Scivive: Time, Space, Events, Longevity

In this final post, we’ll go into Chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10 with some exciting notes on various topics. Congrats for making it this far! You’re either just clicking around the blog OR really Sciviving!

Time

“Don’t make perfect the enemy of the good. Iterate. Fake it till you make it. Do what’s important first, and get the basics done. Only if you have time should you then worry about reaching perfection.”

Excellent is great, but good is always good. Excellence takes time, good takes effort. Prioritize good over excellence, but aspire for excellence as that’s what compounds and over time makes the most good in the world.

“If you don’t know exactly what you want, you may never notice that you’ve already achieved it, and thus steal from yourself the glory and good feelings you deserve. ”

Figure out what you want, or a general direction you want to go, before you start. You don’t need to know what finished looks like, but think about what you want to do. Do you want to write a book? Think about the outline and what finished looks like. Science starts with an observation and hypothesis to prove or disprove, but creativity starts with an idea to see what comes of it.

“Having tunnel vision is more efficient than removing distractions.”

Setting time aside dedicated to being alone or working in a group on deep work is one of the most productive things you can ever do. Get up, take breaks, drink water and entertain minimal distractions, but get your work done.

“You only have so much attention, so be careful what hobbies you have and how many, for at some point they control you more than you control them.”

Don’t think about it in terms of good hobbies and bad hobbies. Think of it as healthy, productive hobbies such as exercise, reading, writing, excelling in a vertical that pays money or knowledge, helping people and so on vs distracting, feel-good, dopamine quick hit hobbies like video games, smoking, gambling, drinking, scrolling social media, etc. You need both, but only one of them is helping you grow and compound. 80/20 in favor of healthy hobbies is probably the right balance.

Also reminds me of Richard talking about why he hasn’t bought a yacht: those types of things tend to own you. Or at least are so tempting to maximize relaxation that you better be OK with producing less for a while if you get on board.

“Put your food in the fridge oldest to the front, newest to the rear, so that when you use them in that order it makes some sense.”

There’s tons of ways to optimize your household. Put the food in the cupboard that you eat the most out in front. If you’re tired of letting things spoil, put things that expire faster than others in the front where you can see them. Anything you want to remember to eat or drink, make it visible or else you won’t consume it and only think about it after it’s too late. Same thing with dishes, towels, whatever. If you want to use something, make it easy for you to grab and use.

“Travel checklists are pretty useful.”

If you don’t have a list, you’re going to forget something. Now how important that thing you forgot is a different story, but if you’re already on edge a little from the inherit anxiety of traveling, new place, nothing is familiar, can’t go back and get it, do yourself a favor and make a list and check it off as you put stuff in your bag and by the door. Don’t pack the night before, start packing a little at a time the week before, putting stuff in your bag as you think of it and by the time it’s the night before the trip, you’re just putting in last minute stuff instead of getting stressed trying to figure everything out and pack.

“If you picked your top 25 things and took off the bottom 20 and avoided them, because they might hurt the top 5, you would be using the negative space idea. The result is more work on the stuff you really care about. Depending on how far different your 1-25 really were, you might have a top 10 that were almost all the same thing, so there’s a little bit of accuracy of scope that is involved.”

I’d adjust this to picking the top 10 things you want to do, then prioritize the top 5 and then only feel satisfied when you do the top 3-4. If you need to sacrifice one, which you’ve already told yourself is less important than four other things, maybe that’s ok.

“We all have only 24 hours in a day. Use this to out compete everyone else.”

That’s how the 1% of every vertical get there: they work when others sleep, they study while others are entertained and they sacrifice what others won’t. They want it so they get it.

“Jealousy exists to motivate you to act in the right directions!”

Jealousy gets a bad wrap, but it's actually quite useful. There’s too sides to every one of these neutral things that are almost always portrayed as evil. Envy and desire motivate you too. But it’s obviously better to envy successful people to be motivated towards success than envying somebody’s car just so you can social signal for success by having that car too.

Next time somebody says, “oh you’re just jealous” – well, you probably said something mean, but if you want to really correct it, you could say, “that’s right, I want what they have… how did they get it? what should I do?” while avoiding gossip and see how productive the conversation becomes.

