As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.
~ Oscar Wilde
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War is not wicked →
Causality →
Most obesity “experts” assume (erroneously) that the big equal sign between the blue and red terms implies a direction of causality. In other words, they assume that an increase in fat mass (the blue side gets bigger), was CAUSED by the red number being bigger than the green number.
~ Peter Attia from, Revisit the causality of obesity – Peter Attia
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Yes, physics always works. Yes, the First Law of Thermodynamics is always true. Yes, “calories in” always equals “calories out”. But that does not explain why we get fat. The equals-sign in the calories-in equals calories-out does not tell you anything about causality.
As with every single thing Peter Attia writes, you should go read this. Twice.
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Dying every minute →
Whenever I’m playing with my phone I am only shortening my life. A smartphone is useful if you have a specific thing you want to do, but ninety per cent of the time the thing I want to do is avoid doing something harder than surfing Reddit. During those minutes or hours, all I’m doing is dying.
~ David Cain, from 16 things I know are true but haven’t quite learned yet
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The whole article is full of great truths, many of which I feel comfortable saying I’ve learned. But on this one in particular I was guilty, until very recently.
About a year ago, I picked up the idea of clearing my phone’s home screen and re-learning to always use the search to explicitly launch the app I wanted. I also disabled all notifications and converted the phone into a tool which I use—the phone never uses me.
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No →
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I recently walked away from Facebook.
Was there some amount of value I was getting from Facebook? …certainly. Given that all things take up time, resources, and/or just space in my mind, what’s the cost-benefit analysis?
No.
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Something ineffable →
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Sometimes I stumble upon things like this—in this case, from Maria Papova—and I’m not quite sure what to do with them. There’s something to this which scratches at the back of my mind.
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Amos Rendao: Journaling, nutrition, and self talk →
What does it take to balance creative passion, personal growth, and professional responsibility while navigating life’s unpredictable journey?
Amos Rendao reflects on what music means to him, flowing vs planning, and the benefits and importance of journalling. The conversation turns to the idea of success and what that means, before moving to Aikido, and information activism. Amos shares his insights on diet and nutrition, his journey with injuries and recovery, and how he manages self talk.
Journaling is such an important way to develop a relationship with yourself.
~ Amos Rendao (49:50)
The conversation covers the relationship between creativity, self-reflection, and structured productivity. Amos reflects on his deep connection with music, sharing how his early experiences in bands shifted to a hiatus as parkour and business took priority. He revisits his passion through home recording, finding renewed joy in music’s restorative power. This leads to broader discussions on the interplay between freeform exploration and the necessity of structure, reflecting on how Amos balances spontaneity with highly organized systems to maximize productivity.
Amos and Craig explore the transformative impact of journaling as a tool for self-awareness and growth. They discuss the challenges of maintaining consistency in habits, diet, and personal health while navigating entrepreneurial and athletic commitments. The dialogue also touches on the influence of aikido in shaping their movement practice, drawing parallels between martial arts and parkour. The broader theme highlights how embracing both structured goals and open-ended exploration can lead to deeper personal insight and development.
Takeaways
Journaling – A powerful tool for developing self-awareness, tracking personal growth, and identifying patterns over time.
Creativity and Flow – Revisiting creative passions can restore mental health and balance, even after long hiatuses.
Structured Productivity – Building organized systems around sleep, diet, and time management can significantly enhance efficiency.
Freeform Exploration – Spontaneous, unstructured days can lead to valuable experiences and insights, balancing out rigid schedules.
Movement and Recovery – Insights into how parkour, aikido, and other movement practices contribute to long-term physical resilience and injury recovery.
Diet and Performance – Experimenting with diet, fasting, and biohacking to improve mental clarity and athletic performance.
Community and Connection – The importance of community involvement, both in local parkour initiatives and broader projects like USPK.
Resources
APEX School of Movement — A movement school co-founded by Amos Rendao focused on parkour education.
Parkour EDU — An educational platform designed to teach parkour principles and coaching techniques.
USPK (United States Parkour Association) — A national organization dedicated to promoting and supporting parkour communities in the US.
Oura Ring — A health tracking device used by Amos to monitor sleep and activity data.
Your Personal Paleo Code by Chris Kresser — A book and program recommended by Amos for dietary experimentation and self-optimization.
(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)
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Excellence is a habit →
We are what we repeatedly do, therefore, excellence is not an act but a habit
~ Aristotle
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Over-thinking it →
I just dropped a jar of salsa on the kitchen floor. How quickly can I agree that this is reality now? The reflexive internal discussion about what ought to be happening is usually an unwelcome distraction. It prevents acceptance. We should always be aiming for real-time acceptance of all developments, to the extent that it is possible.
