In my previous post, I criticized the positive thinking and subjective reality schools of thought.
There is always more advice on self-improvement. The trick is to apply the advice that best fits your situation.
I generally recommend the following sequence:
Level 0:
1. Basic health
2. Non-self-judgment
3. Basic self-tracking
Level 1:
2. Basic cashflow
3. Basic social
4. Basic meditation
Levels 2-99:
Lots of options.
If you are at Level 0 and biology is compromised, it is a bad idea to attempt positive thinking / subjective reality techniques. You will overextend and crash, creating a bipolar life pattern leading to burnout and negative inflection points.
The key to Level 0 is to stop self-blame, eliminate all willpower wastage, and focus on fixing biology by driving continuous improvement through self-tracking and correct paleo nutrition.
If you are at Level 1, positive thinking / subjective reality can be useful. But it is still dangerous. You are not yet Mr. Winning. You will suffer major setbacks. It is more important to lay a solid, stable foundation, than to rev up to max RPM.
At Level 1, I recommend cultivating equanimity, humility, basic social interactions, and any sort of job that will support your minimal comfort level compatible with sanity and health. This is to avoid going back to Level 0.
Once you are securely at Level 1, take stock. What is your critical path to the next level? Maybe it’s improving social facility, or raising income, or productivity systems, or whatever.
Invest in that with your FREE resources. Do NOT overinvest and compromise your Level 1 status. Be patient and steady at first. Later, as your free resources increase, your rate of leveling will also increase.
Mr. MCDONOUGH, finding that his slaves worked for themselves on Sunday, for want of time on other days, proposed to give them Saturday afternoon to work for themselves, if they would keep the Sabbath.
He was soon struck with the amount of labor they performed during the half day they had to themselves, and with the sums of money they contrived to derive from it.
It occurred to him that it would be a good plan gradually to sell them the remaining days of the week, on condition of their paying him certain sums out of their wages, at appointed periods. So far as appears, the plan was suggested solely by financial policy, uninfluenced by any conviction of the wrongfulness of taking other people’s wages. He called his slaves together, eighty in number, and proposed for them to work for him on Saturday afternoons at small wages, instead of working for themselves.
He advised them to draw upon these wages as little as possible, and leave the remainder in his hands to buy Saturday for themselves. That the terms he offered them were pretty hard, is evident from the fact that he told them he calculated it would take them seven years to buy one day. But he reminded them that the first part of the process would be the most difficult; for when they had the whole of Saturday to work for wages, they could, in less time, buy Friday for themselves; and the facility would go on increasing with every day of the week they succeeded in purchasing.
He told them that according to the terms he could offer, and the calculations he had made, it would take them nearly fifteen years to buy their entire freedom.
Undismayed by the tediousness of the process, the slaves seized his offer with eagerness. They went to work so zealously that they bought the whole of Saturday in less than six years. Friday was bought in four years, Thursday in two years and a quarter, Wednesday in fifteen months, Tuesday in one year, and Monday was bought in six months
I have wandered far afield from my original intention in writing this post. So let’s wrap this up.
If I am right and biology takes precedence over mental techniques, then the following experiment will work:
1. Buy 50-100 grams of frozen shrimp.
2. Put frozen shrimp in a bowl
3. Microwave frozen shrimp in own juices until they have a zesty snap crunch texture. (Not underdone or overdone). Takes about 2.5 minutes in my microwave. Time will vary.
4. Eat the shrimp and drink the broth (crucial).
5. Wait 30 minutes to 1 hour.
6. Note how you feel. Is your mood happier, your energy higher, your productivity better?
If so, you had at least one of a host of possible nutrient deficiencies common to Westerners who do not regularly consume seafood. Begin eating 50-100g shrimp (and drinking the broth) daily. Eating more is fine, of course, but for frugality the above is the minimum recommended dose.
Why does this work? A host of reasons, including the paleo diet, the aquatic ape hypothesis, the fact that the mineral composition of seawater is close to human blood, the superior bioavailability of unprocessed animal products versus anything processed or plant based, potassium, sodium, iodine, B vitamins, C vitamins, bla bla bla.
Just eat the shrimp, in exactly the way described above. Do not, for example, boil the shrimp in a pot on the stove, unless you are prepared to drink the entire pot of water afterwards. Why dilute your expensive ocean water?
Note 1: If the ingredient list has anything else on it besides shrimp, such as trisodium phosphate, pick another brand.
Note 2: Do not worry about whether the shrimp was farmed or what country it’s from – shrimp is an omnivorous ocean cockroach, and unaffected by pollution (no biomagnification) and grain-based feeds.