The Long Game 99: Readiness Scores, From Deep Dives to Simplicity, News, Company Culture
The Long Game 99: Readiness Scores, From Deep Dives to Simplicity, News, Company Culture🚢 Global Supply Chains, To Infinity and Beyond, Partial Reprogramming, Population Collapse, Campground, 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😴 Readiness ScoresAs we start gathering more and more data about our health, it’s very tempting for health apps to develop some type of readiness score. By analyzing your resting heart rate, heart variability, body temperature, and sleep, an algorithm gives you how “ready” you are to exercise intensely on a given day. Although the premise might be interesting, I found that for a lot of people, these readiness scores don’t correlate with performance. In this excellent podcast episode about Zone 2 Training, pro cyclist coach Iñigo explains that they don’t look at daily scores because the athletes learn to go with their feelings. For those who use @ouraring, @whoop, or other wearable w/ some sort of “readiness” score, how often do you let this info guide your daily decisions about training? Personally, I also don’t look at these scores both from a philosophical standpoint and from a self-experimentation one. For example, I had some of my best training sessions at a 60 Readiness Score on Oura and routinely have some of my worst sessions after sleeping 9 hours and getting a 95 Readiness score. I think this underlines a more significant challenge. It’s very hard, and many times too big of a stretch, to assess how a person feels in a specific moment with data. There are so many factors at play that giving a score is counterproductive. We also know how these scores can impact your psychology if you give them too much importance. People report feeling anxious or under recovered simply from reading a poor score when they would have felt OK if they didn’t see the score. I lost count of how many people told me they stopped using their Oura/CGM/Smart Watch simply because it was too anxiety-inducing. That brings us to the problem of seeing the data. Gathering health data is one thing; being constantly presented with it is something else. Just like many people create an emotional relationship with their weight leading them not to want to see the number on the scale, the same can happen with sleep, recovery, glucose, etc. At Vital, we believe people should be able to customize what they see. Many people want data to understand long-term trends and not obsess over them daily. I want to know that my HRV decreased 10% over the last month, not that my readiness score was 60 this morning. I want to know that my fasting blood glucose decreased 5% over the previous month and not that it’s still too high. Random idea 💡 for wearable tech :
An app that hides daily data from users by default, and you have to opt in to see it.
• Could ⬇️ unhelpful anxiety around poor values
• And help build interoceptive awareness (how well you know your own physiology) The key is to be data-informed, not data-driven. If data is beneficial in many cases, it would be a mistake to believe it should drive everything. I think about this paradox very often:
I suspect people love Oura so much because it takes away their freedom.
Nobody actually wants to make any decisions and would much rather just follow orders, so having a very authoritative "science-based" app tell you what to do is extremely comforting. 🌱 Wellness🚫📰 On Not Consuming The NewsI mostly stopped reading the news a few years ago, and it had a very good impact on how I feel. It’s trickier to do on Twitter at times, but the “mute” button can help. This piece is excellent to understand how detrimental it is to be plugged in to the news 24/7.
🧠 Better Thinking🛣 From Deep Dives to SimplicityLately, I’ve been more and more attracted to making things very simple. Life, exercise, nutrition, sleep, relationships, etc. I have not always been like that; quite the opposite, in fact, and this tweet from Andrew Huberman powerfully resonated with me. It’s very hard to reach a simple protocol that works for you directly. Years of research and trial and error are often needed to finally get to this seemingly simple solution. So even if one aspires to simplicity, it can be constructive to spend the time necessary to learn, try and assess before finally being contempt with how a specific aspect of your life/work/health is. My top tip for dashboards & making data actionable:
If a coach only takes *one thing* away from viewing a dashboard, what do you want it to be?
Start here. Add to complement, not distract.
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication! Kyle Sammons | SCCC, CSCS, FMS, PN1 @CoachKSammons Making fancy dashboards are cool and all…but can you make meaningful change from them?? Actionable data is 👑.⚡️ Startup Stuff🏛 Joy & Competitiveness & CultureI found this article by Ravi Gupta on company cultures worth sharing.
