1-page cheatsheet

1-Page Summary: Daily Rituals by Mason Currey

Daily Rituals by Mason Currey The best word to describe this book is “delightful”. The author uses brief bios and vignettes to describe the daily rituals of famous writers, painters, composers and other creatives. While non-Western subjects are noticeably missing (with the exception of my perennial favorite Haruki Murakami), the book is an enjoyable and fast-paced read, and I try to re-read a profile or two every night.

The most common activities included:

long walks, typically after lunch or in the early evening
early morning or late night work sessions (instead of the white collar 9-5 schedule)
and related, a large minority had regular jobs of the 9-5 sort
lots of coffee and cigarettes; quite a few took amphetamines and sleep aids, too

Some of my favorite tidbits:

Auden relied on amphetamines, taking a dose of Benzedrine each morning, then a sedative to sleep
Francis Bacon read cookbooks to relax before bed
Beauvoir and Sartre had a relationship where they could take other lovers but were required to tell everything
Sartre consumed absurd amounts of drugs and alcohol; biographer Annie Cohen-Solal reports, “His diet over a period of twenty-four hours included two packs of cigarettes and several pipes stuffed with black tobacco, more than a quart of alcohol—wine, beer, vodka, whisky, and so on—two hundred milligrams of amphetamines, fifteen grams of aspirin, several grams of barbiturates, plus coffee, tea, rich meals.”
Beethoven would often count 60 beans for every cup of coffee, and take long showers by pouring water slowly over his head while standing
Ben Franklin liked to take “air baths” – walking around naked each morning
Freud’s wife “laid out his clothes, chose his handkerchiefs, and even put toothpaste on his toothbrush”
F Scott Fitzgerald was basically a functioning alcoholic, and believed short stories were best written in one go
Proust ate almost nothing — often just two cups of cafe au lair and two croissants a day
Stravinsky required complete solitude to compose, and would do headstands to energize himself
Stephen King writes every day, including birthdays and holidays, and has a daily quota of 2,000 words
Twain liked to read his daily work to his family after dinner
Cheever put on a suit each day, rode the elevator down to the basement of his building, then took it off and worked in his boxers
Louis Armstrong loved to smoke pot, and his favorite meals were red beans and rice, and Chinese take-out
Frank Lloyd Wright, even at aged 85, could still make love to his wife two to three times a day

Favorite quotes:

Murakami: “I keep to this routine every day without variation,” he told The Paris Review in 2004. “The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.”

Joyce Carol Oates: “Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a peanut with your nose across a very dirty floor.”

Baker: “What I’ve found with daily routines,” he said recently, “is that the useful thing is to have one that feels new. It can almost be arbitrary. You know, you could say to yourself, ‘From now on, I’m only going to write on the back porch in flip flops starting at four o’clock in the afternoon.’ And if that feels novel and fresh, it will have a placebo effect and it will help you work. Maybe that’s not completely true. But there’s something to just the excitement of coming up with a slightly different routine. I find I have to do it for each book, have something different.”

Stravinsky: “I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me.” If he felt blocked, the composer might execute a brief headstand, which, he said, “rests the head and clears the brain.

Erdos: “A mathematician,” he liked to say, “is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.

Wallace Stevens: “I find that having a job is one of the best things in the world that could happen to me,” he once said. “It introduces discipline and regularity into one’s life. I am just as free as I want to be and of course I have nothing to worry about about money.

Joseph Heller on writing Catch 22: “I spent two or three hours a night on it for eight years,” he said. “I gave up once and started watching television with my wife. Television drove me back to Catch-22. I couldn’t imagine what Americans did at night when they weren’t writing novels.

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books!

1-Page Summary: The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall

Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall I stopped reading at roughly the 40% mark, but what I did read was interesting and worth sharing. More than the book’s particulars, I stopped because I’m losing interest in contemporary, idea-narrative books of the sort popularized by Gladwell and Lewis. Recently I’ve been in an older, more esoteric book phase (eg, Emerson’s Self-Reliance, the Tao te Ching). Both Michael Hyatt and Nassim Taleb have influenced me here.

