Evolution

4 Blogs/Podcasts That Revolutionized The World, Made People Lose Weight, and Improved Their Sex Lives

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I went for a more catchy title for this post. It’s not a hundred percent accurate, but maybe it will generate some clicks. It’s actually four good blogs, e-courses, and podcasts that I’ve discovered. I hope you like them too!

Tim Ferriss: (Blog & Podcast) Ferriss has a list of questions that he relies on for each of his guests. His book, “Tribe of Mentors,” uses this list, but what makes that book so great is just how many people answered his request to pick some and reply for the book. The questions are intriguing. One example is, “How has a failure, or apparent failure, set you up for later success? Do you have a ‘favorite failure’ of yours?” The answers are revealing because A) can everyone answer the questions (from personal reflection), but B) the celebrities, athletes, and successful people he talks to give honest answers (we are learning from others’ mistakes). The book is a wealth of valuable advice and insight. There are dozens of people represented, and I enjoyed not only the answers, but also meeting and hearing from the lengthy list of achievers from different backgrounds.

American History Tellers (Podcast – iTunes, Spotify): Insightful history of America told with detail and embellished with stories that are sometimes from real-life, and sometimes made up, to help listeners understand what was happening at particular moments in history. Minimal advertising. Enlightening and a fun listen.

How to Listen to and Understand Great Music, 3rd Edition: (Audio Book/Class) This is a fascinating class/lecture series about what most people refer to as “classical music.” However, the professor/teacher clarifies the various periods of history so we can understand the differences in the music he plays for us. The professor has a very dry sense of humor, and I find myself laughing at his comments and descriptions often. Educational and fun.

Ryan Holiday: (Blog, Books) I’ve only recently discovered the writings of Ryan Holiday, but they have already made a big impact on me. My introduction to the Stoic philosophy was through his book “The Obstacle Is The Way,” which is a concise, easy, read that will leave you wanting more. I absolutely soaked up his lessons with gusto, and started reading other books by not only Holiday, but also the Stoic philosophers like, “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius, “The Manual: A Philosopher’s Guide To Life,” and “The Art Of Living,” both by Epictetus. I’m trying to become better at living, at being a good person, and achieving goals I’m just learning to set for myself, and Holiday and the Stoics are a tremendous support system. I highly encourage everyone to read his books. You will not be disappointed if you enter into the relationship with an open mind.

 

 

 

 

4 Blogs/Podcasts That Revolutionized The World, Made People Lose Weight, and Improved Their Sex Lives

DuoLingo

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Over the past year I have worked on learning Spanish through a website called DuoLingo. There are a slew of other sites/companies that can help you learn a second, third, fourth language for not much cost, or even free. Babbel is one of these, as is Rosetta Stone. I’m sure they all have pros and cons, but I tried DuoLingo and this is how I feel about it.

I have some basic French from college but that knowledge has degraded so much that I hesitate to even say that I ever spoke the language. I’ve never used it except once when my wife and I were in Italy and I spoke with some other tourists over dinner at a wonderful, little sidewalk cafe/restaurant. They were Belgian, but they spoke French, in Italy, to some Americans. It sounds strange in retrospect.

I made a simple comment thinking I could hang, and the lady to whom we were speaking actually said something in French. She said it fast, like a native speaker. I had no idea what she said… I felt like an idiot and I definitely couldn’t hang…

Anyway, I wanted to learn Spanish to help with my skill set at work. I figured that I would more likely use Spanish than any other language in my daily life in Oklahoma, and relearning French didn’t seem to be the best option to give me the edge at work that I’m always looking for.

I tried DuoLingo because I saw an ad for it or saw it in the app store… I honestly can’t remember how I stumbled across it, but I did and I signed up for the free version. I’ve been a member long enough that I’ve seen the lessons and the app change and evolve. It’s been a growing experience for different reasons.

The app gamifies things to keep you interested, and the free version shows you an advertisement between lessons. The lessons are broken up into sections like Family 1, Family 2, Restaurant, Travel, etc. and they’re all arranged in a tree to speed the learning process and to introduce you to a language through categories.

