Chestnuts Roasting

When I was in seventh grade, playing in the Jordan Middle School jazz band’s winter concert, I had my very first trumpet solo: eight bars, in the middle of “(Have Yourself a) Merry Little Christmas.”

Last year, a few months into learning to play the piano, December rolled around.  And though I was only about a third of the way through my method book, I paged to the back, and discovered an arrangement of the same song.  It was still well above my level, but, for a week or two, I puzzled it out, one bar at a time.  After which, though still a bit halting and uneven, I could actually play a version roughly good enough to serve as background holiday music in a restaurant or bar.

So, at least for that song, I have a reasonable basis for attachment.  But, despite being Jewish, it turns out I just really love Christmas music in general.  Admittedly, I don’t really have much choice when it comes to holiday listening – the limited array of Chanukah tunes doesn’t really measure up.  And I take some solace in the fact that the large majority of Christmas hits were actually penned by Jewish songwriters.

But, even so, it’s not really my music.  And yet, each year, I feel like it is.  By now, much as twinkle lights (which I also kind of love) feel to me far divorced from any religious origins or undertones, most Christmas music seems to me just sort of free-standing, end-of-year, dark-days-of-winter music.  Which, Jewish or not, seems perfectly fine for me to enjoy.  Or maybe that’s just a rationalization I’m selling myself.  Still, I’m selling it to myself either way.  Because, as I do every December, I’ll be spending the next month playing the grooves off of the Charlie Brown Christmas Album, any number of Canadian Brass albums of carols, and pretty much every cheesy pop Christmas playlist I can find.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas, indeed.

December 11, 2018

KISS Weight Loss – Habit 3

Okay!  So, previously, we looked at two super easy, yet surprisingly effective weight loss hacks: drinking 16oz of water a half-hour before meals, and downsizing your plates.  Either of which, extrapolating from published research, could help you drop 10 pounds over the course of the year.

Fair enough.  Still, while both are effective, they’re also pretty finite in scope.  So, today, I’m sharing a hack with much broader implications, something you can use at pretty much every meal for the rest of your life.

When people get serious about nutrition, they’ll often set out counting calories – both to clock an overall number, and to perfectly balance the macronutrients (the protein, fats, and carbs) in their meals.  And, indeed, that’s an effective approach.  For the very short term.  However, in practice, it turns out to be wildly unsustainable; pretty much everybody quits doing it entirely, reverting to their old ways whether after two days, two weeks, or (if they’re particularly gung-ho) two months.

Fortunately, however, you can get 90%+ of the results, much more sustainably, by using a simpler approach instead: measuring things with your hand.  With a handful (pun intended) of rules, you can figure out the size and composition of optimally healthful meals.  Which has a few big advantages.  First, you take your hands with you most places you go.  And, second, they come already scaled relative to your overall size, which makes them perfectly customized to your specific nutritional needs.

Here’s how it works:

– Your palm (the size and thickness) is a serving of protein.

– Your first (balled up) is a serving of non-starchy vegetables.

– Your cupped hand (or, rather, what you can hold in it) is a serving of starchy carbs.

– Your thumb (length, width) is a serving of healthy fats.

Women need one of each of those to make a meal – one palm of protein, one fist of veggies, one cupful of starches, and a thumb of fat.  Men need two of each.

So, Abigail might eat a palm-sized piece of salmon, a fist-sized serving of broccoli, a cupped hand’s worth of rice, with a thumb of olive oil drizzled on the broccoli and salmon.

Or Bob might have a piece of steak the size of two palms, two fists of sauteed spinach, and two cupped hands of mashed potatoes, mixed with a thumb’s worth of butter.

And maybe they have brunch together, with one or two servings respectively of scrambled eggs (palm), a green salad (fist), a sweet potato hash (cupped hand) and some avocado (thumb).

The possibilities are endless.  And the process is as easy – and handy – as it gets.

