Anecdotes vs Statistics

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Every now and then you hear a story of someone who was killed in a car accident because they were wearing a seatbelt. Perhaps the car went into the water, or caught on fire, and the person couldn’t escape in time because of the seatbelt. It’s awful, and if it happens to someone you know it can really make an impact on your beliefs.

The problem is when you use that horrible anecdote to convince others not to wear their seatbelt, despite decades of data showing that seatbelts make you orders of magnitude safer in an accident.

This issue of anecdotes goes far beyond seatbelts and can be equally problematic in other areas such as public health (particularly vaccines) and nutrition.

In a recent blog post from Seth Godin, he shared:

In issues of public health, how loudly do we hear anecdotal stories compared to how clearly are we presented with verifiable and relevant statistics?

Anecdotes can be very powerful, especially if they’re related to a situation with a family member or close friend, but keeping your eye on the statistics will almost certainly lead to better outcomes for everyone.

What is the desired outcome?

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I’ve shared a few times on here how good decisions can have bad outcomes, and vice-versa, but that only really counts if you know what your desired outcome is. In that post above, the desired outcome was clear — the Seahawks wanted to score a touchdown. At other times, though, the outcome can be a bit foggier.

Take this blog for example. I’ve written every day for a bit over 1300 days, and I’ve explained why I’m doing it, but it’s still a very difficult outcome to measure. To paraphrase myself from four years ago, “I’m writing these posts to help me think more and to sharpen my thought”. I think it’s been successful, but it’s nearly impossible to measure.

Outcomes = goals?

Is a desired outcome essentially the same as a stated goal? I think so, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. If they are quite similar, though, that explains my lack of a clear desired outcome. I’ve shared that I’m beginning to shy away from goal-setting, replacing the goals with processes. If I can write consistently, record videos consistently, work out consistently, etc, those areas of my life should continually improve.

I don’t have a specified outcome from any of those tasks, but if I stay consistent with my efforts the outcomes will reveal themselves to me.

6: What is an unusual habit or absurd thing that you love?

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Today we’re on the sixth question that Tim Ferriss asked people in his book “Tribe of Mentors” (you can see all of the questions here):

What is an unusual habit or an absurd thing that you love?

Of the 11 questions that he asked, there were only two that I didn’t find anything highlight worthy — #2 (Purchases of $100 or less) and this one.

As I thought about the answer for myself, I tried to come up with something useful. However, reading Robert’s thoughts on this one (“For a while, I always skipped the last step when walking on a staircase — up or down.“), I realized that wasn’t the point of the question. It was simply looking for something unusual or absurd.

I decided that working out almost everyday in VR (via Supernatural, which I shared a few years ago) probably counts. How many people do you know that spend 30-60 minutes in VR pretty much every day? That’s unusual, for sure.

In my time in Supernatural so far I’ve racked up just over 500,000 points. There are people with much more than that, but it’s still a pretty big number. A typical song earns roughly 100 points, so that means I’ve worked out to roughly 5,000 songs in the headset! That’s quite unusual and absurd. 🙂

What’s an unusual or absurd habit that you have?

Why We Sleep

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I just finished the book “Why We Sleep“, and while there weren’t any stunning findings in there, there were a lot of little things that I never knew before.

I’ve always considered sleep to be a “let your body rest, and your mind does some REM stuff too”, but it turns out the mind part of things (with both REM and NREM) are vitally important. The book makes the case that sleep is the most important thing you can do for your health, and it shares this great paragraph:

“AMAZING BREAKTHROUGH! Scientists have discovered a revolutionary new treatment that makes you live longer. It enhances your memory and makes you more creative. It makes you look more attractive. It keeps you slim and lowers food cravings. It protects you from cancer and dementia. It wards off colds and the flu. It lowers your risk of heart attacks and stroke, not to mention diabetes. You’ll even feel happier, less depressed, and less anxious. Are you interested?”

Health

In terms of health, these two statements sum up much of it:

“Routinely sleeping less than six or seven hours a night demolishes your immune system, more than doubling your risk of cancer.”

