Howdy! Welcome to this week's digest. This week is a very special "Speed Racer" edition, as we explore speed-related topics including curing rare diseases against time, getting unstuck, productivity-focused society, and the cult of speed. Enjoy!


Source: Giphy

• BOOK - Chasing My Cure: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope into Action by Dr. David Fajgenbaum - David suffers from a rare disease that put him on the brink of death multiple times, and he responded by building and leading the infrastructure to research, treat, and cure the very thing that is trying to kill him (and many others).
   
• KILL MY CONFIRMATION BIAS -  DEPLATFORMING (Thank you, AJ, for the inspiration!) - What resources can you share to help sharpen perspective on deplatforming?
   
• BLOG POST - A Guide to Getting Unstuck by Chris Sparks - Chris' piece does a wonderful job highlighting the different opportunities for getting unstuck, along with a large variety of tactics to experiment with.
   
• ARTICLE - Aeon: If work dominated your every moment would life be worth living? by Andrew Taggart - An intriguing thought experiment that shines a bright, interrogating spotlight on the impact of prioritizing productivity throughout our lives.
   
• BLOG POST - Farnam Street: In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed by Shane Parrish - When we stop to think about it (heresy!), the first-order benefits of speed are vastly outweighed by the second- and third-order costs.

• RESEARCH
  • Harvard Business Review: Are New Graduates Happier Making More Money or Having More Time? - "...students who prioritized time were happier than those who prioritized money. Even when we accounted for how happy students were when they started our study, those who valued time were happier and more satisfied with their lives and careers one to two years after graduation. Our results provide strong evidence that valuing time puts people on a trajectory toward job satisfaction and well-being."
  • European Society of Cardiology: Junk food intake in children reduced by health education that addresses emotional issues - "In our study, a programme that combined information with playful activities and emotional support was beneficial for children and teachers."
  • Journal of Behavioral Addictions: Need a mental break? Avoid your cellphone - "Participants who took a break on their cell phone took 19% longer to do the rest of the task, and solved 22% fewer problems than did those in the other break conditions combined."
  • Pediatrics: 24-Hour Movement Behaviors and Impulsivity - "Meeting the ST (screen time) and sleep recommendations was associated with less impulsive behaviors on all dimensions of impulsivity."
  • Diabetologia: Reduced carbohydrate intake improves type 2 diabetics' ability to regulate blood sugar - "A moderate macronutrient shift by substituting carbohydrates with protein and fat for 6 weeks reduced HbA1c and hepatic fat content in weight stable individuals with type 2 diabetes."
     
• ARTICLES
  • Bloomberg: I Tried Hiding From Silicon Valley in a Pile of Privacy Gadgets
  • The Economist: Big business is beginning to accept broader social responsibilities
  • The Atlantic: Why Is Joe Rogan So Popular? (Thank you, AJ, for sharing!) - "But that’s not why people are obsessed with him. In reality, it’s because Joe Rogan is a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that. I respond to that. The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain. Total human optimization. A goal so hazy and unreachable that you never stop trying, until you realize with a kind of enviable Zen clarity that the trying is the whole point. If the world isn’t giving you much in the way of positive feedback, create your own."
  • CBC: How Europe’s heroin capital solved its overdose crisis (Thank you, Samantha, for sharing!) - "They treat us like sick people, not criminals," he said. "Criminal people are not accepted in society. Here, we are accepted."
     
• BLOG POSTS
  • The Dilbert Blog: The Day You Became A Better Writer - "The main technique is keeping things simple. Simple writing is persuasive. A good argument in five sentences will sway more people than a brilliant argument in a hundred sentences. Don’t fight it."
  • Brain Pickings: The Science of Internal Time, Social Jet Lag, and Why You’re So Tired - "We are only beginning to understand the potentially detrimental consequences of social jet lag."
     
• PODCASTS
  • The Drive #68 – Marty Makary, M.D.: The US healthcare system—why it’s broken, steps to fix it, and how to protect yourself - "There's a law in the United States called EMTALA that requires any hospital to take care of any urgent or emergent patient that walks into their door, it's not dependent on giving your credit card when you check-in... If you feel that there's a legal document that you have to sign your home and your financial life away in order to get stitches, and you are concerned about predatory billing, in that little box in the iPad, you sign "Did Not Read"... There's no legal contract. We are trying to empower people in the United States to say we need a competent and fair pricing system."

• BOOK - Chasing My Cure: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope into Action by Dr. David Fajgenbaum - David is a dear friend from Wharton, and one of the few, pristine examples of transforming catastrophe into opportunity and impact. David suffers from a rare disease that put him on the brink of death multiple times, and he responded by building and leading the infrastructure to research, treat, and cure the very thing that is trying to kill him (and many others). Read his thrilling story of redemption in Chasing My Cure!
   
• Sensible Living: Reflecting on the Fine Essentials of a Beautiful Life
   
• TSD Ventures Consulting - We give Proactive Health companies strategic and financial clarity for the best path forward.
   
• TSD Ventures Coaching - We help our clients build healthy, fulfilling habits.

