Scivive: Mind, Body, Spirit

Welcome to the first installment of Scivive highlights!

In this three part series, we’ll walk through some of the meaningful quotes, discussion and personal reflections, keeping it brief and concise, around three chapters at a time. Of course we’re talking about Richard’s book Scivive (sigh-vive), who’s name came from “how to survive through science” as Richard is a big believer in longevity research and how to maximize your healthspan (not only lifespan). It’s most if not all the secrets you need to win at life, “get rich, be loved, live forever” and all that good stuff. If you want to be a Scivivor, but don’t know what that entails, keep reading.

The latest copy of the book can be found on Telegram, but there is a fan-made webpage up at scivive.net and a couple of terrific audiobook versions on YouTube, originally this one and most recently this series. There’s also a SciVivor Community group on twitter to discuss and share Scivive-related materials and events. One day this book will be in print and available to a wider audience, but for now it’s knowledge for those who are motivated enough for change to join the Telegram channel, look around, talk to people and maybe even stick around for a while to discuss how to optimize one’s life for the better.

So, let’s dive right in!

First, some notes from Chapter 0, the introduction.

Intro

Let’s start with the first words.

“Imagine becoming healthier, stronger and smarter every day”

This itself sets the stage for what Scivive is all about: learning then doing what it takes to become the best version of yourself. If you want more than what the rest of the world has, you have to first believe you can have it, second figure out how to get it and then relentlessly go after it until it’s yours.

I’ll add just one Naval quote in here as I think it’s relevant (his tweets, his podcasts and his book are definitely worth following).

"The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you will get it. But everything else, you gotta let go."

So it’s all up to you. If you read Scivive and believe just because you read it and remarked a few times, said AHA at some passage that it’s going to make you a successful person, that’s just how it works. To win at life, you need to apply the principles while adapting them to fit your particular situation.

“The habits built by taking correct action facilitate the heavy lifting of change.”

What is the meaning to life?

“There is no such thing as meaning except what you give it…”

Each person must find and act upon their own meaning. For some, they find meaning in helping others. Others may find meaning solely in individual achievement, making some kind of dent in the world or climbing the corporate ladder. It’s not for anyone to judge another’s meaning, no matter how altruistic or superficial it may seem to you.

Everyone gets to do at least one thing in life and that is choose their meaning. A lot of struggle in life lies in the fact that most people never really decide on their meaning or decide so very late in life that they might have did more things to get towards goals that rewarded and fulfilled them, according to their meaning, if they had found it and come to the realization sooner. Or maybe that’s meant to be as well, perhaps we can’t choose when we find our purpose, when we find meaning in life, but it needs to come to us naturally. I’d sure rather push myself to find out and not leave my meaning up to chance, though.

What is a Scivivor?

“Scivivors are people who are at such a high level of fulfillment that they have the time, money, and desire to invest in their families’ survival. They leverage science to survive.“

There are 9 core principles of Scivive

• Mind

• Body

• Spirit

• Money

• Power

• Respect

• Time

• Space

• Experience

The first three are you, what you think and feel. The next three are amplifiers, how fast and how well you better yourself. And the last three are what you are in the world and how you interact with it.

The magic sets of three is another interesting concept.

• height, width, depth

• red, yellow, blue light

• highs, mids, lows

• small, medium, large

Things that come in 3’s seem to be intrinsically appealing to humans.

The Survivalist’s favorite quote of all time comes from Calvin Coolidge.

“Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan, ‘Press on!’ has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.”

This is worth putting on your desk, wallpaper or hanging in your home. You can be a genius and if you don’t do anything with it, it’s a tragedy. Talent won’t get it done either. Drive, willpower and ambition are the traits that change the world.

“You’re only awake 16 hours a day. Now subtract out all the hours where you have to be doing something. How many hours are left? Three? This is your free time. Choose wisely how you spend these precious few hours.“

Time is the most valuable resource. Scivivors know this, they internalize it and use it wisely.

