About Schalk

I am a research scientist dedicated to the great 21st century sustainability challenge: how to quadruple the size of the global economy while bringing CO2 emissions below zero. My main occupation deals with technological solutions to this challenge in the form of novel clean energy conversion concepts. On the side, I also work on human solutions, i.e. sustainable living and deriving happiness from creation instead of consumption. I also have a mild obsession with healthy living to ensure that my research career lasts as long as possible and that I get to see how the story of the 21st century unfolds.

Posts by Schalk Cloete:

Schalk
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Recap: Health Foundation

We’ll be spending the next couple of months covering several proven strategies for achieving optimal physical and mental health.  

But all the best health advice in the world is useless if we cannot get ourselves to make consistent healthy choices. This challenge lies at the foundation of healthy living and must be addressed first.

Constructing a solid foundation on which to build a truly healthy lifestyle was the focus of this week’s posts. The key messages from these posts are summarized in the checklist below.   

The checklist

Here is the 1-2-3 to a solid health foundation:

  1. Measure your health.
    • Smart BMI, biological age, stress and sick days combine to give a surprisingly complete assessment of general health. 
    • This invaluable knowledge will cost you a mere 10 minutes per quarter. 
  2. Find you why.
    • Carving out a healthy lifestyle among all of life’s unhealthy temptations requires a strong driving force, a strong why. 
    • Start by fully understanding the implications of health for yourself, your loved ones and your planet. 
  3. Learn to win during the crux moments.
    • Choices during crux moments set you on a longer-term path to either wellness or illness. 
    • Mastering these moments is the key to unlocking optimal health. 

Please make sure your foundation is strong. If so, the next couple of months can add many awesome years to your life 🙂

Schalk
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Crux Moments in Health

A crux moment is a time when the choices you make in the next minute will set you on a healthy or unhealthy course for hours, days or even weeks into the future. 

Over the next couple of months, we’ll go through several great strategies for healthy living. But all the health knowledge in the world is pretty much useless if we cannot get ourselves to choose wisely in crux moments. 

So, let’s see if we can do something about that…

Some examples

A typical crux moment would be when you walk past the empty-calorie aisle on your weekly grocery run. The choices you make in those few seconds will strongly influence the nutrition of yourself and your family for the next week. 

Another typical example is when you learn about (or get the urge to look for) a new series to binge-watch. If, in that moment, you choose to indulge, you’re locking in days of stagnation, probably augmented by unhealthy snacking. 

The way we react in crux moments quickly turns into a habit. And such crux moment habits can easily lock in years of good or poor health practices. 

Why do we choose so poorly?

There is no logic to choosing unhealthy options in these crux moments. Clear correlations between healthy eating and happiness and between TV watching and unhappiness have been established. 

In the long run, the healthy choice in crux moments will always bring the most happiness to yourself and your loved ones. The problem, of course, is that we easily discount all this future happiness for a burst of instant pleasure. 

This endorphin addition is incredibly powerful. Every day, it drives billions of people to make choices they know are fundamentally bad for them. 

What can we do about it?

The craving for instant pleasure may be very powerful, but it has a weakness: no stamina. 

Let’s think through our two examples. If you experience strong cravings in the grocery store, but manage to drag yourself past to empty-calorie aisle to the next item on your shopping list, your mind will move on surprisingly quickly. 

Similarly, if you feel the binge-watching craving and manage to get yourself started on a more wholesome activity, the craving will evaporate in no time. 

In other words, if you can extricate yourself from the circumstance that triggered the unhealthy craving, it will fade surprisingly quickly. 

Winning in crux moments

There are two steps to consistently making the right choices in crux moments.

The first step is simply to catch yourself, preferably with a fun visualization to tame your Craving. We often make unhealthy choices totally out of habit, like dogs trained by little treats of endorphins from the instant pleasure industry. Using our human intelligence to break out of this spell is the first step 😉 

Once we’ve caught ourselves, we need to navigate the next couple of seconds. In the moment, making the right choice can feel almost impossible, but just remind yourself of two things:

  1. This intense craving will fade very quickly after the right choice is made.
  2. The crux moment habits you form over time shape long-term health and happiness for yourself, your family and your planet (see yesterday’s post). 

Please give it a go. It’s hard initially, but gets progressively easier over time as you develop good crux moment habits.

Winning during crux moments is essential to transform upcoming posts from words on a screen into longer and happier lives 🙂  

Schalk
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Why Bother with Healthy Living?

It’s impossible to accomplish anything worthwhile in life without a strong driving force, a strong why. And carving out a healthy life in this world of unhealthy temptation requires a particularly powerful one.   