The Storytelling Animal by Jonathan Gottschall [Kindle]

My main takeaways:

We love stories
Stories are play and practice. We’re entertained while we learn
Stories are, at the heart, deeply moral
We force stories even when they don’t exist. For example, Area 51
The longest lasting, most powerful stories of human history? Religion
Dreams are stories. We’re constantly dreaming, whether asleep or awake
Other species dream, too, and like us the dreams are often scary and bizarre
Reading fiction improves your social skills

Interesting highlights:

The musicologist and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin estimates that we hear about five hours of music per day. It sounds impossible, but Levitin is counting everything: elevator music, movie scores, commercial jingles…

Clever scientific studies involving beepers and diaries suggest that an average daydream is about fourteen seconds long and that we have about two thousand of them per day. In other words, we spend about half of our waking hours—one-third of our lives on earth—spinning fantasies.

But some say that science is a grand story (albeit with hypothesis testing) that emerges from our need to make sense of the world. The storylike character of science is most obvious when it deals with origins: of the universe, of life…

To children, though, the best thing in life is play: the exuberance of running and jumping and wrestling and all the danger and splendor of pretend worlds. Children play at story by instinct.

Or maybe story is a form of social glue that brings people together around common values. The novelist John Gardner expresses this idea nicely: “Real art creates myths a society can live by instead of die by.”

Paley’s book Boys and Girls is about the year she spent trying to get her pupils to behave in a more unisex way. And it is a chronicle of spectacular and amusing failure. None of Paley’s tricks or bribes or clever manipulations worked. For instance, she tried forcing the boys to play in the doll corner and the girls to play in the block corner. The boys proceeded to turn the doll corner into the cockpit of a starship, and the girls built a house out of blocks and resumed their domestic fantasies.

The most common view of play across species is that it helps youngsters rehearse for adult life. From this perspective, children at play are training their bodies and brains for the challenges of adulthood—they are building social and emotional intelligence.

But most of what is actually in fiction is deeply unpleasant: threat, death, despair, anxiety…

According to evolutionary thinkers such as Brian Boyd, Steven Pinker, and Michelle Scalise Sugiyama, story is where people go to practice the key skills of human social life.

In one study, they found that heavy fiction readers had better social skills—as measured by tests of social and empathic ability—than those who mainly read nonfiction. This was not, they discovered, because people who already had good social abilities naturally gravitated to fiction.

The by-product theory of dreams goes by the acronym RAT (random activation theory). RAT is based on the idea that the brain has serious work to do at night, especially during REM sleep. This night work may be one of the reasons we sleep in the first place: so the brain can finish all the housekeeping chores it can’t get to during the day.

And then you have atonia, the sleep paralysis that sets in during REM sleep. Why do we have it? It must be because, eons ago, our ancestors were harming themselves and others by acting out their dreams.

In short, Jouvet’s experiment showed not only that cats dream but also that they dream about very specific things. He pointed out the obvious: a cat “dreams of actions characteristic of its own species (lying in wait, attack, rage, fright, pursuit).”

It is important to stress that the same threat patterns have emerged not only in Western college students but in all populations that have been studied—Asians, Middle Easterners, isolated hunter-gatherer tribes, children, and adults. Around the world, the most common dream type is being chased or attacked. Other universal themes include falling from a great height, drowning, being lost or trapped, being naked in public, getting injured, getting sick or dying, and being caught in a natural or manmade disaster.

When you consider the plasticity of the brain—with as little as 10–12 minutes of motor practice a day on a specific task [say, piano playing] the motor cortex reshapes itself in a matter of a few weeks—the time spent in our dreams would surely shape how our brains develop, and influence our future behavioral predispositions.

In his memoir, Stephen King writes that he is skeptical of the “myth” associating substance abuse and literary creativity. Yet before getting sober, King drank a case of beer a day and wrote The Tommyknockers with cotton swabs stuffed up his nose to “stem the coke-induced bleeding.” At his intervention, King’s wife dumped his office trash can on the floor. The contents included “beercans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic Baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medicine, even bottles of mouthwash.”

The storytelling mind is allergic to uncertainty, randomness, and coincidence. It is addicted to meaning. If the storytelling mind cannot find meaningful patterns in the world, it will try to impose them. In short, the storytelling mind is a factory that churns out true stories when it can, but will manufacture lies when it can’t.

In a more recent study, psychologists asked a group of shoppers to choose among seven pairs of identically priced socks. After inspecting the socks and making their choices, the shoppers were asked to give reasons for their choices. Typically, shoppers explained their choices on the basis of subtle differences in color, texture, and quality of stitching. In fact, all seven pairs of socks were identical. There actually was a pattern in the shoppers’ preferences, but no one was able to detect it: they tended to choose socks on the right side of the array.