“You’re only awake 16 hours a day. Now subtract out all the hours where you have to be doing something. How many hours are left? Three? This is your free time. Choose wisely how you spend these precious few hours.“

You need time for distraction and entertainment, it’s hard to live without those, but use them as a break, as the exception to the rule that you will focus on creating, thinking and building. Relaxing isn’t wasting time, but grinding for nothing is. “Don’t pick up pennies off of a freight train” means don’t waste your time on stuff that doesn’t matter. Nobody on their deathbed says, “I wish I spent more time at the office”, but we suspect many of them wish for more time with family, friends and doing something more meaningful with their lives. You can live well and when it’s over, be fairly satisfied instead of sad and full of regret. Choose wisely.

Ready to learn about the best things in life and how to make them happen?

Mind

“You do less than you could, and know more than you need. What happens to those who exercise and eat well? They become fit. Are you fit? If you’re unfit, is it due to a lack of knowledge? Any exercise works, any diet works. Eat less, move more. It’s certainly not the knowledge that is the problem.“

Knowledge is not the problem, it’s action. You can tell someone to invest in something that is designed in the modern day to go up in value, such as HEX or even by default the S&P 500 or real estate, but they usually won’t listen.

They either…

1) don’t believe you as they don’t consider you to be an expert (even if they don’t say that)

2) believe you, but don’t make it a priority as their life is busy with other things

3) believe you, but don’t actually think they could even become wealthy or rich, so take no action to go in that direction

So you can give them knowledge, but if they’re not listening, not ready for it or not interested or incentivized, they will take no action.

“Learn the language you need.”

• Learn the language of business (accounting)

• Learn the language of scalability (programming)

• Learn the language of entrepreneurship (influence)

You will speak with greater effect if you use words that mean something to the other person, are in context and they have the basics or expertise in the area you want to influence.

If you try and convert an atheist to Christianity, it’s going to be very hard. But if you try and help the atheist be the best version of themselves, while maintaining their own values, they’re more likely to listen to what you have to say. Don’t expect people to always follow your advice, but if they’re not listening at all, then why are you speaking?

“At any given moment there’s an infinite amount of good and bad things going on, and the feelings that you will feel and your perception of the world will be what you focus on.“

Positive thinking beats negative thinking every single time.

“Focus on what you don’t want only for a short time. Which do you think is a shorter path to fitness, understanding losing, or understanding winning? Positive phrasing is super important. If you want to be fit, focus on fitness.“

You could also throw Inversion in here, where instead of thinking of all the ways you want to do something, think of all the ways you don’t want to do it, then do the opposite. Want to drive a car really well? Write down all the things bad drivers are known to do. Now, don’t do them. You’re instantly a better, more informed driver!

“Who becomes more fit? The man who fills his days reading books on weightlifting and diet, or the man who reads no such books, but never misses a morning round of pushups, pull-ups and squats? Learning about fitness is not fitness. Learning about dance is not dancing. Learning about success is not success. Unless you are a teacher or author, learning is only as useful as it turns into action.“

Learn to take action on the acquired knowledge, not just to collect facts. The world rewards those who know a little about a lot, but even more those who are in the top 1% of their vertical. One should still strive for a multidisciplinary education, but only in foundational subjects like math, science, computers, economics and psychology.

Most of the stuff you learn in school, other than social skills, and reading, writing and arithmetic are not very useful in the real world. There’s a reason why home schooled kids are often smarter and less distracted by pop culture. There are trade-offs, of course, but they can be minimized and if you can read the hundred greatest books instead of memorizing the periodic table, you’re obviously going to have a head start on life vs your public school peers.

“Learning what everyone else does, thus by definition of value, the least scarce knowledge is therefore the least valuable.“

There’s a reason people with “particular sets of skills” get paid more than teachers, lawyers and MBAs. The value they provide society is more scarce, so they can make up their own hourly rate.

