Squats are hard...until you have to get up from a chair at 60.
Eating healthy is hard...until you realize your body is insulin resistant.
Doing cardio is hard...until you can't walk up stairs without being out of breath.
Want an easy life? Commit yourself to doing the hard stuff.
The goal body fat percentage for every guy should be 12-15% body fat.
This gives you a foundation for healthy body composition while allowing a decent amount of diet flexibility.
Procrastination Paradox
You avoid starting the task because you're anxious about whether you can do it well. But the only way to reduce the anxiety is to start the task and discover it's not as hard as you feared. The anxiety is both the cause of procrastination and the thing that procrastination makes worse. You're stuck in a loop where the solution to your problem is the exact thing your problem prevents you from doing.
When you reach 40 or above, the health bill starts arriving.
This is the time your body stops negotiating and starts reporting on the decisions you've made with your nutrition, exercise, sleep, and movement.
Take care of it, and life opens up. Don't, and life starts to shrink
Contrary to a what posts circulating on X today say, doing more exercise but getting less sleep does not “age you faster.”
The opposite is true. More exercise = greater healthspan and lifespan gains at any level of sleep.
In fact, short sleepers who do more exercise have ⬆️ (healthy) life expectancy compared to people with normal sleep who don’t exercise much.
How to see opportunities others miss:
1) Study a totally different field, then return to the original problem. Apply insights from other domains.
2) Invert the problem. Try to achieve the opposite.
3) Find ways to engage with hyper-creative people. Their thinking will rub off.
This 3 minute neck drill will change your life.
The neck is one of the most important parts of your body but it gets stiff after long periods of sitting.
Do each of these exercises for 15 seconds, and watch how much better your neck feels afterward.
A simple rule for life that rarely fails:
Optimize for enthusiasm. Make as many choices as you can that leave you feeling energetic and interested. Pay attention to when you have the urge to pursue or participate in something and do more of it.
If you're sleep deprived, one of the best things you can do (counterintuitively) is high-intensity exercise.
A few hours of sleep deprivation reduces insulin sensitivity and impairs cognitive function.
But just 10 minutes of HIIT can enhance brain blood flow, cognitive performance, and blood glucose regulation. It can take you back to baseline, or even above it, for several hours or until you can get adequate sleep.
You may not feel like going hard when you're tired, but the short-term benefits are real. Just don't make poor sleep a habit.