“Adults forty-five years or older who sleep fewer than six hours a night are 200 percent more likely to have a heart attack or stroke during their lifetime, as compared with those sleeping seven to eight hours a night.”

Caffeine

While I’ve largely given up caffeine in my life, I’ve never really understood how it works. One big thing that caffeine does is to simply block the adenosine in your body (the “sleepiness chemical”), but it doesn’t get rid of it — it just holds it back for a while. From the book:

“For the entire time that caffeine is in your system, the sleepiness chemical it blocks (adenosine) nevertheless continues to build up. Your brain is not aware of this rising tide of sleep-encouraging adenosine, however, because the wall of caffeine you’ve created is holding it back from your perception. But once your liver dismantles that barricade of caffeine, you feel a vicious backlash: you are hit with the sleepiness you had experienced two or three hours ago before you drank that cup of coffee plus all the extra adenosine that has accumulated in the hours in between, impatiently waiting for caffeine to leave.”

Older Adults

Older adults tend to sleep less than younger adults, because they don’t need as much sleep, right? Nope.

“That older adults simply need less sleep is a myth. Older adults appear to need just as much sleep as they do in midlife, but are simply less able to generate that (still necessary) sleep.”

ADHD

According to the author, more than half of ADHD cases in children are really just issues of lack of sleep.

“We estimate that more than 50 percent of all children with an ADHD diagnosis actually have a sleep disorder, yet a small fraction know of their sleep condition and its ramifications. A major public health awareness campaign by governments—perhaps without influence from pharmaceutical lobbying groups—is needed on this issue.”

You get used to not sleeping enough, and that’s not a good thing

I’ll leave us with this one. People that lack enough sleep will have issues with energy and alertness, but over time you get used to living that way. A bit more sleep could make a huge difference to so many of us!

“Similarly problematic is baseline resetting. With chronic sleep restriction over months or years, an individual will actually acclimate to their impaired performance, lower alertness, and reduced energy levels. That low-level exhaustion becomes their accepted norm, or baseline. Individuals fail to recognize how their perennial state of sleep deficiency has come to compromise their mental aptitude and physical vitality, including the slow accumulation of ill health.”

It’s a fantastic book and I encourage you to check it out. If you’ve already read it, what are some of the things that stood out to you?

Emulating the values of Charlie Munger

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I finally finished reading “Poor Charlie’s Almanack” (which I first mentioned last month) and it was fantastic. I’ve heard a lot about Charlie Munger over the years, but the depth of this book was amazing.

The book technically wasn’t written by Charlie, but it was his full of his content — text of talks and speeches that he gave over the years, with additional snippets from Charlie and others to frame up the talks. This post is about part of the intro to the book, where it was explained as follows:

The quotes, talks, and speeches presented here are rooted in the old-fashioned Midwestern values for which Charlie has become known: lifelong learning, intellectual curiosity, sobriety, avoidance of envy and resentment, reliability, learning from the mistakes of others, perseverance, objectivity, willingness to test one’s own beliefs, and many more.

That list of values is something that most everyone should strive to follow. Among other things, this blog is intended to help me with a few of those items, and the others are something that I continue to work toward.

Throughout the book Charlie talks much about sobriety, which follows a thought I’ve been chewing on lately in trying to figure out why things like alcohol are so popular. I don’t begrudge someone drinking casually, assuming they can keep it under control, but the downsides just seem too large to ignore. If nothing else, alcohol will cost money, add calories, and make you feel little rough the next day. Taken further, of course, it can lead to devastating consequences. Charlie addresses it (among other things) with:

One should stay far away from any conduct at all likely to drift into chemical dependency. Even a small chance of suffering so great a damage should be avoided.

I know a handful of people who have had very serious issues with alcohol, and Charlie’s take is one that most would agree with — avoiding starting is much easier than quitting later.

I’m pleased that his list of values presented in the book match the values that I already strive for, but they also make me realize how far I have to go. Let’s keep going.

How long to recover?

