Season 1 – Supermorning

The first season of Supermorning featured shorter daily posts. Well over 200 of these posts combined to describe a happy, healthy, wealthy, productive, and sustainable life.

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Season 1 Summary: Life Efficiency

Image by ejaugsburg from Pixabay. 

Season 1 of Supermorning concluded with the main objective behind this entire exercise: getting more life from less environmental impact, a.k.a. life efficiency. 

The key message behind this blog is that sustainable living is not a sacrifice. Not even close. In fact, sustainable living offers a direct pathway to a happy, healthy, wealthy, and productive life. 

Saving the world

The idea that we can save the world by genuinely bettering our lives is deeply liberating. But still, change is difficult. To get started, it really helps to understand why sustainable living is so important. 

Here’s the short version: Human impacts on planet Earth are damaging nature’s ability to provide myriad free ecosystem services. These services are worth about twice as much as all human activities. Losing even a fraction of these services will mean a huge hit to our quality of life. 

So, what can we do? Here are three ideas:

  • Save the world by looking after yourself. Food production represents the single largest impact on our environment. Displacing the typical excessive meat-rich diet with a moderate plant-rich diet is a great way to help yourself and your planet. 
  • Save the world by building wealth. Consumption can only directly address basic human needs like food, shelter, and security. Satisfying higher human needs like love, esteem, and self-actualization is much better achieved by saving and investing rather than spending. 
  • Save the world by embracing your creativity. A creative life automatically crowds out consumerism and offers a direct route to esteem and self-actualization. 

Ecological footprint

To make this more tangible, everyone should know their ecological footprint. I strongly encourage you to take this quick and simple test to see where you stand.

The best ways to shrink your footprint look like this:

  1. Food. A plant-dominated diet is the best place to start. Other influential factors include the amount of food you buy, the distance your food needs to travel to you, the amount of packaging it needs, and its impact on your health. 
  2. Home. The size and type of your home is the main factor, with smaller apartments being much greener than large homes. In most countries, heating and cooling offer the greatest potential for cutting your home footprint.
  3. Transportation. The daily commute from a large home in the suburbs has a very large footprint, particularly if done in a big SUV or truck with only one or two occupants. The air travel footprint also quickly adds up.
  4. Stuff. The high stuff turnover rate resulting from planned and perceived obsolescence creates great ecological damage. Solutions include, in order of usefulness, embracing creativity, simplifying life, and committing to always purchasing high quality. 

Ecological footprint is a major moral and ethical issue because those with the largest footprints are not those suffering most from the damages. Shrinking yours emerges as the right thing to do from every conceivable angle. 

The transformative power of life efficiency

As discussed in the second chapter of Supermorning, our primitive emotions are ill-suited to modern living. For decades now, individual success required a longer-term mindset. 

But today, we need to step it up another level to a global mindset where the impact on society strongly influences our individual actions. Thanks to the great benefits of sustainable living, this shift may just be achievable. 

But it will remain difficult as long as GDP growth is the main indicator of human progress. We need a new measure that accounts for the fact that our end goal is greater health and happiness, not more consumption. 

“Happy life years” is one such measure. With a little bit of math, this shift of focus clearly reveals life efficiency as a critical lever for achieving a sustainable society. 

The best thing about life efficiency is that it can be deployed very quickly. Unlike other sustainability solutions, life efficiency does not need to deploy lots of new capital. 

All it needs is a mindset shift. And if this shift goes viral, sustainability can happen surprisingly quickly. Those who build life efficiency now will benefit enormously as this shift gathers momentum. 

In conclusion

Increase your happiness, health, wealth, and productivity, secure your long-term future, help save the world, and reduce massive social injustices. 

All these benefits come from the direct pursuit of life efficiency. In my mind, there is no more important priority in the world today. 

Thank you for doing your part! 

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Season 1 Summary: Relationships

Image by Photo Mix from Pixabay.

Human beings have evolved to be social creatures. In fact, it’s this social nature that has kept our species alive for millennia.

Today, our social instincts must ride to the rescue once more. This time, the threats are not predators or enemy tribes, but a deteriorating ecosystem and billions of rightfully angry disadvantaged people feeling its effects. 

