Metabolic Fitness, Productivity Porn, and Incubating Innovation
August 2020 - Evergreen Thoughts
What’s on my mind…
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The Future of Fitness
Metabolic fitness is the science of how your body turns food into energy. Each time you eat your body responds with a flood of hormonal activity (e.g. insulin, glucagon, cortisol, growth hormone). These chemical reactions influence your body and mind for up to 4 hours (🤯) in 4 main ways:
⚡️ Energy level: Whether you have high or low energy levels.
🧠 Mental state: Whether you have a clear headed or foggy state of mind.
😋 Appetite: Whether or not you will experience food cravings.
💪 Fuel usage: Whether you burn fat or store fat.
During July I used Levels Health to better understand and optimize my metabolic health. It gave me real time feedback on how stuff like diet, exercise, sleep, and stress affects my blood glucose levels. It made it crystal clear that what I eat has a profound influence on my energy levels, mental state, and appetite.
One of my biggest takeaways is that there are many small actions we can take to minimize the magnitude and duration of blood glucose spikes:
🚶♂️ Walk for 15-20m after a meal.
😴 Get a good night sleep.
🥩 Front load high glycemic index meals with protein and fiber.
🌙 Avoid high glycemic index food later in the evening.
⏳ Reduce hunger-eating by eating a healthy meal or snack at least every 4 hours.
While I’m still going to minimize refined carbohydrates and sugars as much as possible, I find these small actions more practical and sustainable tactics compared to more extreme diets and behavior changes. Give them a try and let me know what you think!
Key Inputs
Natural Hormonal Enhancement by Rob Faigin
The Ultimate Guide to Metabolic Fitness by Casey Means
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The Pitfalls of Productivity
I invest a lot into my productivity system. However, at times, this can be counterproductive. It can lead to optimizing short term heuristics (more, better, faster) at the expense of what I’m really after (love, connection, fulfillment). This is a trap I see myself and others fall into across a variety of domains:
Careers: professional achievement > family and relationships
Product development: metric optimization > creating real value for users
Reading: # books/articles read > insights gained and ability to help you relax
Social media: # likes/followers > meaningful new knowledge and connections
It's human nature to gravitate towards what’s tangible and measurable. At the same time, everything important cannot easily be measured. So for all you high achievers, don’t let the pursuit of more, better, faster come at the expense of what you’re really after.
Key Inputs
“But following that path has led me to a realization: that there is something deeper than productivity. That lying just below our desire for more, better, faster, there are more fundamental things we are seeking – love, connection, intimacy, fulfillment, peace of mind.” — Tiago Forte
“High achievers want to optimize achievement. So they spend all their energy on near term tangible achievements. However, this can lead to negative long term consequences.” — Clay Christianson
"People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and over-invest in their careers — even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness." — Clay Christianson
👨🚀
Incubating Innovation (To Infinity & Beyond)
I recently read Creativity Inc, which gives an inside look into Pixar’s creative culture. It’s a super fun and inspiring read, with countless lessons for how to cultivate innovation and originality. I’m particularly intrigued by how much they embrace uncertainty and failure. Below are a couple of my favorite related ideas and passages, with some notes from others sprinkled into the mix.
Avoiding failure will make you obsolete
“While experimentation is scary to many, I would argue that we should be far more terrified of the opposite approach. Being too risk-averse causes many companies to stop innovating and to reject new ideas, which is the first step on the path to irrelevance.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
“In a fear-based, failure-averse culture, people will consciously or unconsciously avoid risk. They will seek instead to repeat something safe that’s been good enough in the past. Their work will be derivative, not innovative.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
“Having no appetite for being wrong means you’ll only attempt things with high odds of working. And those things tend to be only slight variations on what you’re already doing, which themselves are things that, in a changing world, may soon be obsolete.” — Morgan Housel, Collaborative Fund
Embrace uncertainty and don’t be afraid to wander
“While the allure of safety and predictability is strong, achieving true balance means engaging in activities whose outcomes and payoffs are not yet apparent. The most creative people are willing to work in the shadow of uncertainty.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
“To understand what the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
“Sometimes (often actually) in business, you do know where you’re going, and when you do, you can be efficient. Put in place a plan and execute. In contrast, wandering in business is not efficient … but it’s also not random. It’s guided – by hunch, gut, intuition, curiosity, and powered by a deep conviction that the prize for customers is big enough that it’s worth being a little messy and tangential to find our way there. Wandering is an essential counter-balance to efficiency. You need to employ both. The outsized discoveries – the “non-linear” ones – are highly likely to require wandering.” — Jeff Bezos, Amazon
New ideas need to be nurtured and protected
New ideas must be nurtured and protected in order to have a shot at turning into something worthwhile. So beware the critics and negative naysayers. And make sure you’re creating enough space for people to explore and test new ideas.
“At Pixar, we try never to waver in our ethics, our values, and our intention to create original, quality products. We are willing to adjust our goals as we learn, striving to get it right—not necessarily to get it right the first time. Because that, to my mind, is the only way to establish something else that is essential to creativity: a culture that protects the new.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
“Pixar films are not good at first, and our job is to make them so—to go, as I say, ‘from suck to not-suck.’” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
As stated by Anton Ego in my favorite Pixar movie, Ratatouille:
For those that came here to read and not watch YouTube videos…
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.” — Anton Ego, Ratatouille
Teddy Roosevelt’s “The Man in the Arena” is another favorite related passage:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” — Teddy Roosevelt
Failure should be thought of as an investment
“My goal is not to drive fear out completely, because fear is inevitable in high-stakes situations. What I want to do is loosen its grip on us. While we don’t want too many failures, we must think of the cost of failure as an investment in the future.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
“Experiments are fact-finding missions that, over time, inch scientists toward greater understanding. That means any outcome is a good outcome, because it yields new information. If your experiment proved your initial theory wrong, better to know it sooner rather than later.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
While you can’t avoid failure by doing extra planning…
“But I should caution that if you seek to plot out all your moves before you make them—if you put your faith in slow, deliberative planning in the hopes it will spare you failure down the line—well, you’re deluding yourself.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
“The overplanners just take longer to be wrong (and, when things inevitably go awry, are more crushed by the feeling that they have failed).” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
“The more time you spend mapping out an approach, the more likely you are to get attached to it. The nonworking idea gets worn into your brain, like a rut in the mud. It can be difficult to get free of it and head in a different direction. Which, more often than not, is exactly what you must do.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
…You should try to make failures less expensive and easier to recover from
“So we try to make it less expensive to fail, thereby taking some of the onus off it. For example, we’ve set up a system in which directors are allowed to spend years in the development phase of a movie, where the costs of iteration and exploration are relatively low. (At this point, we’re paying the director’s and story artists’ salaries but not putting anything into production, which is where costs explode.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
“Give them responsibility, let the mistakes happen, and let people fix them. If there is fear, there is a reason—our job is to find the reason and to remedy it. Management’s job is not to prevent risk but to build the ability to recover.” — Ed Catmull, Pixar
Failure needs to scale as a company grows
“As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle.” — Jeff Bezos, Amazon
Key Inputs:
🎧 On repeat: folklore
🍿 Worth binging: Palm Springs
🛒 Product recs: Levels Health, Smart Sweets, Magic Mind
📚 Read: Foundation (3/5), Creativity, Inc. (4/5)
📖 In Progress: Slowing Down to the Speed of Life, Natural Hormonal Enhancement
If you like what you read, consider sharing it with some friends.
👋 Until next time,
Adam