“Curious people get really smart. By definition, we must learn about the topic in question, and we care about it, so we’ll watch a 2-hour video about the boring topic to everyone else, because to use, we must to fulfill our curiosity.“

Curiosity motivates you to spend time and energy getting better at a thing. Are you curious if you can run a marathon, write a computer program or build a table? If you are curious enough, you’ll go down a rabbit hole and probably come out the other side victorious.

If you want to make a lot of money, get real curious about skills that make money or otherwise create value for the world which people will pay you a lot of money for.

“There is a chance that you learn more and think about better things when you’re sleeping than when you’re awake. It’s basically a time when your mind truly gets to decide what it shall focus on.“

Sleeping, exercise and showers have one thing in common: they shift your focus from constantly thinking about the next thing or a bunch of things to just one or two things that you can actually make progress on. Or they, along with meditation, help you not think at all, which makes it a lot easier for new thoughts to emerge and chances are you’ll be excited enough and now have enough energy to chew on them for a while too.

“The set of things that you could misunderstand, the set of ways that you could misunderstand a thing, is nearly infinite compared to the very small set of ways that you could actually understand the way that it really is.“

Humans cannot understand how every single thing works, nor we do need to, so we don’t. We ride a bike without any idea of how the wheel works or how it came about, but we see that it works and we have faith it will keep working. With a limited amount of consciousness, it’s best we ignore most things and focus on what we need to in order to just not spend our days starving at grass and counting all the rocks on the ground, “just so we know”. You don’t get rewarded for knowing everything, but knowing what are useful to know and has utility for others.

“It is rumored that Francis Crick was on LSD when he discovered DNA. If one had to bet their life, one would be likely to tell you that the vast majority of discoveries have been made by people not on LSD... It’s probably unlikely that you would happen to run into a cult of really drugged up, “tripping-face” dudes crushing it in the business world or crushing it in the stock market etc.“

“Exercising is by far more effective than any drug to help you learn better.“

If you’re an ambitious individual, you’ll probably end up trying a lot of different things and then decide which ones you like. Nothing can replace a healthy mind and body, so be careful with the risks you take when you flirt with chemicals outside of fruits, veggies and sunshine.

Body

You body is your temple. It’s hard to beat a good night’s sleep, a good meal and good routine for keeping in good shape.

“Environment is key. Cut out the blue light.“

Blue light keeps you awake, use apps on your computer like Flux and on your phone with “Bedtime mode” to make the difference between day time and night time meaningful again in this modern world.

“Eat to live, don’t live to eat, at least in terms of quantity. You don’t need much quantity to have quality. When you eat you must see how little you can eat, not how much.“

Life hack: use a smaller plate, it makes it look like you have more food as you’ll end up having a fuller plate than if you used a regular sized one. You really don’t realize how much you don’t need to eat until you start eating smaller portions.

“If you have three extra sodas a day, you will be roughly 45 lbs. heavier for the rest of your life. That’s how powerful calories are.“

Trade soda for coffee, tea or other low carb/sugar waters and milks, made from things like coconuts or other natural, nutritional foods.

“If you break a leg, good chance it’s going to heal. If you break a tooth, it’s permanent. It’s not going to heal itself.“

You can replace teeth, but save yourself the time, money and pain and focus on taking care of what you got. Brush your teeth at least as often as you take a shower, but not more times than you eat a meal.

“You know what, you can make a little change in the way you eat, and just stop eating when you’re satisfied, instead of full. “Hara hachi bu” is a Japanese term meaning “Eat until you’re 80% full.”“

Growing up, you may have been taught to eat until you are full. That’s not quite the best way to do things, though, as you may have discovered as an adult. Eating to full is more cosmetic, as it makes you feel good, than useful as now you need to overcome the tired or sluggish feeling. Eating just enough so you’re not hungry anymore, preferably enough and the right foods where you won’t be hungry for a few hours, is the balance you should strive for. Want to lose weight? Eat less. Where do you think the weight comes from? There aren’t many skinny people around that eat a lot of food. Your body will usually adjust fine and use it’s resources more effectively and you’ll probably get more energy back that it no longer needs for the digestion of heavy meals.