We will need all our social cooperation prowess to build a sustainable and just society over the 21st century. And it all starts with making each other feel good 🙂

Bucket filling

The bucket analogy is a great tool for improving any relationship. It states that each of us has an emotional bucket and dipper. If our buckets are filled, we feel great. If they’re emptied, less so. 

Our mission is simply to add at least a few drops to the other person’s bucket in every interaction. And the best thing is that filling another bucket also fills our own. 

To make this more tangible, here are three posts delving a little deeper into bucket filling and bucket dipping. 

Personal relationships

The most direct application of bucket filling is in our close personal relationships. Although such relationships no longer have much direct practical value, they are essential for our health and happiness. 

Here are some tips for maintaining sound personal relationships:

  • Be sure to prioritize quality over quantity. You can get all the benefits from only a few great relationships. Poor relationships harm health and happiness, while average relationships dilute life. 
  • Know a quality relationship when you see one. Do you feel good when thinking of the other person? Do you experience joy when they’re happy and discomfort when they’re sad? Do you trust them completely? Three yesses mean you should treasure that relationship!
  • Three keys to smooth relationships: Fill buckets (even if you don’t feel like it) and refuse to empty buckets (even if they deserve it). Avoid getting defensive to keep arguments rare and undramatic. Respect each other’s time to allow space for the rest of life. 

Professional relationships

Getting important things done in today’s complex world requires multidisciplinary teams. And such teams are built on sound professional relationships. 

Good professional relationships arise from the following four steps:

  1. Establish “win-win more” relationships. When gathering collaborators for your initiative, try to ensure that they get even more from the deal than you. 
  2. Collaborate like true pros. Be open to feedback – both the constructive and destructive kinds. Make sure your communication is crystal clear (misunderstandings happen all too easily). 
  3. Take pride in being the dumbest person in the room. Learn from experts by offering to do all the work in return for their guidance. Get a mentor team, either by reading works from best-selling non-fiction authors or by getting real-life mentors. 
  4. Find your networking style. If you’re a natural networker, you could make a career out of bringing the right people together. If not, rather build close relationships with one or two natural networkers and focus more on online networking. 

But no discussion on relationships would be complete without the glue that holds it all together:

Communication

Most people equate more communication with more talking. This is a serious fallacy. In fact, body language and voice tone are much more important.

If these two key communication elements are not in place, your words quickly become worthless or even harmful. These three posts explored the art of communication in more detail: 

  1. Body language: the core of communication. The most important body language signals are those conveying an open or closed attitude. Learning how to unravel defensiveness through open body language can make you a much better communicator. 
  2. Voice tone: more than words. A deep and engaging voice tone is the emotional glue that makes your words stick. Conscious control of voice tone can also help to keep negative emotions from ruining your communication.   
  3. Words: less is more. If you want people to like you and/or take your message to heart, use fewer words, not more. Try to concentrate as much goodness and insight into as few words as possible. 

Team Human faces many intimidating challenges today. We’ll need heaps of bucket filling, emotional nourishment, effective collaboration, and true communication to emerge victorious. 

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Season 1 Summary: Productivity

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay 

Contributing to society is essential for human happiness. It’s also vital for overcoming our great 21st-century sustainability challenge: lifting billions to decent living standards without destroying the planet. That’s why the productivity chapter of Supermorning was one of the more important ones.

So, let’s start with the philosophical foundation behind sustainable high productivity. 

Finding meaning in work

We all want to be productive, but, most of the time, we just don’t feel like working. Overcoming this disconnect requires a simple ingredient: meaning.

  1. Why do you work? There are two main pathways: You work to earn money to build a good life or you work towards an inspiring purpose doing something you would happily do for free. 
  2. Debt, work, and consumption. The first option typically gets people stuck in a vicious cycle between high consumption and stressful work. This cycle is responsible for most of the unhappiness and environmental destruction in the middle-class today. 
  3. Liberty, purpose, and obsession. The alternative is a virtuous cycle between liberty, purpose, and high life efficiency. This cycle easily leads to obsession, which could become unhealthy if left unchecked. 
  4. Life is long enough to do special things. A truly worthwhile purpose is a multi-decade project. Over such a time frame, you can produce awesome things thanks to the power of compounding. 