Conspiracy theories originate and are largely circulated among the educated and middle class. The imagined model of an ignorant, priest-ridden peasantry or proletariat, replacing religious and superstitious belief with equally far-fetched notions of how society works, turns out to be completely wrong. It has typically been the professors, the university students, the managers, the journalists, and the civil servants who have concocted and disseminated the conspiracies.

Staunch believers in any of the three major monotheisms (Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) may take offense when I refer to their holy scriptures as stories. But many of those same believers would be quick to say that narratives about Zeus or Thor or Shiva—the Hindu god of destruction (pictured here)—are just stories.

Dawkins and Dennett argue that the mind is vulnerable to religion in the same way that a computer is vulnerable to viruses.

Second, religion coordinates behavior within the group, setting up rules and norms, punishments and rewards.

Third, religion provides a powerful incentive system that promotes group cooperation and suppresses selfishness.

We are only too happy to leer on as the bad guys of fiction torture, kill, and rape. But storytellers never ask us to approve. Morally repellent acts are a great staple of fiction, but so is the storyteller’s condemnation.

As novelists such as Leo Tolstoy and John Gardner have argued, fiction is, in its essence, deeply moral. Beneath all of its brilliance, fiction tends to preach, and its sermons are usually fairly conventional.

1-Page Summary: Race Against The Machine by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee

Race Against The Machine I’ve been reading a lot about our economy and in particular, the tumultuous marriage between jobs and technology. If you believe in punctuated equilibrium, then certainly the microprocessor and the internets and the iPhones have forced a jump upward in socioeconomic development; some people jump higher than others.

Race Against the Machine [Kindle] is one of the better books I’ve read on the subject: it’s short, well-written and from experts who have a balanced point-of-view. And it’s got the usual eye-widening assortment of data and anecdotes.

So, I hope the below is informative and not boring. If the topic interests you, I’d love to hear from you. I can loan the Kindle version.

– – – – –

Employment is taking longer and longer to recover from a recession

Recessions always increase joblessness, of course, but between May 2007 and October 2009 unemployment jumped by more than 5.7 percentage points, the largest increase in the postwar period.

Just look at this chart:

Unemployment recovery

A lot of people have quit the workforce…one of several reasons why I discount unemployment rates

And the workforce participation rate…fell below 64%—a level not seen since 1983 when women had not yet entered the labor force in large numbers.

Franklin D. Roosevelt put this most eloquently: No country, however rich, can afford the waste of its human resources. Demoralization caused by vast unemployment is our greatest extravagance. Morally, it is the greatest menace to our social order.

Just look at food stamp rolls, which have increased from 21M to 47M Americans in the last 5 years!

But people can’t stop, won’t stop investing in tech

And by 2010, investment in equipment and software returned to 95% of its historical peak, the fastest recovery of equipment investment in a generation.

Why has unemployment stayed high? According to the authors…

#1 cyclicality (shit happens)

Paul Krugman is one of the prime advocates of this explanation. As he writes, “All the facts suggest that high unemployment in America is the result of inadequate demand—full stop.”

#2 stagnation (we’re not innovating)

Stagnation in this context means a long-term decline in America’s ability to innovate and increase productivity. – Economist Tyler Cowen

A variant on this explanation is not that America has stagnated, but that other nations such as India and China have begun to catch up.

In particular, labor productivity can be measured as output per worker or output per hour worked. In the long run, productivity growth is almost the only thing that matters for ensuring rising living standards. Robert Solow earned his Nobel Prize for showing that economic growth does not come from people working harder but rather from working smarter.

Economists Menzie Chinn and Robert Gordon, in separate analyses, find that the venerable relationship between output and employment known as Okun’s Law has been amended. Historically, increased output meant increased employment, but the recent recovery created much less employment than predicted; GDP rebounded but jobs didn’t.

#3 “end of work” (robots are replacing us)

In it, Rifkin laid out a bold and disturbing hypothesis: that “we are entering a new phase in world history—one in which fewer and fewer workers will be needed to produce the goods and services for the global population.”

“the role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses in agricultural production was first diminished and then eliminated by the introduction of tractors.”

What a quote!

The authors believe it’s #3: we’re losing “the race against the machine”

The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession, or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring.

Such versatility is a key feature of general purpose technologies (GPTs), a term economists assign to a small group of technological innovations so powerful that they interrupt and accelerate the normal march of economic progress. Steam power, electricity, and the internal combustion engine are examples of previous GPTs.

Vending machines now sell iPods, bathing suits, gold coins, sunglasses and razors; some will even dispense prescription drugs and medical marijuana to consumers willing to submit to a fingerprint scan.

In 1995, for example, 2.08 people were employed in “sales and related” occupations for every $1 million of real GDP generated that year. By 2002 (the last year for which consistent data are available), that number had fallen to 1.79, a decline of nearly 14 percent.

But, you know, computers still can’t manage a team or paint a Picasso…

Computers so far have proved to be great pattern recognizers but lousy general problem solvers; IBM’s supercomputers, for example, couldn’t take what they’d learned about chess and apply it to Jeopardy!

And for all their power and speed, today’s digital machines have shown little creative ability. They can’t compose very good songs, write great novels, or generate good ideas for new businesses.

David Ricardo, who initially thought that advances in technology would benefit all, developed an abstract model that showed the possibility of technological unemployment. The basic idea was that at some point, the equilibrium wages for workers might fall below the level needed for subsistence. A rational human would see no point in taking a job at a wage that low, so the worker would go unemployed and the work would be done by a machine instead.

Not everyone is losing the race; 3 types of runners are going to win (but they were in the lead to begin with)

In fact, economist Ed Wolff found that over 100% of all the wealth increase in America between 1983 and 2009 accrued to the top 20% of households. The other four-fifths of the population saw a net decrease in wealth over nearly 30 years.

Instead, the stagnation of median incomes primarily reflects a fundamental change in how the economy apportions income and wealth. The median worker is losing the race against the machine.

Runner #1: High-skilled workers

Over the past 40 years, weekly wages for those with a high school degree have fallen and wages for those with a high school degree and some college have stagnated. On the other hand, college-educated workers have seen significant gains, with the biggest gains going to those who have completed graduate training

Even the low wages earned by factory workers in China have not insulated them from being undercut by new machinery and the complementary organizational and institutional changes. For instance, Terry Gou, the founder and chairman of the electronics manufacturer Foxconn, announced this year a plan to purchase 1 million robots over the next three years to replace much of his workforce. The robots will take over routine jobs like spraying paint, welding, and basic assembly. Foxconn currently has 10,000 robots, with 300,000 expected to be in place by next year.

Runner #2: Superstars

Income has grown faster for the top 1% than the rest of the top decile. In turn, the top 0.1% and top 0.01% have seen their income grow even faster. This is not run-of-the-mill skill-biased technical change but rather reflects the unique rewards of superstardom. Sherwin Rosen, himself a superstar economist, laid out the economics of superstars in a seminal 1981 article. In many markets, consumers are willing to pay a premium for the very best. If technology exists for a single seller to cheaply replicate his or her services, then the top-quality provider can capture most—or all—of the market.

Um, that’s the internet. Bits and bytes.

Runner #3: Capital(ists)

In particular, if technology replaces labor, you might expect that the shares of income earned by equipment owners would rise relative to laborers—the classic bargaining battle between capital and labor.

Similarly, corporate profits as a share of GDP are at 50-year highs. Meanwhile, compensation to labor in all forms, including wages and benefits, is at a 50-year low.

But if humans and machines work together, everyone wins!

As Kasparov writes, it instead consisted of a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and “coaching” their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. … Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.

Technology enables more and more opportunities for what Google chief economist Hal Varian calls “micromultinationals”—businesses with less than a dozen employees that sell to customers worldwide and often draw on worldwide supplier and partner networks.

wonderful study by economist Robert Jensen found, for example, that as soon as mobile telephones became available in the fishing regions of Kerala, India, the price of sardines dropped and stabilized, yet fishermen’s profits actually went up.

We need to incentivize better teachers…

Start by simply paying teachers more so that more of the best and the brightest sign up for this profession, as they do in many other nations. American teachers make 40% less than the average college graduate.

…and encourage immigration…

Increase the ratio of skilled workers in the United States by encouraging skilled immigrants.

…and support entrepreneurs! :P

Foster a broader class of mid-tech, middle-class entrepreneurs by training them in the fundamentals of business creation and management.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, as each successive wave of automation eliminated jobs in some sectors and occupations, entrepreneurs identified new opportunities where labor could be redeployed and workers learned the necessary skills to succeed. Millions of people left agriculture, but an even larger number found employment in manufacturing and services.

Trivia: productivity is hard to measure

Compounding this measurement problem is the fact that free digital goods like Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube are essentially invisible to productivity statistics.

Reminds me of Tim O’Reilly and the clothesline paradox.

Health care productivity is poorly measured and often assumed to be stagnant, yet Americans live on average about 10 years longer today than they did in 1960.

That’s it, folks! Thank you for reading. I plan to do Cal Newport’s So Good They Can’t Ignore You next. It’s the best career advice book for 20-somethings that I’ve read. The irony is not lost on me as 30 is right around the bend…

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books!

1-Page Cheatsheet: Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code

Here’s my 1-page cheatsheet to Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code: Unlocking the Secret of Skill in Sports, Art, Music, Math, and Just About Anything [Amazon].

WHY THE TALENT CODE

I chose this book because #1, it was recommended by Rob Kelly (a friend and mentor), and #2, I’ve always been fascinated by world-class performers of every sort

The book is about how world-class talent is developed. Coyle dives into specific “pockets” (regions, eras, and instructors) known for producing abnormally high %s of world-class athletes, artists, and performers. These pockets include Brazil + soccer, Meadowmount + classical music, and Florence + artists.

From Coyle’s website:

Daniel Coyle is the NYT bestselling author of The Little Book of Talent, The Talent Code, Lance Armstrong’s War, and Hardball: A Season in Projects…Coyle lives in Cleveland, Ohio during the school year and in Homer, Alaska, during the summer with his wife Jen, and their four children

LESSONS AND HIGHLIGHTS

1. It’s all about growing myelin

Skill is myelin insulation that wraps neural circuits and that grows according to certain signals. The story of skill and talent is the story of myelin…myelin is similar to another evolution-built mechanism you use every day: muscles.

2. Deep practice (which requires hard work, mental struggle, and extreme attention to detail) is required

Struggle is not optional—it’s neurologically required: in order to get your skill circuit to fire optimally, you must by definition fire the circuit suboptimally; you must make mistakes and pay attention to those mistakes; you must slowly teach your circuit. You must also keep firing that circuit—i.e., practicing—in order to keep myelin functioning properly

People called the Pietà pure genius, but its creator begged to differ. “If people knew how hard I had to work to gain my mastery,” Michelangelo later said, “it would not seem so wonderful at all.”

Lamm conceived of a new system of bank robbery, applying military principles to what had been an artless profession. His singular insight was that robbing banks was not about guts or guns; it was about technique. Each bank job involved weeks of preparatory work. Lamm pioneered “casing,” which meant visiting the bank, sketching blueprintlike maps, and occasionally posing as a journalist to get a look at the bank’s interior operations. Lamm assigned each man on his team a well-defined role: lookout, lobby man, vault man, driver. He organized rehearsals, using warehouses to stand in for the bank. He insisted on unyielding obedience to the clock: when the allotted time expired, the gang would depart, whether or not they had the money.

If you were to visit a dozen talent hotbeds tomorrow, you would be struck by how much time the learners spend observing top performers. When I say “observing,” I’m not talking about passively watching. I’m talking about staring—the kind of raw, unblinking, intensely absorbed gazes you see in hungry cats or newborn babies

3. Highly talented pockets develop because SECRET #1: they accelerate deep practice

A. Brazilian soccer players and futsal

B. Florence and its craft guilds

As it turns out, Florence was an epicenter for the rise of a powerful social invention called craft guilds. Guilds (the word means “gold”) were associations of weavers, painters, goldsmiths, and the like who organized themselves to regulate competition and control quality…What they did best, however, was grow talent. Guilds were built on the apprenticeship system, in which boys around seven years of age were sent to live with masters for fixed terms of five to ten years.

C. Meadowmount and its 5x increase in learning speed for elite music players

These feats are routine at Meadowmount, in part because the teachers take the idea of chunking to its extreme. Students scissor each measure of their sheet music into horizontal strips, which are stuffed into envelopes and pulled out in random order. They go on to break those strips into smaller fragments by altering rhythms. For instance, they will play a difficult passage in dotted rhythm (the horses’ hooves sound—da-dum, da-dum).

