This saddens me. I recently started psychology of human misjudgement.
Someone in thread asked what’s big deal about him. what did he achieve
My answer would be I never tried to look into his achievements or did care about them. The man was genuinely curious, humble and a geek. He constantly published his ways of thinking. I enjoyed how he thought about things, how i could relate self correct based on it.
The book also mentions that people who had built a habit switched back to old habits under stress. It looks like author had this situation.
Multiple parallel things led to an overwhelming routine and he fell off the waggon.
Meditation helped hi. apply breaks and re think on every day decisions
In my experience in order to build or break a habit you must be able to tie the action to its immediate results. It can be placebo but in your mind that association must settle in.
Meditation for a lot of people creates a state of calm afterwords. Mainly if you breathe at a lower that 6 breaths per minute.
The calmness likely leads to better decisions and helps that way.
It looked like the author has been overwhelmed with stresses of life. Meditation helped to apply breaks and steer the wheel.
the question is 'what is serious?'
generally one can go about every piece of code with a mindset that if it fails the sky will fall, or on the other extreme 'let it fail' philosophy.
I like to take a mix of slow and fast approach. While some cases demand test-driven development, in other scenarios the test cases can follow the user demand.
I like to build test coverage slowly depending on most used parts of the code. So they coverage catches up slowly but at the same time i am not spending time on test cases for things that don't get used at all.
This means, I would prefer releasing features in small batches and as the features start being used, I start improving the coverage.
While this may not work for all the teams or environments, it is one approach to build early stage products. which I mostly do.
such an important point here. The benefits of exercise are maximum when you start from a sedentary life. You will hit plateau at some point and then one has to re-think the plan.
I am doubtful that just 10 min exercise over a few years will get you in a better shape.
Another factor greatly ignored is HRV as key indicator of recovery and response to an exercise. Andrew Flatt (1) is a researcher and has been studying his cardio fitness through HRV for over 10 years. His observation is 10 sec high intensity + 50 sec break in between for 10 minutes improved his hrv. He also thinks 15000 steps contribute to better HRV as good as athlete level.
While there are plenty of questions about 10k steps, what if 15k steps do the trick?
In general, I think since HRV and VO2 max are trackable using hand-held and would be best parameters to track usefulness of an exercise over time. It is always likely that an exercise works at some point and doesn't at other. Possibly because you are more fit now or you have other life stresses dragging you down.
In my experience, a lot of these studies are not reproducible. Because every person is different and context is different too. Genetics add another layer to this. Best is to keep track of your own parameters and try things out.
> such an important point here. The benefits of exercise are maximum when you start from a sedentary life. You will hit plateau at some point and then one has to re-think the plan.
I'd bet that by the time they end up hitting that plateau it'll be a lot easier for someone who has been sedentary to up their game than it would have been if they'd started a more difficult and time consuming workout from the start. Easing into being more active seems like a really good thing and one that might make it easier for someone to start exercising and stay with it long term.
> such an important point here. The benefits of exercise are maximum when you start from a sedentary life. You will hit plateau at some point and then one has to re-think the plan.
They call it the novice effect in strength training. Also why you have to pretty much ignore any strength training research done on untrained individuals (unless you are an untrained individual).
> The benefits of exercise are maximum when you start from a sedentary life. You will hit plateau at some point and then one has to re-think the plan.
I've noticed something similar. In the countryside, I usually exercise when it's warm outside and track my weight and how much I do each day.
After the winter is over, I start at small amounts of exercise (a few km of running, a small amout of sit ups, push ups, pull ups) and it always feels like initially I drop 3-4 kg of weight rather easily but then it almost plateaus, even if I increase the exercise amount.
Regardless, it's probably worth it in the long term for overall wellbeing. Just an anecdote, but personally it feels like exercise increases how much energy I have (including how tolerable it is, the first weeks when starting again are always miserable).
Sorry cant find it. But here a little calculation.
Someone who is 180cm has 80kg of lean mass potential. Someone who isnt trained but lean would be around 65kg or so. So 15kg muscle to gain. If training correctly this person can gain 1-2 kg of muscle per month. So 6 month max 12kg muscle.
Getting more muscle with training aint the hard part. Not getting fater while training for mass is the problem
VO2 max is not trackable via hand-held. VO2 max tracking at this point requires going to the lab, putting on a mask that collects expelled gasses and getting on a treadmill. Neither resting heart rate nor peak heart rate track VO2 max.
Agree, you wont get exact numbers but ignoring the absolute values one can see differences over time to see whats working.
When it comes to these numbers i have learned that you dont focus on absolute values but watch them change
My recommendation will be to track HRV (1) and do the high intensity only when you are on or above your baseline. This is to avoid unexpected side effects of HIIT. If you can't get a hrv tracker then best to keep track of your heart rate recovery. It is common to see heart rate stay high after the exercise, it should return to normal in a few hours (3-4 hours). if not then you are over doing it.
1 - Apps like Elite HRV, hrv4training or Devices like Garmin (watch), CoreSense (Elite HRV), Scosche Rhythm+, polar or garmin chest wrap.
I had a similar experience when I joined a team. The architect was highly opinionated and wanted things to be done in certain way.
The problem however wasn't with him.
The management would usually pin all technical debt and issues on this architect. He was supposed to be answerable for anything that goes wrong.
Which made him a control freak. He wanted to know anything and everything in detail.
It's more of a culture problem.
When I realized this, I started sympathizing a bit with him. Made sure he understood what I was trying to achieve and comfortable with the code base. He was reluctant to accept new ideas but I pitched them anyway.
This is the nature of the job I realized. And it brought peace to me. I did however consider new opportunities with more freedom. But the controlling nature of the team did not bother me
I was in a similar boat. I turned to books. Read all that I could find in philosophy, leadership, and science of life in general.
I also spent lot of time studying other startups and what they did differently to win.
The founder fatigue is natural especially when we pour our heart into it. Failure hits hard. I read an interesting discussion between kapil gupta and naval. We attach our 'self' to much with the startup.
While most literature focuses on avoiding thoughts, my learning after last couple of years is - the only skilll that can help is patience. Being able to wait is the primary skill I now focus on.
Good luck.
Some book recommendations:
Anything from JD krishnamoorty, why zebras don't get ulcers, extreme leadership, charles duhigg both books, power of now (mindfulness), and most important why we sleep.
How coincidental. I believe I listened to the same Naval-Kapil talk you are speaking of just last night. Followed by my usual dose of Jiddu Krishnamurti’s talk.
K’s videos have struck a chord with me and I try to practice what he talks about.
Someone in thread asked what’s big deal about him. what did he achieve
My answer would be I never tried to look into his achievements or did care about them. The man was genuinely curious, humble and a geek. He constantly published his ways of thinking. I enjoyed how he thought about things, how i could relate self correct based on it.