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When reading the book “Effortless” by Greg McKeown, he made a big push toward encouraging us to take small steps. It’s not unlike what I’ve talked about before with One Percent Can Make a Huge Difference, but he took it a bit further, saying:

“Do not do more today than you can completely recover from today. Do not do more this week than you can completely recover from this week.”

While I appreciate the sentiment, I’m not sure it’s always true. I find that there are times in life when it’s worth pushing harder, knowing you’ll need a few days to recover.

This can be true in a variety of ways, but is likely most true in exercise. If people followed McKeown’s advice when it came to running, no one would be able to run for the first time. If you’ve not run in a long time, even an easy mile will make you quite sore the next day. That’s expected and ok, and you just need to take a few days to recover.

Similarly, there are times when I know I won’t be able to get any writing done for a while (perhaps on a family vacation), so I’ll push very hard to get plenty done before we go. It’ll wear me out on writing, but I know I have extra time to recover.

I agree with McKeown’s overall point that we shouldn’t push ourselves to the point of total burnout, but I think it’s fine (and sometimes ideal) to push to a point where you’ll need a few days to recover. If you take everything too slow and gradual, you may never get where you want to go.

My favorite Supernatural workouts

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I mentioned back in May that I was really enjoying the Supernatural VR app for workouts, and I haven’t slowed down. Since that time I’ve done 270 separate workouts, with each one lasting around 15-20 minutes. They have roughly 800 workouts available right now, with more added every day, but I tend to gravitate back to some of them more than others.

If you’re not familiar with it, here’s a quick promo video they put out:

While I generally lean toward workouts where I already know the songs pretty well, and I certainly enjoy those, my favorites somehow end up being ones with less-familiar songs.

The last few weeks have been more Holiday focused (they have a great one with six songs from the Trans-Siberian Orchestra, and another with a eight selections from The Nutcracker), but these are two of my typical favorites.

Y2K Babyyy “Take Up Space” – 25:16

  • Daft Punk Is Playing At My House (Warmup) – LCD Soundsystem
  • Praise You – Fatboy Slim
  • 19-2000 (Soulchild Remix) – Gorillaz
  • I Like The Way – Bodyrockers
  • Go (Radio Edit) – The Chemical Brothers
  • The Rockafeller Skank – Fatboy Slim

Just Dance “It’s Going Down” – 22:44

  • Good Time (feat. Pitbull) (Warmup) – Inna
  • GDFR (feat. Sage the Gemini & Lookas) – Flo Rida
  • Thrift Shop – Macklemore
  • Hot-n-Fun – N.E.R.D.
  • Hangover (feat. Flo Rida) – Taio Cruz
  • Scream & Shout (feat. Britney Spears) – will.i.am

Both start with pretty tough songs (Praise You is quite long, and GDFR has some very tough mapping) and make for some sore muscles!

While Supernatural doesn’t give you a good way to look at the song selections unless you have a VR heatset or use their mobile app, you can find the full list of all 1400 songs and 800 workouts in this great Airtable document that was created by Kam Kuo and Janene Pappas-Mccrillis.

Within, the company behind Supernatural, is also much larger than I expected. They’ve raised over $50M so far, and were recently acquired by Meta for an undisclosed amount. That surprised me, but it explains how they’ve been able to license so much music and produce this huge number of workouts. I love it.

As before, the tricky part with Supernatural is pricing. The app costs $19/mo, but you also need to have a $299 headset to use it. Compared to apps like Peloton and others, it’s not too bad, but coming up with $300 just for the hardware can be a tough place to start. If you have a chance, though, give it a try. I wasn’t sure that I’d still be going strong after seven months and 270 sessions, but here I am.

If you use Supernatural, what are some of your favorite workouts?

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All-nighters are for people who don’t know how to plan

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There are times when most everyone has needed to pull an all-nighter at one point or another. However, if you have to do it regularly it’s a sign of poor planning.

In a recent post, Ryan Holiday summed it up nicely:

Sleep is one of the most important parts of my work routine, period. All-nighters are for people who don’t know how to plan, who put things off to the last minute.

Getting a solid amount of sleep, every night, is one of the best things you can do for your productivity. Getting the right amount of sleep requires a wildly different approach for different people, but it’s something you can work into your schedule.

