7 Lessons I'm Taking Into 2023 - Season 4 Wrapped
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By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold. And it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold.

Hey friends, and welcome back to Deep Dive. If you're new here, my name is Ali, and every week it's my immense privilege to sit down with authors and entrepreneurs and academics and creators and other inspiring people. We found out how they got to where they are and the strategies and tools we can learn from them to help us build our best lives, to build lives that we love. This episode is going to be a bit of a roundup episode of seven of the lessons that I'm taking into the next year, which have been from seven different episodes of this season. I can't believe we're at the end of season four already, and it really does feel like this last year has absolutely flown by and I've had some

absolutely incredible conversations throughout this podcast. And actually, so many that we've actually pre-recorded for the next season of the podcast as well. So that's going to be super fun too. This year has also been a pretty exciting year for this podcast as a whole. According to the stats that we got from Spotify's Unwrapped thingy, 97% of you discovered the podcast this year. So only 3% of you were watching or listening in 2021, which is great to see the growth and the kind of new discoverability of the podcast. The podcast was in the top 1% globally of most shared podcasts. So massive thank you if you have

shared the episodes or the podcast or anything with friends or family or anyone in your life. And we even managed to break into seven podcast charts for a total of 275 days. So we stayed in the charts for three quarters of the year, which I think is pretty good for a seasonal podcast. And very excitingly, this podcast has been listened to just on Spotify alone to listeners in 147 countries all around the world.

Now, just one final thing for me before we roll the seven different lessons that I'm taking into 2023, which is that at the moment, according to YouTube analytics, 81% of you who are watching this on YouTube have not yet hit the subscribe button. And so if you're, for example, in the now 81% of people who are watching this on YouTube, but who are not subscribed to the channel, I would love it if you could do so. And it'd be awesome to get that number down to 50%. And it would be cool to get like 50-50 sub non-sub ratio, just for fun.

Anyway, that's all the rambling from me. Thank you so much for being a watcher, a viewer or a listener of this podcast for the last year. And now let's play the seven top lessons that I'm taking away from this season into the new year. What are the things that we can do to improve our brain performance? So we talk about things like...

rest, which is sleep and also sort of downtime. Nutrition is super important. So the brain is obviously a tiny proportion of your body weight and only weighs a few kilos, but it uses up to 30% of the breakdown products of what you eat. So when you're asleep, your brain is eating up 20% of what you ate that day.

When you're at work and focused on something, it's using up about a quarter of what you eat. And when you're stressed, it's using up to 30%. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so obviously people think, what should I eat if I want to be healthy generally or I want to lose weight or I want to build muscle mass? But the sorts of people that, you know, like you and the people that I work with,

aren't thinking enough about what should I be eating so I can make the best decisions today? What should I be eating so I can solve complex problems? What should I be eating so I can understand what's going on in terms of interpersonal communication with my team, for example? And then there's everything from hydration, exercise, breathing, mindfulness, curiosity. There's so many factors that contribute to brain health. And

They're probably not dissimilar to things as a doctor that you would know contribute to cardiovascular health or gastrointestinal health. But, you know, we at Heights feel that if you approach everything with a brain care first attitude, then you're kind of taking care of the rest of the stuff. Like if you eat and drink in a way that's good for your brain, your skin and your hair are going to look nicer. I mean, and that sounds like it's such a girly thing to say, but people make a lot of really important choices based on

what they look like. And that's fine and that probably has like beneficial effects on our brains and our guts as well. But considering this organ is so energy hungry and it's so important in terms of everything else that happens in your body,

I feel like we need to flip that narrative so that it's starting with, okay, what things can I do today that are going to be the best for my brain? I wonder if we can start with the nutrition thing then. And I guess, what should me and I guess listeners and viewers be thinking about when it comes to nutrition? Or is it all just the stuff that everyone kind of knows but doesn't implement? Or do you feel like there's actually a knowledge gap and an understanding gap? Or if it's just actually...

implementing the things that we all know we probably should do. I like to think there's a bit of both. So I think there's a lot of things that are in the public domain that people are aware of that we all know we should be doing, but we're not necessarily always doing. But there are definitely fun neuroscience facts that I can throw in that I would guess maybe even you haven't heard of. So should we try? Yeah, perfect. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

So, I would say like level one is that you eat three healthy meals a day and maybe you snack in between if you need to. And when I say healthy, mostly plant-based, you know, maybe some fish and eggs, minimal amounts of other types of meat, foods that contain high amounts of water and good fats. So, a bit of dairy. Okay.

Fatty fish, nuts and seeds, berries. I mean, I'm already going above level one, I would say, with some of those. But three healthy meals a day, that kind of food. Question on that front. Yeah. Intermittent fasting? Yeah, yeah. So level two. Oh, that's level two. Okay, fine. If you're not eating healthily generally, if you're not sleeping around...

seven to eight hours 15 a night drinking enough water making sure you're not sedentary don't bother with intermittent fasting you need to have those foundations correct if you're doing all that good stuff and maybe even meditating then you can take it to the next level which is um the first level would be time restricted eating so for example i only eat between 12 noon and 8 p.m

So I'm essentially doing a 16-hour fast overnight, which has all sorts of benefits on longevity and cancer risk reduction. And once you get used to it, it's also good for your mental performance.

And then the third level, which I'm considering doing again for the rest of this year, but I haven't quite got there yet, is what I think is proper intermittent fasting, which is that for two days of the week, you reduce your calorie intake to, for women, 500 calories and for men, 600 calories a day. And the other days of the week you eat normally. But in all three of those stages, you still have to be eating the kinds of foods that I mentioned. And so this is

Tell me whether you knew this or not, but in terms of brain optimization, eating dark-skinned foods is much better than just eating general, you know, the leafy greens or the salads. Dark-skinned? What do you mean dark-skinned? Blueberries rather than strawberries or raspberries. Okay. Purple sprouting broccoli rather than green broccoli. Black beans and black chickpeas rather than cannellini beans or normal chickpeas.

Why is that a thing? I had no idea. So the skin and things like eggplant as well. I think in the skin of darker foods, and actually you'll like this because it does include good quality coffee and dark chocolate that's over 80% cocoa. There are substances called anthocyanins that are really powerful antioxidants and they contribute to something called neurogenesis. So there's three ways of

growing your brain, if you like. And I use that as a metaphor. And the hardest one in adults is for embryonic nerve cells to actually grow into neurons and connect up with other neurons in your brain. And so aerobic exercise and foods that contain high levels of anthocyanins can contribute to neurogenesis. Oh, so going for a run is good.

Going for a run is good. If you're feeling guilty because you haven't been going for a run, then when you do regular aerobic exercise, the cell turnover is sort of 13, 14% of neurogenesis. If you haven't been doing exercise for some time and you start again, it can actually be up to 30%. So to me, that's the perfect excuse for every time I fall off my schedule of exercise and I start again, that I'm really boosting my neurogenesis. But

I'm never sedentary, but I'm not always doing full-on aerobic, more high-intensity exercise. Okay. Yeah. So one mechanism is neurogenesis, the one that makes our brain grow. What are the other two? So neurogenesis is the embryonic cells growing into new neurons.