In short, working only for money and consumption leads to low life satisfaction and high environmental destruction. On the other hand, if you find true meaning in your work, consumption becomes almost irrelevant, and outstanding contributions to society become possible. 

Effective planning

One of the key ingredients of meaningful work is complexity. And complex tasks get a whole lot more rewarding (and less frustrating) when planned well. 

  • Smart work. Proper prior planning is the difference between the hard daily grind and smart inspiring progress. It should happen on three distinct timescales: days, months, and years. 
  • Daily planning. Everyone should have a daily to-do list. Google Tasks offers the three key features of a good to-do list: user-friendly, always accessible, and recurring tasks. 
  • Monthly planning. Monthly planning is about coordination with others, coherence over time, and getting interesting ideas out of your head. A Gantt chart in Google Sheets next to Google Tasks is just the right tool for the job. 
  • Long-term planning. This plan keeps you pointed in the right direction year in and year out. Over a couple of decades, such consistent progress can take your life to awesome places 🙂 

But a good plan is just the start. Putting this plan into action is where the rubber meets the road. 

Time management

Time is our one truly non-renewable resource. We all get the same amount of it every day. And we all get a chance to spend it wisely. 

  1. Planning time. Don’t skip the planning phase. 
  2. Execution time. Make sure you have the five E’s well covered: Effectiveness, Engagement, Environment, Efficiency, and Energy. High efficiency needs sharp focus, the right tools and expertise, an ordered workplan, and great information organization. 
  3. Communication time. Here, we switch from E’s to P’s: Purpose, Preparation, Presentation, Positivity, and Participation. These P’s take a bit of practice, but they’ll give you much more value from your collaborative efforts. 
  4. Recharge time. Never push beyond breaking point to a highly unproductive (and unhealthy) crash. Find your ideal recharge rhythm. It may well be something different from the societal norm. 

All this time management theory is great, but it’s not going to work if you rely too heavily on willpower. We need to make sure that good productive actions happen automatically. 

A productive environment

The topic of smart environment design is a regular Supermorning feature. And it gets a cameo in the productivity chapter too. 

  1. The perfect working environment. Remove all friction from the process of adding value and line up several creative relaxation mechanisms to keep your mind fresh and healthy. 
  2. Digital mastery. Install RescueTime to protect yourself against the horde of digital distractions out there. Then manipulate friction to make good digital actions natural and bad ones tedious. 
  3. Efficient collaboration. Use email sparingly, turn off those distracting notifications, and keep your inbox clean. Use your calendar to avoid being interrupted, while remaining a 100% reliable collaborator. 
  4. Proactive workload shaping. Master the “art of no” to maintain a manageable workload of agreeable tasks. The best tasks contain complexity, autonomy, and a link between effort and reward. 

With this environment firmly in place, productivity becomes second nature. And this is a big win both for you and your society. 

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Season 1 Summary: Technology

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay 

Technology has elevated humanity from an insignificant animal somewhere in the middle of the food chain to the god species reigning over planet Earth. 

Our technology, fuelled by millennia of stored solar energy in the form of fossil fuels, has created a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Surviving and thriving in this epoch of our own making will depend on whether or not we master the double-edged sword called technology. 

Technological revolutions

Our technological progress to date can be broken down into four great revolutions:

  1. Agricultural: Stupendous increases in food production.
  2. Industrial: Stupendous increases in the production of stuff. 
  3. Techno-scientific: Stupendous increases in the rate of change and technological power.
  4. Digital: Stupendous increases in the amount of easily accessible information. 

The word “stupendous” characterizes each of these revolutions. And all these stupendous increases have brought tremendous benefits. But similarly tremendous problems were never far behind. 

Double-edged sword

The products of each technological revolution are useful only up to a point. Beyond that point, the costs start outweighing the benefits. Many of us are way beyond that point. 

