A Learning a Day

I was speaking with someone recently who was seeking clarity on the path forward on their career. As we talked through the options ahead, I found myself returning to a simple three part framework I use:

1. Be clear about what you’re solving for.

At any given point, you can only truly optimize for one or two things – factors like learning, balance, growth, compensation, or impact. Clarity here anchors everything else.

Pro tip: Write it down.

Keep a written version you can reference. There’s something about the act of writing that forces clarity. It helps you see what you’re truly solving for versus what just sounds good.

2. Articulate the trade-offs of what you’re solving for.

When you choose to optimize for a few things, you’re implicitly giving up others. That’s not failure, it’s the sign of a good strategy. The key is to know what you’re giving up and make peace with it.

3. Keep re-evaluating every 6-12 months.

What you’re solving for today might not be what you’ll solve for six months from now. It almost certainly won’t be what you’re solving for two years from now. Revisit the equation often.

If you’re clear about what you’re solving for, aware of the trade-offs, and willing to re-evaluate – you’re making thoughtful choices.

And ultimately, that’s the best any of us can do.

There’s a measure on the Apple Watch called VO₂ max that I check from time to time.

VO₂ max is an estimate of cardiovascular health – how efficiently your body uses oxygen during exercise. The Apple Watch measure is not perfectly accurate, but it works as a directional indicator.

Recently, I took a break from my 15-minute morning hill runs for a 2 weeks period – first while recovering from being under the weather, then while traveling.

When I checked again, my VO₂ max had dropped a notch.

Our bodies don’t lie.

Our fitness is just the sum of small, consistent actions – and the absence of them shows up quickly.

Consistency compounds.

The biggest downside of having a phone in our pocket is that it’s a consumption device first and foremost.

It’s always full of media – videos, news, updates, and endless glimpses into what other people are doing or achieving. It’s easy to spend hours scrolling through other people’s lives while ours quietly slips by.

So here’s the reminder I keep coming back to:

Stop reading about or watching what people are doing. Just go do stuff instead.

For every travel post you scroll past, take a trip – even if it’s just to a nearby park or local trail.

For every post about AI tools or “life hacks,” open one and build something useful yourself.

For every headline about health hacks or the latest longevity drug or even every sporting event you watch, go workout.

The feed is infinite. Life isn’t.

For every post you read/video you watch, go do something yourself.

Thinking is important. However, it is action that shows you what is real and what isn’t.

There are many more opportunities that pass the analysis test than the action test.

Mistakes are guaranteed to accompany action. But we rarely regret the mistakes we make when we’re taking action.

However, we definitely regret the chances we never took.

So, if you’re stuck on something, speak to people, experiment… and take the shot.

Action is where learning and growth live.

The first principle in personal finance is to spend less than you earn.

Ideally a lot less than you earn.

Once you have savings, you can then decide what you do with them. Ideally, you have some money stashed as an emergency fund should you need more cash. Then you begin investing the rest with the goal of long-term growth. And so on and so forth.

But it begins with spending less than you earn.

That comes from being conscious about your expenses, living simply, and upgrading your lifestyle at a rate much slower than your earnings.

When in doubt, that’s the place to start.

I’ve been enjoying Derek Thompson’s weekly newsletter of late. And he had a great post titled “Whose Cup Are You Filling?“

I am thinking of a game. The rules are simple. Every morning, you have a full pitcher of water and many empty cups. By day’s end, you pour all the water from the pitcher into the cups. The goal: Pour the water into the right cups.

Sounds like a weird game, I know. But there’s a catch. You have been playing this game your whole life. The game is attention. You are the pitcher. The water is your time: your ~17 daily hours of waking consciousness, all your care and focus and feeling. The cups represent everything you pour your thoughts and attention into. They are labeled: WORK, TIKTOK, WIFE, DISHES, EXERCISE, REGRET, PARENTS, ANXIETY, GOD. But, by its nature, water cannot go into two cups simultaneously. When you’re listening to a podcast, you aren’t listening to your husband. When you are thinking about politics, you aren’t thinking about your sister. When you are working, you aren’t praying.

He goes to observe – the internet has a way of assaulting our priorities and entreating us to seek admiration and validation from people we don’t know, will never meet, and don’t even like very much in the first place.

And he ends with – This whole project might sound like a major guilt trip, but I choose to see it differently. Our attention is a unique resource. Bodies degrade, wealth rises and falls, reputations come and go. But attention refreshes daily. The morning’s pitcher is always full. The morning’s cups are always empty. The game begins again, and it’s a game you can win today no matter how many times you’ve lost. So this week I wrote myself a note and taped it to my desk, where I can’t miss it: Whose cup did you fill today?