The next one is synaptic connection, which is already existing neurons connecting up with each other to make stronger pathways. And the third one, which you'll be well aware of, is myelination, which is a fatty substance that coats some pathways in the brain and body. And that leads to faster conduction of electrical signals along those pathways. And there are reasons that we have some pathways that are myelinated and some that aren't. Like, for example, if you put your hand in a fire...

Your reflex to snatch your hand out of the fire is a fast myelinated pathway, but your pain pathways are non-myelinated because if you were incapacitated by the pain of burning your hand, you wouldn't be able to move or escape from the threat kind of thing. But in terms of what we're talking about, which is brain performance, basically repetition

can lead to more myelination, which means that that pathway becomes a faster conducting pathway for you. So something like resisting the urge to eat.

junk food. Like those crisps, some crisps over there. And last night I made the bad choice to eat the crisps and Gordon kind of looked at me and like sighed because I was like, whoa, there's 200 calories in these. And today I didn't. I decided to eat the chips as they were. Well, that could be to do with time of day because your willpower also reduces during the day. Yeah, maybe. But I mean, for me, it's mostly about stimulus control, which is that I don't keep those things. Yeah. It's a lot easier to resist.

resist the chocolate cake if it's not there. Okay. So we've got neurogenesis from embryonic cells. We've got the synaptic connections and we've got myelination. Such a pleasure talking to you because most people are like, what were those things again? How do we tangibly impact those things? So we talked about repetition equals more myelination. And I guess this is where sort of repetition when it comes to learning stuff as well, like spaced repetition over time equals more myelination, presumably. What other things can we do to...

grow the brain? So I think in real life, we don't necessarily need to know which underlying physiological mechanism we're affecting, but we need to know, we need to see the real life result if I'm trying to learn something or do something differently and it's working or it's not working. I think the easiest way to just think about those three is that

The myelination is like something that you're already good at, that it would be really easy for it to become your superpower, basically. So for instance, and this sounds, and I don't mean this in a boastful way, but I've got a friend who's a professor of neuroscience who plays in a band and I really admire him for being so good at an instrument, but it really irks him that I can just learn a new language so easily. So that's like one of my superpowers. And

So I have learned five languages in my lifetime. I'm not fluent in all of them at the moment. But if someone said to me, you know, do you want to learn a new language? I'd say, yeah, because I'll probably be quite good at that. But there are lots of other things that would be much harder for me to become good at. So

For me, that would be like my A grade subject. Okay. And I take that unwillingly because I probably find it not too difficult and I'd probably be quite good at it. So think about what that might be for you. And then synaptic connection is more like your B plus, which is something that you're not bad at at all, but you don't love and it doesn't come really easy and naturally. But if you worked really hard, you could make that into an A grade.

And then neurogenesis in adulthood, although there are embryonic cells around the hippocampus, which is where we lay down memories and learning, it's way less than in children. So that would be like, well, I did this. That would be like me taking up golf. I was really bad at it. It took me ages to improve. I would have had to give up my day job to become, you know, any level of decent at it. So...

It's not wise really in adulthood to take on a learning that's so difficult that it's going to detract from your day-to-day brain performance. And in that middle category, for me, I'd probably put something like

Learned the tango quite well, not amazingly. Improved at tennis. Taught myself keyboard, you know, but I'm never going to be like performing or anything. So that's the easiest way to think about those in your mind, like which of those mechanism might I be working on? Because it's really to do with the level of performance.

how difficult it would be for you. Just a quick note from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And very excitingly, this episode is brought to you by Heights. Heights is a brain care smart supplement that I've actually been taking for the last 12 months, ever since I became friends with Dan Moriserta, who was the founder of Heights and who we had on the podcast in season one. And this season of the podcast, we're also featuring Dr. Tara Swart, who is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist. So what is Heights? Well, it's a brain care smart supplement.

Basically, it is a supplement. You take two of them every morning like I do. It's like these two little capsules which have omega-3 oil in them and they've got a bunch of multivitamins as well. They have all of the details on the website. Every single ingredient that they've got is super high quality. And the great thing is that just by taking two of these capsules every morning like I do, you get all of the essential micronutrients that you need without having to deal with drinking sludge or anything fancy like that.

So the great thing about heights is that even if you don't have one of these absolutely perfect diets, at least you know you have your basis covered in terms of the micronutrients that you need. It's very easy to sign up. You just go to yourheights.com and then you sign up to the thing and it's a mail order. They get to you every month or in three month packets. And if you use the coupon code Ali15, that's A-L-I-1-5 at checkout, then you'll get 15% off your first three months of subscription.

I've been subscribed to this for the last 12 months. I also happen to be an investor in the company because I believe in the product and I love how they're fully evidence-based in absolutely everything they do. And if you're interested in the evidence base behind all like 20 different ingredients that they've got here, you can check them out on the website and that'll be linked in the video description and in the show notes. So thank you so much to Heights for sponsoring this episode.

So let's say someone's listening to this and they're thinking, all right, cool. I know, like I've read Alexis Berkey. He's telling me I've got to sell a thing. I don't know what to sell. I don't know if I have any skills. I don't know what I could possibly offer to the world. How do we break that down? Yeah, this is actually a topic that I cover more in the Leeds book that's coming out soon. Soon, relative terms, six months-ish. Okay.

everybody knows something. All right. And so the idea is what do you have? Like everyone has unique depth of knowledge in certain areas because you've been alive and your eyes and ears have taken inputs period. Right. And so I like to think of, of people starting, like, so if you look at every familiar with Y Combinator,

Yeah. I see. Yeah. So Y Combinator is one of the most successful, I don't know if they're technically VC, they're seed capital startup investors in Silicon Valley. And they have a very standard deal structure and they have criteria for what they look for in companies. And one of the most important criteria that they look for is past experience.

And so they're okay with somebody who's super young, et cetera, but they want to, they want you to have experience in the industry because there's just so much ignorance debt that you have to pay down. If you literally know nothing about an industry, like there's just so much, like if your dad was a mechanic, you know, so much about cars just by osmosis of being around a mechanic for 18 years. And so I like to think past jobs you've held, you will know stuff about that industry. Um,

the jobs of your parents are things that you will know about that industry. And then you've got personal interests. And so I think that if I had to put those into three buckets, it's like parent stuff, past jobs of self, and current interests. And so it's like, of those three things, which of those three buckets do you think you could help someone do a thing better? And so the idea is you want to sell the most valuable thing.

