Learn Everyday

“Prevention is better than cure”. This is an old adage but we are obsessed with problem solving rather than problem prevention. Why? Because that is more sexy. But a good leader is someone who steers the ship around an iceberg than hitting it. Yet we make a hero out of the person who, after hitting the ship in the iceberg puts his life on the line and saves all the passengers. We should be careful of this ‘Herosim bias’.

When you are writing a document, be aware that your readers will have a multitude of thoughts in their mind when starting to read your document. You have to entice them to concentrate on your document. So the challenge is to first bring them there — make them stand where you are and then take them through your ideas. Narrating a story format or SCQA format helps. (From ‘The Pyramid principle’)

There are 2 parts to us — experiencing self and remembering self. Remembering self is error prone — we only remember certain peaks of the experience — not the whole experience. While experiencing self does not remember much. That is why we value brief intense pleasures instead of quiet lasting joys. e.g. bungee jumping over long hikes. Youtube videos over reading a book. We need to decide whether to enjoy the present (which will be forgotten) or live for a future photo album.

Courtesy the Tim Ferris Podcast , learnt about a new form of exercise. Can be done anywhere without any equipment. It helps improve your posture, your shins, makes the leg muscles stronger, specially around the knee joint. It also improves your balance. This is how you can do it .

When we compare our lives with others, we focus on only certain aspects — like they have a fancy car or a fancy house. Would you be willing to swap complete lives with that person? Take all their problems too? We find it immensely difficult to view our current situation through a ultra wide lens. Otherwise we wouldn’t get upset about trivialities.

Learnt this from yet another p odcast of the Huberman Lab . The key takeaway for me was that in order to maintain good overall health, your eating habits should coincide with the Circadian rhythm. In simple words, eat between a set time interval during the day and keep that time interval around 10–12 hours. So for example, your first meal is at 8AM, then your last meal should be between 6–8 PM. This along with calorie deficit (i.e. Calorie in < calorie Out) will have long term health benefits.

"Professionals stick to the schedule. Amateurs let life come in the way". We need to stick to the habit complete it irrespective of the circumstances/Mood etc. At some point it comes dow to who can hanle the boredom. Hence the greatest threat tot he success is not failure but boredom. Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It is the ability to keep going when work isnt exciting that makes the difference. (from Atomic habits)

Learnt this today from the Huberman Labs podcast . This is about why we need both Oxygen and Carbon Dioxide. So when we breathe, the oxygen gets into our lungs. From there, it gets stuck to Hemoglobin which is then responsible to take it to the various tissues or organs that need oxygen. Now Hemoglobin acts like a cage. It jails the oxygen inside this cage before transporting it. To release the oxygen from this cage, our body needs carbon-dioxide. It is the CO2 which releases the oxygen at the time of need. That is why it is important to have a balanced breathing!

This one comes from the book — Gut. Found it very informative and enjoyable. We have all had “rumbling tummies” where our tummies make that strange sound. Since childhood, we have known that it means you are hungry. Why is that? Rumbling tummies (or Migrating motor complex) is a process which starts after your food has been passed on from your stomach to small intestine and digested. Still there are some ‘leftovers’ left in the stomach or small intestine which are tough to break down by the gastric juices and digest — e.g. a chewing gum you swallowed by mistake, unchewed corn kernel etc. To clean this up, after the digestion of normal food is complete, this migrating motor complex kicks in and in a big sweep takes all these leftovers through the small intestine. This is what makes the rumbling tummy sound.

Immediately after every lecture, meeting, or a significant experience, tak 30 seconds to write down the most important points of that discussion. Bullet Journaling is one way to do it (if you like to write things down). Else multiple note taking apps can help in this.