RRR16: Snowy Weekend, Three New Habits, Geography Games, FaaS, Kayaks Down the Nile (Update), Ecuador in Crisis
⛄🧠🦾🧠🛶😥
Finally.
Whether we were getting this lovely form of precipitation, or, a whole lot of slush, remained a question right up until the time the storm began. Thankfully, it ended up being just chilly enough to facilitate the lovely images above.
Hopefully it’s a sign of what’s to come!
In Recent Times…
I’m working on a few new things to start the year. First,
and his most recent annual letter introduced me to the concept of kale vs. cocaine phone.The basic premise is that I’ll build two interfaces on my phone with custom rules surrounding when they will be available.
The kale interface will consist of only the healthy components my phone has to offer. I’m loosely thinking it will include Substack, Google/Chrome, Email, Gympass, and some work related apps.
Cocaine phone will contain the dopamine hitting hell of social media, messages, ESPN (for NBA / Soccer purposes), and my other news sources like WSJ, etc.
The other key here is the times in which either interface will be available. I am loosely thinking of going ultra restrictive with cocaine phone. I usually try not to make drastic life changes when trying to form new habits, but this seems like an area where it might be smart to try.
I’ll circle back next week with my official rules :).
Secondly, if I am going to try and unlock new levels of focus, I need my environment to be focused as well.
As such, I am going to completely reinvent my living space to exude minimalist qualities. Maybe I’ll share some before and after photos… 🤔🤔.
And finally, as I foreshadowed last week, I’ll be making a massive commitment to increasing my flexibility, hopefully unlocking some new athleticism on the way 🏃🏻♂️.
In this instance, I will try to create a framework around this habit that makes it desirable / easy (per the advice you get in books like Atomic Habits)
I’ve positioned a yoga mat in front of the TV where I usually spend an hour each evening watching NBA basketball. I’ve already tried out stretching on the floor while I watch, and it works extremely well.
While the games are on, I sort of roll around on the floor, just loosening up and trying to identify areas of resistance within my body. As soon as a commercial hits, I get into a focused stretch, targeting the areas that need work 🧘🏼♂️🧘🏼♂️.
Hopefully I can look back in a couple months time and notice beneficial results.
Content of the Week 📖🎙📺
The Magical Three-Game Combo of Tradle, Worldle, and Globle
In Tradle, you’re given the total exports of a country’s economy, as well as the sector breakdown of those exports. You then have 6 guesses to figure out the country.
However, as that would be incredibly difficult, after your first guess, you get geographic clues as to where the country is located. See below for my redacted guesses today!
Worldle is similar, but instead of exports, you’re given the (scaled to grid) image of the country. A word of caution with Worldle… it sometimes produces territories of other nations, and not independent nations. It was just last week I learned about the French territory of Martinique. Below is an example of the game:
And lastly, we have the purely geographic game of Globle. You start by typing in a random country, and with each subsequent guess, you receive a “warmer” or “cooler” feedback from the game. If you’re really close, you get “X is adjacent to the answer!”. It can get a little tricky with the island nations 🤣.
You can track your average guesses over time. Give them a shot - they’re fun, and you’ll learn a lot along the way.
Lowering Life Requirements, by Leo Babauta
What are your requirements, things you can’t do without? For some people, it changes depending on the circumstances: you need a travel pillow on an airplane, a soft bed and nice pillow in order to sleep, music in order to run or do a workout, some alcohol in order to socialize.
What happens if you can’t have these things—does it make you unhappy or stressed out? Is the trip or social occasion or run less enjoyable?
What happens when we let go of these needs, and just keep them as a “nice-to-have” option?
I love when observations that should be obvious are new and profound thoughts to me…
Liberty’s Highlights #468, by
As with each edition of Liberty’s Highlights, you get a healthy dose of thought provoking words, interesting angles on how the world around us is working, and much more. What really struck me in this edition were his words about Elon Musk’s biography:
I would recommend it to anyone trying to understand Musk and his various businesses. It seems that everyone has an opinion on him, but very few people go deeper than the memes, the soundbytes, and the pre-packaged narratives created by either the fanboys or haters.
If you read this and the Vance bios (which I have also read), you get a much better picture of the man, warts and all. Like with Steve Jobs, it’s okay to have a nuanced opinion and like certain things and dislike others.
May we all carry that sense of open-mindedness when we’re presented with information of any kind.
Focus-as-a-Superpower (FaaS) 🧠🔎🦸♂️
Albeit with great tardiness, I recently read this brilliant piece by
titled “Focus: The Last Superpower?”There were genuinely so many incredible nuggets here that it would be impossible to boil it down. You actually need to just read it in its entirety 🤷🏼♂️.
A focused life means saying not to a million things which makes you less likely to waste your money and time (watching ads, for example). A focused life makes you a lot less valuable as a consumer.
In The World Beyond Your Head, Matthew Crawford called attention “the thing that is most one’s own” because what we pay attention to determines what is real to us, what is “actually present to our consciousness.” Just as we become what we eat, our reality becomes what we pay attention to. And just like our appetite has been hijacked by food engineers (by “manipulating levels of sugar, fat, and salt”) so are attention engineers trying to conquer our minds. Crawford called distractibility, or lack of ability to focus, the “mental equivalent of obesity”.