“You can avoid toilet water splash, and have a quieter pooping experience if you drop a piece of toilet paper in first.“

Anybody can use a toilet, but it takes a master to not make it splash.

“Everyone uses soap, but it’s a rather new human invention, and as much as we use it, we probably need to cancel out the wiping out of our natural oils with some lotions.“

Soap is another interesting tool that we use. Why soap? We use it to loosen up dirt from our skin. What else does it do? Loosens up and lets us wash away natural and protective oils as well. Does this mean stop washing yourself with soap? No, it means understand what its doing and counter it by adding the lotions back, or removing less of them with better or more natural soaps, as necessary.

“If you’re going to be sitting watching television, or writing a book, or lazily enjoying the Internet, you might as well be pedaling your feet while you are doing it.“

There’s a reason why at the gym there’s screens on the machines or on the wall: distract yourself so you won’t realize you’re exercising.

“Being strong is better than being fast.“

If you’re fast, you can run away. If you’re strong, you can fight and win. There are trade-offs, but in the long run, strength in more ways than one is key.

“One way of thinking about the 40% rule is to “train till failure.” When you reach that point of exhaustion during a run or pushing weights, when you usually would stop, keep running for one more minute or complete another rep with your weight training. You’ll be surprised to see how much further you can push yourself.“

You’re always stronger than you think. That’s why when you’re trying to get good at something, you push yourself a little further than you feel like or think you can do. Maybe you can do it, you’ll never know if you don’t try. Of course be safe and don’t recklessly injure yourself or else your progress can go backwards and you’ll be really bored waiting to heal up so you can get back at it.

“In life, your body is a self-correcting, self-regulating, basically conscious actor.“

Your body can adapt to hot, cold, wet, dry, pain, pleasure… just let it and don’t be afraid to feel what you feel in the moment and let nature do its job, or better yet train or better equip it to handle the elements and emotions of the modern world (vs ancient world) even better.

“Drinking alcohol is a loan against the future that you must pay back with interest.”

While it may help you have a good time, it costs time, money and makes you think and react slower at best. Pick and choose your fun times and always, always in moderation. Too much of anything is bad for you, drink too much water or get too much sunshine, it’s not good. Understand and recognize your limits and try and make decisions your future self will thank you for instead of the opposite.

“Because heredity exists, and because we can control which dogs get to breed with other dogs, we’ve been able to create dogs over time to have the traits we choose. We have done the same with nearly all the vegetables and fruits you eat today, and many of these things literally didn’t exist in forms you would recognize 1,000 years ago.“

Apples used to taste more like juicy potatoes than the sweet, delicious fruits we think of them as today.

Spirit

A man who sells his soul never gets what he wants, he gets what the world gives him. Without your spirit, your life force, you might as well be a zombie. Take care of your soul and make sure you’re living life on your terms, not somebody else’s and not the world’s.

Emotions exist to give us feelings and desires to be afraid of scary things, curious about others intentions and the will to fight for love, survival, family. Otherwise, life would be pretty boring.

“Find every edge and use every trick to make the path of least resistance the one that brings long term fulfillment. Make decisions now that your future self will be likely to follow. It’s a cascade. The better you stack the deck now, the better hand you future self will get to play.“

That’s why Compound Interest is so important in every aspect of life, not just money. Friendships compound, success compounds, skills compound. The rich getting richer is a true saying and it’s not a bad thing, it’s natural and healthy to have the opportunity to keep winning once you figure out how to win a few times. Just figure out how to win and join the club instead of complaining about it.

“If you think men and women are the same, you either don’t know much about men, or woman, or both.“

And the difference is good! Men are naturally bigger and stronger, making them good at a protector role, being decisive and taking advantage of opportunities. Women are generally more sensitive and caring, making them more likely to study and think, enjoy more college degrees, fill in the gaps for the husband, be capable of bearing children and so on. That’s why they are so good together and balance out family life, they are complementary in pairs. Men get along with men, women get along with women all fine and dandy too, but a man and woman have the tools to naturally procreate, giving them quite an evolutionary leg up if nothing else.