• We are all fallible. Everyone feels nihilistic sometimes. Everyone lacks conviction with their life choices sometimes. Everyone falls off on their habits. The diaries of the most successful humans in history are filled with frustration and self-doubt... In order to overcome getting stuck, we must both expect and accept that it will happen from time to time. Through attention and practice, we can limit their damage and duration when slumps do occur.
   
• The key mental model for slump prevention is the Firebreak. The most reliable technology for fighting fires hasn’t changed in thousands of years — just dig a hole around the fire. When the fire reaches this “break”, there are no more trees for fuel in its path and it burns out.
   
• The first step for breaking out of a slump is recognizing that you’re in one... Warning Lights are clear, unambiguous signals that we are in, or headed towards, a slump... Be ready with a contingency plan and precommit to course correction at the first sign of danger.
   
• You can change your state of mind by changing your context… if you improve your environment your mood will follow.
   
• Do something generous and unsolicited for someone else. You can start small by telling someone you love why you appreciate them. No need to pre-plan this, just be aware of opportunities to improve or brighten someone’s day. It is crazy how well this works.
   
• It is important to be reminded of our mortality and insignificance on the cosmic scale. Our feelings can become too real and our personal history far too personal.
   
• It seems counter-intuitive, but I think very ambitious people are the most susceptible to the downward spirals that lead to extended slumps. The same driven focus and obsessiveness that leads to outsized outcomes can become ugly when turned to escapism, distraction, rumination, or self-sabotage.
   
• Everyone experiences dips in their productivity. Everyone has off days. What separates top performers is their ability to prevent and quickly recover from these dips. Every setback can be used as an opportunity to improve yourself and your systems. What matters is not the quality of your A game, but the percentage of the time you manage to play it.

• In this world, eating, excreting, resting, having sex, exercising, meditating and commuting – closely monitored and ever-optimised – would all be conducive to good health, which would, in turn, be put in the service of being more and more productive.
   
• ...work will ultimately become total, I argue, when it is the centre around which all of human life turns; when everything else is put in its service; when leisure, festivity and play come to resemble and then become work...
   
• For unlike someone devoted to the life of contemplation, a total worker takes herself to be primordially an agent standing before the world, which is construed as an endless set of tasks extending into the indeterminate future. Following this taskification of the world, she sees time as a scarce resource to be used prudently, is always concerned with what is to be done, and is often anxious both about whether this is the right thing to do now and about there always being more to do... The total worker, in brief, is a figure of ceaseless, tensed, busied activity: a figure, whose main affliction is a deep existential restlessness fixated on producing the useful.
   
• ...one feels guilt whenever he is not as productive as possible. Guilt, in this case, is an expression of a failure to keep up or keep on top of things, with tasks overflowing because of presumed neglect or relative idleness.
   
• The burden character of total work, then, is defined by ceaseless, restless, agitated activity, anxiety about the future, a sense of life being overwhelming, nagging thoughts about missed opportunities, and guilt connected to the possibility of laziness.
   
• ...[T]otal work bars access to higher levels of reality. For what is lost in the world of total work is art’s revelation of the beautiful, religion’s glimpse of eternity, love’s unalloyed joy, and philosophy’s sense of wonderment. All of these require silence, stillness, a wholehearted willingness to simply apprehend.

• Understanding comes from focusing, chewing, and relentlessly ragging on a problem. It comes with false starts, dead ends, and frustration. Thinking requires time and space. It’s slow. It means saying I don’t know. In short, thinking is everything the modern workplace is designed to eradicate.
   
• Speed has helped to remake our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating. Who wants to live without the Internet or jet travel? The problem is that our love of speed, our obsession with doing more and more in less and less time, has gone too far; it has turned into an addiction, a kind of idolatry. Even when speed starts to backfire, we invoke the go-faster gospel.
   
• “Inevitably,” [Carl] Honore writes, “a life of hurry can become superficial. When we rush, we skim the surface, and fail to make real connections with the world or other people.”
   
• Then there is the curse of multi-tasking. Doing two things at once seems so clever, so efficient, so modern. And yet what it often means is doing two things not very well. Like many people, I read the paper while watching TV— and find that I get less out of both.
   
• Remove all stimulation, and we fidget, panic and look for something, anything, to do to make use of the time.
   
• ...[I]n the land of speed, the man with the instant response is king. With satellite feeds and twenty-four-hour news channels, the electronic media is dominated by what one French sociologist dubbed “le fast thinker”— a person who can, without skipping a beat, summon up a glib answer to any question.
   
• This partly explains the chronic frustration that bubbles just below the surface of modern life. Anyone or anything that steps in our way, that slows us down, that stops us from getting exactly what we want when we want it, becomes the enemy. So the smallest setback, the slightest delay, the merest whiff of slowness, can now provoke vein-popping fury in otherwise ordinary people.
   
• Fast is busy, controlling, aggressive, hurried, analytical, stressed, superficial, impatient, active, quantity-over-quality. Slow is the opposite: calm, careful, receptive, still, intuitive, unhurried, patient, reflective, quality-over-quantity. It is about making real and meaningful connections— with people, culture, work, food, everything. The paradox is that Slow does not always mean slow.