Instructions

When I was in high school, I truly loved H. Jackson Brown’s Life’s Little Instruction Book, a collection of short bits of wisdom Brown originally typed up and gifted to his son on his first day of college.

A surprising number of the instructions have stuck with me over the years, word for word. Things like:

“If in a fight, hit first and hit hard.”

“Choose your life’s mate carefully. From this one decision will come ninety percent of all your happiness or misery.”

“When complimented, a sincere ‘thank you’ is the only response required.”

So, earlier this week, when I came across it again by chance, I gave it a quick re-read. And I still think it’s absolutely great.

Though I had, in the years since I last picked it up, forgotten what was always perhaps my favorite part: a short poem Brown wrote at the beginning of the collection, which I think so beautifully summarizes what it means to be a father and a son:

Son, how can I help you see?
May I give you my shoulders
to stand on?
Now you see farther than me.
Now you see for both of us.
Won’t you tell me what you see?

April 27, 2017

300

In my entire life, I’ve probably bowled less than twenty games; when I do, I’m pretty happy just to score above 100. So I was exceedingly impressed when I recently discovered this video, in which a dude breaks a world record by bowling a perfect game in under 90 seconds, using all the lanes in the alley in rapid succession:

It made me think of, nearly twenty years ago, planning a bowling holiday party for my first company. Though I showed up believing the open bar would be the main draw, my colleagues began to arrive toting their own monogrammed balls and shoes, and I quickly realized things were about to get ugly. I went home that night wondering: should I spend at least some time learning to bowl, at least to the point that I’m no longer a horrific embarrassment?

The same thing happens whenever I (rather infrequently) play pool, a game that I can geometrically crush in my mind, yet that somehow goes badly awry when actual cue makes contact with real-life ball. And, similarly, whenever I end up having to draw something in public, the picture of a dog in my mind’s eye devolving into a squiggly, misshapen cow-creature when committed to whiteboard or page.

At various times, I’ve given thought to getting, if not good, then at least decent at any of those pursuits, too. Much like I’ve considered studying chess (something I feel like I’d be good at, even if the half-dozen games over the course of my life don’t precisely back that up), learning to ride a motorcycle, or just figuring out how to do that ‘loud whistle with your fingers in your mouth’ thing.

But, in the end, I’ve inevitably concluded that, at this point in my life, I already have a full weekly schedule. So it’s not a question of whether I’d like to be good at golf; it’s a question of whether I’d like that more than some other equally time-intensive commitment that’s already on my roster.

It reminds me a bit of the well-trafficked story about the advice Warren Buffett gave to his personal pilot, Mike Flint. Flint asked for career advice, so Buffett suggested they draw up together a list of Flint’s top 25 goals. Then he had Flint circle the top five goals on that list.

Flint told Buffett he’d get to work on those five right away.

“But what about the ones you didn’t circle?” Buffett asked.

“Well, the top 5 are my primary focus, but the other 20 come in a close second,” Flint replied. “They’re still important, so I’ll work on those intermittently as I see fit. They are not as urgent, but I still plan to give them a dedicated effort.”

To which Buffett replied, “No. You’ve got it wrong, Mike. Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Cost list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your top 5.”

So, in short, no learning Chinese, getting a flying license, or anything else. I feel good enough about my own ‘top five’ that I can reliably stick with my plan. But I do still, now and again, come across a crazy video of a crack bowler on the Internet, and pine for the chance to somehow do it all. As I recently quoted Tolkien: “I wish life was not so short. Languages take such a time, and so do all the things one wants to know about.”

April 26, 2017

Poly-anna

I don’t have a great history of endorsing email apps, as the last two I jumped behind (first Sparrow, then Mailbox) were both acquired and then discontinued pretty much immediately after I plugged them.

Nonetheless, chancing fate, I’d like to once again make an email client recommendation: Polymail.

First, it’s clean and fast.

Second, it integrates a bunch of useful features otherwise only available as separate services: snoozing messages to reappear in the future, per-recipient read notifications on sent messages, the ability to send emails at a scheduled later time, contact profiles with integrated social media / past interactions, etc.

Third, it’s the only client I’ve found that also integrates two of Gmail’s best browser interface features: undo send, and inbox categories.

And fourth and perhaps best of all, it has a surprisingly effective one-click unsubscribe button at the top of any automated email. While most of those emails end up in the aforementioned inbox categories, rather than my primary inbox, I also find my email wrangling is far less stressful if I cut back on the volume of received messages overall. Between news alerts, messages from merchants I’ve bought from in the past, social networking notifications, etc., the amount of ‘bacn’ (i.e., one step up from spam) that I’d been getting daily was fairly mind-boggling. With just a few weeks of liberal unsubscribe button use, I’ve whittled those down by nearly 90%, to the point that I actually read (and want to read) nearly everything that shows up.

So, Polymail. It’s on Mac and iPhone / iPad now, and coming to Android and (for those living on the dark side – I’m looking at you, Ole) Windows shortly. Check it out!

April 25, 2017

Variable

One of the most fundamental principles in fitness is progressive overload: gradually increasing workout stress over time, so that your body adapts positively to that increase. Perhaps that’s adding five pounds to your squat each time you lift to build strength, or lengthening successive runs to go from a mile to a marathon.

But while overload is easy on paper, it’s far more complicated in real life. Human bodies don’t adapt linearly in even the best of conditions, and progress is even more unpredictable once you factor in life stress, travel, lack of sleep, or a night of heavy drinking and too much dessert. Continuing to overload beyond what your body can keep up with leads to overtraining, which in turn causes illness and injuries, setting progress back.

So as you move forward in training, it’s useful to be able to monitor how well your body is adapting. While there are a number of approaches that work, one of the simplest and most empirically validated is tracking heart-rate variability (or HRV).

We tend to think of our heart as beating in a steady tick-tock. In reality, each beat varies a bit from the last. In fact, a healthy heart has a great deal of variability, whereas increasing regularity (as data from the Framingham study and others have consistently shown) drives increasing risk of heart disease.

Heart-rate variability results from the balance between the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system is like the gas in a car, revving our bodies up for increased output, whereas the parasympathetic is like the brakes, bringing us down into rest and relaxation.

When the sympathetic nervous system overwhelms the parasympathetic, your heart-rate variability decreases. And, similarly, when your sympathetic nervous system overwhelms the parasympathetic, you’re on the road to overtraining.

As a result, monitoring heart-rate variability is a great way to simultaneously monitor overtraining.

While, previously, measuring HRV required specialized equipment (whether an EKG or a chest-strapped heart-rate monitor), the brilliant folks behind the app HRV4Training recently developed and clinically validated an approach to measurement using just your smartphone.

The way it works is simple: each morning, right after you wake up, you hold your finger over the phone’s camera lens for one minute. From that, the app determines your HRV for the day, compares the number to your moving averages over the past seven days and two months, and kicks out a simple recommendation: something like “go ahead and train, but limit intensity,” or “if you planned intense training, go for it.”

As I admitted on Friday, I’ve sometimes been lax with daily HRV tracking. But I always regret it when I am. HRV provides a great window into how I’m adapting to the progressive overload of my workouts, and it’s been a powerful tool in helping to keep me healthy and injury-free, moving forward over the longer haul.

So download HRV4Training, and overload yourself, just the right amount.

All the News that Fits We Print

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics [Murray Gell-Mann is an American physicist who received the 1969 Nobel Prize in physics]. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

– Michael Crichton

April 22, 2017