Better Human July 5
I just slept 20 of the last 24 hours = Health is Wealth
Dear Human,
Trying a new format here in the newsletter.
Fun fact: I just slept 20 of the last 24 hours… I think it was a minor case of food poisoning. Brutal. I’ve never slept that much in my life.
The thing about getting sick is how awesome it is to not be sick, which is something we should all remind ourselves of each day we wake up healthy.
Real health is wealth, as Gandhi may or may not have said.
It’s also something I have to remind myself of any time I get stuck in my own head thinking too hard about money, success, growth.
I have to remind myself that the best thing I’ve ever done within my life is my family… and they are sitting right there.
I hope you enjoy the content below. Have a great week.
Newsletter Video For Week
Book I’m starting this week
Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life - Steve Martin
Bitcoin is your ultimate insurance policy
All you have to do is buy and hold it.
You should understand it, which you will if you put in the 20 or so hours needed.
But at least buy it consistently and don’t sell.
It may be the best thing you’ve ever done for your future.
Use Swan to stack daily with the lowest fees on the market.
Better Man Podcast: On Truth
The Better Human Podcast Network
Recent shows:
What's The Meaning of Life (I ANSWER)
What The Hell Do I Do With My Life?
Being Healthy, Fit and Strong is Not Hard
The Basics of Money and Financial Freedom
Interesting Facts… about lobsters
Lobsters keep growing forever.
They state with their legs.
They chew with their stomach.
The green you find in cooked lobsters is the liver.
Doug Casey: The International Man on Nomads and Crisis Investing
I enjoy most of what he says here and agree with most of it.
But the thing about predicting an upcoming collapse is there is always someone doing it. After long enough, eventually, someone will be correct.
But when?
Two years? 5? 10? 50?
It's tough to say.
I'm preparing my family still, but what I find hard to figure out is how aggressive I should be in my prep. This stuff is expensive in tie and money, especially 2nd passport options.
Should I be a bit more patient or go hard now? I honestly don't know the answer.
This Day in History
On the third day of the Battle of Gettysburg, Confederate General Robert E. Lee’s last attempt at breaking the Union line ends in disastrous failure, bringing the most decisive battle of the American Civil War to an end.
BH POD: What's The Meaning of Life (I ANSWER
I think I know the answer.
Climate? Who knows.
The answer is no one knows and the answer is somewhere in the middle. Personally, I’m more concerned with microplastics in everything. I think that’s going to be a greater threat to our species than carbon.
Society is not serious, never has been
This is kinda why I quit “health content.”
People don’t want to hear it, generally. And those that do, will seek it out.
From the book: Bitcoin: Independence reimagined
In the long run, the coercive methods of big government and large corporations become very expensive to maintain. In order to keep up with the rising costs of keeping the ducks in line, we get phenomena such as negative interest rates, bank bail-outs and quantitative easing. There is a limit to how much a government can earn from taxation as shown by the Laffer curve, but not all governments are aware of this and few see their economic downfall coming before they’re already in an unsustainable position. No matter how bad these behemoths become at their jobs it is always the little guy that will have to pay for the whole charade. Bitcoin fixes this for you by refusing to take part in any of it.
The question for me on this kind of info is what I should do about it now?
I don't know if this is 5-year or 10year of stuff.
I already have my Bitcoin. But do I also need a second citizenship? I have my passports, but is that enough?
And should I still be investing in businesses and real estate here in the US, or is that becoming too risky due to the crazy corrupt and broken system we are in?
I have no freaking clue.
Either way, this book is a must-read.
Another highlight:
People in general want to be free to do whatever they want with their lives. Even left wingers seem to have their personal freedoms as an end goal, even though personal freedom means something else to them than it does to those actually capable of supporting themselves. A lot of people see welfare as an opportunity to live their lives as they want, as starving artists, hermits, bums or junkies. If you’re a nihilist, depressed or just not very materialistic, you might think that living off of social welfare for the rest of your life is actually a viable option.
It’s not really immoral to crave as little as possible, is it? Nor does it really deprive you of your freedoms, does it? Well, ask a Venezuelan what he thinks about such claims. The problem with giving away more and more power to politicians is that you become defenseless when the system implodes, which it inevitably does one day.
This will happen. Time is the only question.
When.
Once a draconian law, a bureaucratic institution or an infringement of your right to freedom of thought is in place, it is very hard to remove it again without an outright revolution. A revolution is always violent, and hardly guarantees any better shot at independence than what you had before it though.
Harder Than It Looks, Not As Fun as It Seems
Great article.
Looks are always deceiving, at least a little bit, because people are curating them.
Good advice that took me a while to learn is that everything is sales. Everything is sales. It’s usually framed as career advice – no matter what your role in a company is, your ultimate job is to help sales. But it applies to so many things.
Everything is sales also means that everyone is trying to craft an image of who they are. The image helps them sell themselves to others. Some are more aggressive than others, but everyone plays the image game, even if it’s subconscious. Since they’re crafting the image, it’s not a complete view. There’s a filter. Skills are advertised, flaws are hidden.
