artpi

Health, Productivity, Staying Sane, Working from home

The optimal human performance formula: the basics

Good news: Scientists have discovered a simple, effective trick to reach your optimal performance and be the smartest human you can be.

Bad news: You’re not gonna do it.

Here is the trick:

Breathe deep,
Drink more water,
Sleep 8 hours every night
Eat more vegetables,
Move your ass
Go outside

For optimal results, do it every day.

I am sure I am not blowing your mind with novel insight.

You probably are aware that air, water, sleep, and exercise are important. But because these are such basics, we tend to discount them. They are not newsworthy, they won’t make the headlines, and they don’t help you delude yourself that „this time will be different, because you have one more magic trick up your sleeve.”

You probably have heard those points before, but you have a list of concerns and cannot deal with a yet-another morning routine that will take your precious time away from you.

But there is more good news: taking care of these basics seriously will have an immediate effect on your to-do list.

“Energy, not time, is the fundamental currency of high performance.”
Power of Full Engagement

In a best-selling book „Power of Full Engagement”, Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz have listed 4 sources of energy that can fuel your attention, performance, and productivity:

physical
emotional
mental
spiritual

And your „Biggest Bang for the Buck” is the physical level by far – it is the cornerstone of the other ones. Unfortunately, Humanity has a fascinating ability to forget important lessons.

Breathing

Physical energy is derived from the interaction between oxygen and glucose.
„Surely I know how to breathe!” You may think to yourself.
If you feel constant anxiety or are low-key stressed all the time, here me out: you may be breathing incorrectly. Shallow breathing can very often influence your mood, focus and energy levels. Throughout our evolution, we would shallow breathe only when there is danger, or we have to chase after prey.
So guess what? Your body is releasing cortisol based on your crappy breathing.
But you are sitting in front of your laptop, doing none of those things and yet getting stressed like your life depends on it.
Proper breathing:

Your arms are back
Your belly sticks out while you are breathing (that is the diaphragm)
Air goes in through your nose
Inhale is at least 3-4 seconds

Watch this video of two navy seals explaining how to breathe:

A sidenote about your laptop/smartphone:

When you are sitting in front of a laptop or holding your smartphone with two hands, you are constricting your lungs.

Your arms get close together, closing your chest and lungs
Your head is down, constricting the air canals
This position is similar to how you would hide from a predator, prompting your body to release cortisol

Homework:

Watch the navy seal video
Set a timer in your phone for every 3 hours that says “breathe”
If you work on your laptop, buy a keyboard and a monitor.

Drinking Water

Drinking water, we have found, is perhaps the most undervalued source of physical energy renewal.
Power of Full Engagement

Your body has lots of water, chances are you know that. But if you are like me, you probably keep putting other stuff in it, like:

Coke
Coffee
Tea

Even though they contain it, none of those things ARE water.

They have much lower PH (they are acidic), which means your body has to work hard to filter them before the water content can be used in metabolic processes.

On top of that, beverages tend to flush out the essential salts ( Magnesium, Calcium, Potassium ) out of the body. All of these elements are needed to keep your brain spinning to ingest my insightful blog posts.

A study published in “Frontiers in Human Neuroscience” has found evidence that drinking water improves cognitive performance in both children and adults. Hydration for health is collecting empirical evidence for the many benefits of just drinking water.

Homework:

Buy a water bottle and put it by your computer
Put a post-it on it that says „Drink Me.”
Drink whenever you feel foggy

Sleeping

Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.
Brain rules

I am writing this for you as much as I do it for my own benefit. Every once in a while, I will get deep into a fun automation project – a book, or a new Netflix series and realize that it’s 3 am already.

The next day is totally wasted and I promise to never repeat that mistake until the next time. Goddamnit, Artur!!

Yes, you need 8 hours of sleep.
You are not as productive at 10 pm as you thought
Go to bed

Arianna Huffington, the founder of HuffPost has decided to devote her entire career to promoting sleep and in this TED Talk, she explains why:

Homework:

Set an alarm that says „Go to sleep” at, say 21:45
Go to sleep when the alarm rings

Moving your Ass

Physical activity is cognitive candy. Civilization, while giving us such seemingly forward advances as modern medicine and spatulas, also has had a nasty side effect. It gives us more opportunities to sit on our butts.
Brain rules

Apart from the countless evidence that exercising keeps your body healthy, it also helps you think.
Read more about Ass-Shaking here
Exercise gets blood to your brain, bringing it glucose for energy and oxygen to soak up the toxic electrons that are left over. It also stimulates the protein that keeps neurons connecting.

Homework:

When you wake up, go for a fast walk, every day for a week. Just try it.
Report back

Basics are your key to success

We search for “advanced tricks” and “pro tips” in a vain effort to save ourselves time and effort on the basics.

The harsh reality is that mastering the basics is the real “trick”. We gloss over them, because they are intellectually simple. Yet simple is not easy and it takes practice to engrain proper habits and foundations.

Maybe someday I will. Until them, I’ll keep having to remind myself to drink more water and move once in a while.

Uncategorized

“Well, we have to measure something.”, And the perils of metrics.

“What gets measured, gets managed,”
Peter Drucker famously said.

The sentiment makes sense. If we are not looking at a compass, how can we know if we are going in the right direction? How can we keep ourselves honest, and how can we course-correct?

Thanks to the culture of metrics, in 2019 Amazon has surpassed Apple as the most valuable company on the face of the planet.
Indeed, what gets measured, gets managed, but at the expense of everything else. Less famously, Drucker said

Working on the right things is what makes knowledge work effective. This is not capable of being measured by any of the yardsticks for manual work.

It is very human to want a put significant round number, so we can judge it’s value. We like explicit situations, and a moral gray area is always unwelcome. Your score is 73rd percentile, and eating meat on a Friday is a sin. At least that is clear.

But life is more complicated and nuanced. It is somehow tough to measure the desired outcome accurately. So we defer to measuring the closest thing that is easy to gauge. Can’t hurt, right? At least we’re in the ballpark.

