My journey with Continuous Glucose Monitoring
Avthar's Weekly Wisdom #33 (12/13/2020)
Hello fellow learners, doers and curious people!
Welcome to edition #33 of Avthar's Weekly Wisdom.
🔥 This newsletter is where I share practical wisdom about self-mastery, startups, health and happiness, all to help you live better. My goal is for you to discover one thing that can change your life, in a big or small way, every week.
ICYMI: You can read all previous editions of Avthar's Weekly Wisdom here and find more useful things on my website.
New thing I'm trying: I’ve teamed up with good friend and fellow podcaster Agustin Zavala to do a 30 day TikTok challenge. The rules are simple: Make at least 1 video, on any topic related to your niche, every day, for 30 straight days. We're on day 6 right now. I’m having fun exercising my “speaking to the camera” muscles and also playing around with the effects and tools TikTok has to offer. You can follow along with me @avthars
Here's what I want to share with you this week:
Life-changing Links
💪 On Health —
My journey with Continuous Glucose Monitoring: My father once told me that he wishes someone would've sat down with him at a young age and told him how to take care of his health. While education is important, prescriptions about diet and exercise aren't one size fits all. To find what sort of diet and exercise work best for me, I've been using technology, specifically continuous glucose monitoring (CGM). I'm a beta user of Levels, a company which aims to solve metabolic disease through technology. In their own words, "Levels tracks your blood glucose in real time, so you can maximize your diet and exercise." This is an interview I did for their blog about how I'm using continuous glucose monitoring to avoid chronic disease.
“Building metabolic awareness is really important because everyone is so different,” says Avthar. “It can be difficult for people to navigate the world of so many different nutritional options, and it doesn’t help that everyone is selling their diet as the best one–-you should try carnivore, you should try keto, here are the foods to avoid, you should do CrossFit etc.”
“People need to try things for themselves and decide what works best for them. That’s where Levels and other biofeedback products can be an enormous asset.”
🏆 On Self-Mastery —
Why you have to play the game at work: I've had many friends ask me for advice about dealing with a horrible boss or job that they aren’t passionate about. This is the video I've shared most to help them. In it, Jocko Willink explains why you must "play the game" in service of achieving your goal, taking care not to be a "fake person". It's a great watch for those who struggle with doing things they don't like, or are restless from working on projects that they find boring.
You have to play the game. And I know that that's hard. And I'll tell you what I did to get myself over playing the game: I turned it into a game in my head. I was like, I'm gonna build a relationship with this boss that I don't like. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna build the best relationship. That's my game.
...Now, does this make me a bad person? Or a fake person? No. Why? Because the reason you're playing the game, the reason you're actually acting this way, is for benevolent reasons.
🚀 On Startups —
What was so special about Airbnb?: Airbnb, the peer to peer home rental platform, went public this past week at a valuation higher than both Marriott and Hilton combined. I've long admired the company and its founders (in particular Joe Gebbia, who has many insightful interviews). In this essay by Paul Graham, we learn about what exactly made Airbnb so special by looking at their journey through startup accelerator Y-Combinator.
What was special about the Airbnbs was how earnest they were. They did nothing half-way, and we could sense this even in the interview...
During the batch our nickname for Brian Chesky was The Tasmanian Devil, because like the cartoon character he seemed a tornado of energy. All three of them were like that. No one ever worked harder during YC than the Airbnbs did. When you talked to the Airbnbs, they took notes. If you suggested an idea to them in office hours, the next time you talked to them they’d not only have implemented it, but also implemented two new ideas they had in the process. “They probably have the best attitude of any startup we’ve funded” I wrote to Mike Arrington during the batch.
🙏 On Happiness —
The Last Thing You'll Remember: I don't remember the last time a Youtube video moved me and made me think as much as this one did. I don't want to giveaway the story, so here's the creator's description for a sense of what to expect: "A short fictional story set in the moderate future, we follow a married couple's ordinary Sunday, which will, unknowingly to them, become their most memorable."
People often say: Live everyday as if it’s your last.
But far less commonly do you hear:
Live everyday as it it were everyone else's last.
Wishing you a week filled with happiness, peace and success,
Avthar
🐦 @avthars
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Insightful , well done