You challenge yourself to complete anywhere from one lesson per day (basic) to 5 lessons per day (insane). As you complete lessons you earn experience points and “level up,” and earn lingots (website) or gems (app) with which you can buy things from the store. I’m not sure why it’s gems AND lingots and not gems OR lingots, but my guess is that they are in transition from one to another.

With the gems/lingots, the store allows you to purchase things like “Streak Freezes” or “Streak Repairs” or other silly things to make you feel better about missing a day, or having to watch all the ads that pay for the free version.

Ultimately you want to level up to the max of 25 in the language. Beyond 25 I guess you should be competent enough to go talk to other speakers of the language and get away from the computer for a while. I’m on level 12 in Spanish now and I have an 18 day streak going.

What I couldn’t figure out early in the learning process is whether to learn the entire tree at level one then go back and go through the whole tree again to get to level 2, or should I learn each category or section to the maximum level of 5 before moving to the next category. It’s either learning a lot of words quickly, or a few words at a time to a deeper level. I’m still not clear what the best strategy should be.

The website is faster than the app thanks to keyboard shortcuts. Way faster. The free version of the app slows you down a lot with ads, as I previously mentioned, and they also recently introduced this thing about 5 mistakes and you’re out for five hours…

It kind of irritated me when they did that because some days are better than others, and some days I make more mistakes than others. After making 5 mistakes a couple of times and having to “sit out” for 5 hours before being allowed to continue my lessons for the day, I knew I had a decision to make.

I could keep going with all these ads and bottlenecks, I could pay for the service, I could try another free service, or I could pay for a different service. I didn’t spend much time looking at the other services because DuoLingo was the cheapest of the few I looked at ($10/month).

After I paid for the service everything changed for the better. I don’t have to wait five hours before restarting my training if I make 5 mistakes. I don’t have the advertisements slowing me down. Everything runs smoothly and I feel like I’m finally making more progress.

In the free version I was happy to reach the insane goal of 5 lessons per day. But I got sick of the ads and slow-downs. After paying the monthly charge to eliminate the ads, and also working from a laptop rather than my smartphone, I’m easily achieving the 16 lessons per day average that I need to reach level 25 by the end of March, 2019. I’m on a schedule here.

I’ve gone from being happy at my 5 lessons a day to a high of 27 lessons in one day. It makes me feel like I’m immersed in the language rather than dabbling in it too. If you want to learn a language, try DuoLingo, and just pay for it. It’s worth it in time saved eliminating the ads and such. Also try the sister website/service called Tiny Cards which is to help reinforce the language training by showing flash cards on subjects.

I’m enjoying it. I catch myself thinking in Spanish about what I’m doing throughout the day, and I think that’s part of the goal in learning a new language.

 

DuoLingo

Quotes To Consider

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Objective judgement, now, at this very moment.
Unselfish action, now, at this very moment.
Willing acceptance—now, at this very moment—of all external events.
That’s all you need.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 9:6

You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along!'”

Eleanor Roosevelt

You could spend your whole life waiting on the mountain to move, but it’s waiting on you. (From “Make It Move“)

Johnny Lang

The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

In a world where comfort is king, arduous physical activity provides a rare opportunity to practice suffering. (From How Exercise Shapes You Far Beyond The Gym)

Brad Stulberg

A straightforward, honest person should be like someone who stinks: when you’re in the same room with him, you know it.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 11:15

To give anything less than your best is to sacrifice the gift.

Steve Prefontaine

(This quote has become something of a personal mantra.)

Quotes To Consider

Embracing Discomfort

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“The problem is that when you run from discomfort all the time, you are restricted to a small zone of comfort, and so you miss out on most of life.”

Discomfort can be good for you. It can teach you what your limits are. It can also improve your ability to withstand discomfort in the future. It can expand what you know.

What does being uncomfortable mean though? How would you define a situation in which you feel discomfort?