So, let’s lay out the key reasons why healthy living is so important. If you’re struggling to make healthy lifestyle choices, my sincere hope is that you’ll find a strong enough why at one of these three levels: 

Individual

Simply put, being healthy gives you more life – both in terms of quantity and quality. 

Obviously, healthy living will increase your life expectancy. But adding years to your life is of no use if those years are spent in a special home where you’re reduced back to the dependence level of a toddler.

Indeed, the true value of consistent healthy living is not that it will add years to your life, but that it will add good years to your life. Good health habits will help you age gracefully so that you can enjoy life all the way to a dignified and painless passing.

The latter half of life is the time when lifelong health habits show their effects most clearly. But let’s not forget about the first half. 

Experiencing life through a fit and youthful body is much like experiencing driving through a top-of-the-line sports car. Like driving, every aspect of living becomes better if you combine beautiful sleek lines with a high power/weight ratio.

We just have one life. Choosing to experience it through a heavy, unfit and unhealthy body just makes no sense. Don’t dilute your precious gift of life with unhealthy lifestyle choices. 

Close relationships

The global self-inflicted lifestyle disease epidemic is causing tons of heartache and pain – not just to those directly afflicted, but also to their loved ones. On top of the emotional trauma, it can also have serious financial consequences for your family.

So, if living a healthy life for yourself is not enough motivation, why not do it for those close to you? 

On the positive side, excellent health makes it much easier to contribute to your close relationships. If you’re in top form, chances are that your relationships will also be.  

Also give some thought to the subconscious influence you have on those around you. They say we’re the average of the ten people closest to us. If you look after yourself, those close to you may just follow suit.

Global

Poor health is costing society trillions and trillions of dollars. 

From a macroeconomic point of view, unhealthy living is much like paying a bunch of people (the instant pleasure industry) to come and smash up your house and then paying another bunch of people (the healthcare industry) to try and patch it back together again. Totally senseless…

Aside from the enormous direct expenditures, poor health also brings tremendous indirect costs in terms of lost productivity. 

At this critical time in history when we’ll make or break the world for future generations, we can ill afford such terrible waste. In fact, if you want to do your little bit to save the world, building a truly healthy lifestyle is the very best place to start. 

Thinking about this stuff might not be comfortable, but a truly powerful why rarely is. 

Tomorrow, we’ll discuss how to use this source of motivation in those crux moments when you must choose between the path to optimal health and the path to self-destruction. 

See you then!

Schalk
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How Healthy are You?

One of the global trends I’m most excited about is our steadily growing health consciousness. The third chapter of Supermorning will contribute to this trend by applying the superpower of consistency to nutrition, fitness and psychology. 

The first step in this journey is to know where you stand today:

Monday 10-minute action Measure your smart BMI, biological age, stress and sick days

 

In my opinion, these four measures give the most value for the least effort. None of them are perfect, but together, the provide an impressively complete picture of your general health. Let’s take them one-by-one.

Smart BMI

Everyone knows that the body mass index (BMI) is an important health indicator. Smart BMI is almost the same thing, but it contains some important adjustments for age and gender. 

You can easily estimate your Smart BMI by feeding your weight, height, gender and age into this website. The healthy range lies between 30/70 and 39/70. If you want to be really cool, go for 34/70 🙂

Biological age

It’s certainly possible to be thin and unfit (poor cardiovascular health). This is where biological age comes in. Use this website to estimate your biological age using some easy waist and resting heart rate measurements. 

With good fitness habits, you can keep your metabolic age below 20 for much of your life. Doing so will greatly diminish your risk of heart disease, the #1 cause of death worldwide.

Stress and anxiety

It’s also possible to be thin, fit and highly stressed. The high incidence of mental health conditions in our modern society should be taken very seriously. Take these two quick tests for stress and anxiety to see where you stand.

You’re in a good place when you score “Little or No” stress or anxiety. “Mild” or “Moderate” indications of stress and/or anxiety can probably be overcome by intelligent changes to your environment and outlook. “Strong” indications may require professional council.   

Sick days

But even if we’re thin, fit and calm, excellent health is still not guaranteed. The last piece of the puzzle is simply to observe how often you get sick. Regular illness is not just an annoyance – it’s a clear call to action! 

The time since your last sick day is a great indicator of whether you’re giving your body and mind all it needs to be healthy (nutrients, movement, relaxation, stimulation, clean air and water, etc.). Never getting sick is 100% possible and is a great target to strive for. 

So, there you have it. Doing all these tests should take a mere 10 minutes of your valuable time. If you’re a data-nerd like me, tracking this info over time on pretty graphs is extremely interesting and motivating.