Well, it can.

In 1956 V. F. Ridgway has pioneered an area called “Dysfunctional Consequences of Performance Measurements.” In the first study of such kind (and the one that gave the name to the whole genre), a systematic analysis of the quantitative measurements in the governmental sector and found multiple examples of it going terribly wrong.

(Quantitative is a fancy term for something that has a number.)

“Indiscriminate use ( of quantitative measures) may result in side effects and reactions outweighing the benefits.”

It boils down to the fact that unlike scientifical phenomena, organizations, markets, and people are really complex. By creating simplistic representations, we leave uncomfortable stuff out, ending up with a perfect model for a world that does not exist. We develop synthetic metrics to gauge “the best we can” and start to measure the progress against that number.

As phrased in “Goodhart’s law“, once you make that artificial number your target, it stops being a useful metric. Everybody in the organization will now realign their priorities in order to “bump” the number. With no regard to how that translates into the bottom line.

As pictured by sketchplanations above, as a nail-making company, you want to make a lot of customers happy with your nails (a noble cause indeed). But if you are sloppy with your metric-choosing, you can get the opposite effect,
Let’s imagine you are trying to measure the output of support employees. If you make them answer the most support tickets, they will try to hit that number at the expense of actually helping the customer, or even worse – making the customer come back a few times with the same problem.
If you’re a private doctor trying to avoid lawsuits (like in the USA), you will order unnecessary expensive tests to ensure legal defense. Conversely, when incentivized to curb spending (like in Poland), you will try to guess the diagnosis to avoid costly tests.

Jerry Muller, the author of “The Tyranny of Metrics,” coined the term Metrics Fixation, which is where you replace judgment with numeric indicators.

The most characteristic feature of metric fixation is the aspiration to replace judgment based on experience with standardized measurement.
Jerry Muller

In a frantic search for performance metrics, we often grab the number that is easiest to gauge, ignoring that “Not everything that matters is measurable and not everything that’s measurable matters” (Jerry Muller).

Metrics fixation not only punishes the organization by delivering unexpected outcomes and lower performance. I would argue that it is one of the most significant risks the modern world faces today.

Broad societal problems with metrics.

1. The educational system.

Public Education is, of course, a lofty goal and a massive achievement of our civilization. It is intended to teach young people a habit of life-long learning, open their minds, and realize their full potential. But the education system has a metric: grades.

The entire school experience is designed to be measurable, controlled, and spoon-fed. You cannot take a long time getting to know algebra because it would be unfair to your fellow test-takers. You cannot skip ahead because the class is not moving at your pace. And in effect, children learn one lesson the most: Learning is not fun.

When students cheat on exams, it’s because our school system values grades more than Students value learning.
Neil deGrasse Tyson

2. Economy and finance.

Shockingly, economists and investors are not judged by the performance of their models in real markets! They are not eager to wait decades to validate a model, so they pick metrics easier to measure – testing the hypothesis on synthetic data, ending up with a perfect model for an ideal world.

If you are a passenger on a plane and the pilot tells you he has a faulty map, you get off the plane; you don’t stay and say “well, there is nothing better.” But in economics, particularly finance, they keep teaching these models on grounds that “there is nothing better,” causing harmful risk-taking. Why? Because the professors don’t bear the harm of the models.
Colorful Nassim Taleb, best-selling author of Incerto, on Economy.

3. Artificial intelligence

Unintended consequences of metrics is the core reason why Elon Musk thinks artificial intelligence is the biggest threat to the human race.

The biggest problem with AI is not that it will become wary of us giving it orders and decides to wipe us out on a whim. This is exemplified in the canonical thought experiment called the paperclip maximizer. Nick Bostrom shows us that artificial general intelligence, presented by a single metric ( number of paper clips produced ), designed competently and without malice, could ultimately destroy humanity.

OK, I GET IT! But what else can we do? Should we fly blind?

Of course not!

Measuring is still the best way to keep you honest and on track. If you measure against real, tangible goals like revenue – it will help you achieve them.

But it’s hard to find those goals in other areas. If your goal is to “be healthy,” should you aim for lower weight? Body Fat percentage? VO2Max (the amount of oxygen you can consume in the unit of time)? Your maximum bench press weight?

Every single one of those numbers represents an opinionated model, and those models are in odds with each other. If you go to 10 different doctors, you will probably get 11 different answers. And each one will not be focused on you but their pet model of the world.

But you know what a great model of reality is? Real-world. It is not entirely measurable, it’s not an exact number, but it’s real. If you want to feel great, then you can use what “Qualitative” measuring is – your answer to the question “do I feel great”

If your goal is to learn a foreign language, then ask yourself the question, “did I just have a meaningful conversation in a foreign language.”
If you want to hire a great employee, don’t judge them by the diploma. Give them a trial project and see how they work, interact with colleagues, and further the real goals of your organization.

People have a natural drive to do a good job and demonstrate autonomy, mastery, and purpose. It has been proven over and over again that intrinsic is the only motivation that makes sense long-term It has also been proved, that when you introduce extrinsic one (this one big metric, higher salary, more pocket money for doing house chores), the intrinsic motivation will vanish, and your employees will stop trying to further your agenda under the singular guidance of the all-important metric.

The more a quantitative metric is visible and used to make crucial decisions, the more it will be gamed—which will distort and corrupt the exact processes it was meant to monitor.
An adaption of Campbell’s Law

Instead of putting a round number on the wall, create an organization where you can trust your people to do the right thing. At least until the advent of Artificial Intelligence.

Career, Learning

The lazy way to being outstanding: go after hard things.

When Peter Diamandis stood under the arch of Saint Louis, with 20 astronauts behind him, he announced a 10-million dollar prize for developing commercial space flight.

*15 years later:* *Musk, Venter, Cameron and Diamandis on X PRIZE Microgravity Flight.*

The prize was called X-Prize because he did not have that money, nor did he know where it could come from. X stood for the name of foundation or individual that would finance this.