It’s not a black and white situation to be honest. It can’t be answered simply or easily. A safe answer would be “any time you’re outside of your comfort zone.” But that too is hazy, vague and needs to be defined further. Could we include “pain” in the definition of “discomfort?”

Pain is sensory. We feel pain. It hurts. Does discomfort have to be painful? Yes, at least a little bit. Experiencing pain is definitely outside the comfort zone. The next questions would be, What causes pain, and why is it of benefit?

A broken bone is painful. Childbirth is painful. A headache is painful. Stepping on a thumbtack or lego is painful. Exercise is also painful, or can be, but has tremendous benefits to one’s well-being. How is this possible? Without exercise, we lose muscle as we age, and this is deterioration, which can be very painful (I’ve experienced pain from muscle atrophy). However, we can exercise to rebuild muscle. At first it may also be painful, but once we change our habits we start rebuilding muscle and it helps us in a number of ways.

Stress can be emotionally painful. Can stress also be of benefit? Long-term stress has been shown to be detrimental to our health and well-being, but in small amounts stress can help us focus, perform at a higher level than normal, and overcome obstacles that we might normally avoid.

I’ve challenged myself to embrace discomfort more to see if it can help me grow. My areas of focus are exercise, diet, reducing alcohol intake, and trying to embrace and use the stress from my job to improve the quantity and quality of work I produce.

What brings you discomfort, and how can you embrace it to improve yourself or your situation? Comments please.

A few articles for further reading:

 

 

 

Embracing Discomfort

Quotes to Consider

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Below is a small collection of quotes I’ve gathered from books I’ve read recently. Granted, what I’ve been reading lately seems depressing based on the quotes below, I strongly encourage everyone to read each of the books from which these quotes were taken as they will educate and enlighten to the realities and possible realities of our current world.

Marcus Aurelius

“It’s quite possible to be a good man without anyone realizing it. Remember that.”

From “Meditations” 7:67

Viktor Frankl

“When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.”

From “Man’s Search For Meaning,” p. 77

Todd Rose

“Contemporary pundits, politicians, and activists continually suggest that our educational system is broken, when in reality the opposite is true. Over the past century, we have perfected our educational system so that it runs like a well-oiled Taylorist machine, squeezing out every possible drop of efficiency in the service of the goal its architecture was originally designed to fulfill: efficiently ranking students in order to assign them to their proper place in society.”

From “The End Of Average”

Steven Pressfield and Shawn Coyne

“The professional masters how, and leaves what and why to the gods.”

From “The War of Art“

Quotes to Consider

GETTING HEALTHY

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The last couple of years I’ve been plodding toward a healthier version of myself. In 2017 I signed up at Planet Fitness and have been relatively good about working out from two to four times a week, though not without the occasional lapse.

I wanted to get in better shape and improve my fitness for the long-term, and started out with no desire to become a body-builder. I don’t lift heavy weights, though the weight is increasing little by little as I build strength, which was my primary goal. My secondary goal was to lose about 25 pounds. I didn’t look all that bad, but I had a gut that I really wanted to get rid of.

What I actually learned over the course of the last year was that changing my eating habits was the hardest part of dropping weight. I had been more successful quitting other vices than I had in adopting a healthier diet. However, I recently made a change to another area of my life which dramatically affected the foods I was able to eat for around six months. I got dentures. That process changed my life in ways I did not expect.

BACKGROUND

I was not born with good DNA where my teeth are concerned – or were concerned. I was also not taught at an early age the benefits of good dental hygiene. I don’t blame my mom. I just didn’t adopt an effective daily cleaning routine. Therefore, by the time I entered adulthood I was already struggling with the ramifications of poor dental hygiene and mediocre dental DNA. Looking back, about every 3-5 years I’d need to lose another tooth. Infections and impacted teeth weren’t uncommon. I tried hard as an adult to fix the issue, but I simply started too late to get ahead of the problem.

