Hello friends, and welcome back to Life Reimagined, a free elixir designed to make your life more enjoyable. We have three topics to discuss today: |
- Living a Long, Vibrant, and Productive Life
- The Dangers of Maximization Strategies
- How AI Will Change the Way We Operate and Think
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Before we dive in, I want to tell you about one of my favorite discoveries of 2022. |
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Magic Mind: A Productivity Drink That Actually Works |
I've been experimenting with nootropics to boost my cognitive performance, and honestly, most of them have been terrible. Even when I get a mental boost, I often get a headache and other unwelcome side effects. |
That's why I was stoked when I tried Magic Mind, the first nootropic that actually worked for me. Magic Mind is a drink that combines 12 active ingredients to reduce stress and increase energy, focus, and creativity. |
I take Magic Mind with my morning coffee on days when I want to get sh*t done. It gives me a reliable boost in energy, clears mental fog, and creates a calmer, sustained focus. |
Magic Mind does not solve all of my problems, but it does make me a lot sharper and more productive during the first half of the day. |
If you want to see if Magic Mind works for you, I've partnered with them to give you a 20% discount on your first order. Just enter the code LIFEREIMAGINED at checkout. |
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 | The Magic Mind I took in Hawaii to write this newsletter |
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And of course, for anything involving health and your body, make sure to DYOR. Alright, let's get to the meat and potatoes of this week's post. |
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Living a Long, Vibrant, and Productive Life |
When I was eleven years old, my step-uncle pinched the baby fat on my cheeks, cackled, and said that a chubby mama's boy would never get girls. I cried all weekend, but looking back, I'm grateful for what he did. |
The pain of that experience motivated me to prove my step-uncle wrong and sparked an early interest in health and fitness. As a teenager, I worked out regularly and educated myself on the basic principles of nutrition. I mostly wanted to "get swole" so that I could impress my guy friends and attract girls. That guiding motivation stayed with me until my mid-twenties. |
But as I've gotten older, my health goals have changed. Instead of wanting to build the optimal beach body, I'm now much more interested in "feeling good" and living a long life that allows me to surf into my 60s and pick up my future grandchildren with ease. |
And over the last two years, I've spent a lot of time updating my health knowledge, adding new tools to the quiver, and reorienting my life to be aligned with my new goals. I've run experiments on myself and documented what I've learned along the way. |
Today, I'm excited to share my latest article about what I've learned so far. |
Musing on Living a Long, Vibrant, and Productive Life |
A sneak preview of what you'll encounter: |
- Principles for getting 90% of the health results you want
- Unexpected insights for improving your sleep
- How to feel good and filled with energy throughout the day
- Simple techniques for reducing anxiety
- The most effective practices for healing injuries
- How to use blood work to identify what's going on inside your body
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The Dangers of Maximization Strategies |
A recent supermarket experience reminded me of a valuable lesson. |
I went to Trader Joe's after a workout and left the store with three full bags of tasty treats. When I got home, I was tired and did not want to climb the stairs to my second-floor apartment twice, so I carried all three bags in one trip. |
As I approached the stairs, one of the bag straps broke, and my food went flying onto the pavement. I shook my head as I looked at the cracked eggs and kombucha that covered the ground. What was supposed to be one delightful trip from the car to my apartment turned into a 20-minute effort to clean up a mess that I could have avoided. |
This little scene has happened to me a dozen times. And every time it does, I think: Okay Calvin. Just take two trips next time, and these kinds of things won't happen. |
I've realized that this whole carrying too many grocery bags experience stems from my desire to maximize time, effort, and results in my life. |
The consequences of maximizing grocery unloading are pretty trivial, but my desire to maximize results in other areas of life has higher costs. |
Say I want to maximize my investment returns to retire earlier. I may stop dollar cost averaging into the S&P 500 (the slow and boring path to wealth) and try to pick individual stocks that can double in a short period of time. Why settle for 8% returns every year when I can get 100% returns? Well, I've tried this strategy, and it turns out that beating the average market return is quite difficult. Not only did I underperform the market and worsen my financial situation, but I also created a lot of unnecessary stress in my life. |
Say I want to maximize engagement on my blog posts. Instead of writing about esoteric topics, I may create content for highly searched topics and use clickbait headlines. This approach gets me more eyeballs in the short run, but I end up frustrated because I never write about topics that matter to me. And over time, my readers think I'm an engagement-farming sellout not worth their time. That's basically what has happened to most major news outlets, which have used hacky engagement strategies to maximize short-term engagement and profits at the expense of trust in their brand. |