And yet, without the money, without really means to pull it off, X-Prize has renewed the interest in developing the commercial space flight industry and sparked the imagination of other entrepreneurs.

I urge you do do the same in your organization.

Doing the hard things is both the best thing for the company, for you and counterintuitively – your lifestyle.

Corporate environments and more established companies tend to be risk-averse. Everyone tries to be in the middle – do a little more than enough to be considered a good employee.

But surely in your workplace, there is a couple of things to tackle that are considered too hard, way out there, maybe not now. It is my long-standing career strategy to go after those things with guns blazing.

It’s possible because of Super-Credibility.

Peter Diamandis says his stunt was only possible because he used Super-Credibility. He tackled a venture so outrageous, bold, and out there, that people stopped evaluating it in terms of logic.

This bold claim jumped over the usual evaluation straight to emotion. People wanted it to happen, so they believed it without a proof.

Warning: this is a mechanism that can-and-is used for evil as well. Please don’t be a fake news jerk.

You can use super-credibility at work without rebuilding one of the toughest industries in the world like space transportation.

When you tackle something considered extraordinarily hard at work:

Everybody knows your attempt is outrageous,
People like to see outrageous endeavors succeed,
Focus helps you judge what is essential and what is not,
It’s a bullshit remover. And bullshit is one of the biggest momentum killers out there.

Sign up to get Deliberate Internet straight to your inbox

I write about the psychological and technical aspects of the Internet, focusing on remote work, online economy, and cognitive load. Every monday.

[mailerlite_form form_id=3]

It’s easier than you expect

Imagine you are just joining a team that has a hard problem to solve. When you ask about the Elephant in the room, you usually get:

This is just the way things are
This part is just too hard.
We tried once, and it ended badly.

The original decision to not touch the Elephant may have been not as clear, but as any great story, it grows in myths and legends.

With every new teammate, the story is retold and how it usually is with humans, gets more exciting because:

This is how human memory and tales work. Yes, the fish was thiiiiis big.
The current team has to justify – in front of you and each other – why they didn’t tackle this problem yet. To reduce cognitive dissonance, if they haven’t addressed it – it must have been too hard.

And that is not only the perception – when you are working against or around a particular piece of code or business process, you are introducing cancer growth processes – something that should not be there but is contributing to the state of brokenness.

But the Elephant in the room is much, much smaller than previously thought. His most threatening quality is that he is unknown, fuzzy – a maverick.

Why you are providing massive value

According to Ray Dalio (the most successful hedge-fund manager currently), the simplified way to solve any problem goes as follows:

Identify the problems in front of goals
Solve /work around problems
Repeat

When you have an untouchable problem, people will work on other stuff. The problem is that sometimes the “Elephant” will be a prerequisite to solving other tasks.

In the ideal world, the organization would throw significant resources at this issue, because solving it will unlock tremendous value. But resources are people – often the same people who have repeated for a long while that this cannot be tackled. Doing the thing now will hurt their egos.

Good people get sometimes emotionally invested in issues being unsolved.

So when you actually take the Elephant out of the bottle, you unlock all this fantastic realm of possibility. When a company does that, we call it disruption. The whole industry is changed because bottled-up ideas are now reachable.

Benefits to you

I value my quality of life. The hardest problems are interesting, but I do not want to work crazy hours or sacrifice my happiness on the altar of the company’s bottom line.

And yet, taming elephants has become my go-to strategy for more leeway and a happier work environment.

As previously mentioned, super-credibility is a bullshit remover. You get VIP passes to get around conventional processes – aka “bureaucracy.” ( Sidenote about Bullshit: I recommend “Life is too short” essay by Paul Graham ).

People are used to ignoring the Elephant. It’s quiet near him, no micromanagement, a lot of autonomy and space to work.
When you have a huge, audacious goal in front of you, it’s tough to wander and lose motivation.
Procrastination is your brain refusing to waste resources on your lack of decision. Without this uncertainty, your productivity is easily 10x.

In his New York Times bestseller Drive, Daniel Pink describes what motivates us:

Autonomy
Mastery
Purpose

Read about Daniel’s ideas on the fantastic fs.blog

All of these three things are immediately given to you once you volunteer to take the Elephant out for a walk.

Accelerated learning

Continuing to support my point with famous New-York-Times bestselling authors, I’ll touch upon Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers.

Trying to dissect the story behind success, Gladwell discovers, that the extraordinary people:

Have a certain, but not disproportionate amount of innate ability – aka Talent,
Have put in over 10 000 hours of practice during their ascent to stardom (the famous 10 000 hours rule)
What is very often overlooked, that was deliberate practice. Always on the edge of ability, always challenging themselves.

Most of us have some innate ability that we utilize in our careers. Most of us have access to 10 000 hours to be extraordinary. The hardest piece to arrange is a steady stream of ever-more-challenging problems to solve.

The Beatles honed their craft on the Hamburg club scene, and Bill Gates used (illegally) his school’s computer to get better at programming.

If you can go after the Elephant during your work hours, without breaking the law or going to Hamburg, then you are in a unique position!

Tackling the most challenging issues at your organization will not only result in more leeway but is the most effective way to advance your career.

A trap: The Elephant is hard, not tedious.

The Fantastic Seth Godin has made the essential distinction in regards to succeeding at work:

Long work has a storied history. Farmers, hunters, factory workers… Always there was the long work required to succeed. For generations, there was a huge benefit that came to those with the stamina and fortitude to do long work.
Hard work is frightening. We shy away from hard work because inherent in hard work is a risk. Hard work is hard because you might fail. You can’t fail at long work, you merely show up. You fail at hard work when you don’t make an emotional connection, or when you don’t solve the problem or when you hesitate.
The Fantastic Seth Godin.

The Elephant – the hard work I am urging you to tackle is the task that is unknown, complex, and emotionally challenging. Your Ego can be hurt, you can be ridiculed, and you can fail. That is the hard part.