Right? And so the most valuable thing is what is the problem that I can help somebody else solve that I could charge the most money for? Or in reverse, that could make them the most money. And then I will be able to charge a percentage of the money that I'm able to make somebody else in this thing. Now, that's in a B2B setting. In a B2C setting, it would be how valuable do people perceive the problem that they have as, right? Whether it's like I can teach music,

Tons of people want to be able to learn how to-- and if you're better because you've had a side interest in that, awesome. Maybe you have a side interest because you're really good at editing the songs. Well, there's tons of musicians who would love-- who hate that part and would love to have it. So it's like we all know how to do stuff, and all we have to do is package the thing that we're doing. And I think the big problem is that people expect that they're going to have a perfect business. But if you look at the track record of all-- I can't think of an entrepreneur besides Jeff Bezos, who's a freak of nature,

whose first business becomes the most valuable business in the world, is most people have a graveyard of failures behind them. And so the idea is you start not with the intent of saying, this is going to be the one thing I'm going to do for the rest of my life, which is the fallacy that employees have.

that whatever they pick is going to be the thing they're going to do for the rest of their lives. When in reality, it's, I just have to do a thing that I'm good enough at that I can learn the game. And the thing is, once you start taking steps, the next step becomes illuminated. You trying to think a hundred steps into the future when you have no context is irrelevant because chaos is going to break your plan anyways. And so do what you know, experiment,

Exchange, I like service businesses to start because they are, in my opinion, the lowest risk to start because it's just your time, right? So service businesses meaning? Do stuff for money.

Like mowing the lawn or cleaning windows or like- 100%, service. Clean houses, like whatever. Like all of those are just service businesses, right? And they're fine. And a lot of people think they need to have some novel idea to start a business when, I mean, the best, in my opinion, if you're getting into it, the best way to start a business is just look at what everyone else is doing and just try and do it better.

Like, I mean, and there's obvious holes. Like if you've, if you've gone to, if you've gotten your dry cleaning, it's like, can I do this in half the time? As this guy, if I do the lawn care, what are the things people hate about lawn care? Ah, they leave the, the trimmings around the edges. They're all shitty. The person doesn't speak English that well. Like, well, cool. Then I've got advantages, right? So it's like, what are the things that I already know how to do or I have past experience in?

What things, because I have past experience, I know that other people struggle with, that sucks about this thing. And then I will solve that specific problem. And it could also be a problem that other people solve too. You just try and do a little bit better. It's just not rocket science. You know what I mean? And then you start selling your time for money. So yes, you're still trading time for dollars. You don't need to read Rich Dad Poor Dad just yet. You're still trading time for dollars. But the point is that you're trading that time for money in order to learn not to earn.

You need to earn in order to pay your rent, eat, etc. But the major thing you're doing is you're paying down ignorance debt. So the vast majority of your income is coming in the form of education rather than earning. Yeah, there's a few things there that I think are really interesting. The first is that I think if we think of sort of how an employee thinks versus how an entrepreneur thinks or a business owner thinks,

An employee sort of mindset is often sort of the activity that I'm doing, whereas the entrepreneur is more like the specific problem that I'm solving.

And I found that when people in our team have started doing freelance work and now they have more of an idea of what a creative business looks like and they can solve a specific problem, they're just like, oh my God, it's so easy to make money. Whereas before they were thinking of their service as like, oh, I offer writing as a service or something like that. But as soon as you connect it to a problem that preferably a business has because businesses can pay for it, suddenly the eyes light up and you realize, hang on, what does money even mean if it's seemingly so easy to make it? Yeah.

I like what you're saying about service-based businesses because it's not that sexy. Like when you hear people on podcasts, you don't tend to hear of someone who built a service-based business and it went really big. You tend to hear the stories of like the tech entrepreneurs that built an innovative product and stuff. They don't see the hundred failed startups. Like the failure rate on tech startups is insane.

just as high as everything else, except it usually takes capital and it doesn't take capital to start a service business. So with you, like my understanding is that you quit your corporate job and started the gym business. And I wonder if we can kind of explore the story there a little bit more. I can actually even rewind. There was a half step in between there. So

So this is also covered in the leads book, but I'll give a sneak peek. So what I did is I actually, because I'd been interested in fitness, right? That was my interest. So like I had past experience. I was obsessed with fitness. At that point, I was 23.

I've been training for eight years. I had several state records. So like I was a pretty, you know, I was pretty into it. Right. And it was to the point where people were asking me for stuff, you know, workout programs and things like that, just because they knew my interest. Right. And so as a, as a quick, you know, pro tip for everybody, if you've got stuff that people ask you to do for them, because you're good at it, maybe you're good at tech. It's like, can you help me set up my like wifi and stuff, you know, blah, blah, blah. It's like,

That means you're solving problems. You can chart, like what people ask you to do as a favor is an indication of the things that you can charge for later. Right? So,

I had all these people who were asking me, not all these, I mean, a handful of people who had asked me for programs and stuff. And so what I did was during my last year of consulting, I started something called the Free Training Project. And so the Free Training Project was I would charge $500 to $1,000, but I wouldn't charge it. They had to donate that to the charity of their choice in exchange to work with me.

Right. And so that way I wanted people to value it, but they weren't paying me directly. So they'd get a write off. They felt good. I had a ton of goodwill also in the marketplace too. Cause I was like, I'm doing all this stuff for charity. I got, I got all these people reaching out to me like, this is so cool, blah, blah, blah. Right.

And so after a year of doing that, I had probably, I don't know, 12 really good test of like great before and after pictures that I had collected from my clients. And I told them that was part of the deal. I was like, you have to donate it. I would like to do this for real later, but you have to let me use your testimony. And they were like, that's fine. So once I had that, I had those first 10, 12 customers who had great before and after pictures donated.

I transitioned many of those customers that, hey, I'm going to do this full time now. Are you comfortable paying the same amount you're paying to charity except just making it charity of Alex because Alex can't either. And that was actually how I transitioned from not-for-profit or donating everything. And I'd even set up the entity. I just told them to literally donate it and send me the screenshot. I didn't even do anything like that. And so I didn't have a website.

All I had was an LLC and a PayPal account. So like for everybody's like, I don't know how to start a business. I was like, you literally just need a bank account and a way to process money. That is it. Like two things. And you can Google how to figure out if you can't figure it out from Google, entrepreneurship might not be for you. All right. But you look like, think about there's 30 million businesses in the United States, 30 million other people have figured this out.

which means you can too so bank account payment processing make the first 10 free or some sort of charitable thing so that people like don't feel weird or you don't feel weird about selling etc after you have it after you're providing this service to people you can transition people from free service to paid service and if they don't want to start paying you then that gives you insight as to either you suck right or they suck which is also possible too but either way

A certain percentage of those people will continue to stay and pay you. And now you have income. Now, you can also ask those people for referrals, which is exactly what I did. So I think half that business came in just for... The initial ones came in from friends and family and me posting. And so I'll close the loop on what I said earlier. A year later, after I had those testimonials, I made a public post being like, hey...

I've got this thing now. I made a website, which is, that was my big announcement. I made a website. I still have the post. I found it. It's 2013. I was like, I made a website and I am now open for business. And so if you would like training stuff, let me know. This is what I'm doing now. And I had some testimonials and go check out the site, whatever. And so from there, I was able to get, I think about 20 guys

uh, who were willing to let me do just like almost bodybuilding type stuff. Cause I was kind of like what I was part of your body, but back then. And so, um, I think I want to say I got 20 guys at 200 bucks a month. And so I was making $4,000 a month.

from those people. And it took me four hours every Saturday to do the fulfillment. - Just a quick little break before we get right back to the episode. And that's to let you know that this episode is very kindly brought to you by Shortform. Shortform is the world's best service for reading summaries of books, but it's more than just book summaries. What Shortform does is it basically creates a sort of study guide for tons and tons of different nonfiction books.