Here are some tips for restoring balance:

  1. Agricultural revolution. Capitalize on the immense privilege of being able to buy every nutrient your body needs at the supermarket. Save the world by minimizing unhealthy food and animal products. 
  2. Industrial revolution. Make sure your stuff is useful (it gets used at least once per month). This happens naturally through investment in that precious intangible asset called life efficiency. 
  3. Techno-scientific revolution. Be a responsible consumer to help nudge technological progress in the right direction. Be a responsible influencer and voter to correctly shape our future.  
  4. Digital revolution. See your consumption of digital information as food for your mind. Just like food, consume the good, cut out the bad, and minimize the useless. 

The degree to which we manage to follow through on the simple tips above will make or break the 21st century. And in today’s day and age, this starts with the digital revolution.

Digital mastery

The digital revolution has deployed its devices throughout society at an incredible speed. Learning to master these devices instead of being mastered by them has become a crucial life skill. 

  1. Computer. Good ergonomics and regular breaks to move your body are essential for healthy PC use. You should also install a distraction blocker to help you focus on what’s most important. 
  2. Phone. Reorganize your phone to escape chronic distraction from notifications and addictive apps. And stop using your phone for things best done on a PC. 
  3. Internet. Remember that information is food for your mind. A healthy information diet is essential. Be especially wary of empty information addiction in the form of video streaming and news. 
  4. Social media. Some social networks are designed to be useful, but the value of most is up to the user. An interesting social media trend to follow is the deletion of purely distracting accounts. 

The digital revolution is far from done. We can look forward to incredible breakthroughs over the coming decades. But if we cannot even master our phones, how will we master AI?

Future technology revolutions

No-one knows what the future holds, but one thing is for sure: our technology will advance, making the double-edged sword sharper on both sides. 

Here are four future revolutions we should prepare ourselves for:

  1. Enhanced humans. Genetic engineering and digital/mechanical augmentation can greatly enhance human health, longevity, and performance. Those who look after their health and wealth could experience these benefits in their lifetimes. 
  2. Artificial intelligence. Learning to communicate with machines will be an invaluable future skill. Machines will take over most menial jobs, but those that involve a high degree of complexity, creativity, or emotional intelligence will be safe from automation. 
  3. Advanced telecommunications. Although physical teleportation is impossible, virtual teleportation is something we can look forward to. Virtual reality technology will totally change the way we meet and travel over the coming decades. Covid-19 has accelerated this trend.
  4. Shared universal mind. Efficient access to the complete shared knowledge and experience of humanity can greatly enhance individual lives. With increasingly automated data collection, the creation of such a shared universal mind is becoming a real possibility. 

If we can learn to wield the double-edged sword of technology with wisdom and grace, these trends point to a truly awesome future. Let’s make it happen 🙂

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Season 1 Summary: Wealth

Image by angelo luca iannaccone from Pixabay. 

Wealth is much more than a high salary or a healthy bank balance. And turning your wealth into a good life is much more complex than going on a spending spree. 

These are some of the interesting topics we investigated in Supermorning Wealth. So, let’s take a quick recap, starting with the obvious. 

Tangible assets

Tangible assets are those things most people would define as wealth: money, real estate, stocks, etc. Building tangible assets needs little more than patience and a basic strategy. 

  1. Make it automatic. Set up an automated investment regime using online banking solutions. Occasionally adjust these automated investments to keep yourself off the hedonic treadmill.
  2.  Investment horizon is key when positioning your wealth. If you can part with your money for many years, risky investments like stocks become surprisingly safe.
  3. Long-term stock market investments yield great returns at very low risk. With an infinite investment horizon and a diversified strategy, your risk is close to zero.
  4. Short-term investments need more security. Split your strategy between low-return investments for your near-term financial goals and high-return investments for your long-term freedom. 

Today’s world belongs to those who own capital. Claiming your share of the world makes life a lot better. 

But tangible assets are not the only kind of wealth out there.

Intangible assets

These assets both increase your ability to grow tangible assets and reduce the critical mass of tangible assets you need to claim your freedom.  