“If you have a lot of “achievement badges” in a video game, you could say that’s a counter achievement anywhere outside that game.”

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes… be careful the games you play and make sure the prizes you want to win are worthy of your time and aligned with your goals.

“To avoid the pain of boredom, we’ll do even the pain of work. Often to discover that the work is quite enjoyable once started, and truly pleasurable when complete.”

If there’s something you don’t want to do on your TODO list, do it first thing in the morning and get it out of the way. Embrace the short term pain in exchange for longer lasting peace. See how much better your day goes without the feeling of anxiety on and off thinking about what you should be doing and probably should have done for the last few days.

“Timing to do the most difficult thing first, so you can enjoy the rest of your day without it looming over your head, is called eating the frog.”

Yes, eat that frog!

“It’s much easier to let yourself down than it is to let your friends/employees/coaches down. They will hold you to a tighter schedule.”

Just having people around you can be useful for producing, but only if they’re more supportive than distracting. Bosses at work often take this too far and make it to the point where it’s uncomfortable to be stared at and checked in on all the time, so set limits upfront there or find a new job.

“The hard part of working out a gym is getting to the gym. Once you’re there, everything is easy, you just hit the weights autonomously.”

You want to go to the gym? Don’t just put it on your calendar where you can swipe it away. Tell your friends to meet you there, put your gym bag and shoes by the door, do everything to make sure there’s nothing going to stop you and make it be work to undo all the preparation you’ve done for it to look and feel like you’re going to the gym. Then, you’ll go to the gym. Otherwise, maybe or maybe not.

“Don’t take away the profitable inaccurate belief someone has unless you have the time and likelihood that you can give them a better one that sticks. If you only take and don’t give, nature abhors a vacuum, and they might replace the old pitfalls with new, worse pitfalls. Some people might replace cigarettes with cocaine instead of exercise.”

Let’s say you’re skeptical of traditional religion, but you grew up in it and your parents still attend church regularly. You may find yourself debating with them, taking merit away from them quoting scripture and generally finding it appalling that they spend so much of their life devoted to something that appears arbitrary and at times unhealthy to you.

Well, if you could snap your fingers and change what they believe, what would you change it to? What would give them more fulfillment at this point in their lives? What they believe promises everlasting life, but you’re going to tell them to get real and stop believing in fairy tales. That’s not very compelling nor are you replacing what they believe with something better. See it from their perspective and it will help you navigate what’s worth a conversation on changing and what’s best left alone.

“Only action matters, and dreaming is only useful to action as long as you need it to create the plan.”

Action equals results, for better or for worse. Inaction doesn’t do anything.

“A single cheat day leads to more cheat days.”

It’s better to spend time forming healthy habits and acquiring the taste for healthy foods than making yourself go out of your way to stay straight 6 days a week and then party like crazy on the 7th day. Tim Ferriss proposes a “eat anything you want” day in The 4 Hour Body, but I’d argue that’s not the most optimal approach. Train yourself to like things that are good for you and you won’t need a cheat day. Of course you can always pick a day to treat yourself, but it doesn’t need to be a ritual.

“One mistake people make is not noticing that they’re chasing a small percentage difference that doesn’t matter. Another common mistake is mistaking linear changes in a number for importance, when that change is a small percentage. What really is the difference between being able to type 115 and 119 words per minutes? ”

Focus on making big changes and improvements or at least building small habits that compound over time into big positive changes. Avoid the opposite or risk wasting time at best or heading on a downwards slope in life.

“How much time have you wasted in the past 10 to 12 years of your life, doing things that you can’t even remember doing now?”

Figure out what matters and spend time on it. Nobody wants to have regrets, yet so few people are proactive in thinking about their lives and what they do with them, which maximizes their chances of feeling accomplished and being satisfied with their choices.

Space

“Who made it is more important than where it was made.”

In the age of Globalism, this isn’t so obvious. But the prime example is how iPhone was made in China, but designed by Apple in California. You may have been born in India, but grew up in America. The You who might have grown up in India would be way different than the You who grew up in America. “It’s not where you start, it’s how you finish” is kinda relevant here too.