~ David Cain, from Accept it whether you can change it or not
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Once you master that skill, the next pitfall is focusing too much on the future by over-thinking everything.
Broken jar of salsa? Easy. Takes a few minutes to clean it up. But . . .
Maybe I should move the refrigerator? …if I had room to open the door fully, I wouldn’t have dropped that. Maybe I should put cork flooring down in the kitchen? …that would greatly reduce breakage. What’s going to happen as I get old and physically less capable? I should develop the habit of placing my pinky finger under things like jars and glasses; When they slip, my pre-positioned finger gives me a much better grip. What if I reduced the amount of glass I have around; Buy more things in plastic? What if I could drastically reduce the number of things in the refrigerator?
Over-thinking things: That’s my current challenge.
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Horsemen →
When you recognize that it is actually impossible to do work tomorrow, then you know to stay with your work until something starts to take form. Today is the only day you can ever work, and once you see this truth, he is defeated.
~ David Cain, from The Four Horsemen of Procrastination (and how to defeat them)
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Is Burnout one of the Horsemen? Because that’s the one who defeats me every day.
If I could just convince myself that today was enough.
I’ve not the slightest idea what work-life balance is.
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Social network or social media? →
The Lesson: This first insight is in truly learning that social media is much more of a mindless habit — and a very strongly ingrained one — than a pleasurable or fulfilling activity. We do it out of compulsion rather than intention.
~ Brett McKay from, A 4-Week Social Media Fast & 4 Lessons From It | Art of Manliness
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Back when we invented all this online bru-ha-ha, they were called “social networks.” I think we should still be using the word network rather than media, because then it would remain clear: A healthy community necessarily has a network of people, but a network of people is not sufficient to create a healthy community.
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Look at that →
In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics looks so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”
~ Edgar Mitchell
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Lynn Jung: Training, recovery, and goals →
How does moving to Brighton and experiencing injury influence an athlete’s approach to training, recovery, and personal growth?
Lynn Jung discusses Brighton, what it means to her, and how moving there affected her life. She unpacks how she approaches training, her movement background, and her journey of injury and recovery over the past few years. Lynn shares how she came to freerunning, her current projects, and her involvement with Storm Freerun and xDubai.
Then I moved to England where I didn’t know anyone other than my boyfriend which I think is a very hard situation to be in because you don’t always just want to spend time with one person. You need to have a broader network of people which was hard to build up first.
~ Lynn Jung (13:30)
The conversation focuses on Lynn Jung’s experiences moving to Brighton and how it shaped her personal and professional life. She shares how the move initially brought challenges, such as building a social network and dealing with the absence of indoor Parkour facilities. Despite these hurdles, Brighton eventually became her home, supported by a community of Freerunners who shared her lifestyle.
Lynn also reflects on the impact of injury, describing her recovery process and the mental shift it required. She explains how her injury led her to explore other physical activities like yoga and diving, broadening her understanding of movement. Professionally, Lynn discusses her involvement with Storm Freerun, her commercial work, and plans to develop skills in filmmaking and photography. Throughout the conversation, she emphasizes the importance of community, resilience, and adaptability in navigating her athletic career.
Takeaways
Brighton as a training environment — The city lacks dedicated Parkour facilities, which initially frustrated her but later pushed her to diversify her training.
Injury and recovery process — Lynn faced a severe tibia fracture, prompting a two-year recovery that reshaped her relationship with movement and rest.
Building community — Moving to Brighton required Lynn to actively form connections and step outside her comfort zone, enriching her experience.
Role of Storm Freerun — Joining Storm Freerun significantly impacted her career, offering professional opportunities and strengthening friendships.
Emotional connection to Freerunning — Freerunning became a refuge after personal loss, highlighting its role in her healing and personal growth.
Resources
Storm Freerun — A professional Parkour team Lynn is part of, involved in projects and community building.
XDubai — A Dubai-based company sponsoring athletes and promoting action sports.
(Written with help from Chat-GPT.)
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Evaluating self-criticism →
The critic as an amateur hack | Seth’s Blog
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My first thought was that my worst critic is myself. It strikes me that Seth’s comments apply equally to the me-voice in my head. Criticising myself is literally zero-effort; Much easier even than someone posting a critical comment somewhere.
I’ve never been much for cheesy self-affirmations. (“I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.”) But I suspect weighting my self-criticism more in line with the effort required to make it would be useful.