  1. Skills and track record. The types of skills and track record valued by the world are changing. Recognize these changes and define your purpose to give direction to your skill development. 
  2. Heath and inspiration. These assets put your skills and track record to good use. Find your inspiring purpose and gradually eliminate inspiration drains from your life. 
  3. Reputation and goodwill. In addition to good skills and track record, a healthy reputation requires integrity, good teamwork habits, and a commitment to quality. The best way to build up goodwill is to develop genuine goodwill towards others.
  4. Life efficiency. This is the ultimate intangible asset: the ability to get more life from less consumption. Consumerism and self-sabotage are examples of poor or even negative life efficiency. 

With sound investment strategies in tangible and intangible assets, we can start to derive genuine fulfillment from our wealth. 

Wealth and liberty

Many people have fought and died for personal liberty. Today, we all have liberty in theory, but all too many remain in economic slavery, working jobs they hate. Wealth is the cure for this sad situation. 

  1. Why bother building wealth? Wealth, both tangible and intangible assets, gives you genuine control over your own time and enables the faster realization of your initiatives.
  2. Building personal wealth makes the world a better place. Aside from granting true personal liberty, a broad focus on wealth building will make the world more sustainable and just.
  3. Financial resilience is the best measure of the personal liberty afforded by your wealth. Financial resilience is the number of years your wealth can sustain your lifestyle. 
  4. The transition to liberty should be done responsibly. Committing to a gradual transition from a strong base of valuable intangible assets can greatly reduce risk.

Most people instinctively want wealth to claim the freedom to consume whatever they want. But lasting happiness actually comes from the freedom to create what you want. 

And this brings us to the final layer in this wealth-based strategy for lasting fulfillment. 

Managing wealth and liberty

There are several options for deriving liberty from wealth. Choosing yours is an important step in the journey to fulfillment.  

  1. Carefully prioritize your investments. There are just so many exciting options out there. Focus on a limited number of enabling investments that can have the greatest knock-on effects.  
  2. Buy your own time and energy. One of the best things to do with any surplus income is to buy more of your own time and direct it towards your purpose. 
  3. Buy other peoples’ time and energy. Any worthwhile purpose will require more skills, time, and energy than you can ever have. Set up win-win collaborations for pursuing your purpose. 
  4. Enjoy sharing your wealth. Giving from a position of abundance is one of the best win-win actions out there. But giving from a position of scarcity can easily backfire. 

So, in conclusion, money can buy happiness – just not in the way our consumerist society has taught us. 

Instead of blowing our wealth chasing happiness through consumption, we should deploy it to liberty and purpose. This is the single best way to turn wealth into lasting life satisfaction. 

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Season 1 Summary: Mental Health

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay. 

Mental health is just as important as physical health. In fact, it’s hard to maintain one without the other.

Unfortunately, our world is just as stressed and depressed as it is overweight and unfit. The mental health chapter of Supermorning is here to do its little bit to address this critical global challenge. 

Short-term stress management

Many of us are already highly stressed. If we’re not very careful, the effects of this stress can easily trigger various vicious cycles, leading to even greater stress. 

Here are some useful tips for breaking such cycles before they get started. 

  1. Develop a game plan for stress management. There are several proven stress-reduction techniques available, but we need a proactive game plan to make them practically useful. 
  2. Let go of unnecessary stress. We’re often stressed about things that are not so dangerous, highly unlikely, or totally outside our control. Mindfulness makes it easier to let go of such useless stress. 
  3. Find your Most Efficient Next Action (MENA). There are also many times when your stress is legit. Pouring all this restless energy into doing something about it results in very natural stress reduction. 
  4. Stop digging. We have a tendency to keep doing the thing that caused our stress in the first place. Recognize when this happens and do the positive things in the previous steps instead. 

These ideas offer effective treatments to the ailment, but long-term mental health requires more proactive actions. 

Long-term stress reduction

Prevention is better than cure. This is just as true for mental health as it is for physical health. We covered four ways to proactively prevent chronic stress. 