Say I want to maximize my daily productivity. I may develop a complicated routine that leads to an incredibly fruitful month of productivity. But eventually, I end up burning out and having long, stress-inducing periods of not being all that productive or happy. And because I maximized my productivity, I may have left too little time for friendships and other activities that bring more joy to my life. My productivity and life ultimately suffer. |
A lot of life's problems take this shape. When you try to maximize something, you eventually discover that there are many hidden costs to maximization. |
The cost can be as trivial as a few broken eggs. But it can also be less reversible things like damage to your reputation, losing 50% of your retirement savings, and watching your personal life and business crash to the ground while you fall into a deep depression. |
So if maximization strategies tend to lead to worse outcomes over the long run, why do we pursue them in so many areas of life? |
One reason is that maximization strategies can work. There are many people who have done remarkable things in a short period of time. Those stories make you think: Why can't that be me? And the truth is that maybe that can be you. |
If you operate in the world of technology, you've heard the story of Peter Thiel who said something like, "Okay you have this 10-year life plan. What's stopping you from doing it in the next 6 months?" This story has a valuable lesson – it's worth considering if there are smart ways for you to achieve more in less time. |
But there's a fine line between pushing yourself a little harder every day and pursuing a risky maximization strategy with a high probability of failure. |
And it's really hard to see which side of the line you're sitting on when you're wrapped up in the pursuit. |
In the last week, we learned about the collapse of FTX, the crypto exchange operated by Sam Bankman-Fried. Time will reveal more about what happened, but I'd be surprised if the desire to maximize wealth over a short period of time was not a major contributor to the disastrous outcomes for the company, investors, and millions of customers. |
What's interesting about the FTX case is that it also highlights why succeeding with a maximization strategy is so alluring. When it works, the prize can be glorious. |
Before FTX's collapse, Sam Bankman-Fried was the poster boy of crypto and effective altruism. By the age of 30, he had amassed absurd levels of wealth and gained favor with prominent athletes and politicians. And he was seen as a good guy because he said he would use all of that wealth to help as many people as he could. |
Now, it turns out that the story of crypto's golden boy is actually an enraging tale of greed, fraud, and recklessness. But before we knew how the FTX sausage was made, Sam basked in the glory of a maximization strategy that worked. |
Of course, not all outlier successes are a house of cards like FTX. There are many inspiring stories of great people who dreamed big, worked hard, and defied the odds of what was possible without breaking the rules. We love these stories. |
But it's easy to forget that for all the tales of people who defied the odds, there are millions of other people who have failed and suffered a lot more than they needed to. |
If I've learned anything from grocery shopping, trying to maximize different areas of my life, and watching the rise and fall of other people, it's that slow and steady progress that compounds over time is often a better strategy than going for glory with a maximization strategy. |
Sure, you may end up less rich or less successful than you could end up. Or maybe it takes you longer than you'd like to do something. But so what? In most cases, the slow and steady approach increases your chances of success and mitigates the risk that you will suffer from negative consequences that you may not be able to endure. |
It's your life, so live it as you want. |
As for me, I'll be taking two trips to unload groceries from here on out. |
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In Case You Missed It |
In my last post, I discussed my adventures in the world of generative artificial intelligence. I covered tools that can create ultra-realistic headshots and improve your writing, but left out the most important question: How will these tools change the way we work and live? |
This week, Steph and I published a new episode of the Sh*t You Don't Learn in School to answer that question. |
You can listen here: Generative AI: The Next Big Thing? |
If you enjoy the pod, make sure to subscribe in your podcast player of choice and follow the pod on Twitter to get the latest episodes when they drop. |
— Cal |
If you liked this piece, make sure to subscribe by adding your email below! |
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🌎 Three other things you might enjoy |
1. Doing Time Right: Everyone wants to get more done in less time. This course will show you exactly how to do that with the eliminate, automate, delegate, and iterate framework. |
2. Foundations Looking for good books to read? Check out Foundations, a growing digital notebook with notes & lessons from 100+ timeless books. |
3. Listen to the Podcast: Feel like school didn't prepare you for adulthood? The Sh*t You Don't Learn in School podcast exists to help make up for this societal failure. |
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