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dodgy or that has been debunked or kind of disagreed with with another author, then the short form team will write a note saying that, hey, you know, this person said this thing about this topic, but actually that has been debunked by this other person and they'll bring in another source. And so it's not just a way of getting summaries of books. It's also a way of expanding your understanding of the genre as a whole. For example, one summary I enjoyed recently on short form is the summary of The Elephant in the Brain. Now, this is a book that I read like three years ago and made a book summary of it for my YouTube channel, but it's been a while since I read the book.

And so I found myself wanting to revisit the key ideas. I often just open up Shortform when I'm on the toilet and just look at the app and see, hey, what's a book summary that I want to read? And I find it super helpful to kind of rejog my mind and to rethink about kind of my own motivations for doing things, which is kind of what the elephant in the brain is about. But I found it super helpful to look at the Shortform summary to revisit some of the ideas in the book. And this kind of tends to be how I use Shortform. Either I use it as a way of deciding whether I want to read a book individually

if it's new to me, or I use it as a way of revisiting ideas from books I've already read. So if any of that sounds up your street and you too would like to try out the world's best service for summarizing books, then head over to shortform.com forward slash deep dive. And firstly, that will give you a completely free five-day trial where you can try it out and see if you like it. And it will also give you 20% off the annual premium subscription, which is the thing that I personally subscribe to. So thank you so much Shortform for sponsoring this episode. So I feel like we've got a good...

well, a basic kind of grounding in the importance of the circadian rhythm in regulating important aspects of, I guess, physiology and psychology. Can we talk about sleep now? So, I mean, I read Why We Sleep and I've listened to a bunch of podcast episodes about this, but I'd just love to get your take on a few of these frequently asked questions about sleep. So, I guess the first one that comes to mind is

Six hours, seven hours, eight hours, nine hours. What's going on there? I think the key thing for me is that one shoe size doesn't fit all. And one of the sort of slight frustrations that's emerged is that an average value is taken as the optimum value for all of us. And of course it isn't.

across adults for example healthy sleep can range from six hours maybe slightly less than that out to 10 or 11 hours and so yes there is an average but actually there's so much individual variation it's really I think wrong to impose a specific amount for each of us and the point of the book to

to some extent, is to allow people to define what's optimal for them. How do we do that? How do you do that? So how do you know if you're not getting enough sleep? Well, it's the kind of things our grandparents probably would have told us if asked that question, which is that do you need a partner or an alarm clock to wake you up in the morning? Does it take you a long time to wake up? Do you crave caffeinated and sugar-rich drinks during the day to keep you awake?

Have your friends, family, colleagues reported that you're showing a lack of empathy, increased frustration? They may have noticed that you do stupid and unreflective things. And when given the opportunity to sleep, let's say at the weekend and very notably on holiday, do you find your sleep patterns change?

And it's really defining what each of us needs and then trying to adopt behaviors that defend that sleep pattern. And, you know, we know, for example, that the duration of sleep varies enormously between individuals. But not only that, their timing, going back to the molecular clock, there are subtle changes which can make you a morning person or an evening person, but also going back to light.

That can contribute to what's called your chronotype, your morningness and eveningness. So morning light advances the clock, makes you get up earlier. Evening light delays the clock, makes you get up later and go to bed later. So evening light is in... Dusk light. So dusk delays, morning advances the clock. So you're constantly being nudged backwards and forwards. And of course, one of the problems of...

is that we don't get asymmetrical exposure to light, which can be a problem. Asymmetricalism. As in you're not getting an equal amount of advancing and delaying dawn-dusk exposure. So we looked at a bunch of university students around the world, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Holland, and in the U.K.,

And we showed that those were the latest chronotype. Those that like to get up late and go to bed late were not getting morning light, which would have advanced the clock, made them get up earlier. They were missing that. They were sleeping through the morning.

but they were getting evening light, which would delay the clock. Which causes them to sleep even later. Yeah. So our sleep timing is dependent upon our genetics and when we see light. But also there's another factor, which is how old we are. So from about the age of 10, there's a tendency to want to go to bed later and later and later. Peaks in lateness...

In males, about 21, 21 and a half. In females, about 19. So men tend to be later for longer. And then as we age, we sort of move to a more morning chronotype. The time we're in our late 50s, early 60s, we're getting up and going to bed. At about the time we got up and went to bed when we were 10. And that actually changed...

almost perfectly correlates with the changing levels of estrogen and testosterone. So that sharp rise during puberty and then the sort of decline into old age. So the point I'm making is that not only is there lots of differences between individuals in terms of their preference for how long they want to sleep and when they want to sleep, but it changes as we age. Therefore, it's completely daft to try and define the optimum sleep

you know, the optimum sleep duration. You must get eight hours. And I think it was kicking back against that, which was one of the reasons for writing the book. I mean, people have actually come up to me after a public talk, and this was before lockdown, and one person said to me, I don't get eight hours of sleep. Am I going to die? And I said, well, I can assure you you're going to die, but it may have nothing to do with your sleep. And so people have become...

about their sleep. Rather than embracing the sleep that they get, they become anxious about it. And it's reinforced by sleep apps. It's worth bearing in mind that at the moment, no sleep apps are endorsed by any of the sleep federations or FDA approved.

And of course, you know, when you look at the validation of many of these apps, you'll go into the paper and you'll see it works perfectly for eight undergraduates, you know, in California. And that's about it. But of course, the point I've just made is that sleep changes as we age and between individuals. And so one algorithm is also not appropriate for telling us what good sleep is.

People have come to me and said, oh, do you believe in slow-wave sleep? And I've sort of said, yes, kind of. Why? And they said, well, I don't think I'm getting any because my app is telling me I don't get any slow-wave sleep. And, of course, these apps are profoundly powerful.

They just can't detect that. They don't have the sensitivity to do that. And so people can get very badly misled. So there's the sort of the mantras that are a bit frustrating. You must do this. You must do that. But it's reinforced by sleep apps saying, oh, you had a good night's sleep or a bad night's sleep. And again, we should be listening to our own biology using very straightforward sort of criteria that we've just touched upon. Nice. Okay.

I have another potential myth that maybe you can debunk, which I've heard a lot, which is that you might think you can get by with six hours of sleep, but when you're 65, you're more likely to get dementia and Alzheimer's and stuff. So make sure you get your eight hours, Sonic Jim. It's a good point. I mean, I would not want to marginalize the importance of sleep. Absolutely. But I do think that we need to take responsibility for it. Now, if you are in your middle years and you are, you know,

doing crazy sorts of things in terms of business and all the rest of it and are chronically sleep deprived, then there is evidence that chronic sleep deprivation in the middle years will predispose your risk, increase your risk to Alzheimer's and dementia. So I think that's a serious issue.

But again, it's horses for courses. And I think most people know if they're not getting the sleep that they need. Yeah.

How important is it to wake up at the same time every day? I think it is important because it reinforces all of the sort of signals that regulate the circadian system. So eating at the same time, getting light exposure at the same time, that all acts to stabilize. However, having said that, you know, there's going to be an occasion where you have a party. You're going to get up late, you know, and sleep is very dynamic.