  1. Proactively prevent overwhelm. Overwhelming yourself only reduces your ability to get things done. Understanding why you get overwhelmed is the key to a more manageable life. 
  2. Take special care of your health and relationships. Environments for automatic healthy diet and fitness are great stress reduction tools. Master the key moments to prevent relationship stress.
  3. Win over your biggest critic: yourself. Invest, fail, learn, repeat. Getting comfortable with this cycle is key to the healthy self-respect needed to stop stressing about your own life. 
  4. Make a big stress reduction move if really necessary. Sometimes you need to get out of things like a damaging relationship or a bad career choice.

On the other side of stress lies a much happier and more fulfilling life. But we also need to recognize that happiness is not simply the absence of stress…

Chasing happiness

We all want to be happy, but most of us go about it the wrong way. 

  1. Directly chasing happiness is pointless. The amount of time and money spent on instant pleasure activities is a good measure of unhappiness. Instead, focus on things that give meaning to life.  
  2. Materialistic pursuits of happiness have their benefits, but also some serious drawbacks. Although the pursuit of material success brings little lasting happiness, it has fueled great human progress. But this motivation has a dark side in terms of environmental destruction, social injustice, and self-destructive behaviors.
  3. The combination of liberty and purpose offers an attractive solution. This philosophy can bring lasting life satisfaction and further accelerate human progress without any of the downsides.
  4. Informed gratefulness can make big contributions to happiness. Gratitude increases happiness because it can reset our benchmarks to more reasonable levels. 

A world full of calmer and happier people will certainly be a much better place to live in. Let’s take great care of our mental health and make this world a reality 🙂

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Season 1 Summary: Fitness

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We built our modern world to limit physical effort to a bare minimum. Back in the old days, when food was scarce, this was a good idea. But today, this inactivity is one of the leading killers out there. 

So, how do we get ourselves to move more in a world so meticulously designed for sedentary living? You guessed it: we build an environment to make movement automatic.

Automating movement

Here are the four best avenues to fully automated daily motion:

  • Personal transportation. Many short car trips can be made by muscle power instead of fossil power. The coming of age of electric bicycles makes this transition much easier. 
  • Sport and nature. Finding sources of movement you genuinely enjoy (or even crave) is great for automation. Sport and nature are the two foremost candidates in this category.  
  • Work. Even though most of us spend our working lives at a desk, there are several simple habits that can permanently incorporate regular motion into your job. 
  • Morning and evening routines. Movement is great for switching on the body in the morning and relaxing the mind at night. As part of a set routine, it quickly becomes automatic. 

If these sources of automated movement still look too intimidating, there are several useful fitness tools that can help get you going. 

Fitness toolkit

  • Ideally located home. A location close to some green spaces where car ownership is unnecessary all but guarantees healthy fitness levels. If at all possible, this is my top fitness recommendation. 
  • Equipment. Spend wisely to not end up with a basement full of fitness gizmos gathering dust. The quality of the equipment you buy should be proportional to how much you will use it. 
  • Technology. Keep it very clean and simple. Start with Google Fit, add a fitness band if you can genuinely use the features, and join Strava for great motivation if you regularly cover long distances. 
  • Friends and family. Movement and socializing play well together 🙂 Actively look to bring more motion to your socializing. There are tons of possibilities! 

All these tools can then be deployed to construct an ideal environment that guarantees lifelong fitness.

Fitness environment

Here is the 1-2-3 to lifelong fitness:

  1. Build easy fitness habits. 
    • There are countless opportunities for free movement in our daily lives. 
    • Most of these are very easy and quickly become lasting habits when given a chance. 
  2. Create a fit home. 
    • The location of your home is a crucial fitness consideration.
    • Simple changes in and around the house can encourage movement and discourage stagnation. 
  3. Make movement desirable. 
    • One of the primary motivations for getting fit is to build a body that makes movement fun. 
    • Use the previous two tips to reach this tipping point and then capitalize on sports and socializing to take it to the next level. 

Life just gets so much better when experienced through a fit and able body. Put in the effort to make fitness automatic. It’s totally worth it!

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Season 1 Summary: Nutrition

Image by silviarita from Pixabay.

Nutrition is a strange subject area. On the one hand, it can be very simple. We all have a reasonably good idea of what we should put in our bodies and what we shouldn’t. But, on the other hand, actually following through on this simple advice is really tough. Hence, the global obesity epidemic. 