Copy-pasting spreadsheets or tackling something that should never be done in the first place is safe but tedious and time-consuming. This is dead-end, laborious, and unfulfilling work. Avoid that. Or Automate.

Once you deal with the Elephant, everybody will marvel at your skill, even if you don’t have any extraordinary talents. You have seen my drawing ability and it only goes downhill from there.

Go take that Elephant out for a walk. It’s really friendly, it really needs to pee, and the weather is beautiful out there.

Hey Fellow Hacker News reader! ?

I think you could also enjoy my piece “Well, we have to measure something.”, And the perils of metrics.

It shows when Quantitative metrics can sometimes not only be beneficial but sometimes turn out harmful, despite popular opinion.

Remote Work

Ramit Sethi – is this guy legit? I took his courses and found these 5 principles.

Everything was going fine in my life, and I was miserable.

Five years ago, I had a ‘fine’ job, but I craved a challenge – something I could be proud of. Slacking off at the office, I was browsing Hacker News (a technology-oriented version of Reddit), marveling at the fantastic things everybody ELSE was doing. I could see my future as a cog in the corporate machine, and it was not inspiring.

Ramit’s advice helped me truly level up. During one of those Hacker-News-Fueled ‘breaks’, I stumbled upon this financial blogger with marketing, business, and job-search advice. Despite the scammy-sounding title of his blog – “I will teach you to be Rich”, I found it very helpful and ended up taking the “Dream Job” course.

Fast forward five years, I work remotely for the best company I could ever dream of, making past me very proud. I travel the world with my wife, who also works remotely – thanks to Ramit’s advice. Our company even flew us to India to present at a conference. We never dreamt of going to India, let alone on the company’s dime. We went to a city known for one of the most luxurious hotels in India – in fact, Ramit went there on his honeymoon!

After taking Dream Job, I have attended Success Triggers, Delegate&Done, Mental Mastery and How to talk to anybody. I recommend each one of these courses. They deliver consistent, exceptional quality and are great lenses to organize your existing knowledge.

To answer the title question: Yes, he is legit. Any course you will choose will be the best one in the category.

“Ramit Sethi is very, very legit”
Tim Ferriss

The biggest value I get from these curriculums is what not to focus on at this moment. Ramit claims that he and the team spend the majority of the time on nailing the lesson plan and it really shows. In the world where information is abundant, this curation is the ultimate value.

Ramit is about the “Rich Life”

Yes, he is in the personal finance sphere. But instead of focusing on curbing spending, budgeting, power of compounding in investments – and all the other components of successful financial future, he focuses of the end goal – the Rich Life, whatever that means for you:

Getting rid of credit card debt ( in the “I will teach you to be rich” book )
Getting a better job ( in Dreamjob )
Starting a business (in Earn1K and Zero to launch Courses)
Negotiating a raise (in Dreamjob )
Reclaiming your time (in “Delegate & Done” course about virtual assistants)

5 principles of Ramit

After reading Ramit’s content for years, I have teased out these underlying messages in all of his teachings:

Disproportionate results

By investing 10% more than others into preparation, research and figuring out the strategy, you can get 10x – 100x better results. This approach is applicable in job search (make connections first), building a business (nail down your target niche first), fitness, dating and other areas of Rich Life.

Strategies, not tactics

The Internet loves gimmicks and listicles like “10 apps to polish your resume, 20 online marketplaces for creators.”. But these are tactics. The important things to internalize are the strategies that help us understand “game being played around us”. Not frantic tactics that will be useless after a year.

Focus on the big wins

You can focus on saving a few hundred bucks a year by cutting back on lattes, or you can get a 30 000 dollar raise. Nuff said. Click here if you want to read one of Ramit’s classic rants on ‘cut back on lattes’.

Psychology is key

The best advice is the one you take and follow-through. Ramit understands that and optimizes his courses, emails, and tips to make help you follow-through. They are not stuffed with every conceivable piece of information on the topic, but meticulously designed to make you succeed. That being said, his courses include “Vaults” that have 10x the amount of tips and tactics as the main material. But as I mentioned, the tactics are never the focus.

Test relentlessly

Do stuff that works. Take a hard look at what doesn’t. Don’t try to make yourself feel better by confusing the two.

Get his advice for free

Ramit frequently claims that 95% of his advice is free. I don’t think this is accurate. I found that he shared 305% of his advice for free. But you still should take his courses, because they put everything in place.

I would recommend the following path to take advantage of this plethora of resources:

Step 1:Check his Instagram.

It’s hilarious. It’s also a good test if Ramit ‘resonates’ with you.

Step 2: Tim Ferriss interview.

Tim is a world-class interviewer and they are friends.

Step 3: Briefcase technique

The technique illustrates all the principles I laid out above and helped me get my job.

Bonus round: Ultimate guides

Following that, I recommend his free “ultimate guides”:

“How much should a man spend on an engagement ring?” is a fascinating example of Ramit diving into an area populated with generic advice and actually providing an exceptional answer. This is my gold standard on what a blog post should look like.

A note about joining Ramit courses.

The only way to join Ramit Courses is to sign up for his email list. There is a public page with all the products he sells, but they are only “open” one at a time.

Sign up to his email list. You don’t have to pay him a dime, but you will get tremendous value out of the emails. They are packed with knowledge.

And I do recommend the courses.

Ramit’s vision of Rich Life has rubbed on me a little bit. Even though he does not sell anything in the space, he convinced me to get a personal trainer, cleaning help for our apartment and I even have a personal VA.

Past me would marvel at a life I built.

And if you want to hear in detail what I learned, and how I adapted Ramit’s advice to suit the Remote work environment – sign up for MY email list. ?

[mailerlite_form form_id=1]

Deliberate Technology, Productivity

Why do you have so many bots?

If I died today, I don’t think my friends would notice for a while.

My digital ghost would keep responding to some emails, pay my bills, and send birthday cards. He would read my text messages, forward important ones to my virtual assistant, or respond.

