Hej! Welcome to this week's digest. This week is a very special "Mad Scientist" edition, because I am sharing a variety of resources that I have built over the past few years. Enjoy!

The genesis of this week's digest is that people close to me continue to share their delight in discovering 'new' resources of mine that were put out into the world years back, resources that I assumed they already knew about. Marketing is certainly not a core competency of mine, but still, every month or so, I get pretty clear feedback about how bad my lead generation can be (for now) ;D I invest a lot of time aggregating, curating, and synthesizing information around proactive health, as this is entirely too fun for me. The resulting resources are simply the compound interest flowing from that investment! And because there is zero marginal cost, it brings me joy to share them with you.



Source: Giphy

• RESOURCE - Sensible Living: Reflecting on the Fine Essentials of a Beautiful Life - My ever-evolving framework, principles, and resources for living an examined life.
   
• RESOURCE - TSD Ventures Consulting - How I pay the bills and make large-scale impact professionally! We give Proactive Health companies strategic and financial clarity for the best path forward. 2 years and 25 clients in!
   
• RESOURCE - TSD Ventures Coaching - How I make 1-1 impact professionally! We help our clients build healthy, fulfilling habits. Definitely does not pay the bills, but incredibly meaningful work.
   
• RESOURCE - Key Health & Wellness Behaviors from Research - A snapshot of the handful of key health behaviors that improve productivity across nutrition, exercise, sleep, and mindfulness. Make sure you are doing the basics right! To put it bluntly, fuck silver bullets ;D
   
• RESOURCE - Morning Mantras Poster - My current collection of words of wisdom to help me start every day with my desired mindset.
   
• RESOURCE - The Habit Digest - A smorgasbord of behavior change nerdiness! If you want to change a habit in your life, I aggregated, curated, and synthesized a ton of research and resources back in 2016.
   
• RESOURCE - Applied Mental Health - Practical resources to enhance your emotional and psychological well-being. Mental health seemed stigmatized and complex, so I aggregated and curated a collection of proven tools and providers back in 2017.
   
• RESOURCE - Proactive Health Innovation Market Map - My tracker for companies and investors leading the charge in proactive health innovation.

• TOOLS FOR LIVING
  • Mosaic Foods - Delicious, healthy frozen meals — cooked with care and delivered to your door. (Thank you Matt for creating this!)
  • Tiny Organics - Early exposure to natural flavors and textures shapes healthy eating habits in young children.
  • Focusmate - Virtual coworking to help you get things done. (Thank you Nate for sharing!)
  • Questions to Ask Before Giving Up - "You've made it this far, and you will make it through. You are stronger than you think."
  • The Science of Having Good Meetings - Recommendations for Before, During, and After meetings, backed by research.
     
• RESEARCH
  • PNAS: Optimism is associated with exceptional longevity in 2 epidemiologic cohorts of men and women - "Previous studies reported that more optimistic individuals are less likely to suffer from chronic diseases and die prematurely. Our results further suggest that optimism is specifically related to 11 to 15% longer life span, on average, and to greater odds of achieving “exceptional longevity,” that is, living to the age of 85 or beyond. These relations were independent of socioeconomic status, health conditions, depression, social integration, and health behaviors (e.g., smoking, diet, and alcohol use)."
  • Marketing Theory: Portable technology and multi-domain energy practices - "During interviews respondents discussed how a full battery gauge made them feel positive and as though they could go anywhere or do anything. Anything less than half full, however, induced feelings of profound anxiety and discomfort."
  • Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior: Multiple vs Single Target Vegetable Exposure to Increase Young Children's Vegetable Intake - "Families that offered multiple vegetables recorded an increase in consumption from .6 to 1.2 servings, while no change in consumption was observed in families serving a single vegetable or families that did not change their eating habits. Increased acceptance for multiple vegetables was noted during the five weeks of the study and sustained at three-month followup." 
  • Nature Medicine: Adipose lipid turnover and long-term changes in body weight - "Lipid removal rate decreases during aging, with a failure to reciprocally adjust the rate of lipid uptake resulting in weight gain. Substantial weight loss is not driven by changes in lipid removal but by the rate of lipid uptake in adipose tissue. Furthermore, individuals with a low baseline lipid removal rate are more likely to remain weight-stable after weight loss. Therefore, lipid turnover adaptation might be important for maintaining pronounced weight loss."
  • Penn State: A little kindness goes a long way for worker performance and health - "An ultimate solution to improve worker performance and health could be big pay raises or reduced workloads, but when those solutions aren't feasible, we found that even small offerings can make a big difference."
     
• PODCASTS
  • The Knowledge Project: Pleasure is the Measure with Sex Educator Dr. Emily Nagoski - "Pleasure is the measure of sexual wellbeing. It's not about how often you do it, who you do it with, what room you do it in, what positions, how many orgasms you have. It's whether or not you like the sex you are having."
     
• ARTICLES
  • Aeon: Our illusory sense of agency has a deeply important social purpose - "These observations point to a fundamental paradox about consciousness. We have the strong impression that we choose when we do and don’t act and, as a consequence, we hold people responsible for their actions. Yet many of the ways we encounter the world don’t require any real conscious processing, and our feeling of agency can be deeply misleading."
  • South China Morning Post: China’s internet regulator orders online AI algorithms to promote ‘mainstream values’ - "They should not recommend content that undermines national security, or is sexually suggestive, promotes extravagant lifestyles, or hypes celebrity gossip and scandals" [Note: An interesting data point in the macro landscape of empowering censorship via technology to promote ideology of any flavor... It is not so 'correct' when it is not your ideology 0_o]
     
• BLOG POSTS
  • Auren Hoffman: First Principles About When to Use First Principles - "...the third rule of thinking: make sure that many of the proxies that you use conflict with each other at least some of the time. If all the proxies that you use agree with each other, you might never have the opportunity to question your assumptions. And some (but likely less than 25%) of your proxies should be heretics in their field."
  • More to That: The Meaning of Life Is Absurd - "The thirst for more sounds comically absurd when you zoom out and see that nothing matters, so it’s about going deep into the zoomed-in life you already lead. Your health, your loved ones, your work, your interests, your desire to help others, your values, your existence."
  • Farnam Street: The Power of Questions - "We can learn a lot, often more, from the work involved in answering a question than from the answer itself."
  • Wait But Why: The Enlightenment Kids - "The U.S. Constitution would work the opposite way. It was a set of rules that, rather than serving any particular goal or outcome, would be sacred in themselves. The Constitution described a sacred process—a set of inviolable means by which any and all national or individual goals would need to be accomplished."