The mission of the Supermorning Nutrition chapter was to automate healthy eating. And it all starts with some food groups that are not only healthy but also tasty, convenient, and affordable. 

Five groups of superfoods

Here they are in all their glory:

These guys can give you all the nutrients (and enjoyment) you need from food. But making them a permanent part of your life requires some proactive action.

Making super the new normal

Here are some proven guidelines for making these superfoods a permanent part of your life:

  • Nuts, seeds, and berries: Buy your seeds in bulk and select packs of mixed nuts and mixed frozen berries. Together with some yogurt, they create the perfect breakfast.  
  • Raw green veggies: These green nutrient bombs taste rather bland, but things like a green drink and smart combinations with other tasty foods can make them regulars in your diet.
  • Cooked veggies, mushrooms, and beans: Here, we focus on the “meat as a vegetable dressing” idea. This will give you very tasty cooked meals with a huge amount of vegetables. 
  • Fish and eggs: The convenience of smoked and canned omega-3 fish and scrambled eggs or omelets can make these high-quality protein sources regulars in your diet. 
  • Avocado (and other fruit): Here we discussed the fine art of avocado ripeness management together with several ways to make fruit consumption even easier. 

Putting these ideas in place takes a bit of effort and experimentation. But once it’s up and running, you’ll have yourself a lifelong zero-compromise healthy diet 🙂 

Healthy, tasty, convenient, and affordable. It sounds like the perfect happy ending! But sadly, this story also has some bad guys who do their best to make us fat, sick and addicted.  

Four food villains

Here are the bad guys in the nutrition story:

It is possible to keep these villains at bay. But this does not happen by itself. We need to take the time to construct some super-powerful defenses. 

Building the fortress

Our healthy eating fortress has four layers of defense:

  • Refuse to pay for self-destruction: Trading time, effort, vitality, and life expectancy for fleeting endorphin highs is a truly terrible deal. Realizing this on a deep level is a great first layer of defense.  
  • Healthier snacking: Sometimes really tasty treats can have some longer-term benefits. For these rare occasions, choosing healthier alternatives makes all the sense in the world. 
  • Home-made meals: Taking care of your health becomes a lot easier when you take direct control of what goes into your body. Home-made food also makes overeating much less likely. 
  • Whole foods: Buying more whole produce is a great way to keep self-destruct foods out of your life. Getting into the habit of reading food labels can also add many good years to your life. 

Making change stick

This chapter conveniently coincided with the end of the year, so I framed this as a New Year’s resolution. But you certainly don’t need to wait until the end of the year for making healthy nutrition permanent:

  1. Understand why diets have such a high failure rate.
  2. Intelligently shape your environment.
  3. Intelligently shape your habits.

It takes some time and effort, but lifelong healthy eating habits are possible. Setting this up will add many years to your life and much life to your years 🙂

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Season 1 Summary: Accelerated Evolution

Image by John Hain from Pixabay.

The second chapter in the Supermorning series was a bit of an odd one. It basically set out to explain why we continuously do things we know are wrong and not do things we know are right. 

It’s central to the principle of consistency advocated on this blog. Without it, our innate inconsistency is terribly frustrating. With it, this inconsistency becomes understandable and even controllable. 

So, let’s start with the problem:

Cavemen stuck in the future

Humans have evolved slowly like any other animal over our 200 millennia history. And for 99.9% of this history, this slow pace of evolution worked fine, simply because our environment changed just as slowly. 

But then science and fossil fuels combined to kick off the Anthropocene. We totally changed our environment in the evolutionary blink of an eye, while our emotional makeup remained unchanged. 

Hence, we’re all cavemen stuck in the future – a place where our primitive emotions are badly outdated. 

Primitive emotions

To simplify things, we can zoom into five main primitive emotions: Craving, Ego, Sloth, Frustration, and Worry. For me, it also works to view these as the Big Five mythical creatures roaming our minds. 

Conditioning your mind to instantly recognize the Big Five is very useful in the quest to adapt to life in the Anthropocene. The emotion safari is one way of approaching this conditioning. 

