SD#65: Regret, breathwork and laziness
June 25, 2023
Welcome to the 65 edition of Seven Dawns, a weekly newsletter by me, Tomas Ausra, with a focus on getting better every day. A very warm welcome to the new subscribers who joined since last week. I’m glad you’re here.
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Hi friends,
Could breath be the most underutilised weapon of our body? We all breathe automatically. Except now… as I made you aware that you’re breathing and you’re cussing me silently. But did you know we can use breath to make us feel more relaxed or alternatively alert?
🔎 Our seven ideas this week:
1. Regret is the best definition of risk Regrets are a dangerous liability because their final costs are often hidden for years or decades. And decisions that are easiest in the short run are often the most costly in the long run. Daniel Kahneman once said an important part of becoming a good investor is having a well-calibrated sense of your future regret. You need to accurately understand how you’ll feel if things turn out differently than you hoped. Maybe regret is the best definition of risk. Risk isn’t how much money you might lose. It’s not even necessarily how you’ll feel when you lose it – over time, a lot of painful experiences turn into cherished lessons. The real risk is the regret (or lack thereof) that might come years or decades later. We spend so much time trying to quantify risk when the answer is just figuring out what you will or won’t regret. The anonymous Twitter account FedSpeak wrote, “The purpose of life is to experience things for which you will later experience nostalgia.” The opposite of regret. 👉 Morgan Housel |
2. Focus on effort, not outcomes It’s a strange paradox. The people who are most successful in life, who accomplish the most, who dominate their professions — they don’t care that much about winning. They don’t care about outcomes. As Marcus Aurelius said, it’s insane to tie your wellbeing to things outside of your control. Success, mastery, sanity, Marcus writes, comes from tying your wellbeing, “to your own actions.” If you did your best, if you gave it your all, if you acted with your best judgment — that is a win…regardless of whether it’s a good or bad outcome. 👉 Ryan Holiday |
3. No matter how intense an external situation might be, whether it’s dealing with screaming children or a boardroom confrontation, there is always a grounded centre of calm available to you through consciously shifting your breathing rhythm Techniques for tactical mindfulness — using mind-based or “top-down” tools to influence our thoughts and feelings — have exploded in popularity. But when our nervous systems are hijacked and adrenaline is coursing through our veins, unless we have thousands of hours of mindfulness training, it can be hard to avoid panic mode, let alone drop into meditation. Fortunately, it is possible (and far more efficient) to leverage your physiology — known as “bottom-up” practices — by using breathwork to self-regulate and positively impact your internal state in real time. Deep inside your brain lies a piece of biological hardware known as your insula cortex. It interprets signals from your breathing rhythms, serving as a central hub for somatic (bodily) and interoceptive — or internal — signals. When you breathe through the mouth and into the upper lungs, signals are relayed to activate the sympathetic or activating part of your nervous system, creating a cascade effect that communicates to your endocrine system to secrete adrenaline and cortisol — which, in turn, generate measurable shifts in your blood chemistry. These shifts in blood chemistry impact the emotions you feel and even the tone of thoughts that will arise—like impulsive actions, anxious thoughts, and feelings of frustration. We can fall into a trap as these unproductive thoughts and feelings reinforce or even exacerbate the breath pattern that activates the sympathetic response in the nervous system. If we deliberately change the way that we breathe, for example, using exhales that are twice the length of the inhale, we consciously send different signals to the medulla oblongata (the brain’s control centre), just as we might change the input channel on a television remote. This part of our brain responds with instructions to the endocrine system to produce a neurotransmitter that slows down our heart rate, regulates blood pressure, and returns our body to homeostasis. 👉 Every |
4. Online tracking is a danger to the integrity of democratic institutions In recent years we have seen a serious wedge driven into the political life of the USA and several European countries. There is a direct link between tracking by the online ad industry and the polarisation of democratic societies. A study by a group of Facebook executives in 2018 reported that almost 2/3 of people who joined extremist groups on Facebook were directed there by recommendations from Facebook’s algorithms. And where do these systems get the data that informs their algorithms? From tracking us. Professor Hany Farid, an expert at the University of California, Berkeley, has said, “They didn’t set out to fuel misinformation and hate and divisiveness, but that’s what the algorithms learned.” Tracking is also a national security threat. In April of 2021, a bipartisan group of U.S. Senators wrote, “This information [from adtech data] would be a goldmine for foreign intelligence services that could exploit it to inform and supercharge hacking, blackmail, and influence campaigns.” They went on to say, “Few Americans realise that [adtech companies] are siphoning off and storing…data to compile exhaustive dossiers about them…we must understand the serious national security risks posed by the unrestricted sale of Americans’ data to foreign companies and governments.” 👉 Bob Hoffman |