November 25, 2018

About Time

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been trying to take a hard look at myself of late. And though that’s mostly been diving into some of the bigger issues that I’ve identified in myself, I also keep stumbling across small, strange weaknesses that I’ve never really considered before. For example, it turns out I’m absolutely crap at remembering exactly when in the past things happened in my life.

Here’s a good, recent illustration: when designing workouts, it’s usually wise to do a ‘deload’ every four to six weeks – essentially, after beating yourself down with increasingly heavy weights and increasing intensity, week after week, for a subsequent week you step the intensity way back, often literally halving the weights used, to give your body a chance to recover. Recently, I’ve been playing around with daily and weekly workout structures in my own workouts, but I haven’t been paying close attention to the multi-week cycles that would include a deload. But, this week, feeling pretty run down, I commented to a friend at the gym that I thought I could probably use one. I just felt like I needed a break. Which was weird, I told him, as I’d just taken time off, during a week when the gym happened to be closed. My friend looked at me funny, and then reminded me that the gym was actually closed at the end of August, almost three months back.

Similarly, if you asked me in what year I did certain things – when I moved to a given apartment, started a company, worked on some project, headed off on a big trip—I’d have pretty much zero idea. Which is weird, because I actually tend to have very vivid and detailed memories of all of the individual episodes; I just can’t really order them, or place them specifically in time.

Fortunately, unlike any number of other things I’m working through, this one doesn’t seem to cause problems in my life, at least so far as I can tell. But, it’s an interesting quirk of my brain to consider going forward. And I suspect ‘consider’ is about the best I can do. Because, though I’m finding ways to work through and resolve a bunch of my other stuff, this is one I’m not even vaguely sure how to debug.

November 15, 2018

Picture This

As I’ve mentioned previously, for the past year or two, I’ve been trying to learn the very basics of a new skill each quarter – stuff like playing the piano, or chess, or pool.  Three months of chipping away daily seems to be enough to get off to a pretty good start on most skills.  And for some (like with pool, where I went from horrific to merely pretty bad), a good start turns out be all I really want.  Whereas others (like with playing the piano, which I realized I actually love), I end up keeping as a permanent part of my routine.

One reason I started doing these quarterly projects was that I had a laundry list of random skills I’d always wanted to at least try to acquire.  But another reason, one that I think has actually become the primary driver as I’ve continued to do this, is that I wanted to regularly suck at something.

Looking back on my younger self, I see that I was lucky to excel quickly at a bunch of things, and that I wisely and diligently invested a bunch of time and effort on developing those areas over the years.  But, conversely, I also see that I was probably far too quick to jettison anything I didn’t crush right away.  I’d just assume that, if I didn’t stand out immediately, I probably never would, so what was even the use of trying?  And, as a result, I never really spent as much time as I should have in the hard and embarrassing and frustrating early stages of being terrible at something new.

So, I guess, I’m making up for lost time, and trying to find things now where I can practice sucking, day in and day out.  Which makes this quarter’s project—drawing—particularly good.  Because I really, really can’t draw.  Like, you know how, when you’re six, you draw stick figures, and then you move on?  Well, I never moved on.

Still, at the start of October, I set to work.  Per the instructions in one of my drawing books, I memorialized my starting point with three pictures: one of my hand, another a self-portrait drawn from mirror reflection, the third a portrait drawn from memory.  For that third, I drew Jess.  Or rather, I tried to draw Jess.  I really did.  I spent a good thirty minutes drawing an eyebrow, and then erasing it because it wasn’t quite right, and then trying again.  And, at the end of a half hour, I had a cartoonish face that looked nothing even vaguely like Jess.  Though it did sort of look like a picture a kindergartener would draw of their kindergarten teacher and then bring home for their parents to post on the fridge.

Yet from that rough start, I’ve been putting in the work.  And though I’m still pretty terrible, every so often, I’m starting to surprise myself.  This evening, I drew another attempt at a hand – this one with the palm up, and the fingers curled in, a position that required foreshortening the fingers to make them appear correct in perspective.  And, holy crap, my picture came out kind of looking like my hand!

