I haven't felt this connected since I saw Avatar in 2010.
...it might be worth reconsidering your limits. This video blew my mind.
'Nuff said.
If you read this blog, you know I like exercise, coffee, protein shakes, etc. I genuinely enjoy them for their intrinsic value.
People keep asking me what my workout schedule is, so I'm deciding to post it here so I can just link it instead of having to explain it over and over. Chirag showed me how valuable this can be.
In case you're wondering what sort of "plan" or methodology this is, it's essentially a combination of Leangains, Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour-Body plan to benchpress 300#, and a reinstatement of Crossfit around late March and early April. I eat about 80-90% paleo six days a week and like big meals. I'm not a stellar athlete but I take my health seriously and believe that if you want to keep your inner game sharp, you ought to keep your outer game sharp. The below workouts are all interspersed with other fun activities like aikido and yoga, but I consider those more spiritual than physical in nature, so all the "workouts" below are purely for physical conditioning purposes. With that, here's the plan for the next few weeks:
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The purpose of all the heavy low-rep weight-lifting in the first several weeks is to complete a six-month cycle of strength-building that I began in order to be able to function at the level of strength Crossfit requires. Crossfit changed my life in the summer of 2011 and I highly recommend it to anyone looking to amp their game and rediscover their killer instinct.
The strength gains included in the plan above are all predicated on the assumption that I can average 200+ grams of protein per day, 2500+ calories per day, and 7+ hours of sleep per night. I'm usually pretty good at this, especially when it comes to the eating. :)
What gets measured gets done.
A close friend recently sent me this New Yorker article about Ray Dalio, who heads up Bridgewater. Super interesting. Reminds me of the Radical Honesty bit in Esquire and the bit on Fernando Flores and the Power of Words in Fast Company, both of which are absolutely worth reading. I've included a few bits from the New Yorker article below (bolding is mine):
"Dalio’s philosophy has created a workplace that some call creepy. Last year, Dealbreaker, a Wall Street Web site, picked up a copy of the Principles and made fun of a section in which Dalio appeared to compare Bridgewater to a pack of hyenas feeding on a young wildebeest. In March, AR, a magazine that covers hedge funds, quoted a former colleague of Dalio’s saying, “Bridgewater is a cult. It’s isolated, it has a charismatic leader and it has its own dogma.” The authors of the article noted that Dalio’s “emphasis on tearing down an individual’s ego hints at the so-called struggle groups of Maoism,” while his search for “human perfection devoid of emotion resembles the fantasy world in Ayn Rand’s ‘The Fountainhead.’”
..."Once a tape recorder had been switched on, Jensen, McCormick, and Dalio discussed the possible promotion of an internal candidate to a senior-management role. McCormick, a soft-spoken forty-five-year-old who studied engineering at West Point, argued that the candidate’s prior experience at a big Wall Street firm indicated that he could probably do the job. Dalio disagreed. An investment bank is a “totally different world,” he said. But, rather than continue the discussion, he asked one of his assistants to call in the candidate. One rule of radical transparency is that Bridgewater employees refrain from saying behind a person’s back anything that they wouldn’t say to his face.
The man arrived and stood before Dalio’s desk. Dalio explained what the discussion was about and said, “I don’t imagine that you would be a good fit for the job.” The man took a seat, and Dalio and McCormick continued their discussion about his qualifications. The candidate explained his experience on Wall Street and said he thought he could do the job well. Dalio leaned back in his chair, looking skeptical. The employee didn’t get the promotion."
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'Transcendental meditation, which he took up following a trip to India by the Beatles, also helped his work habits. Most mornings before going to the office, he still meditates. Demonstrating his technique, he sat back in his office chair, closed his eyes, and clasped his hands in front of him. “It’s just a mental exercise in which you are clearing your mind,” he said. “Creativity comes from open-mindedness and centeredness—seeing things in a nonemotionally charged way.”'
..."In April, an article in New York ridiculed Dalio’s Principles, saying that they read “as if Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra had collaborated on a line of fortune cookies.” It also accused him of running Bridgewater like a cult. “I’ve been surprised that there’s been so much controversy about us having such clearly set-out principles, especially since they’re all about being truthful and transparent to do good work and have meaningful relationships,” Dalio wrote to me subsequently. “Most of the people who don’t like us having them haven’t read them—they just assume that us having a lot of principles makes us a cult. That’s O.K. I figure that the people who matter to us will take the time to read them and form their own opinions and those who don’t care enough to read them don’t matter to us.”
"Dalio may protest too much. The word “cult” clearly has connotations that don’t apply to an enterprise staffed by highly paid employees who can quit at any moment. But Bridgewater’s headquarters are in the woods, isolated from any other financial institution; Dalio is a strong-willed leader; and the employees do use their own vocabulary—Dalio’s vocabulary. Bob Elliott, a twenty-nine-year-old Harvard graduate who has worked at Bridgewater for six years, told me earnestly, “Once you understand how the machine works, you have the ability to take that and study and apply it across markets.” It’s also the case that in the time I spent at the firm I saw senior people criticizing subordinates—but not the reverse.
In his Principles, Dalio acknowledged that his firm can seem strange to outsiders and newcomers: “Since Bridgewater’s culture is very different from what is typical in the world at large, people often encounter culture shock when they start here.” In part to minimize this shock, for years Bridgewater recruited young men and women straight out of college. (Harvard, Princeton, and Dartmouth were favorite targets.) But the firm’s in-your-face attitude—and the relentless pressure to perform—takes its toll. “We get a lot of people who self-select out of that pretty quickly,” Michael Partington, a recruiter at Bridgewater, said to me. Within two years of arriving at Bridgewater, about a quarter of new hires have quit or been let go.
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Like many successful financiers, Dalio justifies capitalism and his place in it as a Darwinian process, in which the over-all logic of the system is sometimes hidden. This is actually what the mention, in his Principles, of hyenas savaging a wildebeest was about. “Is this good or bad?” he wrote. Like “death itself, this behavior is integral to the enormously complex and efficient system that has worked for as long as there has been life.” Of course, this view conveniently ignores the argument that hedge funds, through their herd behavior, have contributed to speculative bubbles, in tech stocks, oil, and other commodities. Even some defenders of the industry concede that the problem is real and potentially calamitous. “There is a basis for the argument that hedge funds add economic value,” Andrew Lo, an economist at M.I.T. who runs his own hedge fund, says. “At the same time, they create systemic risks that have to be weighed against those positives.”
Check out the full list of Ray Dalio's Principles and values by which he runs his company here...that is, if you're into that sort of thing. Seems kinda nuts to me...but interesting nonetheless.
A few of my favorites:
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"If you're going through hell, keep going."
- Winston Churchill "It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat." - Theodore Roosevelt, "Citizenship in a Republic," Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910 "All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it's possible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer." - Niccolo Machiavelli "Commitment is what transforms a promise into reality. It is the words that speak boldly of your intentions. And the actions which speak louder than the words. It is making the time when there is none. Coming through time after time after time, year after year after year. Commitment is the stuff character is made of; the power to change the face of things. It is the daily triumph of integrity over skepticism." - Abraham Lincoln "If you're going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don't even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery--isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you'll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you're going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It's the only good fight there is." - Charles Bukowski |