I really can't emphasize. One size does not fit all. And because it's such a dynamic and variable behavior, it can be tweaked and it's flexible. Yeah. The other really interesting myth that so many, again, people sort of perpetuate the myth, it's not only eight hours, but it's eight hours of uninterrupted sleep.

And, of course, what we know from Roger Eckert's work, from his historical studies looking at sleep patterns in the pre-industrial era, is that human sleep almost certainly wasn't a single eight-hour block. So you hear in the literature, I had a wonderful first sleep.

And, you know, I didn't have such a great second sleep. And there's a, Roger talks about a wonderful French doctor who says young couples should make love after their first sleep when they are less tired and will be better at it. I mean, you know, so you've got to.

This literature which sits out there. And that then encouraged people like Tom Weir to say, okay, well, let's find out what happens to modern humans if we bring them into the lab, give them 12 hours of light, 12 hours of darkness. And lo and behold, you get what's called biphasic, a couple of episodes of sleep separated by wake, or indeed polyphasic, which is multiple sleeps with interruptions throughout the night. Right.

If you look at all mammals, again, that wonderful comparative perspective, all mammals show, they don't show a consolidated bunch of sleep. It's polyphasic or biphasic. And indeed, societies today without electric light show multiple wakings and sleepings. So that...

A bit of information is not out there. And so when people wake up in the middle of the night, think, oh my God, that's it. I'm never going to get back to sleep. I might as well start drinking coffee and doing my emails, which is nonsense. If they stay calm, you don't necessarily have to stay in bed. You can keep the lights low, do something relaxing. You will feel tired again and then go back to sleep. I read somewhere that you worked into mindfulness and meditation. What was your journey with those things? So...

My mom used to do it and she used to try to get me to meditate when I had Tourette's and that didn't work. So many years later, this was actually during lockdown. So I had this crazy experience where I didn't see people very much. And then when I did, for some reason, I was getting so socially anxious. And it could be something like sitting in the car with a really good friend, like my best friend. I could be in the car with him.

And I could basically have a panic attack. And it really came out of nowhere. And I'm not sure if it's related to just stress at the time or... I still don't know why it happened, but I sought out therapy. And we worked through it. But one of the things the guy recommended was to meditate. And so I downloaded the Calm app. And I learned about...

experiencing feelings in my body and thoughts and kind of noticing them for what they are and not taking them as seriously as I used to. But yeah, that said, it was still, it doesn't just fix it. It's not one of those things. I think some people think like if I meditate 10 times this week, everything's going to be good. You still have, there's still other factors at play. But over time, it's definitely kind of helped alongside just doing things again and doing things that I'm uncomfortable with.

I'm comfortable with? So yeah, like for example, podcasts. Yeah. You know, I'm not asked on that many podcasts, but I've been asked on probably 10 podcasts this year. And I've said no to every single one. And because I was like, what if I have a panic attack while I'm doing a podcast? Which is, you'd probably look at me now and you're like, you probably don't seem like that. But yeah, so I was avoiding it. And then I was like, I got the DM from you.

and I'm already getting a lot better. Like the last kind of year and a half, I've just been trying to do things that make me scared. And I was like, okay, this is a great opportunity. He seems like a really nice guy. This is not going to be intimidating. And now I'm going to do it. And even before this, I'm obviously, I was pretty nervous. But now I've done it, I'm going to probably do more. And so that's also my advice is one is meditating.

But two, if something really scares you, obviously don't jump right into the deep end, but try and do it because it's way worse in your head. Especially things like sitting in the car with my friend. I mean, there's nothing dangerous about that, but something about that was giving me anxiety. You didn't have anxiety before this?

Not so much. No, no. But I think it is related to Tourette's. I mean, Tourette's, ADD, a bit of OCD, all of these things are kind of related. So yeah, you know, it's something my mom struggled with, my sister struggles with. So yeah. But I think, you know, again, it's one of those things which at the time it sucks and so on. But if you can use it

to teach yourself lessons and also appreciate when you're not feeling anxious and you're just like, "Wow, I feel normal." And then you just enjoy simple things, then it's actually a bit of a power too. What does your meditation practice look like? So it's super competitive. The opposite of what meditation should be. I basically sit down and listen to Calm. What's her name on Calm?

There's this one, Theresa, is her name Theresa or something? Everyone, people in the comments will know who I'm talking about. And she basically does a guided meditation and I do that. But sometimes even before I'm doing something that's difficult, I'll just take some time to breathe. No matter what happens, I'll feel nervous. Like I can't stop that. But I'll notice what that is and I'll be like, okay, what's the worst that can happen? You can end up in hospital.

What's the worst that can happen? You could die. Okay, that sucks. I'm just sacrificing here. Okay. That's what usually goes through my brain. So then what do you do? Then I'm just like, fuck! Then I just go and do it. No, you just go and do it. And then I just feel like you breathe. You can even get things like this, which you might think, why do I have this? And when I first met you, we shook hands and I had it in my hand. You probably don't remember. But this is like, it's just like something I can play with. It distracts me.

Things like that. You just come up with your own stories of things that work for you. Maybe going for a run, for example, in the morning could also help kind of release stress. Things like that. Makes life quite fun.

Trying to like, coming up with ways to get through things. And then the best thing is once you finally do something you're really nervous about or you struggled with in the past and you actually do it, there's no better feeling. Like after this podcast, I'm just going to go home and be like, yeah, I did it. Battle through. Exactly.

Yeah. So this is something I've been, I've been looking into a fair bit. I mean, firstly, thank you for being so open. This is great. Like, um, I'm sure there are people listening to this who are fully relating with all of the things you're saying and like, oh my God, thank God someone's talking about this. Well, I saw, I think, saw Lewis Capaldi recently talking about this and I was like, that's, that makes me feel good. Like it's not just me. So seeing him struggle makes me feel great. Yeah. Especially with a lot of the, a lot of the mental health stuff as well. Like it's,

It's so easy to think that this is just the way I am, this is normal, and that no one else has those struggles. But hearing people like you being open about it on podcasts, it's just super nice and helpful. Yeah, thank you. I've been...

doing a bunch of research for the book that i'm writing around um like uh energy and and like uh sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system um i'll pretend i know what those mean sympathetic nervous system you know when you're in sort of stress mode when you're in yeah and you literally you know this stuff well can you give me a session yeah we'll give it a go um but there's

It's sort of even people who say that they don't, who wouldn't identify with struggling with anxiety. There's some stat that like 75% of the workforce in, at least in the US, feels that sort of sympathetic activation in that sort of stress anxious mode while they're at work.