At this point, I’m still a good ways off from becoming the next Van Gogh.  Though, fortuitously, I also recently discovered, and was heartened and fascinated by, the story of how Van Gogh himself became Van Gogh.  Apparently, Vincent had never even really tried drawing for most of his life.  And then, when he was 27 years old, his brother Theo talked him into it.

As Vincent later wrote to Theo:

“At the time you spoke of my becoming a painter, I thought it very impractical, and would not hear of it.  What made me stop doubting was reading a clear book on perspective, Cassange’s Guide to the ABC of Drawing, and a week later I drew the interior of a kitchen with stove, chair, table and window – in their places and on their legs – whereas before it had seemed to me that getting depth and the right perspective into a drawing was witchcraft or pure chance.”

Vincent Van Gogh, who sadly died young at 37, spent the last ten years of his life, 1880-1890, becoming an artist.  The first two years of which he spent just teaching himself how to draw.  Drawings from the start of that stretch, like his 1880 Carpenter, are plagued with proportion problems, and a slew of other issues.  But by two years in, he’s making drawings like his 1882 Old Man Reading, has figured out how to make pictures at least technically work.  Five years of practice, and he’s drawing stuff like the 1885 Digger, is painting in earnest, and has really become Van Gogh, is putting out the masterpieces we all know and love.

Which is pretty inspiring.  And I was further encouraged in my hand attempts by Van Gogh’s own working and re-working of that same challenge.  In 1885, when he had already hit his stride, he was still doing sketches like Three Hands, Two Holding Forks, trying to figure out how to make hands look just right.  Even at the very end of his short life, as he was sketching drafts of some of his most famous works, like his 1890 Sower, his sketches for the painting are surrounded with a slew of carefully drawn hands in all kinds of positions.

So perhaps I shouldn’t completely write myself off, despite the slow and late start.  And even if drawing turns out to be one of those quarterly projects that largely ends once the quarter does, too, it has already given me a much greater appreciation of real artist’s work, and is (at least slightly) changing the way I look at the world around me.  But, most of all, it’s reminded me that, even for something that really, really isn’t in my wheelhouse, diligent practice actually can make a difference.  It’s been truly excellent practice at sucking at something, bad, yet sticking with it nonetheless.

October 30, 2018

Everything is Scoliosis

As is inevitable over the years of athletic life, I’ve had my share of back, or hip, or even knee, shoulder, and ankle tweaks.  And, if I were looking at myself from a rational, outside perspective, I would probably think that the unaddressed scoliosis might at least conceivably be part of the underlying cause of any of those.  But, as ever, I simply ignored the possibility, working on all kinds of other stretches and mobility drills and pre-hab exercises, skipping anything that dealt specifically with the slight spinal curve.

In the last month or two, however, I finally realized that’s kind of ridiculous.  So I started thinking and researching and self-programming to address the scoliosis head on.  It’s early, still, but even in that short amount of time, I’ve made a real impact.  Which leads to a reasonable question: why hadn’t I done this before?

I’ve thought about that a bunch, and I think the answer is simple: I just didn’t like the idea that I had an inherent structural flaw.  So, instead of facing up to the problem and trying to solve it, it was psychologically easier to ignore it and to route around it and just to try to power ahead.

Maybe it’s age or wisdom, or a year-early onset of a 40-year-old midlife crisis.  But, for the past few months, I seem to be having a ton of similarly obvious ‘revelations.’  Because it turns out there are all kinds of things I do, all kinds of behaviors and beliefs and patterns and habits that haven’t served me particularly well, that I’ve similarly spent decades studiously ignoring.  Most, similarly, aren’t even that big.  But by not addressing them, by trying to just plow past them, I’ve tripped over them repeatedly, in ways big and small over the course of my life.  And it’s only in the last little bit that I’ve been willing to say: if I have flaws or shortcomings, certainly it’s better for me to own them and try to face them head on, rather than pushing them into the back of my mental closet, shutting the door, and trying to pretend that not seeing them means they don’t exist.