His post goes a bit deeper, and the main focus is that “the perfect day begins with a good evening”. If you can create a solid evening routine, including a consistent bedtime, your mornings will almost always be better.

On the other hand, if you find yourself having to pull an all-nighter, it’s either a very rare circumstance or a lack of planning to blame for it.

Balance in any given day is overrated

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Balance in life is always important.

Balance between exercise and rest.

Balance between work and play.

Balance in eating and sleeping.

However, none of that means that every single day should balance out perfectly. Consistency is worth a lot, but looking at balance across your life in terms of weeks or months is often more important (and easier to achieve) than perfect balance every day.

Ben Wilson dug into this related to Thomas Edison in his fantastic “How to take over the world” podcast. Edison frequently took things too far, but was famous for being a workaholic and then relaxing for weeks at a time on vacation to recharge.

A similar example is Yuval Noah Harari, author of the excellent book “Sapiens” (as well as a few others), who finds time to dig in and write incredible and detailed books while also taking a 60-day silent retreat each year.

Daily can help

On the flip side, some daily habits can be helpful. Take this blog, for example. Until about a year ago, I tried to blog “a few times a week”. The archives don’t lie, and in the four months before I started publishing daily (mid-June to mid-October of 2020), I published a total of two posts. That’s not anywhere near “a few times a week”, but I’ve kept up the daily habit for over 300 days in a row now.

I had a recent conversation with a friend about exercise that covered a similar concept. During the conversation, we discussed a mutual friend that exercised 3x weekly, very consistently. We were impressed by that, as neither of us could do that consistently (a “few times per week” turned out closer to zero) — we’ve both moved to exercising daily in order to stay consistent and it works for us.

Plan for extended balance

I think the best example I see of this is with Ali, my business partner at GreenMellen. With her young children she’s currently part-time right now, working Tuesday-Thursday, which quickly lends itself to some degree of weekly balance. Even within that, though, she does a great job of doing intentional things such as working late hours some days so she can help out at her daughter’s school the next day. She doesn’t let it happen by chance, but through what she calls “scheduled variety”. She looks at her entire week at a glance, and plans for the week to include a great deal of balance, even if individual days don’t.

Balance is something to always be working on, but taking a wider look at it can make it much less intimidating, particularly in certain phases of your life.

Zwifting along

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I’m sharing this largely because I wish I had known about it a few years ago, so maybe I can save someone else from that.

In short, Zwift is an app that puts you in a virtual world connected to your treadmill or your stationary bike. It’s kind of like being in “Second Life”, in a virtual world with virtual characters.

There are various ways to watch it while you run, but I just run it from my iPad and the iPad sits on my treadmill.

Here’s a promo video they made for it when it first launched in 2015 (when it was only for cycling):

A few things make it pretty neat:

Matched Speed: It can connect to your treadmill (or you can buy sensors if you have an older treadmill) and your character in the game paces at exactly your speed. With that, you can move through the world and it’ll track your pace, distance, etc.

Real people: While you’re exercising, the world is filled with other real people in the app at the same time. Zwift started as a biking app, so there are more bikes than runners, but having all of these people moving around helps to bring the world to life. They even do events like virtual 5K races at specific times, and you’ll see a bunch of virtual people lined up at the starting line.

Training plans: They have a few training plans to help get you started. They’ll tell you when to speed up, when to slow down, and encourage you as you go. It seems that they don’t have very many, but it’s a great way to help get started.

Gamification: As you exercise more, you earn points and levels and the kinds of things you get from a game. I don’t fully understand this yet, but I’m earning a lot of points!

All of that said, it doesn’t do much — just watching your character run can get boring after a while, even with the goodies I mentioned above. That’s ok, though. While the game has some ambient sounds, it doesn’t make much noise. As a result, you can still listen to music/books or watch TV while you work out, but have the added bonus of an interactive world in front of you instead of an LCD panel that is always creeping to higher numbers. 🙂

If you have a treadmill or stationary bike that you work out with, give Zwift a try. They have a seven day trial to play with it, and then it’s $15/mo after that.