A Learning a Day

“Pros make as many mistakes as amateurs; they’ve just learned how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.”

“Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.”

I’ve been aggregating advice in themes from Kevin Kelly’s book – “Excellent Advice for Living.” These two notes were beautiful and linked in my mind.

The moment we try new things, we are sure to make mistakes. The challenge is gracefully recovering from them and realizing that failure is not the falling down, it is the staying down.

This is where unfailing enthusiasm becomes our biggest ally. Our ability to stick with things opens more doors full of learning opportunity simply because everyone else along for the ride gave up.

Every personal finance book I’ve read has a predictable set of recommendations in order of priority –

(1) Pay down debts
(2) Keep an emergency fund in your bank account – typically around 3-6 months of living expenses
(3) Save
(4) Invest said savings in index funds

In his book “Mindful Investing,” Jonathan shared a minor modification to this. He suggested changing our emergency fund buffer based on the stage of our life –
(1) Young adults (18-35 years) – 3-6 months of expenses
(2) Middle years (36-55) – 6-12 months of expenses
(3) Nearing retirement + in retirement – ~24 months of expenses

This minor modification resonated with me as the middle years are likely to bring with them kids/dependents and career pivots/changes/layoffs – all of which may require more of a financial buffer than we had prior.

At the end of the day, emergency funds are all about creating peace of mind. Everyone has a different threshold for this. Best to start with guidelines like this and modify as you see fit.

The Michelin guide publishes their rating of the top restaurants in the world with the following definition:

(1) 1 star: A very good restaurant.

(2) 2 star: Worth a detour.

(3) 3 star: Worth a special journey – this could even mean traveling to a new company.

It is a simple way to illustrate how special a culinary experience can be.

I think of the national park system the same way. A county park is often a good place to go. A state park is likely worth a detour. And a National Park is worth a journey.

I’m not an expert at Michelin starred restaurants (fine dining isn’t our thing) and have no opinion about how good these ratings are. But I view National Park journeys with a Michelin star mental model. While all National Parks aren’t created equal (just as there is variance between Michelin 3 star restaurants), they’re the nature’s equivalent of a Michelin 3 star experience in my mind.

Since writing about Outlive two Sundays ago, I started sharing changes I’ve made in my life thanks to Outlive. Last week spoke to the first major change – intermittent fasting. Today’s is about another major change – to workouts.

Peter Attia breaks workouts into 4 categories –

(1) VO2 max or Zone 4+ workouts: Imagine going up a steep hill at full pelt and feeling breathless. This stretches our lungs to maximum capacity and is the type of workout that helps us build up our VO2 max.

(2) Zone 2 workouts: These workouts involve extended periods at an elevated – but not uncomfortable – heart rate.

(3) Grip strength: Our ability to deadlift weights. This needn’t be lifting weights above our heads – it is just a measure of our ability to grip a heavy weight and carry it.

(4) Stability: Our ability to maintain balance.

I learnt 3 lessons from the book that have inspired more changes –

(a) Stability first. I didn’t appreciate how important stability is. It is logical – stability prevents injuries. And, in the long term, the single best thing we can do for our health is prevent serious injuries. I’ve added some stability work to my workout every day.

(b) Grip strength. I’ve been gradually building grip strength in the past year with 12-15 min workouts 3-4 days a week. I’ve now made these 5 days a week with gradual increases to grip strength.

(c) Zone 2 + Zone 4 run. Finally, I’ve made a 12-15 min run every morning a priority. I’ve seen some of the research about the power of getting a few minutes of sunlight in the morning. And this run has been a breath of fresh air – no pun intended. I’ve started with a fixed circuit involving two steep hills nearby and I can already see marked improvement in my ability to run up these hills. I expect to add more variations in time – the goal is to maximize time in Zone 2 with at least one Zone 4/max sprint.

I don’t know how or why I didn’t do this before – but moving from 3-4 days of ~15 minutes of workouts to a ~30 min workout every weekday morning has felt great.

Additionally, I’ve been increasing time spent walking up and down stairs in the office – which has also added a surprising amount of time spent in Zone 2.

There are more additions I expect to come in time. As our kids grow up, more time spent outdoors actually results in a workout. A year ago, for example, a bike ride with the kids did not do anything for my cardio. But that’s changing quickly as they get older. And I’m also in the market for a regular game of football/soccer. There are many small changes coming together – all of them are having a large impact on my mental health in addition to my physical health. The key is to keep the momentum.

Every addition to the schedule has trade-offs however. Creating space for all of this means removing stuff that takes space. And, in my case, the trade-off has been following Manchester United. Following the news, catching up on highlights, and watching the news was a guilty pleasure. Breaking this 20 year old habit came easy once I realized what was at stake. I’ll write about this in the coming weeks.

“Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.” – Warren Buffett

# of people who actually love you/# of the people you want to have love you is a powerful success metric for life.

Few things are truly not measurable, few things are worth being measured.

We optimize what we measure. Pick wisely.

All these years later, I’m still amazed at the transformative effect the “What is a learning that has changed your perspective or how you operate” question can have on a catch up conversation.

Whenever we take a shortcut, we incur a debt.

In time, that debt always comes due. Always. Regardless of which aspect of our life. It applies to health, to our relationships, to the products we ship, and the people we hire.

The answer isn’t to never incur a debt.

It is just important to be conscious and thoughtful about which debts we choose to incur and overall debt load we carry.

A lesson I’ve learnt from years of reflecting on my emotions every day is to not overweight emotions from any given day.

Put differently, don’t make irreversible/hard to reverse/expensive decisions based on a day’s worth of data. For such decisions – e.g., buying something expensive, committing to a time intensive project, getting married, hiring someone, having a kid, or quitting a job – there is little upside from making a hurried decision. Especially one made on the heels of a bad day.

We all have bad days. Some days are monumentally bad. But things often turn around quickly enough – sometimes on a dime and often faster than we expect.

If things don’t look up after a bit of time (say 2 weeks), it is worth asking the hard question. If things look stubbornly bad after a month, it might be time to make a decision.

The key is to take the emotion out of key decisions. For most of us, that helps get rid of enough noise so we can pay attention to our gut.

Rash or “rage” driven decisions rarely lead to good long term outcomes. And overweighting negative emotions on any given day is a recipe for rash decisions.

I was out on a run the other morning pondering a challenging situation from the previous day. I was feeling low on energy as I thought about the situation.

Until I paid attention to the sun.

As I saw the sun rise, I found myself wondering – how many such problems has the sun been witness to in its lifetime?

My challenges were immediately put into perspective.

Then, I thought about how the sun just shows up consistently every day. It is there – always present, always reliable.

I realized that is all I should aim to do – show up and be there. In time, the challenges will work themselves out.

And they did.