“If you’ve been drinking, or have headphones on, or are otherwise not at your finest, you shouldn’t be doing risky things like running red lights, crossing streets at weird places, or taking other risks.”

Understand when you’re distracted and adjust for it.

“We didn’t invent territory. Lots and lots of other creatures figured out that idea on their own as well. Property works.”

Having your own space and place to exclusively organize and keep in who you like and keep out who you don’t is fundamental in a society that encourages individual sovereignty and fulfillment of your own potential. It’s hard to think for yourself when you’re surrounded by people pushing thoughts and ideas you don’t prefer and it's hard to create your own stuff when you’re distracted helping others all the time.

“If it’s true that people just have a natural tendency to follow suggestions or follow orders, whether they really should or really need to or not, let’s give them some good better directions to follow.”

Always apply second order thinking before following directions if what you’re doing has any real importance. But if it’s way too complicated for you to understand before you need to do it and you trust the person who told you what to do, perhaps follow your intuition there. Marketing often takes advantage of human tendencies and all kinds of different biases, so if you’re in a place where you think you’re being influenced, think twice if you want to avoid a bad deal or if it doesn’t matter to you, let the salesman just sell you what you want and maybe it will actually be as good as or better than what you need.

“The things around you will influence your focus, whom you fall in love with, what jobs you have, and what businesses you start. ”

So surround yourself with good people, things that help you practice good habits or at least get rid of or avoid things that trigger bad habits for you.

“Once your taste in things get advanced enough, you basically save a lot of time shopping because no one has anything you want, anywhere.”

You may notice this after creating art and painting. At first you don’t notice any mistakes other people make, but after you’ve done 100 paintings, you start seeing the flaws in others' work much more often. It’s the price you pay for knowledge, funny enough.

“When you’re leaving the house, there’s an ever so small statistical probability that you’ll get robbed while you’re out. You should really only bring the necessary wallet, keys, and phone.”

If you don’t have it with you, you can’t lose it. So many people take all this stuff with them when they go out and they end up losing stuff over time. Don’t like losing stuff? Keep it at home or in a safe.

“The sun has a nearly infinite amount of energy to give us, and as long as we can accept that energy and harness it to do our bidding, then we can have all the delicious food we want, all of the peace that we want, all the travel that we want, all the progress that we want through reformatting and changing that energy source.”

Go outside, don’t live indoors. Sunshine gives you vitamins naturally, for free and the freshest air is usually outside, also free and how to stay fit, have fun, meet others usually happens outdoors or outside of your house. Home is where you’re often creative, but going out can be quite healthy.

Events

“Stay sober. If you are drunk when you’re doing all the fun stuff, then you are hindering your memory of all the fun stuff, and you would have a better memory of your life if you were totally conscious and aware for the best parts of it.”

If you use alcohol as a bandaid, it won’t fix the problem. You need to solve it from the ground up, be honest with yourself, decide you’re going to fix it and seek counsel as needed. If you use alcohol as a tool, however, to have a good time with friends every once in while or the celebrate a big win, it makes sense, but always in moderation. If you want to have a good time, not feel bad the next day and remember every moment, just splurge on food or an trip for an experience instead.

“If you created a human from scratch, like a science project, you would need some way to program it to behave in certain ways and not others, while making sure that it didn’t get stuck in a loop and do the same thing over and over again, like forget to eat and then die. Nature came up with a great way to do that: emotions.”

Emotions make us human. They also can be enemies of progress, if we let them. Mastering your emotions so they help you more than hurt you is key to reducing so much anxiety in life. You want to have more friends and success in your career rather than people avoiding you because you’re a downer or never spending enough time on stuff that matters because you’re always stuck in a new procrastination cycle. Less productivity means less progress and never reaching your goals keeps emotions compounding downwards instead of trending upwards like you’d like to keep them.

“While you are dicking around trying to feel different feelings, the real world is coming for your limited resources, they will eat your lunch, and it will not be pretty.”