Anyway, I realize this sounds so patently obvious when I put it down in words.  Which makes me further wonder how I managed to make myself willfully blind to so many issues for so long, rather than simply sucking it up and trying to solve them.  I definitely feel like the guy who’s walked for miles with rocks in his shoe, ignoring the pain, taking aspirin, coming up with different ways to walk that don’t hurt.  When, instead, it would be so much more effective to just stop for a minute, to take off the shoe, and to dump out the rocks.

October 19, 2018

Minimum Viable Fitness

Old joke:
First fish says, “how about all this water!”
Second fish replies, “what’s water?”

I know, not a great joke. But, actually, a pretty good reminder when starting a company.  And one I overlooked in the case of Composite, until Jess made some wise comments a few weeks back that helped get me onto a better, broader track.

I should first note that the startup/fish/water problem already gets a lot of coverage, at least in the San Francisco tech world.  There, 20-year-old tech dudes developing apps apparently gradually forget that there are other people in the world aside from other 20-year-old tech dudes developing apps, leading them to focus their energy solely on startups that solve their own problems.  Hence the spate of companies focused on becoming an Uber for laundry, and the like.

But, in fitness, the same kind of thing tends to happen.  From my observation, I’d estimate that about 5-10% of the US population sees exercise or fitness as a primary hobby, or a core part of their identity.  And I’d guess another 5-10% aspire in that direction, even if they’re not currently fully immersed.  And then there’s everyone else: the other 80-90% of the country who would like to be fit and healthy, but for whom that’s just one priority among hugely many, one obligation they can try to wedge into an already crazy busy schedule and life.

When fitness startups pop up, however, they tend to come from people already entirely surrounded by other people in that deeply fitness-committed 5-10%.  And so they essentially preach to the choir, solving the problem of how you might make that 5-10% even fitter, more deeply engaged.  (On rare occasion, companies do pop up targeting the non-enthusiast majority.  However, they tend to do that through savvy branding and messaging, rather than actually tailoring the underlying product or service.  Consider Planet Fitness, which has been hugely fiscally successful, yet whose members I would guess make even less forward progress as a whole than the already dismal results for gym members overall.)

Anyway, as I’ve been putting together Composite’s algorithm, I’ve too much been a water-ignorant fish, solely wearing my fitness-insider hat.  I pondered questions like: will members want to come in to the physical gym three or four times a week?  And what if they’re avid runners, and want to do some 5k or marathon training on top of that; how many times should they do that each week, too?

All of which is excellent and valuable and will be greatly appreciated by the insider crowd.  But the real question is, what about someone who can only commit to coming one time a week?  With the right guidance, maybe they’d also be willing to do two more 15-minute sessions at home during the balance of the week.  So given those parameters, for that person, can we still make a big impact?

Fortunately, I absolutely think we can.  It just takes a very focused, scaled down approach.  And the big upside of the AI-plus-human-coach model is that we can seamlessly go in either direction, personalizing to individual needs.  In fact, we can even scale up and down over time for the same person: maybe you have a busy stretch at work this winter, and want to pull back, but then in the spring, you’ve always wanted to do a Tough Mudder and you want to look good for a big upcoming beach trip at the start of the summer.  Perfect.  We can do any and all of that.  Or, at least, we should be able to.

And that’s what I’m working on at the moment.  Though the Composite algorithm is getting better and better, this week I went back to the drawing board, to start thinking about the changes and additions we’d have to make to expand it to really work for EVERYBODY, rather than for just the hardcore fitness few.  Sure, we may still start out with a beachhead model, bringing in the fitness-obsessed first and expanding out over time.  But just having that goal in mind gives me all kinds of ideas, things I want to work on, and small tweaks to the setup that I need to bake in from the start.

If I had to come up with a Good to Great-esque Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal for Composite, it would be to eventually make a statistically significant impact on health outcomes for the US as a whole.  And making sure we set out from the beginning asking how we’ll one day move beyond the NYC workout crowd is certainly the only way we even have a chance of getting there.

October 9, 2018

KISS Weight Loss –Habit 2

Last month, I shared the first in a series of super easy changes you can make to help lose weight: drink 16oz of water, 30 minutes before each meal.  In one study, over the course of 12 weeks, that one change was enough to help participants lose an average of 10.5 pounds.