Positive emotions

Every villain needs a hero. In this case, the Big Five primitive emotions meet the Great Five positive emotions: Inspiration, Altruism, Flow, Tolerance, and Excitement. 

But like any good superhero story, the villain is not all bad, and the hero is not all good. We need to strike a fine emotional balance. 

Building environments

A good understanding of the Big Five and the Great Five facilitates the construction of intelligent environments that attract good emotions and suppress bad ones. 

Here are some instructions for each pairing:

  • Craving and Inspiration. Remove temptation from your life and, instead, learn all you can about things you’re passionate about. 
  • Ego and Altruism. Regularly expose yourself to challenges to learn that failure is not fatal. Make sure some of those challenges are truly altruistic in nature. 
  • Sloth and Flow. Rid your environment of bait for your sloth. Instead, consciously shape it so that productivity becomes as natural as possible. 
  • Frustration and Tolerance. Don’t expose yourself to frustrations you can do nothing about. For everything else, remember that there are only two useful responses: positive action or tolerance. 
  • Worry and Excitement. Limit exposure to worries beyond your control. Use worries within your power as motivation for doing the thing that will reduce your worry the fastest. Also, make sure you have a long-term purpose you can get excited about.  

But even in such well-designed environments, primitive emotions still stick around. They get weakened, but they never leave. Dealing with the Big Five as they come up gets quite a lot easier with some fun visualization. 

Acceptance

There are hard limits to how quickly we can change the wiring in our minds. Hence, primitive emotions will continue plaguing us for years to come, even if we do our best to accelerate our evolution. 

Accepting the caveman in yourself and in others can save you a huge amount of wasteful inner conflict. If you can direct all this previously wasted energy to more useful purposes, you’re already well ahead of the pack. 

Accelerating evolution

Of course, accepting our caveman does not mean that we should stop improving. On the contrary, some of the mental space opened up by reduced inner conflict can be used to further accelerate our evolution. 

This can be put into practice by including accelerated evolution into your constitution and keeping a counter of tiny saves where you successfully warded off the Big Five. Another vital application is when something really bad happens and we need to stop a Big Five stampede. 

These tools and ideas are not magic bullets, but they will slowly increase your compatibility with our modern world. And this increased compatibility will gradually make happy, healthy, wealthy, productive, and sustainable living the default instead of the exception 🙂

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Season 1 Summary: Morning Routine

Image by S. Hermann & F. Richter from Pixabay

In two weeks’ time, we’ll start a brand new season on this blog. And there are plenty of exciting changes in store 🙂

But first, we’ll take a look back at each of the ten areas covered in Season 1. So, without further ado, let’s revisit the first Supermorning chapter: Morning routines. 

Why bother?

A simple illustration of how much easier it is to finish the day on top after a good start.

The main motivation behind a morning routine is the fact that life snowballs so easily. If you stray off track early in the day, you can easily crash into more obstacles, knocking you further and further off course. 

However, taking full control early each morning starts you off on a smooth track. As long as you stay on track, all those obstacles lurking in the shadows can’t get to you, and life becomes much simpler and more rewarding.

That’s the origin of the old saying: Win the morning, win the day.  

Consistent sleep pattern

A consistent bedtime that gives you a healthy 8-9 hours of sleep opportunity is the foundation of a good morning routine.

Sleep is one area that I gave too little attention to in Season 1. Here is the one summary post on getting a good night’s sleep. I’ve since been better educated and will fix this in the next season.

For now though, just know that sleep is the foundation of a good life and it all starts with a consistent sleep pattern (even on the weekends). 

Elements of a good routine

We covered many different elements that can contribute to a good morning routine. You certainly don’t need all of them, but more is definitely better. 

Here they are:

Morning routines in the real world

Life does not always make it easy to maintain a consistent morning routine. There are many things that can disrupt your sleeping pattern or weaken your resolve.

For this reason, it’s important to bulletproof your routine. This involves developing a short version, recovering quickly from setbacks, and fully understanding the value of your routine.  

An example

The way I chose to put this all together is described here.

Yours will look different. In fact, it should look different. The more invested you become in designing a routine that’s uniquely yours, the more likely it will last a lifetime 🙂 

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