One shouldn’t celebrate a woman simply because she’s a woman, that’s just the radical diversity and patriarchy, the quite unhelpful part of postmoderism talking. Celebrate a woman who has overcame adversity, done great things or make the world a better place. Just like you would anybody else of any gender, any color, or from any place.

“Let's just get some diversity in all the other countries too. let's just open up all the borders, force every country to reflect the makeup of the world, and watch it all fall apart and split up again.“

Diversity of thought, matters, not so much diversity of race, gender, etc. Just as you should judge people based on their character, and not the color of their skin. measuring and mixing people based on what they look like just doesn't make things better. Only exception being that if there's a ton of males and only a few females or visa-versa, sure let's make that more diverse so the human race continues. Corporations pretend like diversity matters and all they do is further risk radicalizing the people left who don't buy into it and have common sense. Don't hire people because they are white or black. hire them because they are qualified. Want more qualified minorities? Start early with education. not late with sorting by race and diversity quotas. Hiring an unqualified person is unfair to them and the rest of the company. Want to hire from historically X or Y universities? Go there and recruit hard, using the same hiring standards as every other university. That's real equality.

“If the universe is one of many, or a simulation, it truly matters not.“

Whether or not we are living in a simulation does not matter because first of all, it’s not knowable. And second, if it was knowable, it wouldn’t do anything positive for the world. Perhaps chaos would ensue, depression because of the chains would set in and most of the world might just give up. It’s better to forget the question exists and act as if we’re not living in a simulation so we can get some stuff done.

“Most people think their mind and body are separate, until you remove little parts of the brain in their body, then you discover that the mind stops existing as you take bites out of the brain.“

That being said, mind uploading might not work as we think of it in the movies and Sci-Fi novels, but reading and writing to memory like computers do at a biological level just might.

“To punish the bad behavior of those that have wronged you, you will naturally feel like being angry, or hurt, or retaliatory, all of which instantly harm the quality of your life.“

To quote Naval here, “I and I alone am responsible for everything I think and feel” — you can’t be hurt by something that sounds ridiculous to you, only by something that a little part of you thinks might possibly be true. If I called you an Eggplant, you’d laugh and appear bewildered. If I called you a fake, and part of you had insecurities about such a thing, you might be sensitive to it. Choose to care or choose not to care, but do reflect and choose so you can either use it as feedback to change for the better or just let it go.

Regarding emotions…

“These are the parts of your brain that usually influence you before you influence them.“

Emotions can help us or hurt us, its all about how much we train them. Control them and don’t let them control you.

Live in the moment as much as possible as reflecting on the past you can’t change or the future that you don’t need to think about so much takes away from all we got: the present moment.

“Think about a world where people harm themselves, and don’t care to eat or take care of their kin because of bad emotional programming or adherence to emotional programming. Those people would all be selected against.“

You must take care of yourself if you want to survive and help others make it through thick and thin. You are fundamentally a survivor. All of your ancestors survived and procreated to make it all the way to you. It’s a paradox in the way that in the grand scheme of the universe, you matter so little, but to yourself, you’re all that really matters, you and your consciousness. You’re born, have a bunch of experiences and then die. So live as long as you can, it’s the only real game in town.

“The programming that governs our behavior isn’t needs, it’s mood and emotion. Needs are just a weird combination of certain selected emotions that is not accurate. 

We come programmed with some pretty great software. For the well and normally programmed of us, lying feels really bad, keeping secrets is hard, we want people to like us, we get bored, we want to travel.“

We have all the tools we need to be successful, it’s just lining them up and making them work for us instead of against us.