This spooky afterlife is not the goal. I have been automating bits and pieces of my daily responsibilities for the opposite purpose – to save more time for the things that truly matter in life. My ghost is here to help me now.

Ikiryō (生霊, lit. “living ghost”), in Japanese popular belief and fiction, refers to a spirit that leaves the body of a living person and subsequently haunts other people or places, sometimes across great distances.

Examples include:

Reading the invoices I get over email to pay specific ones and file them for my accountant,
Answering, recording and transcribing the calls I get from all unknown numbers,
Putting all the newsletters that I choose to receive in my pocket app, where I consume all articles,
Monitoring my communication and reminding me to contact friends I haven’t reached out to for a while,
Many many more, including sending birthday cards to my friends.

Show me more of these crazy automations!

And this list does not even include automations that run this blog!

You see, I don’t automate to save a minute here or there. Writing, testing, and ensuring nothing goes awry is labor-intensive. I automate to forget about things. My digital ghost worries about A LOT, so I don’t have to.

My goals of automation

Do you know that glut of “stuff” sitting in your stomach? The nagging notion that you have SO MUCH to do? Or maybe you are familiar with the guilt that you are so far behind in errands?

Transfers have to go out, invitations to whatever event sent, expenses reported. How can you find time this weekend to do something fun when you have amassed all this?

It certainly was a feeling for me!

That stressful notion of overwhelm is called the “Cognitive Load.” Think of it as a tax for remembering to do stuff. It does not even include doing the actual task – it’s just an overhead and my first goal of automation is to cut it as much as possible.

My second goal is to make sure things are done. Since both me and my wife work remotely, we travel a fair bit. After work, we have been exploring the cenotes of Yukatan, safaris of South Africa, and depths of underwater Thailand. But when you have to put in 8 hours of solid work and then rush to catch a diving boat, doing bank transfers, taxes, and calls is a real inconvenience. It’s really hard to do taxes underwater (although the feeling is the same).

We would postpone those things, and then, after the trip is finished, we would be hit by a freight train of obligations. Taxes on Jetlag are not much fun either.

As Stephen Wolfram summarized in his fantastic post “Notes on my personal infrastructure”, my bots consist of “the technology and other things that help me live and work better, feel less busy, and be more productive every day.”

Building a personal infrastructure has freed my time, mental energy and capacity to focus on more inspiring tasks. Instead of treading the water copying cells from one excel spreadsheet to another, I can spend time with my wife or promote Remote Work in an effort to help curb climate change.

And I want you to free your potential too, so you can focus on a higher calling.

Everyone can Automate

This Barista has fully embraced automation

Automation is no longer only for programmers like me and theoretical physicists, like Steven Wolfram. It often does not require a single line of code.

Eric Dietrich has a fantastic post, “Don’t learn to program, learn to automate” where he describes his process of automation. Here are the steps required to write your first bot:

1 – You have to get very clear on what you are trying to achieve.

2 – You have to think about your process of achieving that.

If you are familiar with the GTD methodology, you might have noticed that these steps are the surefire way to Get Stuff Done. In the majority of cases, I would stop here. Focusing on goals and optimizing the “algorithm” of a manual task pays off before automating, and it’s sometimes enough.

But If you want to get the thing totally out of your mind:

3 – Implement the process. I know this sounds daunting, but have a look at a service called Zapier (or the free alternative – IFTTT). With a few clicks, I have created automations that will:

Save messages I starred in slack to my TODO list,
Tweet 3 and 10 days after I have published a blog post
Remind me what my mom needs help with whenever I’m close to her place
Keep the tweets and pocket articles I starred in a spreadsheet
Many, many more.

I would often need to change my manual process because Zapier would not let me implement a specific flow, so don’t be surprised if you’ll have to go back to the previous point.

4 – Bonus points: maintenance

Stuff breaks, services change their offerings, and your automations will work unreliably. Just like a manager ensuring his team is getting the intended results, you’ll have to budget an hour per month to make sure everything works as expected.

With your own bots (or Ikiryo if you prefer) handling the overhead, you could have more time for what you want from life.

But I have to warn you: busywork is sometimes enjoyable. It gives you a quick dopamine boost and satisfaction from a well-accomplished task. Having the stuff to do has a way of making us feeling essential and special.

The more you automate, the more deliberate you have to be with your life.

For me, that’s the third goal of automation.

Deliberate Technology, Gear, Travelling

For the love of Kindle – the ultimate nomad library

When I pictured my dream house, it always had a lot of books. Maybe even a dedicated „library” room, with walls invisible under shelves of volumes, all neatly stacked.

Of course, one of the bookstands would hide a secret passageway. There has to be a secret passageway in a dream house, duh!

Now I do have a house and I am sorry to report that there is no library room and its fine. I did not give up on my childhood dream nor gave up reading. In fact, I do read significantly more.

But I did quit physical books.

There are no bookshelves, stacks of first editions nor walls covered by volumes.

Almost all my reading happens on a Kindle, precisely because it does not have to happen in a library. And replacing the whole room for this device has several benefits.

⚖ Weight

I bought my first Kindle when I started traveling a lot. The books I read tend to be on the thick side, and they were taking too much damn space inside the carry-on. Kindle Paperwhite weighs 205 grams. Hardcover version of „Song of Ice and Fire” volume 1 is 970. That means that the first part weights as much as five kindle readers.

? You don’t have to decide

Or take books „Just in case.” What if you finish that first part? Seven volumes of George R.R. Martin’s finest work weigh as much as 14 kindles.

? Any book in the world at your fingertips

Let’s imagine you are traveling through Africa and you just heard about a fantastic book that would complement your understanding of the culture. Chances, that you can stumble upon that title in a country that uses a different language are very slim.

But Kindle can instantly turn into ( almost ) any book in Amazon’s offering. You can buy a book on a whim and start reading it 2. MINUTES. LATER.

In fact, in our house books are the biggest „impulse spend.” We had to delete a Credit Card from the Amazon account since we used to buy any book recommended to us.

