Louis' Learnings 9 - Sleep, Snoozing, Happiness, and Mindset

4 Mini Essays That Might Change The Way You Think

Jan 11, 2021

🐘 Greetings from Tuscaloosa, AL 🐘

I just settled back into my apartment in Tuscaloosa to finish up my last semester of college. I’m looking forward to finishing my last few courses and will do my best to enjoy being a student in the time of the COVID 😷

This week, as a part of the 🚢Ship30for30🚢 challenge, I wrote short “atomic” essays on sleep, snoozing, mental models, happiness, and beliefs. I share four of my favorite in this week’s newsletter.

Best “Atomic” Essays from Last Week

You Need a Sleep Checklist

I hate lying awake in bed.

If I don't fall asleep within 10-15 minutes, the feedback loop from hell kicks in. Stress about not being able to fall asleep. Stress about not getting enough sleep. Not sleeping because of the stress from not sleeping.

More than being endlessly frustrated in the moment, the quality of my sleep determines my happiness, self-confidence, long term optimism, and demeanor on a day-to-day basis.

Knowing these critical factors are at the mercy of my sleep, I studied my patterns to learn how to avoid sleepless evenings.

I observed three rules that form the basis of my "sleep checklist."

1) Did I drink caffeine too late in the day? (within 8 hours of bed)

2) Did I nap for too long or too late in the day?

3) Did I exercise (moderate intensity) for at least 30 minutes?

With all three correct, I sleep like a child. If not, I run the risk of another frustrating evening and an entire day off-balance.

Now, I take every precaution to avoid breaking a rule. I'd prefer to "waste" two hours in the afternoon binging YouTube to not throw off my sleep schedule with a nap. It's worth forgoing two productive hours to save an entire day.

Benjamin Franklin is credited with saying that "fatigue is the best pillow.” My checklist lead me to the same conclusion: the most important factor for falling asleep is being tired.

Everyone needs a sleep checklist. Look for patterns. Document what works. Tweak, experiment, and optimize the right variables.

Don’t Snooze, Win The Day

With James Clear’s personal email list crossing 1-million subscribers, there’s no denying that the discussion of habits has gone mainstream.

After the fundamental habits are dialed in (smoking, drinking, healthy eating, and exercise), the snooze button should be the next target for habit-change.

Successful people focus on winning the day. Skills are acquired by stacking days of practice, books are written by stacking days of writing, and bodies are sculpted by stacking days of training.

If you snooze, you don’t win the day.

Yiddish culture has a proverb for this: Lose an hour in the morning, chase after it all day. Just as the height of a pyramid is governed by its base, the effectiveness of your day is governed by your morning.

Start your day with a mini-victory. Wake up at the first alarm.

How to break the snoozing habit?

Change beliefs — Deeply believe that snoozing is losing

Add consequences — Venmo a friend $50 every-time you snooze

Plan your first 20 minutes—Brush your teeth, drink coffee, go for a walk. Know exactly how you want to spend the first 20-minutes

Celebrate victory—Put "no snooze" on a ToDo list and cross it off

Yiddish culture has one more proverb that might persuade you: If you want your dreams to come true, don’t oversleep.

Get up and get after it.

Happiness is really simple

Don't try to guess what will make you happy this year.

Don't set new resolutions. Conduct a detailed 2020 review instead. This 10-minute exercise changed my outlook for the coming year.

Get a blank sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle to make two columns, name one positive, the other negative.

Flip your calendar to January 2020 and relive the year, week by week. As you do, jot down the good and bad in the appropriate columns. If you journal, flip through that as well.

After completing this exercise, I was dumbfounded by how a few simple variables constituted 90% of my well-being.

My best days: outdoor cardio, proper sleep, frequent reading and writing, frequent playtime (racketball, frisbee, deep conversations), cold showers, and active in-person socialization (family, friends and dating life).

With all of those variables in place, I felt happy, motivated, and grateful to be alive.

My worst days: stress & overwhelm, unnecessary busyness, poor sleep, canola oil, obsessive number checking (stocks, bitcoin, website traffic, podcast downloads), and unrestricted social media use.

Those weeks sucked.

From this basic exercise, I know what to prioritize this year and what to avoid. Use the past year's worth of data to derive your own personal happiness equation!

Don't try to guess what makes you happy. All the info you need is right in front of you.

Don't Confuse Viable with Mandatory

I'm graduating college four months from now.

This "deadline" to figure out my life is inducing a lot of stress, and I finally identified why.

After binging a few dozen entrepreneurship books my sophomore year, I've taken deliberate steps to convince myself that "entrepreneurship is viable immediately after graduating."

What were those deliberate actions?

Input Immersion: Obsessively consuming content that promoted this belief — books, podcasts, even personal conversations.

Affirmations: Literally repeating the statement "entrepreneurship is viable immediately after graduating" on a near daily basis

Actions: Learning and developing "entrepreneurial skills" & starting side projects

The problem? That formula worked way too well. I fully convinced myself of my intended belief, but did not anticipate the wave of unintended side-beliefs that would come with it.

By convincing myself that entrepreneurship is viable immediately, I accidentally convinced myself that it was mandatory. Anything else was failure. Taking a job, no matter how good the opportunity, the pay, or how much I would enjoy the work constituted losing in my distorted & self-imposed game.

The reward for expanding your sense of possibility should be confidence—not stress. Finishing your first marathon does not mean you HAVE to graduate into Iron-Mans just because you now think they are possible.

Don't confuse what's now possible as being mandatory.

Content Updates

LK Podcast #49 with David Oakley: David Oakley is Alabama's most productive multifamily real estate broker of the last decade, having transacted over 6 billion dollars in deals. In this interview, he shares the wisdom he's acquired from that experience.

Coming Soon!

Episode 50, Lessons Learned from Conducting 50 Interviews!
Podcast interview with Geoff Woods, host of The ONE Thing Podcast
Podcast interview with Dickie Bush, creator of the 🚢Ship30for30🚢 challenge

Quick Clicks

(1) Tinkering 💡: Thomas Frank’s Notion Templates

I’ve been re-exploring Notion lately and found Thomas’ templates extremely useful.

(2) Watching 👀: Crypto Casey on YouTube

Really entertaining and helpful crypto content.

(3) Housekeeping 🧼: Factory Reset Your Computer

This was a pain-in-the-butt, but I cleared up some nagging problems with my mac. I do this every few months to shed unused stuff and speed up my computer.

(4) Something Random 👻: Mr. Beast’s Dog Shelter Video

Mr. Beast (a YouTuber) hosted a creative campaign to help a dog shelter find homes for every single dog. This was entertaining and interesting from a marketing perspective. He bought 50 billboards, but only saw a mild surge in traffic to the facility. It helped me understand how low conversions can be for a general marketing campaign.

(5) Something to Read 📖: Billionaires Build by Paul Graham:

This circulated the internet a few weeks back, but I only recently took the time to read it. Paul makes a great argument in defense of billionaires and writes a helpful guide about the “right” reasons to start a company.

Photo of The Week

Making no comment about anything even mildly political, this meme made me laugh.

Obviously ignoring many equally relevant factors, this meme makes the argument that everything we are observing right now (good or bad) can be traced to a domino-effect started by Facebook, originally a “website to rate women on campus.”

Louis' Learnings