Appreciation is an act
Hey reader. You, yes you.
I appreciate you. š
I appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day to read the words I spent time writing.
Our mindset of the week was Appreciation. This is one Iāve struggled with for a long time. I associated appreciation with celebration, and I was never one to celebrate. For some reason I thought it was like a weakness. Whenever we would accomplish things my response was always āgreat, what next?ā But I was a bit of a hypocrite. I believed I didnāt need to celebrate wins at all, while also appreciating it when someone else decided to celebrate our work.
Achievement without appreciation makes you ambitious but miserable.
Appreciation without achievement makes you unambitious but happy.
Tim Ferriss
It wasnāt until I was leading teams that I understood how motivating appreciation can be. Itās a bit of an asymmetric gift ā with very little work on your side to express appreciation you can have a highly positive outcome for the other person. But thereās a double-whammy here: appreciating others makes you feel better too as you recognize what you have. Now I try to express appreciation more generously.
How can you incorporate appreciation into your life?
Given the choice, would you live forever?
Upon meeting someone for the first time, my fellow director Steven ten Holders likes to ask Do you want to live forever? It's something most of us don't really consider, but as the science of longevity continues to progress, is one we will start to have to grapple with.
Well, not actually forever, but longer. I find it strange when people think the life we live is "long enough" already. While there is a vast difference between 150 years and forever, life will always feel either too short or too long. My personal philosophy is to build a life that will feel too short, no matter how old you become. If you think 100 years is too long you might want to reconsider your life. Not to give you an existential crisis in the first 2 paragraphs.
It is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it has been given in sufficiently generous measure to allow the accomplishment of the very greatest things if the whole if it is well invested.
Seneca, On The Shortness of Life
Conducting these sorts of thought experiments and conversations are always fun. My students discussed whether they wanted to pursue longevity and to consider the long term effects of a 200-year lifespan on society and I enjoyed participating in a few breakout rooms!
Longevity is the evolution of healthcare
Whether we were consciously pursuing it or not, modern healthcare has been extending our lifespan for decades. By living healthier lives and reducing or eliminating common causes of death, we live longer on average as a population.
While this has increased average lifespan, there hasn't been equal gains in the maximum lifespan. This brings us to a key distinction within longevity: healthspan vs lifespan. I first heard of healthspan several years ago when listening to Peter Attia on Patrick O'Shaughnessyās podcast and was immediately sold. Whereas lifespan is the length of our lives, healthspan is the number of healthy years we have. They are connected but different. I've attempted to conduct small life changes for the benefit of my own healthspan such as making sleep my top priority and adjusting my fitness regimen to include lifting heavy. Maybe one day I'll muster up the courage to do cold dips.
We have evolved and built a society for us to stay comfortable as much as possible, avoiding stress. Most people likely exist within a temperature band of 10Āŗ C. We live in temperature regulated houses, then walk to our heated/air conditioned cars, before arriving to our temperature controlled jobs or stores. We never need to feel discomfort when it comes to temperature! The same goes for diet ā we have the ability to eat what we want, when we want. Unfortunately, this comfort is not benefiting us in the long run. Short periods of acute stress can be beneficial such as by changing our diet (eating less, eating less often, eating less protein) and changing our temperate (raising body heat or experiencing cold). Our bodies have evolutionary mechanisms that activate during scarcity and stress to repair the body. If you're curious about the benefits of stress, check out the book The Upside of Stress1. And if you want to see what taking human health to the extreme looks like, check out Project Blueprint.
Divide and conquer
Iām starting to realize that some of what we do at TKS is create "trojan horses" that appear to teach certain skills or ideas, but also help shape their worldview in non-obvious ways. Hereās an example from this past weekend.
In small groups, students researched what was happening in 8 different areas of longevity and presented back their findings. Our primary intent was the get them excited about the various topics within longevity and want to research it further. They got to practice skills such as creating a single slide and delivering a short presentation. But beyond that, it was an effective way for the group to rapidly learn about a wide variety of topics.
Instead of trying to learn about all eight topics individually, we were able to divide up the work and have each group teach the rest of us. This is a really powerful approach for collaboration as it allows you to learn far more in much less time. At Versett, my team would do an anti-book club, inspired by Forte Labs. Instead of all of us reading the same book, we would each read our own books and create a short presentation summarizing what we learned.
Team members were learning key insights without needing to read the book, but also seeing if they wanted to take the time to read the book themselves! This compression of knowledge allowed us to grow and learn significantly faster. The point was not to completely replace the book-reading experience, but to give everyone the chance to learn while still reading if they wanted.
As students prepare for their first hackathon next weekend, it's important they realize that specialization is a helpful approach. Instead of having everyone contributing to every aspect of the project, dividing and conquering will allow them to move faster. As we go through the rest of the program, I'll be having my eyes peeled for other trojan horses we have in the curriculum.
The moral grey area
We introduced students to the trolley problem and its variations in session. While some were familiar with it already, others were new to the ideas. I find it fun to see the students squirm and try to avoid the decision, coming up with alternatives in the scenario and thinking outside the box. I used to also do the same when I had the conversation.
But this defeats the purpose of the exercise.
Where we (hopefully) end up is with the realization that morals/ethics are not black and white, and very context dependent. These discussions are an opportunity to explore that grey area in a world that pushes us to be black and white about everything. It was one of the few times where students were able to engage in productive dialogue with opposing views. They took that same energy and openness into their discussions on longevity this week.
If youāre curious about the trolley problem, watch the first 15:00 of this video.
Song of the Week:
Had to a pick an on-theme song.
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Note: Chronic stress is very different and has negative effects on the body.