Some of the books on my reading list I have not bought yet

Books are not like cars (in many aspects). It mostly does not matter what you drive. It will still get you there. On the other hand, the difference between the best book on the topic and the 5th best is sometimes immense.

The friction of paper books means that sometimes you read what is available – and not what is the best reading choice.

Of course, chance encounters of hidden literary gems that serendipity put in our laps should be cherished. But being stuck with a terrible book and the responsibility of finishing it is a waste of time life What you read matters. Much more than How Much.

Amazon has the best selection and arguably the best electronic reading device. That is why I don’t bother with any other brands. They may be technically better or cheaper, but removing the hassle from procuring a book works out to my advantage.

The highlights, OH MY GOD – the highlights

I believe that concrete takeaways are more important than reading more books. Recollection or even reflection upon the concepts, thoughts or mental models can further my understanding of the world. My reading list contains a lot of non-fiction, sometimes called „self – help.” This is a dubious term because they usually are about the workings of the world. Topics like psychology, randomness, organizational design, business or innovation are sometimes dense, but biographies or history books are an excellent example of non-fiction that can teach you a lot about reality.

This is a topic for a whole another blog post, but in essence – taking lessons from books is the single most valuable activity I can imagine.

Inspired by the amazing Derek Sivers, I started a practice of summarising every book that I read. While I’m reading, I do highlight a lot, sometimes even make notes on the kindle touch keyboard (clumsy but doable). After finishing the book, I will fashion some posts about the book.

Having it in public forces me to be more verbose and explicit in my notes. All the posts are written only for the audience of 1 – future me. The external accountability motivates me to put a little more effort into my writing. And future me is grateful for that.

Before Kindle, I was very reluctant to highlight stuff in the book itself. I grew up in a family that was not rich by any means and we cherished books. Highlighting anything feels to me like destroying something valuable. Even if I hesitate only a bit before marking a passage – that has an impact on the lessons I can remember.

But on the Kindle, I can highlight very generously. What’s more, I can also find these highlights with minimal effort. These two aspects of Kindle highlights fundamentally changed how I read.

Here is what I do after finishing a non-fiction book:

Copy my-clippings.txt file from my Kindle to my laptop
Run a simple script to generate bullet points with highlights from a particular book
Use that as a stub to write a book summary post
Publish that, enjoy a wild success on the Internets, be famous, profit from my fame, start attracting the wrong crowd and have paparazzi publish my shameful deeds.
In the meantime, review my posts periodically to refresh the takeaways.

Currently, I am experimenting with Twitter threads (like 1, 2, 3 ) WHILE I am reading a book. Join me!

My fiancee uses the service called Readwise that will send her emails with the highlights.

While automation is particularly appealing to me, I like the responsibility of having to summarise the takeaways myself. It makes me more focused during the reading.

Kindle Paperwhite backlight.

The paperwhite model features an ambient backlight. There are diodes on the sides that make the entire screen reflect a bit of light. It works differently from your smartphone – the light is reflected and does not interfere with your sleep.

But it means that you don’t need a reading light, which is a GAMECHANGER.

It opens an entire world of bedroom entertainment with your partner.

Particularly a sleeping partner you don’t want to wake up.

But the…

Photo by ?? Janko Ferlič – @specialdaddy on Unsplash

Yes, smell, feel… All that is nice. It’s nice to have something to put on your shelf as well. I know. The passageway…

In the world that turns everything into digital ephemera, having a hard copy of a book is lovely, grounding and tactile.

But in the end, it’s about reading. And if I did not have my Kindle, I would do significantly less of that.

And I will never give up on that secret passageway. Just watch me.

Map, Travelling

Matala, Crete

My life is a real struggle. To keep my hard-earned gold status on Star Alliance, I have to fly to Greece every year. This, obviously is a chore, because I have to eat a lot of food and sit in the sun.

Subscribe to learn more about how I earn miles in a greek airline program, even though I live in Poland.

The first time my wife and I had to complete this particular „mileage run,” her brother was working as a tour resident in Rethymno on the island of Crete. That made it an easy trip to justify! We could have visited Joseph AND earn our status on the way!

Crete is the biggest island in Greece. They have plenty of olive trees, very tall mountains, reasonably friendly sheep, and spectacular beaches. The sandiest and calm ones are located on the north coast – that is where the majority of hotels and towns is, including Rethymno.

The south coast is more rugged and rocky. Like the life of a Polish teenager, it is sharp and devoid of any comfort, soft sand, and all-inclusive resorts.

It has character though, in particular, some of the most exciting geography found on Crete. Joseph has recommended we visit Matala – a charming city by the bay.

And boy, Matala did NOT disappoint!

Since the rocks were easy to excavate, many artificial caves were created. The word is that during Roman times, these caverns were a designated burial place. This story does not really hold together, since the caves clearly have rooms and they are quite roomy for graves.

You could for example sit and work there if you reaaaally wanted to.

Archeological research in progress. Were Romans able to do office work in these caves? Lets find out!

Hipster history

Since these caves are so comfy, why not live there?

That is what happened in the 60s. Hippies discovered the (then) secluded Matala, with it’s inviting caves, fantastic beach and the shining sun. Several celebrities spent time in Matala, including Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell.

All was fun and games until the Greek dictatorship in the 70s. Hippies were chased away, and law & order got established. Fortunately not for long.

The hipster vibe is definitely felt throughout the town today. It is the most „Jamaican” place in the whole of Greece. Not in the fake, pushy, buy-Bob-Marley-T-shirts sense (although you can definitely do a lot of that!),

It’s just that the spirit of sixties seem to have lasted a bit longer here… Maybe Greece is a good fit for the free-love-enjoy-the-sun approach to life. Maybe it’s the sun, maybe ther is something in the water. Visit Matala to find out for yourself. You won’t regret it.

Map

If you are looking for amazing gorges, bays, and coves, check out this post.