Small, but powerful.  So let’s keep it going, with this month’s simple but effective habit!  Which is:

Use a smaller plate.

Thanks to something called the Delboeuf Illusion, your brain perceives the size of a thing in comparison to its surroundings.  As a result, people tend to use the size of their plate as an unconscious cue as they pile on food, covering, say, 2/3 of any given plate as what seems like a reasonable serving.  Thus, when you use smaller plates, you end up serving yourself less by default.  According to one study from Cornell and Georgia Tech, moving from a 12-inch plate to a 10-inch plate led people to serve themselves 22% fewer calories.  Do that just at dinners over the course of a year, and you’ll lose about 10 pounds!

That’s it.  So now you’re up to two habits: drink a big glass of water a half hour before each meal, and then eat those meals on slightly smaller plates.  Crazy enough, those alone should start to make a real difference over the next month.  Tune in four weeks from now for dumb but impactful KISS habit number three!

October 6, 2018

Wu Wei

There’s an old joke in the meditation world: don’t just do something, sit there!  And, for me, I think that’s the crux of why meditation has been helpful.  By my nature, I bias towards action – I’m constantly in motion, trying to push life forward, trying to make things happen.  And, often, that’s great.  But there are also a slew of times when not doing, when stopping and pausing and listening and waiting are actually a far better idea.

In Taoist philosophy, it’s called ‘wu wei’ – doing by not doing.  And though I learned about it some twenty years ago, I feel like I’m only just now really starting to get the hang of it.

For example, last week, Jess shared some of her current life frustrations with me.  And, in standard boy-mode style, I immediately set out to try and find solutions.  After all, if she was telling me about things, it must be because she wanted me to fix them.  Or maybe she was blaming me!  So I leapt into frenetic and defensive action, feeling like I needed to figure things out, stat.

Then, after a day or two, the wiser part of my brain finally clicked in.  And it reminded me that she wasn’t sharing frustrations because she thought I would make them disappear – she was sharing them because she wanted me to listen and care and understand.  And in my solution searching, I had actually done a pretty mediocre job of those far more important things.  So, better late than never, I apologized to her for not getting it at first.  And then I told her that I really did understand how she felt and that if I were in her shoes I’d feel the same way and that I thought it sucked and that I loved her and was there for her and on her team.  Which, not surprisingly, made her much happier than what I was doing before.

Similarly, over the past couple of years, I’ve had the usual array of athletic tweaks and injuries – most recently, left knee; before that, right hip.  In the past, I was quick to start puzzling through causes and solutions, would head to physical therapists or doctors, and would generally make myself crazy trying to deal with the situation.  But the past few times, I’ve been more measured.  Time may not heal all wounds, but it sure seems to heal a lot of them. For the vast majority of non-catastrophic athletic injuries, just stopping doing stuff that hurts, and then waiting it out, is actually wildly effective, so long as you’re willing to be patient, and give it the weeks or months required.

So, wu wei: definitely something I’m working on.  As the world throws things at me, these days I’m trying to give myself at least a moment to pause before I react.  And, increasingly, I’m finding that the best reaction is more or less no reaction at all.

October 3, 2018

Unetaneh Tokef

This year, I helped lead the Jewish High Holiday services I attended (on top of blowing the shofar, as I’ve done in a number of past years).  So, more than I would have been otherwise, I’ve been immersed in the Jewish liturgy over the past few weeks, leading up to Rosh Hashanah and then Yom Kippur.

In the midst of that, I learned that one of my friend’s mother had passed away, suddenly and unexpectedly.  Which made the prayers I was practicing, most of which revolve around life and death, judgment and compassion, seem all the more relevant and real.  Even so, I felt unprepared to comfort my friend in his loss, much less to really contemplate how fragile my own life is, like the lives of the people I love.

