Word vomit is 1000 words in 15 minutes, unedited.
Wow, good morning! I was blind but now I can see, I feel good, man. (Both ideas from Limitless, a pretty good movie that I’d recommend watching. Video after the post.)
I slept early last night, and it was a great decision to have made. Well, early to me means I decided to get off the computer at about 12:30am or so, and by the time I actually got to bed, it was about 1:15am. I think I looked at my phone at about 1:44am. I remember being semi-awake at some point, maybe about 3 or 4 am. I had an interesting dream that I can’t really remember very much about any more. (Damnit!) And most importantly of all, I woke up naturally, peacefully, at about 8:15am. (I suspect that I actually woke up once earlier than that, maybe at about 6am, but went back to sleep.)
Doing the sleep deprivation study with Duke-NUS was interesting for me because it made me a lot more self-aware about my own sleeping habits, my sleep cycles. Most of the time I used to be groggy about my sleep- I’d stay up late until I absolutely couldn’t take it anymore, then pass out for a number of hours (usually about 10 hours, actually) and wake up in the middle of the afternoon, feeling lethargic, tired and frustrated.
Not today, today I am well rested and clear-headed. It feels amazing. It makes me realize that I’ve been living a certain way ever since late secondary school. After my O Levels, I started sleeping really, really late. 3am and 4am nights became absolutely commonplace. I’d go to school sleep-deprived every morning, sleeping on the bus on the way to school, sleeping in lectures. It was just a way of being for me, and on hindsight I suspect that this might have been one of the most detrimental things that I did for my own academic performance. Being in a constant state of sleep deprivation is like diminishing your own consciousness- and I kinda have evidence to back that claim up, which is my own 90-week-project data. When I slept well, I performed better in whatever I set out to do. Bad sleep, and it’s like everything is a blur.
Makes me wonder- how many people who claim to be “not morning people” have really, truly experimented with morning living? I swear, I’ve always thought of myself as a night owl- but now I’m starting to revise that idea. It’s possible that I was just entrenched in a way of living that was trying to rationalize itself.
It’s also interesting to look at this vis-a-vis more general ideas about habits and routines- I like to pay lip service to things like freedom and open-mindedness. How open-minded and free are you if you stick to one way of living without ever experimenting with another? (I suppose you could say “as long as you don’t judge anybody else for their lifestyles, it’s fine”, true, but I’m interested in personal freedom and liberty, and it’s clear that it’s not just a matter of rebelling against whatever is perceived to be orthodox, normal or good- it’s about finding the balance for you. It’s not anti-feminist to choose to be a stay-at-home mum, it’s anti-feminist to denigrate a woman for making that choice.)
I’ve been reading Taleb’s Anti-Fragile and it’s been just making so much sense to me. It’s one of those books that’s slightly beyond my ability to fully digest and understand- and it’s not the language that’s difficult, it’s the ideas. And it’s not that the ideas are difficult per se, they’re just more poignant, more powerful somehow. It feels like a powerful tome that needs to be read and re-read multiple times to glean value from it. In contrast, I’ve also been reading Chris Guillebeau’s $100 Startup, and that seems almost trivial and simplistic in comparison. I don’t want to fall into the trap of claiming that Taleb is some sort of messiah, I’m sure he would disapprove of that himself. But the ideas he presents are great. I especially love his loathing of sterile academics (what he calls the Soviet-Harvard Complex), describing how, for instance, it never occurred to thousands of academic geniuses to put wheels under their baggage. I can’t convey this properly at such short notice, I’m going to have to read and re-read the book to distill more value, but I’m glad I got the book, and I recommend it to anybody who wants a good mind-stretching challenge (and not in the “Old English is so hard to read” kind of way)
What else. I seem to be losing my train of thought. Let’s run through everything again. So I woke up this morning with lots of mental clarity. I did my pushups, I’m drinking my water, and in a few minutes I’m going to head out to have breakfast with a friend. I got a little bit of reading done, and maybe I’ll continue reading once I’m done with breakfast. After that, I’m going to systematically go through my commitments and perhaps get even more writing done. It feels fantastic. I really need to experiment harder with this.
Ah, yes, this is the point I wanted to make. Yesterday at 12:30am or so I decided that I was done, and that I was going to bed. This choice ended up being worth all the rationalizing in the world. I could’ve spent the next 4-5 hours stoning, “thinking”, looking for something that I’d most probably never find in my diminished mental state… but it is far better to make choices. Wealth is options, and we should always exercise choices that increase our options. Going to bed early yesterday gave me more options to work with today, so today I am a wealthier man because of the choice I made yesterday. This isn’t actually a particularly difficult or complex idea- in fact, you could say that it’s almost “intellectually insulting” in its simplicity. But that’s the magic of it.