It resonated. Thanks Derek.

In 2002, after a tense game between Arsenal and Tottenham Hotspur, Tottenham’s manager and several players complained that Arsenal’s winning goal should have been disallowed for offside.

Arsène Wenger, then at the height of his powers as Arsenal’s manager, delivered a line that’s since become football folklore:

“Everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife at home.”

What he meant was – every manager believes their team plays the best football and deserves the best results. It was a witty way of pointing out our universal bias. We all defend our own side, even when we’re not entirely objective.

I think about Wenger’s remark often when I feel the urge to defend the people around me. It’s natural.

But the best we can do is stay aware of that bias, and keep perspective when push comes to shove.

Hannah Ritchie has a typically thoughtful analysis on how we eliminating contrails could make a significant dent in carbon emissions from flying.

When you see a plane in the sky, you might see a small, white cloud-like trail behind it. Those are contrails (short for “condensation trails”).

These have a net-warming effect on the planet. And this effect is worse at night and in winter.

But here’s where things get interesting. Just 3% of the world’s flights generate most of the warming from contrails.

And a short change in flight path (1-2% increase) can mitigate this. This translates to less than $1 per ticket.

From Hannah – What would help a lot is increasing public awareness of the existence of contrails, their climate impacts, and how inexpensive it could be to eliminate them. There is a general understanding that decarbonising aviation is expensive, and this often means the aviation industry gets more of a free ride. But this is based on replacing jet fuel. If people were aware that it could cut a huge chunk of its footprint at a fraction of the cost, they might be more demanding.

Eliminating a few percent of the world’s warming is a big deal when the costs are so small. It seems insane to me that such a cheap solution is sitting there, completely untapped.

That and the reminder that there are often creative and inexpensive solutions out there for so many complex problems.

A dental hygienist we met recently told us we should floss before brushing instead of after.

“No way” was my first reaction. I thought I had my dental hygiene routine down.

It turns out she was right. Flossing first loosens and removes food particles and plaque between your teeth that your toothbrush can’t reach.

Once the spaces between teeth are clean, toothpaste’s fluoride can reach more surfaces and protect them better.

This logic made sense. And it has shown up in studies too (like this one).

3 takeaways –

(1) It is amazing how you can do something every day for so many years and realize there is a better way to do it.

(2) It is more important to floss than worry about the order. So that’s the first habit to nail.

(3) And assuming you do, floss before brushing.

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about the evolution of our behavior with television – or “the idiot box.” My hypothesis was that the cause for the global decline in intelligence could be attributed to the fact that we now get to carry this box in our pocket.

Derek Thompson had a beautiful articulation of this in his post – “Everything is television.” A few excerpts –

Social media: Social media has evolved from text to photo to video to streams of text, photo, and video, and finally, it seems to have reached a kind of settled end state, in which TikTok and Meta are trying to become the same thing: a screen showing hours and hours of video made by people we don’t know. Social media has turned into television.

Podcasts: But the most successful podcasts these days are all becoming YouTube shows. Industry analysts say consumption of video podcasts is growing twenty times faster than audio-only ones, and more than half of the world’s top shows now release video versions. YouTube has quietly become the most popular platform for podcasts, and it’s not even close.

Sora and Vibes: Even the architects of artificial intelligence, who imagine themselves on the path to creating the last invention, are busy building another infinite sequence of video made by people we don’t know. Even AI wants to be television.

Too much television: One implication of “everything is becoming television” is that there really is too much television—so much, in fact, that some TV is now made with the assumption that audiences are always already distracted and doing something else. Netflix producers reportedly instruct screenwriters to make plots as obvious as possible, to avoid confusing viewers who are half-watching—or quarter-watching, if that’s a thing now—while they scroll through their phones. 

Perhaps a great deal of television is not meant to absorb our attention, at all, but rather to dab away at it, to soak up tiny droplets of our sensory experience while our focus dances across other screens. You might even say that much television is not even made to be watched at all. It is made to flow. The play button is the point.

Gen Z: For five straight years, Gen Z has told pollsters that the thing they most want to be when they grow up is an “influencer.”

Inwardness: When literally everything becomes television, what disappears is not something so broad as intelligence (although that seems to be going, too) but something harder to put into words, and even harder to prove the value of. It’s something like inwardness. The capacity for solitude, for sustained attention, for meaning that penetrates inward rather than swipes away at the tip of a finger: These virtues feel out of step with a world where every medium is the same medium and everything in life converges to the value system of the same thing, which is television. I don’t have the answers here. But we should figure it out soon. The marble is still spinning, but it is reaching the bottom of the bowl.

Indeed.