about success, about goals, about gymnastics… I could not even decide what to pull-quote.

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Agency from individual neurons

Published January 25, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 25  ·  

What I’m going to argue today is that agency is a fundamental property of the brain. Not only is agency the function of the brain — and thus it’s very reason for existence — but it’s also built into the brain’s fabric and architecture. Because even neurons have agency, in the form of (metabolic) selfishness, higher-order brain systems don’t need to create agency ‘from scratch’ out of mindless robotic slaves. They inherit agency pretty much for free.

~ Kevin Simler, from Neurons Gone Wild

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The question of agency occassionally sucks me into a deep whirlpool of introspection. The idea that it might arise as an emergent property simply from the huge number of neurons is intriguing.

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To serve man

Published January 24, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 24

And you know why I do it? I need that help, too. I get tired, angry, upset, emotional, cranky, irritable, frustrated and I need to be reminded from time to time to choose to be the better version of myself. I don’t always succeed. But I want to. And I believe everyone else – for some reasonable statistical value of everyone else – fundamentally does, too.

~ Jeff Atwood, from To Serve Man, with Software

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He had me at the “to serve man” Twighlight Zone reference…

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Where we are

Published January 22, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 22

That’s where we are as a culture. We run desperately to abstraction and avoid action at all costs. Thoreau’s man of “quiet desperation” has never been so prevalent. The world is full of men who are “stuck” in life. There has been some mass paralysis. Modern man has forgotten how to take action.

~ Kyle Eschenroeder, from 10 Overlooked Truths About Taking Action

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Curious: My self-perception is that I too often charge ahead doing things. By which I mean, I should more often take some time to reflect, think-through, etc. I am frequently way off on a tangent doing something, which from the hind-sight of next year, was clearly not a good expenditure of my efforts.

Curiouser: Others tell me that I spend way too much time figuring out systems and trying to sort-out/plan every little detail of something. When what’s needed is to make a few steps forward.

Curiouser and curiouser: What if both of these ideas are perfectly correct/true?

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90 days out

Published January 21, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 21

Looking ninety days out, you have a good idea of what you can actually get done in that time frame, so your capacity estimations are about right and yet you can make some very substantial progress towards a big goal. It leads to moving faster without compromising strategy – being more agile. Having goals and visions for three or five years down the line is valuable, but it’s often not very helpful to try and plan out concrete steps—there’s just too much that has to get done which feels overwhelming and leads to inaction.

~ Taylor Pearson from, Why Successful People Plan Their Lives 90 Days at a Time

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I certainly find that if I spend a large amount of time planning way far out… that ends up never working out. For this year (2018) I’ve a few “visions” — some big picture things I’d like to work towards, but I’m trying to keep my plans/planning on a smaller scale. Makes it much easier to have daily successes too.

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A lifetime of successful training

Published January 20, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 20  ·  

This entry is part 64 of 72 in the series My Journey

I had to change my expectations of how much I trained because I was in that mindset, the more training, the better. You can’t do more intense training, so now I probably train, if you look at it, still, I train maybe four or five hours per day, but three of those hours or four of those hours are watching video, or reading books, and researching because I can do that without damaging my body or going too far. For me, it’s not saying, “Well, I guess I’ll never be this good. Well, I’m just not going to have the expectation that I can get on the mat and grind it out with the 20-year-olds for five hours a day.” That’s not going to happen.

~ Burton Richardson, from Show Notes

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If you don’t know who Burton Richardson is… uh, think: Direct student of Bruce Lee, and 30 years of training with many of the greatest martial artists in history. Also, zero ego.

This interview with the legendary Burton Richardson is life-changing. My pull-quote does not do this interview justice. This 45-minute interview contains an insane amount of insight into training and practice for the long-haul.

…yeah, how many hours a day do I train?

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Expecting nothing in return

Published January 19, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 19  ·  

It’s quite easily forgotten that it’s required that you respect yourself before you’re able to respect another. Because it’s always about respecting the other and getting respect from others. But how often is it the case that we are not respecting ourselves? I’ve been taught quit well that you can only give from your abundance. So if I’ve got 3 coins and somebody asks me to give them four coins I know I don’t have it. I only have three! Let’s say I need two for myself, then I’ve only one in abundance that I can actually share. The same goes for respect. If I don’t respect myself, there’s very little to give to others. If I do give — which most people do, they tend to give respect — it comes with expectations. You will expect something in return because you’re giving although you don’t have it. So you expect something in return because it hurts to give it away like that. You don’t give because of the joy of giving, of sharing. You’re kind of filling the bank with credit, and you think “ok, I want something in return.”

~ Paul Brand, from How to Improve Your Business with Change Management with Paul Brand

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I really do need to work on having respect for myself. My incessant internal monolog of, “Work harder! Work faster! Be better!”, turns out to be a brutal, abusive, destructive task-master.

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A telescopic view

Published January 17, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 17

It has been a difficult year — politically, personally. Through it all, I have found solace in taking a more telescopic view — not merely on the short human timescale of my own life, looking back on having lived through a Communist dictatorship and having seen poems composed and scientific advances made under such tyrannical circumstances, but on far vaster scales of space and time.

~ Maria Popova, from In Praise of the Telescopic Perspective

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Not sure what it is about this winter, but I’m finding it notably harder to knuckle-down and dig in to prepare for 2018. Normally, the dreary winter months are generally depressing, but it’s the sort of dreary that “cozy up with a good book by the fire (and maybe some good Scotch)” takes care of. But this winter. meh I’ve got a lot of sorting out to do yet for 2018.

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Decisions

Published January 16, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 16

If you want to achieve a goal you’ve set, the most crucial part is to DECIDE to manifest it. It doesn’t matter if you feel it’s outside your control to do so. It doesn’t matter if you can’t yet see how you’ll get from A to B. Most of those resources will come online AFTER you’ve made the decision, not before.

~ Steve Pavlina, from Cause-Effect vs. Intention-Manifestation

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Reaching my goals does NOT happen simply by my wishing for it. However, making a decision and visualizing the goal DOES get me on my way there. The more I believe, the more I push the boundaries, the more I explore while reaching for the vision, and the harder I work… the luckier I get.

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The ideal day

Published January 15, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 15  ·  

The ideal day is not one which is completely fixed — neither fixed-the-same every day, nor fixed-the-same week after week. The ideal day is one in which I know my goals at various levels– daily, weekly, yearly. etc.. A day where I feel no worry about making progress, because I know I’m making progress. A day where I am presented with challenges I feel that I have chosen. A day where I get to work on things which are interesting to me, and useful to others. A day where surprises are interesting and add value, (as opposed to causing me to react by feeling stress, panic and existential crises.)

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The King complex

Published January 14, 2018  ·  All posts on Jan 14  ·  

That’s the reason it’s difficult for many individuals to leave the internet — even for as little as a few hours in the evening, over a weekend, or on vacation. In short, the internet makes us feel like kings. It is the ultimate concierge.

~ Blake Snow, from Why the King Complex Makes the Internet So Hard to Put Down

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I’ve read a lot about how parts of the Internet are designed to hold your attention, how social media services are designed to beaddicting, and how using “game” theories can get everyone to want to interact more, and how all of that leads to a slippery slope. But this idea—thinking of how the Internet caters to your every whim, and why you then drool all over it to get more of that—this is a new twist I’d not seen before.

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