For all the normal people out there though, just checking where you stand once every quarter is enough. I highly recommend setting a recurring reminder in your calendar!

Then I’ll see you tomorrow when we’ll discuss just why health is so critically important. 

Schalk
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Week 20 of Getting 1% Better

Unlocking the superpower of consistency requires nothing more than consistently doing the small things right – one week and 1% at a time. 

Two weeks ago, I had to travel to Istanbul for a meeting. To put it mildly, travelling is not one of my favorite things, so such trips are always tough. But this time, I was determined to manage my primitive emotions and get the most out of the trip.

This resulted in some reasonably good and productive days during the meeting as well as the two full travelling days there and back. Since the hotel had no piano and a good breakfast buffet, my daily skills training and eating habits were the only aspects of my life that really suffered. 

But the most important benefit from managing my primitive emotions during this trip was the way I could hit the ground running after getting back home. Usually, I need a couple of useless days to recover from such a tiring trip. Not this time. In fact, the week directly following the trip has been one of my best!

You can see the dip during the trip and the strong recovery immediately thereafter in the little red bit at the end of my Graph of Life below. 

All you need to know about this graph is that it heads upwards if I have a great day and downwards if the day is just good. I've not had a bad or even just an average day for the past year :-)
All you need to know about this graph is that it heads upwards if I have a great day and downwards if the day is just good. I’ve not had a bad or even just an average day for the past year 🙂

 

So, how was your week? The three simple poll questions below can help you decide. They’re formulated from the understanding that we really only need three things to be happy: good health, a feeling of progress, and positive relationships.

If you ticked any of the top two boxes in all three questions, I’m pretty sure you made your 1% gain this week 🙂

If not, what can you do to make sure next week is better? Resolve to take at least one action to help you make your 1% gain next week. 

How well did you look after yourself this week?
Vote

Do you feel that you made progress this week?
Vote

How do you feel about your relationships and general human interactions?
Vote
Schalk
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Recap: Accelerating Evolution

Over the past two months, we’ve talked a lot about our outdated emotional responses and how to handle them. 

Taming our primitive emotions is not easy. If it was, everyone would be genuinely happy, healthy, wealthy and productive in this truly amazing modern world of material affluence. 

That’s why it’s so important to set ourselves on a journey of accelerated evolution towards full compatibility with our modern world. 

The checklist

Here’s the 1-2-3 of staying on course during a journey of accelerated evolution:

  1. Make it part of your identity.
  2. Focus on tiny saves during day-to-day living.
    • Use a counter app on your phone to track your small victories over the Big Five.
    • Use some fun visualizations to dispatch the Big Five when needed. 
  3. When bad stuff happens, it really is time to step up.
    • Recognize the danger of a Big Five stampede and learn how to stop it.
    • Use such events as a valuable experiment to learn more about yourself. 

So, that’s it for the second chapter of the Supermorning series! Next week, we’ll shift our attention to the pursuit of perfect health. 

If you have any feedback or suggestions that can help me improve these accelerated evolution guidelines, please use the form below.

Your message will not be publicly visible, so please don’t hold back. Having gone through the scientific peer-review publication process about 100 times, I’m used to critical feedback 🙂

The Supermorning blog will run on an annually repeating basis, so this time next year I will present an improved version of these guidelines on accelerated evolution. Your feedback is important to make sure that next year’s version really offers a clear improvement.

Thanks in advance!

Schalk
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Stopping a Stampede

From time to time, life will just randomly walk up to you and kick you where it hurts the most. There’s a lot we can do to minimize the likelihood and intensity of these painful experiences, but it’s impossible to guarantee that bad things will never happen.  

Responding well during such troubled times is crucial. A poor and primitive response has the potential to launch you into a downwards spiral that can inflict serious damage to your life. 

Such a spiral is what I like to call a Big Five stampede.

Possible stampedes

Maybe you find yourself giving in to Craving after every bad thing that happens to you. Over time, this can develop into fixed unwholesome consumption habits that severely damage your health, wealth and reputation. 

Perhaps your Ego takes such a serious knock during some patches of bad luck that it causes you to miss out on big opportunities when good luck eventually comes your way. 

Some setbacks at work could render you paralyzed into inaction by Sloth. This inevitably causes you to fall further behind and could really sour your relationship with your work, making your Sloth grow even larger. 

Bad experiences involving other people can easily morph Frustration into Anger or even Hatred. At best, this is a huge mental burden. At worst, it can lead you to rash actions with serious long-term repercussions.

Exposure to one of the millions of wrongs in the world can trigger excessive Worry that keeps you up at night and stressed during the day. Such Worry often serves no useful purpose. It just drains you of the energy and focus needed to make a positive impact, fueling even more Worry. 