And, you know, a lot of stuff around how evolutionarily it made sense that, you know, there was a bit of a threat in the grass. And now you want to be in fight or flight mode because you might have to run away from a tiger. But, you know, having a conversation with your boss at work or being in the car with your friend, like where the brain tricks us into being in reactive fight or flight mode.

and weirdly there's like so much science around just like deep breathing like yeah you know short-circuit sympathetic mode activates parasympathetics which is like rest and recharge mode and retraining again i'm not going to know the words that you know like retraining those those things in your brain that kind of every time at that point when i didn't want to get in a car i was like every time i got to a car it just happened and you just got to

slowly learn how to deal with it and eventually you can retrain your mind not to have that feeling. So that's why people who get to where they get to, it's from practice. Not everyone starts off super confident and able to do everything. It takes time. That's why I love hearing people like Lewis Capaldi or whoever it is saying how difficult it was. How have your attitudes towards money changed from

Kind of age 14 thinking a Mercedes Benz cost 500 quid and making, you know, a few quid an hour to now having a life changing exit. Like what was the, that journey? So I think at the beginning, I think there's also the case with quite a lot of people. I think at the beginning I had quite a scarcity mindset towards money. Um, I very much was like, Oh, I've got this. I have to make sure that, you know, it doesn't go.

And I think over time, because I've proved to myself that I've become the type of person who can create value and make money, I now approach it with a lot more abundance, a lot more like, oh yeah, cool. That's fine. Okay. This happens. This happens. And I'm very aware that it's very, I guess, like fortunate position to be in, but like

I think that was the big change was just going from scarcity to abundance. And, you know, every time you'd hear people say like, you know, money doesn't make you happy, et cetera. It's like, like, yes, that's true. But I'm also significantly happier. Right. I'm also significantly happier than I was before.

like when I didn't have it. So, um, those would probably be the two main ones, but I think definitely going from scarcity to abundance. And actually think a mental trick I should have done when I was younger was I think I should have tried to like program my mind to think more in abundance rather than waiting for the money to come to then think in abundance.

that was a mistake. If I had treated money as more like, uh, Oh, you know, like, you know, it ebbs and it flows. It goes from here. It goes from here. I just need to become the type of person who can do it. Blah, blah, blah. Like I would not have held onto things for too long. And I also would not have made certain decisions, which were based out of like, I don't want to lose. Um,

rather than now i'm just like oh cool whatever so let's say someone's listening to this and they currently have a scarcity mindset towards money and they're thinking oh tim easy for you to say you've got i know um that was me yeah uh what would be the instructions that the the code for the firmware update to get that mental model of money the one that's more abundant rather than scarce assuming you don't have several zeros after your bank account balance

Money comes as a result of the person that you are. And the person that you are is by and large the consequence of like the skills and the habits that you have. So rather than optimizing for the money, like focus on like skill acquisition, right? For example, with me, I really...

In our first two years, really in our first, yeah, three, four years, all the brands that came to us were due to inbound. Like they'd come to us rather than us going directly to them. And it's because we became very good at like building marketing funnels and all that stuff that brought in brands. And I learned those funnels from like, again, Russell Brunson and all these guys. So I'd build all these funnels that will become the like foundation of the business and that will bring people in.

So I thought more about like the skills I was cultivating. And as a consequence of those skills, I was then able to create something of value. And then those things of value then made me money. So to that, you know, young person thinking that, I'd say, yes, A, yes.

I know it's incredibly challenging to think like that when you don't have money, but it's very important to focus on like the skills and actually cultivating skills, which can then lead to money, which is things like, you know, marketing and sales and, uh,

copywriting, things like that. Like you want to focus on just like being of use to the economy, because if you're of like general use in some way, people pay you for that. And like, that's the way that you create value. It's almost like leveling up in a video game. Like if you want, if you want to get the gear to take down that end game boss, you need to level up. You need to do all this stuff to level up, train up to these different trade skills. That

That's why I was talking about cheat codes. Actually with the book, with the book, one of the titles, one of the suggested titles was basically around cheat codes. It was like, it was something like, it was basically like,

how to discover the cheat codes to winning in business and life or something. Dan actually told me not to go with that title because he said that you don't want to be linked with a word cheating. So I was like, okay, cool. But, but, but I do see it as a game of just, you know, figuring out the inputs. Okay. That worked. That didn't work. Done. Yeah. Yeah. This is something I was talking about with Alex as well in the podcast. This idea that,

I know so many people who come to me and they're like, "Hey, Ali, you know about this investing stuff. I'm currently making, I don't know, 50K in my job and I'm saving 10% and I want to put it in the index funds or individual stocks."

I mean, the right answer is index funds, but actually that's the wrong answer because what you're going to earn three, four, 6%. And when you're 55, then you'll be good. Like instead, if you can find a way to invest those things in your own education so that you become the sort of person who then can command a premium and can just make money as an individual, that's way more ROI positive. Yeah.

And the way Homozy describes it is that it's investing in the S&P versus the S&ME. Oh, that's good. There you go. Yeah. I mean, you know, like people talk about compounding interest, but you almost want to, you know, compound yourself. Yeah. Like that's way better. If you, if you, the returns on compounding yourself are way more than any stock, right? Yeah. Than you could ever, right?

more than any crypto. Yeah. And I guess almost there's like a tier list of this almost where it's like

Most, like the top returns are in compounding yourself. The second top returns are in investing in your own business. And then worst case scenario, S&P 500. Okay. Once you have literally no other options and the money's just sitting there burning a hole in your account. Okay, fine. Let's try and go for 7% to beat inflation. But like there are so many options beyond that point. But I think people default to, oh, I should invest because-

especially I think in traditional fields, like I know so many doctors who feel like they don't have any skills outside of medicine. Like how do you make money? Investing is just the only option. Yeah. Rather than I actually could start a business. Yeah. I could learn how to do that. Yeah. You want to almost like see yourself. One of the things that I say to friends is that you want to see yourself as like a Sims character. Oh,

Oh, okay. Tell me more. That you're almost just like there and you're playing Sims and like you're the character and then it's like, okay, go left. All right, cool. It's like, go to gym. I go to the gym. I do this. All right. Do not eat now. Okay. I shall not eat now. Right? Like type on laptop. Right. Cool. So,

When you have a Sims character and you just like tell it to do stuff, it just, it just like goes and does stuff. And I've often tried to see my life as a bit of a Sims character. Like I am now in good shape and beforehand I was not in good shape. And I was like, okay, what are the two things that I need to do to be in good shape? Well, eat less, move more, done. Right. So,

I eat less. So sometimes I'll be hungry and I'm like, well, I'm not going to eat now. Okay. I don't eat. Right. Um, I'm not gonna, you know, move more gym. Cool. I now go to the gym. So I think I treat myself almost like a Sims character because I'm just like, well, if a Sims character can do it, then why can't you, you know, um, that's kind of the mentality that I have towards just life in general. Love it. There are certain components to deep and lasting attraction.

You have chemistry, perceived value, perceived challenge, and connection. The reason I like this model is because when you look at this, you can usually see, you can sort of self-diagnose where something may be going wrong.

Chemistry is interesting because there's a certain intangible there and an unknown there and we certainly can't control all of it.

But we can control some of it. The way that we look, how well we take care of ourselves, the way we move, importantly, is a big factor in chemistry, which is why you can sometimes see someone in photos and think they're really attractive. And then you meet them in real life and you kind of go, oh, weird. I don't feel the same way. It's also why you can get back from a date and say, oh my God, I just had this amazing date with this incredibly hot person. And if you show pictures of that person to your friends, they're like,

Okay. I guess. Because you were there. You were there. You saw how they move, how they smile, how they gesture, their micro-expressions. There's certainly things we can do to affect chemistry. Obviously, you can create tension too, which is a big factor in chemistry. Then there's perceived value. Perceived value is all these things that we are and do that bring value to the table.