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Were mistakes made? →
The biggest factor in getting something to go from hard to easy is normally exposure. The more you encounter something, the less intimidating it gets. Your emotional relationship changes. There’s less uncertainty, your skill in dealing with it improves, your resentment for it fades, your craving for ease or salvation disappears. It has become easy.
~ David Cain from, How to make hard things easy
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That is so obvious, yet it’s so worth repeating.
What lies outside your comfort zone? Growth.
Yes, there are other things beside growth, outside your comfort zone: Fear, danger, and mistakes, for example. Irrational fears you know you should work through. Danger you know you should avoid. But what about mistakes? When’s the last time you made a mistake?
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Are you self-aware →
The following is from Bruce Lee’s hand-written essay entitled, The Passionate State of Mind, which I discovered in the Artist of Life by J Little.
To become different from what we are, we must have some awareness of what we are. Whether being different results in dissimulation or a real change of heart—it cannot be realized without self-awareness. Yet is is remarkable that the very people who are most self-dissatisfied and crave most for a new identity have the least self-awareness. They have turned away from an unwanted self and hence never had a good look at it. The result is that those most dissatisfied can neither dissimulate nor attain a real change of heart. They are transparent, and their unwanted qualities persist through all attempts at self-dramatization and self-transformation.
~ Bruce Lee
I wish I had read that 20 years ago. But I suspect I wouldn’t have understood it the way I do now. I only understand because of the path I’ve taken through my life.
Bruce Lee was not an Exceptional Philosopher; Please stop quoting, “be water my friend,” as if it’s the ultimate grain of wisdom for the ages. Rather, I suggest that Bruce Lee was an Exceptional Person because he asked questions and he followed those lines of enquiry wherever they led, often inward into his thinking, beliefs and goals.
Are you self-aware enough to ask, “am I satisfied with myself?” and what are you going to do with the answer?
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Silence is sedition →
… I wasn’t surprised to read that nationwide survey by the Chicago Tribune in which half of the respondents said there should have been some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse and just as many said they “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic.”
~ Bill Moyers from, ‘Journalism Matters,’ March 30, 2000 | BillMoyers.com
Imagine: Free speech as sedition.
Tell your students: Silence is sedition.
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I am not a journalist.
Having read this article by an actual journalist, I am left wondering:
What did we abandon that seems to have killed—or if you feel inclined to be positive in your assessment—seems to be killing journalism?
I don’t think the journalists are gone. I don’t think real publications are gone. What is gone?
You stopped reading.
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Think for oneself →
A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.
~ Oscar Wilde
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Feeding the mind →
I wonder if there is such a thing in nature as a FAT MIND? I really think I have met with one or two: minds which could not keep up with the slowest trot in conversation; could not jump over a logical fence, to save their lives; always got stuck fast in a narrow argument; and, in short, were fit for nothing but to waddle helplessly through the world.
~ Lewis Carroll from, Feeding the Mind: Lewis Carroll’s Rules for a Fine Information Diet and Healthy Intellectual Digestion – The Marginalian
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What an interesting metaphor! Can a mind be overfed? Can a mind undergoing regular, additional exercise require more feeding? Are there different diets—composition of the nourishment, not strategies to lose weight—for the mind?
Am I the sort of person who takes seriously the specifics of nutrition and exercise of the mind?
What would “junk food” be for the mind? What would “comfort food” be for the mind? What’s the equivalent of quadrupedal movement for the mind? What would over-training be for the mind?
…and why do I have the urge to dump out the “cabinets” where I store my mind’s nourishment in order to reboot my mental diet?
No answers today. Only questions.
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The real challenge →
The challenge with on-boarding as with most investments in the humans at your company is proving a compelling and measurable return on that investment. Everyone agrees that on-boarding feels like a thing we should invest in, but isn’t the first priority building and selling a product?
~ Rands from, Everything Breaks – Rands in Repose
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The answer to that question, by the way, is, “No.”
Winning sports teams, and successful companies, focus on getting the small things right. Do this right. Do that right. Focus on doing the right thing now. The team’s season, and the company’s product, will take care of themselves.
Except for a leader. The team and the company need a leader with vision. It’s true that to build the best wall, you focus on laying this brick as best you can, and the result is the best wall. Except, someone had to determine where the wall was located. Someone had to determine what materials we’re building with. So we need the focus on doing things right, and we need a leader with vision.
The real challenge is to integrate the leadership vision with the team that’s doing things right.
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