5. To be creative, you have to be okay with doing absolutely nothing In a recent interview with Rick Rubin, he was talking about working with AC/DC. Rubin was saying how when he was producing them, they’d just sit around all day in the studio drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. Rubin would get antsy, point to his watch and the lead guitarist, Angus Young –– who was really the heart and soul of the band –– would just point to the cigarette in his hand like… What the fuck do you want me to do? I’m smoking? I can’t play guitar while I’m smoking? What Rubin later realised was that AC/DC’s genius didn’t just come from them “doing” but from them “doing nothing”. The band knew they only had 3-4 creative sprints in them a day and so, like a pride of lions, they’d lie around for hours at a time, shooting the shit until inspiration struck. Then, they’d put down their cigarettes, pick up their instruments and hunt. There’s a lot to hate about cigarettes. What’s to love, however, is that cigarettes give the smoker an excuse to sit around and do nothing. Holier-than-thou kale-eating fucks like to talk shit about cigarettes––and they have every right to do so because, well, cancer –– but sometimes I wonder if humanity isn’t worse off spending 12 hours a day staring owl-eyed at their screens. To be a decent writer, you have to be okay with either writing or doing absolutely nothing. I’m a firm believer that the only way to be creative is to sit around and do nothing until you get bored enough to entertain yourself. That’s writing, though. Some days you do nothing. Other days, you do something. But, the only way to have the days where you do something is to be okay with the days where you do nothing. 👉 Cole Schafer |
6. AI has the potential to greatly enhance students’ abilities to think critically and expand their soft skills Five predictions for the future of learning in the age of AI: 1) Getting one-on-one support for services like tutoring, coaching, mentorship, and even therapy was once only available to the well-off. AI will help democratise these services for wider audiences. 2) With AI, it will become possible to personalise everything from learning modalities and needs (e.g., visual versus text versus audio) to content types (e.g., easily bringing in a kid or adult’s favourite character or favourite hobby/genre) to the curriculum. 3) A new generation of AI-first tools for both teachers and students will rise. Historically, students and educators are natural trendsetters when it comes to productivity software. 4) Assessment and credentialing will need to evolve. Many educators argue that ChatGPT is a technology that should be integrated with learning and teaching and that leveraging AI will be a crucial career skill in the future. To realise this, we’ll need to make a series of adjustments in the classroom and in how we assess classroom achievement — and make adjustments, just like we did when Wikipedia, calculators, the internet, personal laptops, and more came onto the scene and eventually became pivotal classroom technologies. 5) Fact-checking will become critical as the “truth” gets distorted. Today’s AI-generated responses are especially dangerous because they can easily compose coherent prose and it’s level of polish can fool us into believing it to be factually accurate and true. 👉 a16z |
7. Far from a fatal flaw, laziness can be beneficial. From increased wellness to better work efficiency, being lazy can lead to a more relaxed but also more productive life Lazy solutions can be smart. Light switch, remote control, escalators, smart speakers… Laziness has been the source of many innovations. Frank Gilbreth Sr. famously said: “I will always choose a lazy person to do a difficult job because a lazy person will find an easy way to do it”. Unproductive time helps us manage our stress and makes us less prone to burnout. Research suggests that procrastinating away from work and spending unproductive time can help us cope with stress. It is particularly true of teenagers. Activities (or lack thereof) that may be perceived as lazy by adults are necessary for the mental health of young people. Lazy time also encourages diffuse thinking. Our mind has two modes of thinking: the diffuse mode and the focused mode of thinking. We need to maintain constant oscillation between the two modes to be our most creative and productive. Mind wandering, a form of diffuse thinking, is a useful mechanism for our brains to process information — sometimes leading to non-obvious solutions. When manipulated as a tool — with caution and control, but no unnecessary shame — laziness can be used to be more productive and more relaxed over the long run. Being lazy can lead to smarter decisions, innovative solutions, and better mental health. 👉 Ness Labs |
👨🏫 Quote of the week:
“Faith is universal. Our specific methods for understanding it are arbitrary. Some of us pray to Jesus, some of us go to Mecca, some of us study subatomic particles. In the end we are all just searching for truth, that which is greater than ourselves.”
Dan Brown
🎁 Fun things to click on:
8 ways to read (a lot) more books this year. “Let’s face it—artists are always working, though they may not seem as if they are. They are like plants growing in winter. You can’t see the fruit, but it is taking root below the earth.” How to reduce carbon emissions at home.
Thanks for reading! If you have any learnings you’d like to share with me, or disagree with any of the ones above then do drop me a message.
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Speak soon,
Tom