It might be our personality. It might be the things that we're good at in life. It might be our life, the life that we've built. It can sometimes be our friends and family. Sometimes you meet someone's friends and family and you go, whoa, what a life this is to come into. They have an amazing group of people around them, so much love, so much. So there's a lot of ways for perceived value to manifest itself. Then there's perceived challenge.

And the interesting thing about perceived value is it goes down regardless of how many things are in that category if there's no perceived challenge. And perceived challenge is not the kind of, I don't know, a typical way of thinking about it, I guess would be like hard to get. It's not, that's a cheap way to create challenge because the problem with hard to get is you can't keep it up forever. The moment you are got...

If someone's, if your attraction was built around the getting, then you can't sustain it. But if the real beautiful, sustainable way to create challenge is for there to be, for your value to have a price. Okay. What do you mean? That your value doesn't come for free. Your value is something that has to be earned by someone showing up in the way you're prepared to show up.

by someone being prepared to make the kind of sacrifices you're prepared to make for someone, by someone giving to you on a level that you're willing to give, respecting you on a level that you respect them, and also not giving someone too much credit too quickly. That's a big problem. When we come from a needy place, when we come from a place of insecurity, we start giving people credit they don't deserve yet.

I just had the most amazing date with the most amazing person. Oh my God, they're incredible." Based on what? Based on what basis, what information could you have possibly got on one date that enables you to say this? You have been seduced by a kind of charm, charisma maybe,

The fact that you did something really fun on the date, the fact that they made you laugh a lot, the fact that they told stories about their past that made them relatable or sympathetic or seem really authentic, all of that is great. I'm not saying be inherently suspicious. I'm saying you don't know. You don't know. So on what basis are you giving them all of this value already based on projection?

And based on insecurity, there's immediate putting them on a pedestal and putting yourself down here. And when someone smells that, they don't see an equal anymore. And that's what I mean when I say challenge. I don't mean artificially constructing games or hoops for people to jump through. I mean that the criteria you have for someone has to be real. It has to be real. Like it's...

You and I met today for the first time, really enjoying our conversation. Hope you are too. But we don't know each other yet as friends. You don't know if I'd be reliable if you needed something. You don't know if I would show up to support you if something went wrong in your life. You don't know any of that. So it would be dangerous to go away and make a

an assessment on how great of a friend I would be based on this exchange. What you would hope in an organic situation is that you and I go, this was really, really fun. We got on really well. This was a great conversation. I would like to get to know this guy better. That would be really cool if we could hang out outside of the podcast.

But it's not, I have to be friends with Ali, you know, like I have to because he's an amazing guy. You know, like now that's dangerous because I'm basing that on the fact that you're clearly outwardly a very impressive human and what you've achieved, what you've done is very impressive. And you seem to have had a really amazing kind of impact on...

on a lot of people. Those are all amazing things. Those are amazing things in their own right. It's not about devaluing those, but I have no idea what your value would be as a friend until we try being friends. The mistake people make in dating commonly is they look at someone's stats

How charming were they? How charismatic were they? How successful are they? Where are they in their life? What kind of person do they seem to be? But none of that exists in relation to you. That's all just you admiring what this person has or is.

But none of it says this person's going to be a great boyfriend or a great girlfriend. None of it says they're going to be loyal. None of it says they're going to be reliable. None of it says they're going to be a great teammate. All it says is this person seems, on these metrics, to be attractive. In terms of importance, you have to go through four stages. One is admiration.

That's just where I can see someone and admire them from either up close or afar. Wow, this person's pretty impressive and attractive. Not very important. In the stages, not important. Necessary, but not important. Then there's connection. Connection.

Or chemistry. Both. That's the next stage of, do we feel connected to each other and is there a kind of chemistry? All right. Now it's slightly more important because now it becomes mutual. Now it's not just me admiring you. It's, oh, there's something between us. Not important. Because necessary. Yeah.

but not important. How many people have ruined their lives over the fact that they had chemistry with someone, even when that person was a terrible partner, a terrible person to base their decisions on? The next stage is commitment. Okay, I admire you. We have mutual chemistry and connection, and we're both actually saying yes to each other. I deal with people every day where they have this stage, but that person isn't saying yes.

They're saying, "Yeah, I'd like to see you this Friday at 11 o'clock." But they're not saying yes to an actual relationship. So you need commitment to go to the next stage of importance. But many people are treating something like it has total importance, even though they're only at the second stage. So you need a yes, you need commitment. Now, you would say if you've got that, that's the most important thing you can have. You've got someone you admire, you've got someone you have a connection with in chemistry, and you've got someone who is committed.

It would seem like that was everything, but that kind of idea, is it Virgil, love conquers all? Love does not conquer all. Two people saying yes to each other doesn't make for a long-term relationship. You also have to have the fourth stage of importance, which is compatibility. Are you actually compatible? Because if you're not, you can say, yes, I want to be with you. Yes, I'm committed. But

That lack of compatibility will show up in ways that will make both of you miserable. Well, what do you mean by compatibility? It could be anything. It could be my idea of a good time is staying home watching movies and yours is constantly traveling around the world. It could be your idea of a good time is going out and drinking and doing drugs. And I don't want to live that life. And we've both said yes to each other, but

Our idea of what is a good life is completely different. Or our idea of loyalty is completely different. Your idea of loyalty is that I don't have sex with anyone. My idea of loyalty is that you don't emotionally cheat on me in the texts you send. We've both said yes to each other. We have admiration, connection, commitment, and yet I am miserable because of what your definition of loyalty is.

So compatibility is, do we both want to live the same kind of life and do our values line up? And do we both have the same idea? Two people can say I value kindness, but we can have very different standards for what kindness actually means. So without that stage, so many things go wrong. What I mean to say with all of this is that we lose our value in dating when we

stop paying attention to the appropriate level of importance at different stages. If you take stage two, I found someone I have a connection with. As the be-all end-all and the thing that you martyr yourself in service of, you lose all your value. You are now the person who spends a lifetime

accepting really poor treatment from someone because every time you see them, it's amazing. You don't understand when we're together, it's so good, it's so incredible. They're so there for me. The sex is amazing. The chemistry is amazing. We have such amazing conversations. What's the problem? I haven't heard from them in two weeks. But Matt, you don't understand the connection is incredible. You don't like this. This is really important to me. Why?

Why? Because you have miscalculated the value of stage two. And when you do that, you lose your value because someone realizes your value, what you're willing to give has no price. It's free. It does not need to be earned. So your perceived challenge drops. And when you're perceived, when there's no challenge to you, when someone realizes your value has no price,

then you lose respect and you end up losing real value as a result, which is crazy. I know it all sounds kind of heady, but this stuff is real. There'll be people listening to this, guaranteed. There'll be someone in the comments who says, does it all need to be so difficult? Can't you just be yourself? The answer is no.

