The Long Game 117: A Benchmark of Fitness, Authenticity, Reality Catches Up, Consistent Hard Work
The Long Game 117: A Benchmark of Fitness, Authenticity, Reality Catches Up, Consistent Hard Work🛸 Down the UFO Rabbit Hole, Useless Supplements, Milk, Sneakers, Designing for Trust, and Much More!Hi there, it’s Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder at Vital, and this is The Long Game Newsletter. To receive it in your inbox each week, subscribe here: In this episode, we explore:
Let’s dive in! 🥑 Health⚖️ A Benchmark of FitnessPatrick O’Shaughnessy came up with a good question: is there a single benchmark of fitness? As I read this, I thought: “no, there isn’t.” The reason is that fitness encompasses multiple things, and no indicator truly takes all of that into account. You can be very good at cardio but lack muscle strength, for example. You can have both of these but lack flexibility, and so on. So it made me think: what would be the few indicators of great fitness, without having to focus on only one benchmark? I came up with:
The point of having multiple indicators is that they conflict with each other. For example, if you build a lot of muscle, your mile time will be more challenging, if you’ve been focused on marathon training, your VO2 max might be great, but your squat might not. You get the idea. This brings us to the concept of training to be a hybrid athlete. Both strong, with good cardio, and flexible. I think this type of training will only get more popular. Crossfit is somewhat an example of this, although I’m not particularly a fan of it. Some interesting hybrid athletes you can check out:
What other indicators would you include? Let me know! 🌱 Wellness🤠 AuthenticityI have been thinking about authenticity for the last few days. It seems to be a value that’s more and more appreciated and celebrated in our society. As we’re broadcasting an ever-increasing part of our lives online, it seems logical that the second-order effect of this is a greater appreciation for authentic people. That was the idea initially, but this quickly led to people curating every single part of their lives and still trying to portray all of this as 100% genuine and authentic. Welcome to Instagram. As a backlash, other, more recent social networks came up with a counter-positioning focused on “bringing back” said authenticity. BeReal comes to mind here. Although the product is built in a way that tries to promote authenticity, and I salute them for that, it seems that we humans are too good and addicted to faking authenticity. Rex Woodbury writes:
As I went down the “authenticity rabbit hole,” I came across this excellent piece by Rohit from Strange Loop Canon:
Finally, I remembered the great Seth Godin on why authenticity isn’t what you should focus on:
Maybe instead of authenticity, we should focus more on consistency. 🧠 Better Thinking↪️ Reality Catches UpYou can be a con artist for a while, but reality will catch up at some point! This is, in short, the idea perfectly explained in this piece.
⚡️ Startup Stuff🛠🔂 Consistent Hard WorkNo new article or book this week, I just liked this tweet: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world that hard work and high output isn’t necessary to do great things. Paul Graham @paulg Replit just did something in a couple weeks that I would have expected to take most of a year. When I asked how they did it, Amjad sent me their commit graph. https://t.co/sZB3awFd84It’s another great reminder that great things are very hard to build and that the current trend promoting “smart work” instead of hard work is bound to prevent a lot of teams from building something truly extraordinary. Overall, from what I read and what I see, I think that Replit has an excellent company culture. Something to learn from, I especially like the “seek pain” mantra. At @Replit we "seek pain." You can't learn unless you ship real product to real people and then dig into what's not working and fix it. Successful businesses are always learning and learning is often painful at first. Yet we're naturally hardwired to resist pain.
(1/6) 📚 What I Read🥛 How we adapted to milk, and how we adapted it to usAn interesting piece on the evolution of milk digestion:
Pair with: GOMAD to pack on weight (for lifters) - funny 😄 ➗ He Dropped Out to Become a Poet. Now He’s Won a Fields Medal.The fascinating story of June Huh:
📉 Slightly Against Underpopulation WorriesAstral Codex Ten on the underpopulation worries. Consider this as your daily dose of bad news, as the author believes the singularity is coming before 2050 and that it will lead to the end of humanity 😅
🍭 Brain Food🛸 Down the UFO Rabbit HoleI admit it: there’s no better month than August to go down the UFO rabbit hole (again.) It started with this episode with former Navy fighter pilot Ryan Graves, which is a perfect follow-up to the older episode with commander David Frevor. What always strikes me is the “barrier belief”: So many people seem unable to simply explore the possibility that we might be wrong about so many of our current beliefs.
I couldn’t stop here, so I continued with the classic (that I hadn’t watched yet) Bob Lazar & Jeremy Corbell on JRE. Think about it what you want, this episode will blow your mind! 🤯 🎥 What I’m Watching🎨 How Airbnb Designs for Trust💊 The Worst Supplements Everyone Takes for Muscle Growth🔧 The Tool of the Week👟 Sneak in PeaceA great, well-designed place to discover & collect the latest sneakers. 🪐 Quote I’m Pondering
— Robert Greene 👋 EndNoteThanks for reading! If you like The Long Game, please share it on social media or forward this email to someone who might enjoy it. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the ❤️ just below, which helps me get visibility on Substack. Until next week, Mehdi Yacoubi If you liked this post from The Long Game by Mehdi Yacoubi, why not share it? |
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