In the last four or five years I’ve been thinking about dentures as a solution as the semi-annual visits to the dentist for cleanings turned into quarterly, alternating visits to the dentist and periodontist. However I was timid about getting dentures because I knew it would be expensive. (I’m also a cheapskate…) A poor reason to put off healthcare or dental care, but still, I’m guilty of making the decision more than once.

Finally, though, I’d had enough and the ongoing treatments and solutions sounded less and less appealing. They also took more and more of my time. Dentists and Periodontists love to tell people to keep the teeth they were born with as long as possible, and I tried to do that, but eventually I made the decision to go all the way and address the root of the problem once and for all. I didn’t realize it at that time, but plodding toward a healthier lifestyle was about to get a rocket-assisted boost.

SURGERY ONE

In October, 2017 I had my first round of surgery – removing my back teeth. This was a total and complete body-pounding. I cannot tell you how hard it affected me physically to go through not only the surgery, but the healing process afterward. The first week afterward was pain management, the second week was a little less of the pain and more of the starvation that comes with having only front teeth to eat with. I could eat, sort of, but I had to use muscles in my jaws that I had never used before so at about the 10-14 day mark I thought my jaws were locking up due to the soreness… I was scared for a day or two, but it eventually passed.

I also ate Advil and Oxycodone like candy to deal with the pain in the early days. The foods I could eat were not all that different overall, but I had to make sure I let the gums heal so I stayed with soups and softer foods. Salads were out. I had no back teeth with which to grind leafy greens, so vegetables had to be soft. After a few weeks I was able to eat things like chicken or the occasional steak again. I had lost a little over 10 pounds by this time by eliminating fast food and large lunches out during the work week, and I’d cut out soda pretty much all together.

SURGERY TWO

In January, 2018 I had the front teeth removed and started using the new temporary dentures.

My dentist told me that the second surgery would be easier on me physically since the front teeth had one root and the back teeth had two or three roots. I was ready to complete the process and get the temporary dentures, give my gums enough time to heal and then start preparing for implants. However, the second surgery didn’t really go as easily as I’d been led to believe…

Where I had been in the chair for an hour and a half for the first surgery (pulling the back teeth and having bone grafts to prepare for implants), the second surgery lasted around three hours according to my wife.

After the removals and bone grafts the periodontist was frustrated that the dentures didn’t really fit quite right and my wife ended up hauling me to the dentist across town so he could help with the situation. I was still heavily sedated and bleeding… The dentist got everything fixed properly and sent me home to recuperate.

I awoke that evening with a soreness that I had never known before. I could also eat even less now because the dentures sat on top of gums that were still stitched up and swollen and very, very sore. It was basically a liquid diet for the first two weeks after surgery two. That’s when I lost the other 15 pounds.

I could go on and on about how the gums change over time, or how the dentures need to get adjusted by the dentist to go along with the changes in the gums, or a lot of other things, but I won’t. What I’ll say at this point is that I’m working very hard to keep that weight off. I’ve learned that portion control is king. Eating a lot more veggies and a lot less meat is also a big part of my success.

I also couldn’t work out at Planet Fitness as much as I wanted. I really didn’t have much enthusiasm to add additional soreness to my body… But I’m happy to say that I’ve kept off that 25 pounds, I’m back in the gym two or three days a week adding muscle and getting fit, and I’m eating a LOT better than I used to.

It’s taken months to get used to wearing dentures. It’s been the hardest thing I may have ever done for myself, but it’s been good for me in the long-term. I feel better than ever because I’m eating a much healthier diet, I’m working out regularly, and my self-confidence has never been higher because not only do I feel better, I look better too. I guess the silver lining is that being forced to do something is sometimes the only way some people (me) can make a change they know they need.

 

GETTING HEALTHY

Book Review: The Shallows, What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains

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This is a book about the human brain and how it works. At times it’s heavy reading, deep reading, which is very much the point. The author looks at how the brains of humans have developed over the millennia, not so much from an evolutionary perspective in terms of the shape of or newly formed regions in the brain but from the perspective of intellectual evolution. In other words, the brain itself hasn’t changed physically as much as it has changed in how it works based on two human developments that are actually quite recent in human history – maps and books.

