I really thought this was a moth. Turns out it’s a member of the Cynthia Group.
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Painted lady →
Root of modern disease? →
… 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
~ Dr. J Sonnenburg from, Is a Disrupted Gut Microbiome at the Root of Modern Disease?
super-organism. And we can’t forget about the microbes because they’re really an important part of our biology.
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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 →
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 →
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 →
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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The life in your years →
And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
~ Abraham Lincoln
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Do calories matter? →
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?”
~ Peter Attia, from «http://eatingacademy.com/nutrition/do-calories-matter»
…
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.
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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 Déplacement, 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 →
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 →
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 →
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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