Because you may not be doing the things that make you confident or that show your real value. You shouldn't be someone you're not. But people define being themselves as holding on to all of their values.

the things that make them make bad decisions or that make them their trauma or the things that they haven't healed or the things that make them chase after someone who will ruin their life. That's not being yourself. That's not healing. That's not doing the things that are necessary for you to attract a much more quality version of connection and love in your life. You have written and talked a lot about the concept of Ro. What is Ro? Pronounced

Ru in Swedish. It's just another word. I don't think anyone really thinks about it more than any other word. But it's a word that doesn't have direct translation to any other language that I know of, at least not English. Basically what it means, Ru, is just like calm, tranquility, peace. So if you've had like a long day, you might say in Swedish Ru.

I just want some peace and calm or I want to find a place to have some ro. And I started because a lot of like somehow my philosophy in life is goes back to ro, which essentially means that

Even at the end of the day, if I've had a long day or a stressful day, I always want to feel like I'm coming back to a place where I feel like I can rest and relax and feel calm on the inside. And I try to create those habits in my everyday life. I want my home to be that place. I want to have that feeling with my close relationships where I can feel like this person

gives me some roo, as opposed to the opposite of giving me stress or anxiety or... Yeah, so I think that's just where it started. I was like, this is a great word, and more people should know of this word or concept. And I started my newsletter, named it Monday... Monday Roo, I think. I haven't... I'm writing a lot there. But I'm basically just writing...

stories of Ru or tips on Ru and things like that. And a lot of people enjoyed it and resonated with the concept of just wanting more Ru in their lives. And that's how that was born. I could do with some more Ru in my life. How does one go about finding Ru? Good, good pronunciation. I think it means different things to different people. So like having Ru in the morning to me is just...

not feeling stressed in the morning and waking up early enough to where I can have a coffee and sit on my couch and cuddle my dog and not have to hurry anywhere or feel like I'm stressed out and that I'm well-rested. So that's just a way of finding Ru. Or I love taking long walks and not listening to anything and just enjoying the walk with no sounds. And to me, that's Ru. So I think it means different things to different people. But I think the feeling is just simply...

It's a bit meditative where it's like, it's like the feeling where you're taking a long walk in the forest or something and you don't have any distractions other than bird sounds or, you know, the sound of bushes or whatever. Something that is just very peaceful and calming. And yeah, I think it's going to be different things for different people. But you're going to know if you start paying attention to your day, like, where do I feel like I'm

at ease where do I feel like no one is bothering me there's like a calm feeling throughout my body and I'm just being and what is that to you can you identify anything like that in your life yeah yeah very much so I was just thinking as you were saying that that like your whole vibe is very like oh nice very like kind of zen kind of like calm and tranquil and

it's just sort of just like sitting here talking to you is making me just feel a bit more calm. And I'm just like, yeah, this is a nice conversation. I feel like I'm relaxed. I feel like I'm, I'm energized. And it was sort of like, uh,

Being energized through being relaxed. Yeah. Rather than being energized through being like frantic. Yeah. So it's not necessarily, to me, it's not like feeling sleepy or, you know, taking a nap. It is feeling energized, but through something very simple and calming. So journaling can be pretty much that as well, depending on what you're writing about. If you're ranting about a recent heartbreak, maybe it's not very real, but...

Can you find anything specific in your area? Yeah. So I've been thinking about this sort of concept a lot recently because with the book that I'm working on, the core thesis, I guess, is that, you know, for me, productivity has always been about trying to get energy from my work so that I can give energy to the things that I want to do outside of work. And I find that the way I get energy from my work is by approaching it in this sort of

With lightness and ease and tranquility and remembering to have fun with it and remembering that I don't need to be stressed out. And I think it's easy to, and even had this when I wasn't working for myself. So when I was working as a doctor, it's very easy to sort of approach it with a frantic energy of like, oh shit, all this shit needs to be done and stuff. And I found that on days where I would have that attitude towards it, I would just feel completely drained and it wasn't fun.

But on days where I had exactly the same to-do list, but I approached it with a sense of, hmm,

I've got a lot of things to do today. This is going to be fun. There's a quote from Grey's Anatomy where Patrick Dempsey, the neurosurgeon, he always starts his operations with, it's a beautiful day to save lives. Let's have some fun. And I sometimes think about that as being like, that is actually a way of approaching anything. It's a beautiful day to save lives. Let's have some fun, regardless of what's actually happening in the thing. And so I try and remind myself to do that with work stuff or whenever I feel

frantic or harried in any kind of way. Just taking that breath and being like, no, it's all good. And I can choose to approach this with, I guess, rue rather than, yeah. Totally. I think attitude is like, I know some people get annoyed when you talk about just have a positive attitude or a good attitude, but I really think that it does so much to how you approach things and how you see things. Like if I think to myself, okay, I have to create this video this week and I have to do this and that. And I kind of stress myself up

of all the things that I have to do and accomplish and the time that I have doing it and deadlines. I'm just going to be stressed out. I'm not going to enjoy the process as much. And it's probably not going to turn out as well either because it's going to start feeling like this thing that I just have to do rather than this thing that I want to do. If I instead try to be like, okay, I have to write the script. I'm going to grab my coffee. I'm going to sit on the couch. I'm going to put my dog in my lap and we're

Somehow we feel like if we have more of a calm approach to things, we're not as productive. You know, it's not as efficient. I can at least feel sometimes like, okay, why am I not feeling too stressed about this? Does that mean that I'm slacking? Even if I'm getting as much done and getting it done better than I would have had otherwise, there's something...

in me and maybe in you and other people where you kind of feel like being productive means that you need to feel like you're running around and you're doing this and that and you're switching between tasks and you're like, you want to feel a little bit stressed. That can sometimes make you feel like you're being more productive. Whereas if you're drinking coffee and you're just kind of having this calm vibe, you might feel like you're not being as productive, even if you are. So I'm just trying to lean into the fact that I can actually approach things being more

chill with that grace anatomy quote attitude and i can still heal the same results and enjoy the process a lot more have you come across uh derek sievers i don't think so he's like this uh you know used to be an entrepreneur sold his money sold his company for a lot of money and then decided to live the chill life of kind of doing what he wants and he's he's written a couple of really good books about like intentional living and stuff

But there's a really good story that he talks about of how, you know, I think he used to live in like Australia or something and he used to sort of cycle the length of

some cycle path and he would always try and like go as fast as possible. And he'd be like, okay, need to beat 42 minutes. Need to be 42 minutes. And 42 minutes was his number. Um, and then one day he decided, you know what? I'm just going to take a chill. Like I'm actually, I'm not going to huff and puff. I'm going to enjoy. I'm going to enjoy the cycle ride as I'm going along. And, you know, he was like, I'm not going to time myself. I'm just going to go around the cycle. You know, I might like wave at some people along the way, listen to the birds. I really enjoy myself. And he gets back home and he looks at his clock and it's 44 minutes.

And he's like, shit. Wow. For the last like six months, have I just been huffing and puffing for the sake of two minutes? Like what the fuck? Yeah. And now he, like, I think there's a wider message in that. Yeah.

huffing and puffing actually does not necessarily lead to the outcome that you think it's going to get to. All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast.

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