Maps gave humans the ability to think in a more abstract way about the world around them. Books gave humans the ability to amass knowledge and to think more deeply than ever before. Books evolved from the cuneiform tablets of Mesopotamia and the Hieroglyphs of Ancient Egypt, to the creation of papyrus documents, connecting papyrus documents together to make scrolls, to the invention of the actual book as we know it around 1400, and then to the evolution of the written word and how sentences are formed. As books became more available, writing styles developed and evolved and deep reading was more possible than ever before, which led to deep thinking.

At a broad level, writing and deep reading allowed humans to think about specific ideas and concepts rather than spending our time scanning our environments looking for enemies or game to feed ourselves – a very distracted state. Other inventions also contributed to human advancement, like clocks, but they didn’t have as great an impact on our cultural evolution as maps and books from the author’s perspective.

One of the more interesting things covered is neuroplasticity, or how the brain actually works. The human brain is capable of rewiring itself throughout our lives either through training or through recovery from injury. For example, when someone suddenly goes blind from injury or illness, the brain can rewire the areas devoted to processing visual stimuli and redirect those areas toward improving touch or smell or sound. There are numerous studies that support neuroplasticity.

However this flexibility can be both a strength and a weakness. While it  can rewire itself as mentioned to allow other senses to develop when one sense is damaged, neuroplasticity can also cause problems when this rewiring doesn’t go quite right leading to obsessive-compulsive disorders, bipolar depression, or others.

How does the Internet affect the development humans have achieved over the last 500 years or more? We don’t have the capacity for deep reading or deep thinking on the Internet. Corey Doctorow, writer and tech guru, is quoted as saying we are plunged into an “ecosystem of interruption technologies” when reading on the Internet limiting our ability for deep reading, and therefore deep thinking. The backlit computer monitor delivers competing rapid-fire stimuli through the numerous alerts and distractions that come along with the Internet.

Michael Merzenich, neurosurgeon and author, writes “As we multitask online we are ‘training our brains to pay attention to the crap.’

But I have to wonder if the author stopped too soon. He focused on our collective intellectual journey primarily over the last 500 years, and now that it’s changing because of the Internet it is for the worse. My first problem with that is the assumption that everything leading up to the Internet was in the right direction. Though I can point to no alternate direction humans could have taken, it’s still an assumption that how we developed was along the correct path. My second problem is that the Internet can only be a bad influence though it promises so much more.

What if our brains are being rewired in a way that is positive, but we’re not able to see the end result yet? Perhaps we’re in transition to a new state of enlightenment. If deep reading is focusing narrowly and deeply on a topic and the Internet scatters our attention shallowly and broadly, is there a point at which the breadth of the “knowledge pool” we’re wading in becomes in itself a positive thing? Maybe we haven’t yet reached that breadth of knowledge required to attain this new, different intellectual state of awareness.

Though the Internet may be making our thinking shallower, perhaps the multitude of associations that can be made through this theoretical breadth of knowledge can more than make up for the narrowness and deepness of the specialized knowledge of our recent past. In other words, the Subject Matter Expert may be replaced by the Renaissance Man, the Jack Of All Trades, the handyman…

Also, it makes the assumption that everyone was a “deep reader” and therefore a “deep thinker” prior to the Internet. Before the Internet MOST people listened to Top 40, not Mozart. They read tabloids, not The Iliad. MOST were watching Friends or Roseanne or The Nanny, not enjoying Shakespeare at the theater. At least in the USA…

Though I don’t disagree with the basic premise of this book (the Internet can be bad for us) I absolutely have to question the scale of the problem it brings to light, namely that the Internet is turning everyone into distracted neurotics…

I gave it two stars because I did learn from the book, but I have reservations that everything human society achieved prior to the Internet was in a linear direction toward positive or “correct” evolution.

 

 

Book Review: The Shallows, What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains