Thanks for checking out the Weekly Learning Roundup. These bite-sized, weekly posts are designed to give you a quick hit of interesting learnings and articles I came across this week.
It’s a motley assortment of tips, resources, and links that will hopefully give you a bit of inspiration for the upcoming week. Enjoy!
What I’m reading —
We Aren’t Built to Live in the Moment by Martin Seligman and John Tierney
An interesting look into the latest from the world of neuroscience and human behaviour. The authors share their thoughts on how humans, and our inherent ability to think about the future, is the key differentiator between ourselves and other species. A collective belief in the future is what allows us to develop things like language, culture, or technology. Individually, those who are stuck in the past are often depressed and by rewriting our past we can give hope for our future.
Books, documentaries, or podcast episodes I’m enjoying —
Transcript: Dr Rhonda Patrick on Exploring Smart Drugs, Fasting, and Fat Loss from The Tim Ferriss Show
I know I shared this episode in my Weekly Learnings Roundup (May 14, 2017) but it’s worth revisiting. Firstly, the link above is to the transcript version of the podcast episode. Since Dr. Patrick goes so fast in dropping knowledge that it’s helpful to have the transcript handy. Second, I wanted to post her top six recommendations for living a healthier life. It’s worth exploring further by listening to the episode or experimenting with each recommendation for a few weeks.
#1 – Eliminate refined sugar from the diet to the greatest extent possible.
#2 – Practice time-restricted eating and eat generally in accordance with your circadian rhythm.
#3 – Do everything in your power to maximize vegetable intake, possibly using the micronutrient smoothie method as a way to jumpstart the habit.
#4 – Enlist your physician in helping you monitor your vitamin D blood status and then attempting to titrate your dose to an above 30 ng/ml range, possibly trying to land between 40 and 60 ng/ml.
#5 – Try to get some form of meaningfully vigorous cardiovascular exercise, at least 30 minutes, a few times per week.
#6 – Get bright blue light during the day, as early as possible, and avoid that same blue light as much as you can in the evenings.
In June, I’m planning on adding in an element of #2 – time-restricted eating – into my daily habits. To make things easy as a beginner, I’m just going to make it a universal rule to stop eating by 8 p.m. each evening. I’ll be monitoring how I feel and any visible effects of this change over the course of the month.
A quote that’s inspiring me —
Every minute can be a holy, sacred minute. Where do you seek the spiritual? You seek the spiritual in every ordinary thing that you do every day. Sweeping the floor, watering the vegetables, and washing the dishes become holy and sacred if mindfulness is there. With mindfulness and concentration, everything becomes spiritual.
— Thích Nhất Hạnh
Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist
Product or service I’m loving —
My favourite app for saving and reading web-based articles. It basically pulls the text from the article and arranges it into a minimalist format for easy reading. It’s easy to add highlights for future reference and you can also setup custom folders to organize your articles if you’d like. This app is particularly helpful if you visit websites like the New York Times or Harvard Business Review that cap your articles after a certain number per month (since Instapaper saves the article separately).
For IFTTT users out there, Instapaper can be linked to other apps. For example, when I see an article that I’d like to read later, I schedule a tweet through Buffer with the hashtag “mustread”. Once the tweet goes out later in the day or late in the week, I’ve setup an integration with Instapaper which sends any article with that hashtag to my Instapaper account. End result? I have a running list of the articles that I’d like to read throughout the week.
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Featured image by Lorenzo Carafo.
As always, thanks for checking out this Weekly Learnings Roundup. Follow me on Twitter @peternakamura to see the full list of articles that I share on a daily basis.
Peter Nakamura 