“Since gratitude is a key to happiness, it’s good to honor those that we owe so much. Rarely have you ever heard anyone genuinely exclaim how lucky they felt that the road was paved, or that they had such a great language available to them that they didn’t even need to invent.“

Gratitude is one of the most underrated things ever. If you ever can’t stop feeling sorry for yourself, visit an orphanage, homeless shelter or third world country and connect with the people there. Then you’ll see you don’t have it so bad, you’ll be more thankful for what you have and you will feel better inside, at least for a period of time before you start forgetting how bad millions of other people have it in the world. When somebody has as major health scare, they tend to be more thankful for what they have and less regretful for what they don’ have or didn’t do. You can simulate that by showing yourself that things are absolutely better than they seem.

“Boredom exists to make us do something new.“

That something new can leave a lot of stuff unfinished, which isn’t great, but it can also create wildly amazing things if you’re a creative, driven person.

“Behaviors that aren’t self-fulfilling enough are self-extinguishing.“

That’s why groups are so powerful: they decide which ideas to keep in and which ideas to kick out. Groups are certainly a good thing and helped us accomplish a lot, build civilization and so on, but there’s a flip side: groups inherently search for consensus, they try to get everyone on the same page. Generally this is fine, but it doesn’t promote individual sovereignty or first principles thinking. Individuals are looking for truth and with the social pressure of the group and its values, this is always at odds. Recognize this so you can manage it.

“Frustration is a halt command. Anger is a follow command. Frustration makes you stop interacting with whatever you’re doing. It’s the opposite of anger. Anger laser focuses you in on a single thing and gives you tunnel vision.“

Frustration helps you stop yourself and reflect to figure out how to remove the pain and anxiety. Anger is only useful when it motivates you to overcome fear. If someone is attacking you, anger and adrenaline makes you decide what to do faster and with more force. In the modern world, where we usually only get angry at work or at home, it’s usually does more harm than good. Keep calm, take a walk and work through your frustration before it becomes anger.

“The more comfortable you are with uncertainty, the more joy you will have in your life. When you aren’t comfortable with uncertainty, your body and your mind will put you in an unattractive state of stress.“

You won’t fear what you don’t know if you are prepared or ok with whatever happens. In the modern world, it’s more likely the thing stirring the bushes is a bird rather than a cougar. Don’t lose your sense of wonder.

“You’re supposed to cycle into and out of happiness, just like sleep, just like eating, just like breathing, in and out.“

Happiness isn’t a state you finally get to, it’s a place you get to every once in a while, like every other emotion. The trick is to set up your life, your routine, your day to make happiness easier to occur and for longer and longer periods of time. Each desire you have creates a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get it, so have desires, but just not too many and tackle them in bite-sized chunks.

“If equality exists, why is there a Michelin star rating? Why do people use brands? Why do they Choose cheerios instead of tasteless oats? Why do they listen to different genres of music? Equality doesn’t exist, competition exists. Competition is where items or aspects of life that need refurbishing get demolished by the thing that’s good. Natural, and unnatural selection at its finest.“

Aspire for equal opportunity at best, not forced equality. Equity in every domain is the enemy of excellence and in a free society, we like excellence.

“Cooperating with yourself to get shit done is the smallest version of collectivism“

Most of the time, you can be your own worst enemy, or your best friend. Optimize your life in a way that makes getting stuff done fun and exciting rather than boring and straining.

“If everyone’s life is worth the same value, then what is a nation-state, and what is a family?“

Although you should certainly walk around treating people fairly and promote the idea that everyone is created equal and so on, in reality you’d save a family member before a stranger if you could, you’d spend money on your own healthy food before donating to a shelter and all of these things are good and will help you and yours survive for a longer time than trying to help every homeless person on the street (which comes with it’s own set of other dangers). This can look a little fishy when the judge lets off the rich guy and gives a harsher sentence to the vagrant, which if you have any sense of justice you’d prefer they be treated close to if not exactly the same, but there is a point to be made which one society values, wants to see succeed and prefers more and more of.

“If you improve each of your skills that effect each other by 10 percent, you get 100 percent more profit.“

Success compounds success. Be the healthiest, brightest most kind person you can be and the world will reflect it back at you.

That concludes Part 1/3 in our series. Until next time, Keep Sciviving!