Every day we are forced to navigate a world filled with junk food media, “packaged in ways that our brains find irresistible.” Compared to this “highly engineered environment”, Crawford writes, “the natural world begins to seem bland and tasteless, like broccoli compared with Cheetos.” We crave stimulation and distraction. Our attention span falters.
Don’t cheat yourself of this one, definitely go check it out!
Good writing has the power (⚡💡) to unlock tons of inspiration (just be ready to capture it).
Kayaks Down The Nile (Update) 🛶🛶
I previously wrote about my eagerness to start this book. Making good headway has been hard.
Yes, still 40 hours to go of “Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”…
However, I have made a healthy dent, and I am happy to report that I’m enjoying the book for the imagery it possesses.
To be completely honest, Goddard comes off as a bit full of it. The book seems almost suspiciously packed with near death encounters, romanticized experiences, and generally lacks the negative headspace you might expect to find in any non-fiction adventure story written by a human being.
With that being said, maybe Goddard was just an optimistic lad with a real zest for life (after all, you would need that to undertake this sort of challenge) 🤷🏻♂️🤷🏻♂️. I ought to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Anyways, back to the imagery.
The book does such a great job of painting a picture of the magnificent beauty that lies in the heart of Africa. If some details are embellished, I don’t care. It’s so fun to read for this reason if nothing else.
This is sort of how I envision it:
State of Emergency Declared in Ecuador
Just today, as I was getting ready to wrap up this edition and blast it into the digital universe, I started to see and read about some more horrible circumstances taking place in Ecuador.
Previously, I wrote about the political assassinations happening in the country. Now, one of the most prominent drug lords in the area escaped prison in Guayaquil, his second escape in the last 11 years.
Ecuador's "most-wanted prisoner", the leader of the Los Choneros criminal group, disappeared from the jail where he was being held, authorities said on Sunday and launched an operation to locate him.
General Cesar Zapata, the national commander of police, told a press conference that the country's armed forces had determined that one of the inmates in the Guayaquil prison was missing.
While Zapata did not mention the inmate by name, the prosecutor's office said it would investigate "the alleged escape" of Jose Adolfo Macias, the leader of Los Choneros.
Macias, whose alias is "Fito", was sentenced in 2011 to 34 years in prison for various crimes including drug trafficking and murder.
Los Choneros is a criminal organization authorities have linked to extortion, murder and drug trafficking, among other crimes, and accused of controlling the country's main prisons.
Just hours later, armed gunmen linked with organized criminal gangs took over a local TV broadcast in Guayaquil.
Violence has reached a fever pitch in the historically peaceful nation.
It is perhaps equally important that the patience of the wonderful people of Ecuador has run out. I suspect violence and corruption will not be on the menu for much longer.
The government is stepping in quickly and aggressively. The question that remains is whether or not the security apparatus is working entirely in sync with elected leaders.
This week’s chaos shows that Ecuador has not only lost control of the prisons and streets, but also the country’s security apparatus, said Ecuadorian law professor David Cordero-Heredia. He argued that Noboa’s executive order Tuesday was a mistake, because it grants an elevated “political status” to the country’s gangs, by defining them as terrorists, and grants expanded powers to security forces suffering from alleged corruption at the highest levels.
“They think they are commanders of a force that should be obedient to them,” he said of Noboa and his predecessor. “But they find [the security forces] have their own agenda.”
Despite three security rings in the country’s prisons, Ecuador’s most important gang leader managed to escape, “mocking the security of prison guards, police and military,” Cordero-Heredia said.
“This only shows that the country’s security forces are not at the service of the government,” he said, “but are heavily infiltrated and at the service of organized crime.”
OG Anunoby + the Surging Knicks 🟠🔵
Last week, the New York Knicks traded promising young guard Immanuel Quickley, RJ Barrett, and a second round pick to the Toronto Raptors for OG Anunoby, Malachi Flynn, and Precious Achiuwa.
The main haul the Knicks got back is Anunoby.
To my dismay, the Knicks faithful seemed to hate this trade when it happened. I really like Quickley. However, I don’t think the Knicks just traded away a player who will ever be as useful and impactful as OG Anunoby.
A lot of casual fans would look at Anunoby’s traditional stats (points, rebounds, assists) and not realize what a talent he is.
In reality, he is an remarkably perfect fit for this Knicks team. He has a malleable skillset that would frankly help him fit nicely on any team.
Many of you will wonder, why trade him if you’re Toronto? The truth is that he’s a free agent at the end of the season, and there’s no guarantee he would resign (or for a dollar figure they felt comfortable with). Better to get something in return for him than letting him walk in the off-season. A win-win trade.
I encourage you to watch this incredible breakdown from “AlexHoops” on YouTube. Keep in mind the video is just a hair outdated as the Knicks are now on a 5-game win streak after dispatching Portland, rather than a 4-game win streak.
Go NY go NY go.
Thanks for reading❣.
Damn not even telling the crowd who put you on to tradle / worldle / Globle is crazy
Also in terms of minimalism I recommend starting in the upstairs bathroom
FaaS...Brilliant segment that I desperately need to work on. Great RRR