Health, Psychology, Staying Sane

To rest – move

“It was stressful, so I went to the gym.”
WHAT?! ?

I have seen this scene a couple of times in TV Shows or maybe movies:

Some jacked dude picks up the phone. There is a woman on the other side. She wants to meet. He says something along the lines of:

“It was a stressful day at work, so I went to a gym. I am going to take a quick shower and join you in town.”

It sounded ridiculous to me. If he was stressed – why didn’t he have a nap?! The gym is the last place I think of when I am tired!

Enter Tony Robbins

I always wanted to go to a Tony Robbins seminar. Trought his career he has coached presidents, movie stars, business tycoons and thousands (or probably millions) of regular folks. This man is a machine.

His “entry-level” seminar is called “Unleash the Power Within” and focuses on helping you raise your standards and commit to a better quality of life. If you get a chance – it may be the best investment of your life.

Apart from many takeaways, 2 things stood up for me in regards to fitness and energy:

We spent a bulk of time on dialing in the health. In the western culture we view our bodies as mere vehicles for the brain (Read here how I blame Plato and Aristotle), but the physical well-being is the engine powering our mental capabilities and the source of energy. We learned that the plant-based diet is right for you, that most of us don’t hydrate enough and even that somehow, the modern folk have lost the way to breathe correctly.
These four days were 16-18 hours long. There was no slowing down, almost no food or breaks, and yet, I was pumped and full of energy throughout!

The key was alternating lectures with proprietary SYA technique. The SYA technique stands for Shake Your Ass.

It was also way more joyful!

And did we shake our asses like there is no tomorrow! The movement generated energy that helped us keep focus, improved learning, and enhanced the attention.

We also had Pitbull to help us.

The stress and exhaustion we sometimes experience in the modern world are radically different than what our bodies were accustomed to. We face no real danger from our overbearing bosses, nor do we have to fight for our lives daily, even though it feels that way. Physical activity gets your blood flowing, nourishing your cells, and restocking all the supplies. It grounds you in what is real and immediate.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwarz in the “Power of Full Engagement” agree with Tony Robbins. Cycling periods of physical activity with rest is the key to maintaining energy. Switching gears – mentally and physically – is the key to rest, not inactivity.

“The best way to manage your energy is to balance spending with replenishing.”

Sitting all day uses your mental energy, but let’s be honest – you are not moving much. Your exhaustion is mental, even though it feels the same way as physical.

And, counter-intuitively, after a long, stressful day of work, the physical activity lets me gather my thoughts and rest.

According to Tony Robbins, there are

Eight gifts of pure energy

Vital breathing and lymphasizing
1. Breathe through your diaphragm, inhaling deeply
2. Jump around, helping your lymph system to work
Living water and live foods
1. Drink water, for goodness sake
2. Eat real food, ideally full of water – stuff that is green! (Except green cheese)
Essential Oils
1. No, not the magical aromatic ones. The ones like Olive Oil or Avocado. Monosaturated fats.
Alkalinity
1. Again, eat green stuff. It’s alkaline.
Aerobic energy
1. SHAKE. YOUR. ASS
Maximum nourishment
1. Just eat real food, mkay?
Structural alignment and maximum strength
1. Stretch.
2. DO strength training.
Directed Mind and heart
1. Be a nice person. Don’t dwell on how people have wronged you. Think nice thoughts

Even though it all sounds a little woo-woo, it’s precisely what the doctors always said we should do. The more we keep dismissing all that as “basic”, the more critical it is to remind ourselves that we have bodies that need nourishment, water, and movement. We cannot keep punishing ourselves with Twinkies, Pizza, and beer and expect to be strong and healthy.

homer simpson eating GIF — Homer, following a Keto diet like a boss

We are somehow infected with the idea that good things have to be hard, inconvenient, and/or disgusting. It is all, of course, a matter of mindset, but physical activity can very well support mental performance. You have to get over your lazy self and shake your ass.

You’ll see you’ll feel better afterward and will have more energy to send these emails you’ve been putting off.

Travelling

Learning to cook Indian food in Mumbai

Oh God, I love Naan! And my wife does too. I think this is an addiction, but I am afraid to seek medical help because I could not quit.

Fortunately, Indian food is quite popular in Poland, so we have a dependable supply of these delicacies. But it was always a mystery to me:

? How is it possible that they are so delicious?

? Fortune favours the hungry

Fortunately, fate decided to help launch me on a fact-finding mission.

When we were roaming around Thailand, our company organized an event in India. Since we were reasonably close, we volunteered to help with the situation and visit Udaipur and Mumbai and enjoy the culture food.

And learn the secrets of the Naan.

??‍? Naan-making class

On a trip to Paris, a few years ago, I have attended a croissant-making class. I highly recommend the experience, and I was on the lookout for similar fun since.

Somebody should tell Artur that these are not the Naan.

So, Naan being superior to Croissants, you would expect an even greater abundance of delicious learning opportunity in India, right?

Wrong! Cooking classes are very hard to come by in India!

How is that possible? Indian food is so Instagram-mable, delicious, hard to make, and popular that there should be no issue finding a cooking school. But there are none!

Fortunately, my Indian friends were kind enough to explain it to me in great detail.

What you went for a cooking class? Hahahahahahaha! You are so weird! Hahahahaha!
Kruti, my friend.

After the mockery was over, I learned that Indian people learn to cook from their mothers and grandmothers. There is 0 need for a cooking school because they will learn to make delicious Kadai, Kormas, and Naans at home.

As a side note, it is also quite accessible to hire a cook that will come to your house and cook you food for 2-3 days. In Europe and the US we are used to takeout, but in India, they approach this situation from precisely the opposite viewpoint.

You cook and learn to cook at home. Not at a cooking school.

Fortunately, I have used this thing called capitalism to find a cooking school in Mumbai (Click here for Chhabria Cooking Classes). After double-checking with the teacher that we indeed will be making Naan, we embarked to see the school.