Other examples include: the Spartak Tennis academy in Moscow, the Bronte sisters, KIPP

4. Chunking is a secret to accelerated struggle

In the talent hotbeds I visited, the chunking takes place in three dimensions. First, the participants look at the task as a whole—as one big chunk, the megacircuit. Second, they divide it into its smallest possible chunks. Third, they play with time, slowing the action down, then speeding it up, to learn its inner architecture.

As football coach Tom Martinez likes to say, “It’s not how fast you can do it. It’s how slow you can do it correctly.”

5. SECRET #2: Ignition

Ignition is about the set of signals and subconscious forces that create our identity; the moments that lead us to say that is who I want to be

For South Korea’s golfers, it was the afternoon of May 18, 1998, when a twenty-year-old named Se Ri Pak won the McDonald’s LPGA Championship and became a national icon…Before her, no South Korean had succeeded in golf. Flash-forward to ten years later, and Pak’s countrywomen had essentially colonized the LPGA Tour, with forty-five players who collectively won about one-third of the events.

6. Long-term commitment is a huge predictor of success

With the same amount of practice, the long-term-commitment group outperformed the short-term-commitment group by 400 percent. The long-term-commitment group, with a mere twenty minutes of weekly practice, progressed faster than the short-termers who practiced for an hour and a half. When long-term commitment combined with high levels of practice, skills skyrocketed. “We instinctively think of each new student as a blank slate, but the ideas they bring to that first lesson are probably far more important than anything a teacher can do, or any amount of practice,” McPherson said. “It’s all about their perception of self. At some point very early on they had a crystallizing experience that brings the idea to the fore, that says, I am a musician. That idea is like a snowball rolling downhill.”

7. Great teachers are key – but they’re not what we commonly think of as great teachers

Instead, the teachers and coaches I met were quiet, even reserved. They were mostly older; many had been teaching thirty or forty years. They possessed the same sort of gaze: steady, deep, unblinking. They listened far more than they talked. They seemed allergic to giving pep talks or inspiring speeches; they spent most of their time offering small, targeted, highly specific adjustments. They had an extraordinary sensitivity to the person they were teaching, customizing each message to each student’s personality.

On John Wooden: Gallimore and Tharp recorded and coded 2,326 discrete acts of teaching. Of them, a mere 6.9 percent were compliments. Only 6.6 percent were expressions of displeasure. But 75 percent were pure information: what to do, how to do it, when to intensify an activity.

Patience is a word we use a lot to describe great teachers at work. But what I saw was not patience, exactly. It was more like probing, strategic impatience.

THAT’S IT, FOLKS!

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books!

Hope that was useful! What could be added or changed or removed? Which books would you like me to read and summarize?

1-Page Cheatsheet: John Ratey’s Spark

spark-book-cover I started documenting and summarizing books using a concept I called the “Good Life guides”. Here are some examples. How can we take a nonfiction book’s lessons and apply them to live a good life?

However, the guides were too time-consuming and I wasn’t enjoying the creation process, so I’m trying something simpler and more straightforward where I take the most interesting findings, facts, and snippets, and pack them into a “1-page cheatsheet”.

Comes out to about 1000 words, which is closer to 3 pages, but oh well :)

HERE WE GO!

I chose Spark because it came highly recommended by Steve Pavlina and I’m always looking for motivation to exercise more.

John Ratey is a psychiatry prof at Harvard Med School. His book Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain [Amazon] is about the tremendous benefits of exercise, specifically cardio-intensive activities like running and biking. Through a combination of interviews, frontline work as a clinic researcher, and extensive analysis of the latest scientific literature, it concludes that frequent, moderate-to-high intensity cardio permanently improves not only physical health, but mental and psychological health too.

LESSONS AND HIGHLIGHTS

1. Exercise helps your body utilize energy more efficiently

One of the ways exercise optimizes energy usage is by triggering the production of more receptors for insulin. In the body, having more receptors means better use of blood glucose and stronger cells. Best of all, the receptors stay there, which means the newfound efficiency gets built in.

2. Regular exercise helps you:

A. Be more social

Studies show that by adding physical activity to our lives, we become more socially active—it boosts our confidence and provides an opportunity to meet people. The vigor and motivation that exercise brings helps us establish and maintain social connections.

