A Learning a Day

The year was 2004. A good friend and I were newly minted music obsessed teenagers. One of our favorite weekend haunts was an old mall that had a “Worldspace” store.

Worldspace is a now defunct satellite radio company. I think they sold subscriptions back then. The best part about their store was the presence of a collection of nice headphones which gave you access to Worldspace and popular music.

Green Day had just released American Idiot and it’s hit “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.” I vividly remember how often we went to the Worldspace store to just try our luck and see if we could listen to it. We couldn’t afford buying CDs – so this was our way.

And I remember so many wonderful moments when we put on those headphones at just the right moment and enjoyed the song.

It was a simple but wonderful pleasure at a time when we couldn’t afford much.

It is easy to take what we have in life for granted. On days when I sense myself taking things for granted, I remember moments like those at the Worldspace store.

If you had told me then that I’d have no problem affording music and that I’d always walk around with headphones and all my music in the pocket, I would have thought you were joking.

Dreams do come true. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Mental strength is the ability to normalize challenging circumstances.

And we get to work on it every time we face a challenging circumstance.

The more the challenges at any given moment, the bigger the opportunity to improve our mental strength.

“And I don’t think a temper is so bad. Sometimes when I lose my temper, I think it’s just me trying to tell me something I’m not ready to hear.” | Wade, Elemental

Profound.

I’ve become significantly more diligent about saying please and thank you at home in the past couple of years.

This learning/change in behavior had one root cause – attempting to teach our kids to do the same. As kids (like most other humans) ignore what I say and watch what I do, the only way to influence their behavior was to change mine.

This is why teaching is an effective way to learn something. To earn your chops as a teacher, you have to do the work to learn it yourself.

The more (conventionally) successful someone is, the funnier and more important self deprecating humor becomes.

I’m reading Outlive by Dr Peter Attia. The thesis of the book is that our approach to medicine needs to move to Medicine 3.0.

Medicine 1.0 was ancient medicine – where physicians prescribed cures based on observation. Medicine 2.0 is the medicine of the modern age. Powered by the scientific method, we’ve become proficient at interventions – like surgeries and vaccines – to stop “fast deaths” due to accidents or diseases that act quickly. The COVID-19 vaccine is a great example of how we’ve shown ourselves capable of moving very quickly when needed.

However, medicine 2.0 does a poor job at dealing with “slow deaths” caused by what he calls the “Four Horsemen” diseases – heart disease, cancer, alzheimer’s, and “foundational diseases” like insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes. That’s because Medicine 2.0 operates on short horizons while these diseases take effect over decades. As a result, we’ve become accustomed to a pattern of old age where elders often suffer a decade or more of degeneration at the hands of these diseases.

Hence “Outlive” – which is both about living longer and delaying these diseases but, more importantly, living better in the years we’re alive. This thesis resonated with me – I’ve seen far too many elders go through that degenerative cycle. There should be a better way.

I saw a review on Amazon titled “The owner’s manual we should have received at birth.” I’m now a third of the way in and, so far, I agree. It is shaping up to be a must-read.

A good friend shared an idea from a psychology study in the 1980s – women tend to prefer speaking face-to-face and men tend to prefer speaking side-by-side.

It crystallized something I’ve observed over the years. For example, I love doing walking meetings when I can at work. And they tend to be more enthusiastically received by men over women.

A good reminder to be conscious about choosing whether to converse face-to-face vs. side-by-side.

I see two consistent patterns –

(1) A Friday with large chunks blocked for thinking and taking stock almost always result in a very positive end to the week.

(2) A Sunday that ends without a last minute sprint to finish chores almost always results in a great start to the next.

Despite knowing this, I don’t consistently implement this. On some days, it is because of things outside my circle of influence. But, more often than not, it is simply because of the difference between being aware of something and learning it.

Awareness is an important first step on the road to learning.

But to learn and not to do is not to learn.

An underrated skill that contributes to the longevity of our relationships is recognizing the other person’s need for space and finding the security within ourselves to give it.

We spoke to a doctor about a stomach ache recently. He said the stomach aches that seem scary are the ones that come quickly and feel intense.

But, ironically, those are the harmless ones. They’re just our body’s reaction to something it didn’t like.

The worrisome aches are the ones that slowly grow in intensity. They often have more serious underlying causes.

Lots of parallels to problems we face in this life.