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Sleep is good

Ali Abdaal Avatar

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Hey friends,

I’ve been listening to lots of podcasts about the importance of sleep, and how we screw ourselves in the long run by compromising our sleep. As such, because it’s already past my bedtime and I’d rather not get dementia when I’m older, I’m going to prioritise my sleep rather than write a proper newsletter this week. Hopefully that’s enough of a snippet of life advice 🙂

Have a great week!

Ali


This week on Not Overthinking

Not Overthinking | Treating your personal life like a business | Episode 30

In this episode we talk about a new theory of Taimur’s — that we should treat our personal lives more like businesses, and treat our businesses more personally. We explore two aspects of “business thinking” in particular — valuing time + comparing options in terms of ROI (return on investing), and thinking in terms of systems — and how to apply them in our lives. We try and figure out why it generally feels weird to have systems for personal things.

Stuff I enjoyed this week

1 – Podcast – This interview with Matthew Walker (the guy who wrote the book Why We Sleep) on Bulletproof Radio was excellent. I read the book a few months ago but there were so many bits in this podcast that made me sit up straight (while driving) and think damn! this sleep stuff is really important.

2 – Podcast – This is another episode of Bulletproof Radio (discovered that podcast this week). It’s an interview with a guy who researched human endurance and the whole bio-hacking scene that I’m trying to understand more of (and my usual method for dabbling in any field is to listen to a tonne of podcasts).

Kindle Highlight of the Week

I can’t tell you how many times the students come to me and they show me their textbook and it’s highlighted in four different colors. I say to them, “I can tell you have done a lot of work and that you really want to succeed in this class because you have blue and yellow and orange and green highlighter on your book.” And then I have to try to tell them that any more time spent on this after the first time was a waste. They’re, like, “How is that possible?” I say, “What you have to do is, you read a little bit and then you have to test yourself,” but they don’t quite know how to do that.

From Make it Stick by Peter Brown. Resurfaced with Readwise.

This week’s video

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