“All businesses are loosely functioning disasters” Brent Beshore says. But it’s like an iceberg, only a fraction is visible.
OMG is this true.
It’s the same for people. Instagram is full of beach vacation photos, not flight delay photos. Resumes highlight career wins but are silent on doubt and worry. Investing gurus are easy to elevate to mythical status because you don’t know them well enough to witness times when their decision-making process was ordinary, if not awful.
This is the problem with ALL predictions. There are some people that have been making the same predictions for 20+ years. LOL.
https://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/hard/
Do you know what money is?
This is a great article on money and its evolution and why Bitcoin is the future.
As you might have guessed, many of the problems listed above are solvable by using a widely consumed commodity that is always in demand and can be exchanged for other goods.
For example, the Romans used salt. Salt is easily divisible, non-perishable (can be stored for a long period of time), limited in quantity (it was expensive and labor-intensive to produce), and widely consumed by everybody.
In Ancient Rome, salt had to be mined from the Earth and was hard to come by.
People would keep and store a reserve of salt in their homes for both day-to-day transactions and future emergencies. Roman soldiers were partly paid in salt. This used to be called “salarium” (sal means salt) and is the origin of the word “salary”.
Different places had different commodities that people used as money, some examples being:
Cattle in India
Salt in Rome
Tobacco in Virginia
Rice in Carolina
Cowry Shells in Africa
Sugar in Brazil
Tea in Mongolia
It is worth noting that just about anything can be “money” as long as enough people accept it in exchange for their goods and services.
Money does not have to be backed by a government to be considered money
Eventually, humans learned to dig deeper and found metal ores. Metals were used for many things like making swords and shields, armor, and tools of all types (i.e. they had value in use).
Metals were inherently valuable (since they had value in use), highly durable, divisible (and unitable), fungible, homogeneous, and it was easy to verify their purity by melting them.
Eventually, people started using metals as money. (Note: Metallic money is just a form of commodity money.)
Metals were scarce across the globe and weren’t too climate-dependent, so they had universal acceptability.
The downside to metals is that they are heavy
Eventually, humans learned to dig deeper and found metal ores. Metals were used for many things like making swords and shields, armor, and tools of all types (i.e. they had value in use).
Metals were inherently valuable (since they had value in use), highly durable, divisible (and unitable), fungible, homogeneous, and it was easy to verify their purity by melting them.
Eventually, people started using metals as money. (Note: Metallic money is just a form of commodity money.)
Metals were scarce across the globe and weren’t too climate-dependent, so they had universal acceptability.
The downside to metals is that they are heavy.
A food creator I found on YouTube
If you like food porn, you'll love his videos.
You'll probably never find my making these recipes, though I appreciate the crazy amount of detail and time involved.
Something about food that I try to ignore yet always bites me in the but is time.
When I rush recipes, the flavor suffers.
Flavors take time to develop. And the fridge is your best friend for making this happen.
One-pot meals almost always taste better after they've sat in the fridge a day and then reheated.
The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Business
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right.
I've noticed this in my deep work. When I'm doing slightly challenging work, I feel the most fulfilled afterward and the most productive.
When I'm feeling a slump in my motivation, it's always because I don't have a clear idea of this kind of work.
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just
How To Work Hard by Paul Graham
That seems so obvious, and yet in practice we find it slightly hard to grasp. There's a faint xor between talent and hard work. It comes partly from popular culture, where it seems to run very deep, and partly from the fact that the outliers are so rare. If great talent and great drive are both rare, then people with both are rare squared. Most people you meet who have a lot of one will have less of the other. But you'll need both if you want to be an outlier yourself. And since you can't really change how much natural talent you have, in practice doing great work, insofar as you can, reduces to working very hard.
This is a phenomenon I've observed over the years in myself and others.
I came from a place of thinking I was less than in the intelligence category because I never did well in school.
My high school education crated in me a fixed mindset around specific topics, particularly math, in which I would say, “I’m not good at math.”
Then I became an entrepreneur and discovered the power—and importance—of spreadsheets.
And I realized I could be as good at math as I wanted to be... if I put in the work.
I truly believe that the difference between winners today is the work.
You can be the smartest person on the planet, but that itself doesn’t build billion-dollar companies or produce the next great novel.
Only work does.
Einstein had this quote, “It's not that I'm so smart, it's just that I stay with problems longer."
He dedicated his entire life to solving a core problem in physics.
He held this problem in his mind every day and night for years.
And after years of “staying with the problem,” he came to a breakthrough.
We now revere him as a genius, but was he?
Maybe, maybe not.
When was the last time you thought about a single problem for years?
Conformity
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson
Confirmation Bias
the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of one's existing beliefs or theories.
The most common bias of the human species.
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Who am I? I’m a CEO, Coach, Educator, Entrepreneur, Father, Podcaster, Thinker, & Helping People Think Better and Live Better: Bio page
Thank you for reading… it means a lot to me…
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