Although your company's culture is ultimately what you do and not what you say & write on the walls, it’s still important to define the type of team you want to be. The best values are choices, and emphasize the tradeoff you’re willing to make. If someone else couldn’t reasonably adopt the opposite value (“stability over speed”) the value isn’t distinguishing - it’s a baseline expectation. Bobby Goodlatte @rsg Facebook’s “move fast and break things” was one of the best company values of all times It’s incredibly misunderstood and interpreted in bad faith
Finally, there’s a temptation to please everyone when defining your culture. This is a mistake. You simply can’t do this and have to choose the most important values for you. They won’t be the same for all people & companies, and that’s fine. 📚 What I Read🧬♾ Partial reprogramming deep dive: the good, bad, and partially unresolvedIf you’re curious about partial reprogramming, this deep dive is what you’re looking for:
💭 Unattractive People Are Unaware of Their UnattractivenessI found this to be a fascinating research paper The abstract:
To pair with: somewhat related, but not really, just a great thread on a book I mentioned multiple times already. New York’s nightclubs are the particle accelerators of sociology: reliably creating precise conditions under which exotic extremes of status-seeking behaviour can be observed.
Ashley Mears, model turned sociology professor, wrote a great book about them. Thread of key points: 🌌 To Infinity and BeyondEarth is finite, humanity doesn’t have to be:
🎙 Podcast Episodes of the WeekThis week in podcasts:
🍭 Brain Food📉 Population CollapseElon has been very vocal about the dangers of falling birth rates over the last few months, and rightfully so. Derek Thompson wrote a great article explaining all the problems coming from a population collapse.
The reasons are multiple, and people not having enough babies is part of them, but death (excess deaths due to COVID accounted for 50 percent of the difference in population growth from 2019 to 2021) & immigration are also crucial factors in this population collapse:
I covered many times the fertility & cultural problems leading to fewer babies in the newsletter; here’s a reminder:
Fertility statistics do not adequately communicate how hard demographic collapse is going to hit. Culturally mainstream people in all modern societies are having fewer kids than any low-fertility country is as a whole. The fertility is all outside the cultural mainstream. Pair with: What if babies could develop outside of the human body? 🎥 What I’m Watching🚢 Why Global Supply Chains May Never Be the SameAn excellent documentary on how the global supply chain will be affected in the future. Pair with: How Long Haul Trucking Works 💣 World War II Every Day with Army Sizes🔧 The Tool of the Week🏕 Campground — Music, TogetherCampground is another excellent example of a vertical social network. It’s an app to listen to music with your friends! I think it’s very well done. 🪐 Quote I’m Pondering
— Steve Schwarzman If you enjoyed this newsletter, make sure to subscribe if you haven’t 👇 👋 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. Podcast reviews are also gratefully received. You can also “like” this newsletter by clicking the heart just below this, which helps me get visibility on Substack. Feel free to email me or find me on Twitter if you have any feedback or questions. Until next week, Mehdi Yacoubi PS: Lots of newsletters get stuck in Gmail’s Promotions tab. If you find it in there, please help train the algorithm by dragging it to Primary. It makes a big difference. If you liked this post from The Long Game by Mehdi Yacoubi, why not share it? |
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The Long Game 98: Strength Training, Teens & Social Media, How People Think
Monday, March 28, 2022
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The Long Game 97: Going to the Doctor, Longtermism, Art, Debunking Cynicism
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📱 The Truth About Online Dating, 14 Peaks, Jakarta, Substack Reader, Knowledge Networks, and Much More!
The Long Game 95: Mindfulness Apps, Nutritional Epidemiology, Hustle Culture, Shock Cycle
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📱 Vertical Social Networks, Ukraine, Russia, Goody, Hiring Young Talents, Engineering Victory, and Much More!
The Long Game 94: Behavior Change Through Wearables, Predicting Future Trends, Exercising for Depression
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