Will Read

The Examined Life, Fitness, Health, Tech

Enrepreneur (Exited @Sideways6Ideas), builder, creator & angel investor

🌮, 📚,🌌, 🌊, 🧘, 🥊, 🐝, 🏋️ enthusiast.

[Will Read @WillRead]

You Should Read This

https://t.co/SZMTHbkiNs

[Will Read @WillRead]

I'm about to go travelling for a while and I'm in the mood to be one-shotted for the better again if anyone has any recommendations!

[Will Read @WillRead]

3 books to one-shot long term behaviour change for the better. All meaningfully improved the quality of my life by changing how I live it.

1. Ultra-Processsed People by Chris van Tulleken @DoctorChrisVT

- Ultra-processed junk is really bad for your metabolic health.
- Dramatically cut my consumption of packaged on the go crap (bye, protein bars 😢)

[Will Read @WillRead]

3) Lost Connections by Johann Hari @johannhari101

- There are many clear, 'fixable' causes of anxiety and depression. Avoid them.
- MAde me prioritise human connection, time in nature, more meaningful work, and meaningful values

[Will Read @WillRead]

What is most personal is most universal.

[Will Read @WillRead]

- No vibrating alarm.

[Will Read @WillRead]

3 months back on @ouraring after 3 years with a @WHOOP. It's at least 2x better:

- The insights are more interesting. There's less focus on a single recovery score. With Whoop, it feels like HRV is everything. With Oura, there's more

[Will Read @WillRead]

- Less scary/aggressive. I ditched the Whoop because the UX made it feel like the day was ruined if your HRV was low. Oura feels far more 'nudgey' and long-term

Downsides:

- Charging is less convenent with Oura. I've forgotten to charge it a few times

[Will Read @WillRead]

😕😕😕

[ein @stylishdawg]

> “your life should be devoted to work”
> check bio
> meaningless AI startup
every time

[Will Read @WillRead]

What stage of the bubble is this?

[Elizabeth Holmes @ElizabethHolmes]

The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.

[Will Read @WillRead]

Morning FM Episode 3

https://t.co/dU3kedWLXy

[Will Read @WillRead]

Eight Sleep is incredible.. when it works. I've had 2 and each has lasted a year-ish before breaking. Clearly an amazing team there, but I wish they'd spend a bit more time on the important but less marketing-friendly stuff - like the longevity of the actual product.

[Matteo Franceschetti @m_franceschetti]

Eight Sleep is becoming the operating system for sleep, health, and longevity.

Read my thoughts as we take @eightsleep into the next chapter.

[Will Read @WillRead]

Long live @themaccabees

@OrlandoWeeks / @felixwhite / @hugowhitenoise in Dublin

[Will Read @WillRead]

@ikirigin :)

[Will Read @WillRead]

Super exciting. A fantastic writer who manages to hit at the nerve of human existence so, so well

[David Perell @david_perell]

Henrik Karlsson may be the best new writer I know. He has near-superhuman powers of eloquence and perception, and if you aren’t reading his Substack, it’s time to change that.

How does he do it?

Some answers:

1. A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox.

2. Almost everybody would be well-served thinking more about what to focus on.

3. Always, always aim to reach past your current understanding of a topic — to reach the thought behind the thought.

4. Beware of knowledge shields: These are mental models that are good enough to explain most of what we see, but cause us to ignore everything else, filter out contradictory evidence, and resist deeper explanations of reality.

5. Many of the greatest mathematicians didn't think in words or symbols; they thought kinetically. They'd feel ideas in their hands and follow the intelligence of their body.

6. When drawing, the trick is to spend more time looking at the thing you’re trying to describe than actually drawing. The same is true for writing. Look at what you’re describing more than the words you’ve written.

7. The philosopher Wittgenstein said: “Don’t think, look!”

8. "I'll go and look at a plant. I could stand and look at that for a long time, just describing what I'm seeing and then correcting it again and again."

9. The writing is finally good when what you’ve written evokes the same sense of aliveness and truth as the thing you’re trying to describe. Edit your writing until that’s true.

10. Finding your people is perhaps the biggest perk of writing online, but if you follow conventional writing advice, you will cut the very things that’ll help you find the people you’re looking for.

11. “I need to let things live in my body for about a year before I can actually turn them into essays.”

12. This is obvious, but bears repeating: If you write the best thing that’s ever been written about a topic, you’ll receive repeat traffic for years to come. There’s lots of competition for mediocre writing, but very little for any piece that’s 5-10x better than average, which is paradoxically the easier strategy to pursue.

13. If you insist on making your writing immediately comprehensible, you’ll block yourself off from especially interesting ideas that are right at the edge of language.

14. "Sometimes I'll lie on the sofa in my writing studio, close my eyes, and put on voice transcription and just talk."

15. To write is to pin your thoughts to the table so you can examine them.

16. The real work of becoming a writer is in becoming the kind of person who can think interesting thoughts, and essays are the exhaust from that process of personal growth.

I’ve shared the full conversation with @phokarlsson below. If you want to watch it on YouTube, or listen on Apple or Spotify, check out the reply tweets.

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

It's not just a rise in mental illness and a decline of attentional capacity. There is also a set of personality changes that will make it harder for young people to succeed.

@jburnmurdoch thinks smartphones and streaming services are likely culprits:

https://t.co/zcYlXWdCUB

[Will Read @WillRead]

My ick is otherwise serious Americans saying 'I could care less' when it makes 0 sense and they should be saying 'I couldn't care less'