But a Big Five stampede rarely features just one primitive emotion. Mostly, it will be a confusing mess of multiple self-destructive emotions. Getting trampled by such a stampede can do lasting damage. 

Prevention is better than cure

The best way to stop a Big Five stampede is to ensure that it never gets going. For this reason, the period shortly after something bad has happened is critical.

No matter how bad it is, you always have a say in how you react. Will you give in to primitive self-destructive instincts? Or will you choose the more enlightened route?

My go-to path to enlightenment in such times is to see this event as a valuable experiment to learn more about the Big Five.

Think about it… We really only see the Big Five up close and personal when we’re in an emotional state. If we’re not in such a state, we can theorize all we want, but we don’t have a proper chance to test our ideas. 

But when that emotional state hits, it’s game on! These are the only real opportunities to learn how your mind operates. The moment that you decide to seize this precious opportunity for self-discovery, it can trip up the entire stampede, causing the Big Five to end up in a harmless heap. 

This might not make all that much sense to you right now. But please try it next time something bad happens. If you manage to catch yourself in that crucial moment, it will all become clear 🙂

Schalk
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The Tiny Saves Counter

Habits are formed in small increments. Many times, we’re not even aware of our default thoughts and actions, but, whether we recognize them or not, every little one counts.

That’s why it’s so crucial to address those negative patterns we’ve unconsciously developed over the years. Far too many of our default thoughts and actions are driven by caveman instincts that no longer serve any useful purpose in today’s world. We need to take control. 

The best way I’ve found to do this is the tiny saves counter. 

Tiny saves

The tiny save counter is nothing more than a simple app on my phone with counters for each of the Big Five primitive emotions. I use a free app called Multi Counter, but there are many options out there. 

Every time I manage to catch a clearly detrimental thought or action caused by the Big Five and stop it in its tracks, I pick up my phone and add one click to the appropriate counter. 

Sometimes these tiny saves can have a huge positive effect. One save could be the difference between a healthy and productive day and a self-destructive day of binge-eating and binge-watching.  

Try it! See how many of these tiny saves you can make in a day. Over time, the counter will also give you some interesting insight about which member of the Big Five gives you the most trouble. 

When you catch one of these primitive creatures, dispatch it with the visualization trick we discussed earlier. You’ll know you’re doing it right when it brings a smile to your face 🙂

But there will still be times when more serious bad stuff happens, triggering a Big Five stampede that cannot be stopped by a few tiny saves. Managing this stampede will be tomorrow’s topic. 

Schalk
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Completing Your Constitution

Welcome to the last week of the Accelerated Evolution chapter of Supermorning! This week will be all about making this advanced state of mind a permanent part of our lives. 

The rewards for getting this right are tremendous. If you can evolve your mind to the point where good actions happen naturally and bad actions simply fade away, a happy, healthy, wealthy and productive life is guaranteed 🙂

So, let’s start with this week’s…

Monday 5-minute action Make Accelerated Evolution part of your constitution

 

Over the past two months, we’ve spent our time trying to fix a simple problem: many of our natural instincts and emotions are totally outdated in today’s world.

In fact, we’re all cavemen stuck in the future. And these caveman instincts are pushing us to act in ways that are bad for ourselves, our families and our society. 

Training your caveman for effective living in the modern world is the only permanent solution. And this becomes substantially easier if you give yourself a regular daily reminder through your personal constitution. 

As a quick refresher, the whole idea of a personal constitution is to gradually improve your definition of yourself. It’s a series of simple statements of how the ideal version of yourself will act. 

Today, we’ll add the final touch: a section about Accelerated Evolution. Here’s mine as an example. 

I will continuously accelerate my evolution towards full compatibility with our modern world, thereby automating the spontaneous occurrence of wholesome thoughts and actions. Today, I’ll go on my daily safari, make plenty of tiny saves, and patiently tame my primitive, self-defeating emotions. 

After many repetitions, this final constitution segment has made the act of continuously updating my mind to our modern times an integral part of my identity. 

Try it! I think you’ll like having a mind that automatically gravitates towards wholesome thoughts and actions 🙂

Schalk
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Hilarious English Lesson from YouTube

Have you ever wondered why the world communicates in English? It certainly has a lot more to do with British colonialism than the attractiveness of the language itself.

Indeed, English is not the most beautiful language and, as hilariously illustrated in the video below, it contains tons of inconsistencies. 

But still, we seem to be stuck with English. If you have any aspirations to expand your life outside of your local community, English is your ticket. It should be read, written and spoken as often as possible.  

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