Though the High Holiday services are built on the same framework as a regular Saturday Shabbat service, they include all kinds of expansions and ornamentations.  Among those additions, there is one prayer that I’ve thought about in particular in the past few weeks, especially in light of my friend’s loss: Unetaneh Tokef.  Since I first remember hearing it some thirty years back, it has always seemed to me the central expression of what the holiday is about.

Though much of the service is considerably older, Unetaneh Tokef was written only about a thousand years ago, by Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, Germany. Apparently, Amnon was a close friend of the bishop of Mainz.  Close enough that the Bishop was concerned for the Rabbi’s soul, and insisted that Amnon convert to Christianity.  To buy himself time, Amnon asked for three days to consider.  But once he reached home, he became distraught about having given the impression that he might be willing to betray his god.  So he spent the three days fasting and praying.  And when the time ran out, he didn’t come back to see the bishop.

Eventually, the bishop had the rabbi rounded up, and demanded an answer.  To which Amnon replied that, not only would he not convert, he’d rather his tongue be cut out for having said he’d even consider it.  Furious, the bishop told Amnon that his sin wasn’t in his tongue for what he’d said, but rather in his legs for not coming back as promised, and he ordered Amnon’s feet to be chopped off, joint by joint.  They chopped off his hands, joint by joint, too, asking after each cut if Amnon might reconsider.  And, when he didn’t, he was eventually sent home, along with his amputated limbs.

When Rosh Hashanah arrived a few days later, the Rabbi asked to be carried to the front of his synagogue, where he recited one of the central prayers of the service – the Kedushah – recited a poem he had composed – Unetaneh Tokef – and then died on the spot.

Three days later, Amnon appeared in a dream to another Mainz Rabbi, the famed Kabbalah scholar Klonimos ben Meshullam, teaching him the text of Unetaneh Tokef, and asking him to send it out to the Jewish world so it might become part of the Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur prayers.  As indeed it has.

Anyway, even for non-Jews, the prayer itself is kind of amazing and haunting as just a piece of literature, with descriptions of how the great ram’s horn will be blown, how a “still, thin sound” will be heard, how even the angels will tremble. Amnon writes that god will make “all mankind pass before [him] like members of the flock. Like a shepherd pasturing his flock, making sheep pass under his staff, so shall [he] consider the soul of all the living [and] inscribe their verdict.”

But it’s in the middle of the prayer, set to a mournful melody that gives me goosebumps every time, that he really gets going, describing in detail the fates we might face:

On Rosh Hashanah will be inscribed and on Yom Kippur will be sealed how many will pass from the earth and how many will be created; who will live and who will die; who will die at his predestined time and who before his time; who by water and who by fire, who by sword, who by beast, who by famine, who by thirst, who by storm, who by plague, who by strangulation, and who by stoning.  Who will rest and who will wander, who will live in harmony and who will be harried, who will enjoy tranquility and who will suffer, who will be impoverished and who will be enriched, who will be degraded and who will be exalted.

Tough stuff.  Though as the rabbi eventually advises at the denouement of the prayer, “through repentance, prayer, and charity, we may reduce the severity of the decree.”

I’ve always been fascinated by that phrase.  Amnon doesn’t say that repentance, prayer, and charity will nullify the decree, just reduce the severity.  Yet when you’re talking about death, it seems like a pretty binary outcome: you die or you don’t.  And as I read the prayer, that’s Amnon’s point – eventually, all of us do die.  Yet by trying to return to our best selves, trying to be our most transcendent, trying to do the greatest good we can in the world, we can at least change the ‘severity’ of our eventual death.  We can change what our life means along the way.  And we can leave a lasting legacy to the people we love.

September 24, 2018

Lech Lecha

“God does not tell Abraham his destination, because the goal cannot yet make sense to someone who has not experienced the journey. Arrival is not the essence. The lesson that Abram will pass on to his descendants is that the key to the journey is the journey.” – Rabbi Wolpe

On this Rosh Hashana, the Jewish new year, I’m wishing a shana tova umetukah – a good and sweet year – to all of my readers, Jewish or not. May you enjoy the journey in the year ahead!

September 12, 2018