Only to find out it was indeed someone’s home! A very enterprising Indian lady was running cooking classes for foreigners at her apartment. It was perfect because the kitchen had a very similar layout to ours, so we learned how to prepare delicious Indian dishes, Yes, including Naan.

Naan Recipe

Download the full set of recipes we learned that day

Remote Work, Staying Sane, Working from home

Take a walk to get unstuck

Let’s start from the beginning.
Ever since Plato (423 BC), humanity was plagued by this notion of mind-body duality. Dark Ages have really entrenched the idea that the body is only a vehicle to move around our pristine and godly minds. The flesh pursuits are of lesser concern and don’t deserve much attention.

*“Plato and Aristotle, conniving about derailing humanity’s understanding of mind-body connection”*. By Raphael.

And this particular idea has seeped into western philosophy. We don’t pay specific attention to the link between the way we treat our bodies and mental performance

We try to “save time” by sacrificing sleep, resulting in severely diminished productivity and mental skills,
We sit all day on our asses, getting more and more stressed about some artificial situation, avoiding the solution that our bodies were built for,
We forget to hydrate or eat properly, because – of course – we “don’t have time.”

How taking a walk can help you get unstuck

Shinrin-Yoku
Japanese, forest bathing: The immersive experience of spending time in nature.

Spending time in nature has a profoundly therapeutic effect on thinking clarity, overall health, and is a surefire way to lower the stress levels. Shinrin-Yoku (forest bathing) is a recognized treatment in Japan, and British doctors are looking into prescriptions for mindful walks in the woods themselves.

Our bodies evolved in green space, surrounded by trees, shrubs, streams, and rocks. We are familiar with the wild in the core of our souls. This is where our ancestors lived their whole lives, honing their genome to fit the environment.
Is life in a concrete jungle so drab? Can a few hours in a forest significantly improve my mood? I set out to answer these questions.

For a few years now, I document my thoughts in a journal. I have an Evernote-based system, where I mostly rate the previous day and recap what happened.
I will expand on this in another post, but one of the valuable insights I was able to discover is the answer to the question

“What do my happy days have in common”?

Every quarter or so, I review my notes and try to tease out what consistently made me happy during this time.
Over and over again, spending time in nature (and preferably good swimming) is at the top of the list.
Maybe it is because I was a scout for 11 years, and I am trying to reproduce the conditions of my youth. But perhaps it is because I am a human being, and this is the environment where humanity was thriving in for millennia.

My Wife, recognizing the importance of trees and taking a walk.

I try to plan my life accordingly, but as you probably know – it intervenes sometimes. Deadlines pile up, work has to be done, and I forget what restorative effect a walk has on my thinking.
I forget that it clears my head and allows me to get a fresh perspective.
I tell myself: “Tomorrow, I don’t have time today.”

What does the science say?

The science says that I’m dumb.

“To improve your thinking skills, move.”
Chris Medina, “Brain Rules”

Moving can help our brains via several mechanisms:

Moving means more cardiovascular action, which means more oxygen. Our brains REALLY like oxygen. Brains like oxygen how I like the georgian meat pies. Often and in any quantity.
Moving means neurons firing in the brain. Think of it as a bit of a rhythm. By making the body move, the brain gets into a groove of action, and any cognitive tasks get accomplished easier.

“Your lifetime risk for general dementia is cut in half if you participate in physical activity. Aerobic exercise seems to be the key. With Alzheimer’s, the effect is even greater: Such exercise reduces your odds of getting the disease by more than 60 percent.”
John Medina, Brain Rules

Before you embark on spending an exciting 60 minutes on a treadmill, consider the messy outside world. Moving helps but to get the best results, combine it with spending time outdoors.

“People living near more green space reported less mental distress, even after adjusting for income, education, and employment”
This is your brain on nature, National Geographic

What could you do to combine the amazing effects of moving with restorative effects of spending time in the green? Guess what! Take a walk in the forest!

Would it help to convince you, if you knew Steve Jobs was pretty insistent on walking meetings?

Check out Outside Magazine amazing feature “**The Nature Cure**“

Artur, but this is basic! DUH!

I clicked on your link expecting some insightful comment, and I don’t want to be lectured about such basic things!

I hear ya. But this advice needs repeating.

Intellectually knowing something is not enough. As Derek Sivers says, “If knowledge was the problem, we would all be billionaires with perfect abs.” We can know something is true and still act totally irrationally.
By all means, I am guilty of this as well. I sometimes discard this advice as “not serious enough” and “this is fine for those wellness people, but I have serious work to do.”
Intellectualizing is not the answer. If you care about doing something, you need to build a habit around it.

The Outside Challenge ™️

Do a test! Check if going outside is really for you.

Get your ass outside first thing in the morning, for a week.
Just walk around, notice things. DO NOT STARE AT YOUR PHONE.
After 30 minutes, go back home.
Be awesome!
Crush your day.

Subscribe to learn more about remote work

Know exactly what to include on your resume to position you as a stellar „remote” candidate, even if you never worked remotely,
6 critical things that remote companies look for in a candidate, even though they don’t advertise it!
Step-by-step process that uses The Autonomy Leverage to prove that you are an employee of their dreams.

Subscribe to get an exclusive educational video that will help make your resume stand out ?

[mailerlite_form form_id=1]

No spam, no BS. Privacy policy.

Remote work helps again.

I know not everybody has a nice green space near home.
But… If you worked remotely, what precludes you from living near a forest?
You could even have a view on the trees, getting the benefits of surrounding yourself in nature while you work.

Have you noticed that I post lots of pictures of my laptop opened somewhere in the wilderness?

Because for me, there is no better place to work than surrounded by tress, with wind on my face.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Deliberate – Work remotely 🌏 (@deliber.at)

You don’t have to be in exotic place, or wait till the weekend to enjoy time in nature.

You can pick your laptop, hop on a bike (or into a car) and after an hour, you will most likely be in the forest. Yes, I’m pretty certain that they will have LTE coverage.

Now go outside and take a walk!