Manage how you spend your resources. Survival is always number one, but we naturally spend less time worrying about it now in the modern world as most people live in stable countries with strong militaries and allies. If you live in South Korea or Ukraine, you’re unfortunately spending more time than the Canadians thinking about backup plans, prepping and more survival instinct motivated ideas. In order to make progress, survival has to take a backseat to education, thinking and building strong families and partnerships or else you’ll find yourself in a Soviet, “WW3 is just around the corner” mindset and be making decisions and judgments that reflect that, which aren’t as profitable when the chances of you being in harm’s way at a macro level is very small.

“It’s always fun to see someone misunderstand what you are saying so hard, that they are entirely wrong about it, and not because they understood it in the correct way, to be incorrect about it in the correct incorrect way, but to just get it entirely wrong based on a misunderstanding.”

Listen to people for what they mean more than the exact language they use when saying it. It’s easy to nitpick non-native English speakers, but then you won’t learn the valuable things they may be saying. Is it your point to criticize others from your keyboard or build your knowledge base? You get to decide, but in the moment, be honest with yourself about which approach you are taking so you’ll be less confused when you look at the results.

“Uncommon permutations and stacking highs: You can stack a sugar high with a coffee high with a good nap with an orgasm, and whatever else you like. Uncommon permutations can lead to cool stuff.”

Each person is a little different in what they like, what makes them feel good and how they react to stress or pain. Just like you tend to go back to the same place that has the best burgers, you may like to find what you like and keep having a moderate “buffet” of it. Like visiting a particular site, city or hiking trail? Unless you just don’t have any preferences, why not keep doing what you like and riding those highs regularly, as long as they’re healthy activities?

It’s hard to say what you like until you test yourself and find out. The best way to stay stuck in a progressless “I don’t know”-ville is to keep just randomly guessing about what you like, optimizing for that and then wondering why you can’t quite be satisfied.

“There’s also an innumerable amount of beautiful people out there, getting it on. You can’t compete on a looks, kinkiness, or quantity measurement. You can win on the visceral and real experience meter, though.”

Avoid competing on status and if you must compete with others, do it on real things you can measure and build your own brand and utility that you care about, not what others value or say matters.

As Naval says, “Nobody can compete with you on being you” – authenticity wins every time.

“These are the magic moments that you will remember on your deathbed. The things that made life worth living. Your first love, the birth of your child, achieving that lifelong dream, sharing great food and sights with friends and loved ones.”

Nobody regrets their deep, meaningful moments and shared memories. Nobody wishes they spent more time at the office or playing video games. If you feel like you’re wasting time, you probably are, assuming you’re disciplined enough for it to take a long time before you start questioning yourself. Give yourself a reality check by answering the question, “If I only had 5 years to live, would I continue doing this?” – if not, you might have your answer.

Longevity

“We’re all born to die. Oh yeah? Well, life could surely be a lot shorter then, eh? Seems like we’re born to live. ”

It’s a lie that is as old as time: it’s natural to die. What’s more true is that we all die, at least based on past evidence that certainly suggests this. But it’s not as if there is some internal clock that runs out. So while it is not practical to live forever, it just makes sense that we can develop therapies that keep the body and mind in better shape longer and longer until our good health keeps us living for centuries assuming no accidents or malintent occurs.

“You won’t have the problem of a 200-year-old man for at least 80 years, so don’t worry about it. In 80 years we’ll have more than enough resources to handle a cool 200-year-old dude.”

Again, technology is doing more with less. If you believe technology gets better, that makes us likely to know how to use our resources with new tools that makes overpopulation laughable. The human population is starting to have a trend of having less kids, too, so that can’t hurt.

“When you diet and exercise, you only help yourself; nothing you’re doing there is helping anyone else. When you build medical technology you not only help yourself, you help all the humans that will ever exist in the future.”

Maybe you work on making yourself the healthiest, happiest and wealthiest possible first with the end goal of investing in biotech research that will help save more people just like you.

“We focus on trivial things too often.”

Instead of spending an hour standing in line to ride a roller coaster, you could be sharing a meal with a loved one, reading a good book or petting and enjoying the company of a dog or cat. If you spend one hour that you’ll never get back on something that thrills you for a few minutes, ok once or twice that’s ok. If you’re a kid, that’s ok. If you’ve been there, done that and have perspective that you’ll never get that hour back, then standing in line, arguing about your bill over the phone, talking to people who just want to hear themselves speak, all these things you’ll minimize because they aren’t helping you or anybody else.