B. Calm down

As for the trait, the majority of studies show that aerobic exercise significantly alleviates symptoms of any anxiety disorder. But exercise also helps the average person reduce normal feelings of anxiousness.

C. Fight depression

In Britain, doctors now use exercise as a first-line treatment for depression, but it’s vastly underutilized in the United States, and that’s a shame.

D. Improve focus

Paradoxically, one of the best treatment strategies for ADHD involves establishing extremely rigid structure. Over the years, I’ve heard countless parents offer the same observation about their ADHD children: Johnny is so much better when he’s doing tae kwon do.

E. Fight unhealthy addictions

In smokers, just five minutes of intense exercise can be beneficial. Nicotine is an oddball among addictive substances as it works as a stimulant and a relaxant at the same time. Exercise fights the urge to smoke because in addition to smoothly increasing dopamine it also lowers anxiety, tension, and stress levels—the physical irritability that makes people so grouchy when they’re trying to quit. Exercise can fend off cravings for fifty minutes and double or triple the interval to the next cigarette.

F. Make better decisions

…the participants reported that an entire range of behavior related to self-regulation took a turn for the better. Not only did they steadily increase their visits to the gym, they reported that they smoked less, drank less caffeine and alcohol, ate more healthy food and less junk food, curbed impulse spending and overspending, and lost their tempers less often.

G. Have healthier babies

Exercise seems to be more than just not harmful, though. In one study, Clapp compared thirty-four newborns of exercisers to thirty-one of sedentary mothers five days after birth. There’s only so much you can do to gauge behavior at this early stage, but the babies from the exercise group “performed” better on two of six tests: they were more responsive to stimuli and better able to quiet themselves following a disturbance of sound or light. Clapp sees this as significant because it suggests that infants of exercising mothers are more neurologically developed than their counterparts from sedentary mothers.

H. Live longer!

If your brain isn’t actively growing, then it’s dying. Exercise is one of the few ways to counter the process of aging because it slows down the natural decline of the stress threshold.

[A subject I’m personally very interested in. Here are my resources on living forever]

3. How much and what types of exercise?

#1: AEROBIC. Exercise four days a week, varying from thirty minutes to an hour, at 60 to 65 percent of your maximum heart rate.

#2: STRENGTH. Hit the weights or resistance machines twice a week, doing three sets of your exercises at weights that allows you to do ten to fifteen repetitions in each set.

#3: BALANCE AND FLEXIBILITY. Focus on these abilities twice a week for thirty minutes or so. Yoga, Pilates, tai chi, martial arts, and dance all involve these skills, which are important to staying agile.

#4: MENTAL EXERCISE: KEEP LEARNING. My advice here is to keep challenging your mind. You know by now that exercise prepares your neurons to connect, while mental stimulation allows your brain to capitalize on that readiness. It’s no coincidence that study after study shows that the more education you have, the more likely you are to hang onto your cognitive abilities and stave off dementia

Doing a mix of low, medium, and high intensity exercise is important as they all do different (good) things for your brain & body

FUN FACTS

It turns out that marijuana, exercise, and chocolate all activate these same receptors in the brain.
As an illustration of the power of drugs, consider that while sex increases dopamine levels 50 to 100 percent, cocaine sends dopamine skyrocketing 300 to 800 percent beyond normal levels.
The brain is made up of more than 50 percent fat, so fats are important too, as long as they’re the right kind. Trans fat, animal fat, and hydrogenated oils gum up the works, but the omega-3s found in fish are enormously beneficial
The one proven way to live longer is to consume fewer calories—at least if you’re a lab rat. In experiments in which rodents eat 30 percent fewer calories, they live up to 40 percent longer than animals allowed to eat as much as they want.
Low-carb diets may help you lose weight, but they’re not good for your brain. Whole grains have complex carbohydrates that supply a steady flow of energy rather than the spike and crash of simple sugars, and they’re necessary to transport amino acids such as tryptophan into the brain.
Vitamin D is being recognized not only for its importance in strengthening bones but also as a measure against cancer and Parkinson’s. I would recommend 1000 IU (international units) of vitamin D…I would also recommend taking vitamin B with at least 800 mg of folate, which improves memory and processing speed.

Here’s a list of all 1-page cheatsheets, and a list of all books!