No. 471 — May 8, 2022 — Read on FS

Welcome to Sunday Brain Food: a weekly newsletter full of ideas and insights that never expire.

FS

“The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction. When in doubt, just remove. But be careful of what you remove. … When it is possible to reduce a system’s functionality without significant penalty, true simplification is realized.”

→ The Laws of Simplicity

TKP Podcast

“When you look at centenarians, the people that live over a hundred, they have (low levels of persistent stress) in common. They have a good sense of humor. They don’t worry too much in their lives on average. And they also have good partners. It’s been shown by studying hundreds of people over their lifetimes that one of the most important, if not the most important factor, is to have a reliable partner. A pet can substitute for that if you don’t have one of those at the time. But yeah, you want companionship. That really does reduce your stress levels and leads to longevity.”

Biologist and genetics expert Dr. David Sinclair joins me to discuss the process of aging and we can live a long and healthy life. We explore optimizing your diet, stressing your body with exercise and sauna, the role of a positive attitude, the importance of sleep, the three supplements he takes every day, and I share my experience with Lyme Disease.

→ Listen on FS (with show notes), Apple Podcasts, Spotify, watch on YouTube, or read the transcript.

Insight

"Trust is earned in drops and lost in buckets."

That internal saying at Amazon reminds me of what Warren Buffett observed, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently."

Tiny Thought

The price of longevity is inefficiency.

What's most efficient at the moment is rarely the most effective in the end.

Someone who maxes out their mortgage makes a lot of money when the tide is rising but gets exposed when it goes out. We are conditioned to compare ourselves to whoever is doing best. That's the bar. An impossible standard that encourages us to take more and more risks.

(Share this Tiny Thought on Twitter)

Explore Your Curiosity

→ "I’ve realized a new reason why pessimism sounds smart: optimism often requires believing in unknown, unspecified future breakthroughs—which seems fanciful and naive. If you very soberly, wisely, prudently stick to the known and the proven, you will necessarily be pessimistic. No proven resources or technologies can sustain economic growth. The status quo will plateau. To expect growth is to believe in future technologies. To expect very long-term growth is to believe in science fiction. No known solutions can solve our hardest problems—that’s why they’re the hardest ones. And by the nature of problem-solving, we are aware of many problems before we are aware of their solutions. So there will always be a frontier of problems we don’t yet know how to solve."

— Why Pessimism Sounds Smart

→ "All the best things that I did at Apple came from (a) not having money and (b) not having done it before, ever. Every single thing that we came out with that was really great, I'd never once done that thing in my life.”

— Steve Wozniak

→ Stripe co-founder and CEO, Patrick Collison, is a voracious reader. In this clip, Collison explains how he chooses what books to read, how he takes notes on books and his philosophy on quitting books.

Stay safe,
— Shane

P.S. The Galaxy

P.P.S Happy Mothers' day to all of the incredible mothers out there. I know I won the parent lottery with my mom.