“You do can something, right? We are at the time where we do not have to pretend that there’s nothing that can be done. There are things that can be done, and as Silicon Valley tech billionaire Peter Thiel said, they’re underfunded. No one cares about them. Poor Aubrey de Grey has been giving talks on TED and at Google, and no one believes. The listeners are just thinking, “Eh, crazy guy. Death is cool.””

Death is not cool, obviously. So what are you doing about it? You don’t need to talk or think about it everyday as that would probably be distracting for most people, but stop pretending that it’s not going to happen sooner than you’d like (assuming you’d like to live to be 150 or so) if we don’t start funding living longer research.

“Perhaps you shouldn’t be answering the door at all really. If you don’t answer your door, you can’t be served with a subpoena, or punched in the face.”

Avoidance can be useful in certain cases. You can’t get into a car accident if you don’t drive or less likely if you use public or private transit. Can’t talk to scammers if you don’t pick up the phone for weird numbers or answer weird emails or messages. You can’t be robbed if you have nothing to steal or at least if you look as if you don’t. Cover stuff up in your car when parking in public and try not to walk at night in any neighborhood that isn’t lighted well or has a healthy looking crowd if you can.

“Better than training is controlling your own environment.”

Having a few of your best friends over is usually way better than throwing a huge house party. You actually get to socialize with people you like and work on ideas and personal relationships vs risking somebody showing up who could steal stuff or ruin the night. Plus the cleanup is much faster and easier too. If you want to meet new people, go out, don’t bring a bunch of unknowns into a such a sacred place such as your own house.

“Arguments against eternal life”

• Only rich people will get it (No tech has ever done this.)

• Better to give money to the poor than science. (Family, city, state, nation, has proven local investment beats foreign.)

• Dead people make more room for new, other people. (Consider going first.)

• Run out of resources. (Live people discover/extract/renew better than dead or nonexistent.)

• Overpopulation. (Colonize the seas, solar system, or have a war.) Stop having kids.

• Worse wars. (Nukes are more dangerous than having your first 220-year-old person in 2136)

• Dictators never die. (They die all the time and rarely of age.)

• Old people are expensive. (50% of your lifetime medical costs occur in your final year. Delay is profitable.) 

• Old people suck. (Death is an inferior cure to robustness.)

• You’ll get bored. (Your memory isn’t that good, or your boredom isn’t age related.)

• You’ll have to watch your loved ones die. (So you prefer they watch you?)

• Like Tithonus, you’ll live forever in a terrible state. (Longevity requires robustness.)

• Against God’s will. (Not if he disallows suicide, then it is required.)

• People will force you to live forever.

• Do you think less people make progress faster? What’s your target level of depriving life of existence?

There are no good excuses for all of us to live longer, healthier lives on this planet.

“Peter Thiel says that you have three options when contemplating death.”

1. You can simply accept it, thinking that it is unavoidable.

2. You can care, but not believe that you can do anything about it.

3. You can choose to fight, which is the choice Thiel makes.

Peter Thiel is known for being a contrarian and asking, “What important research is no one funding?” – so it’s natural that he found anti-aging through this train of thought.

“We need more human beings doing more intelligent things that benefit other people. We need more people acting in their own best interests. We need more people to understand what their own best interests are, which means less complacency, less cowardice, and more correct, heroic, honorable action.”

The highest and best use of yourself could be many things to many different people. It may just be that you save your own life and that of your families.

“But if you are making a “rate-my-sandwich” app, I truly hope you find a more empowering and fulfilling use for your creative skills.”

Spend your time on stuff that matters. Living, loving and being at peace.

This is the end game: if you believe human consciousness is the most important thing on Earth, why aren’t we working harder to save and protect it? Medical research, especially the research being done by Aubrey de Gray and the SENS Foundation, is trying to extend human life by creating new, targeted therapies to heal the body before it gets too frail.

And that wraps up our series! Thanks for consuming the content, hope it is helpful to you and yours.