We live in an internet and media culture where we see entrepreneurs sell companies for millions, celebrities have chiseled abs, and athletes achieve glory and wealth by breaking world records. We have all compared ourselves to them at one point and wondered how cool it would be to achieve such feats, but it is far more helpful to compare to yourself rather than anyone else.
Finding a good benchmark for comparing yourself can give you the motivation to achieve your goals, but choosing the wrong benchmark can detract from happiness, end in burnout, and could provide worse results. By comparing yourself to others, you are almost certainly preparing yourself for burnout and unhappiness. [click to continue…]
Sleep. We all know we need it, we all feel better when we have it, but we don’t know why. Worse, we rarely have time to get adequate sleep with all the work, responsibilities, and easy access to electricity and light. Despite this, sleep is one of the most important factors that determines your alertness, focus, happiness, and ultimately your success. By offering my own experiences, hacks, and the scientific evidence behind them, I’ll hopefully provide you with an informative and instructive guide to sleep.
Ancestral Slumbers
Ripping off a PaleoFX panel discussion name, ancestral slumbers refers to our evolutionary need for a certain type of sleep. For most of our species’ evolution, sleep has been a natural part of the 24-hour life cycle. The absence of light gave our ancestors no choice but to sleep 8 – 9 hours every night with seasonal changes. The invention of fire changed all of that, but only today has electricity made it possible to easily stay awake for days. [click to continue…]
The owners of my apartment told me a story about the previous tenant’s willpower. He used to maintain a strict diet and exercise regimen every day of the week except for one. On his “cheat day”, he allowed himself one “sweet of the week”. It lasted for a few weeks, but it wasn’t long before this “sweet of the week” quickly turned into a “sweet of the weak.”
Although I never knew him, he sounded like a good guy with one fatal flaw. I see it all too often with those who want to improve something in their life: he didn’t commit 100%. Pushing myself, whether it be with food, exercise, meditation, drinking alcohol, or work, has always been a 100% commitment because it is actually easier than 99% and it provides family and friends with a role model for personal growth. [click to continue…]
In America, and Texas especially, I have a great perspective on society’s perception of “freedom”. Although we Americans have put some effort into marketing ourselves as the freedom capital of the world, there is some truth to it. Our freedom loving founding fathers regarded tyrannical rulers as the foremost threat to liberty, but I contend otherwise.
Far more detrimental are the restraints we place on ourselves through our thoughts. Few people consider these freedoms, yet they are the ones that we have the most power over. Therefore, I am declaring independence from this tyranny, which has resisted my every wish. If you join me, it isn’t going to be easy, but we shall thank ourselves profusely when we are free. [click to continue…]
My livelihood is technology, but attending the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, Texas proved that I was strangely “behind” the times. Everyone was talking about X app, Y program, Z widget, and I had no clue what any of it meant. Furthermore, I felt for a day that I was out of place, losing touch with my generation, and would be left behind. Upon further inspection, and some timely insight from my brothers in Florida, I realized that this wasn’t the case at all. Rather than spending my time consuming such technology products, I was instead trying to produce what other people used. This epiphany was insightful, but I realized that most of society consumes far more than it produces. It is time somebody provided insight into why humans consume so much more than we produce and how we can reverse that. [click to continue…]
