PFL: Habit Stacking, exploration, 3 selves
Welcome to PFL, this is a weekly newsletter that is focused on three topics. Productivity, Fitness, and Life in general. This is the newsletter that I wanted but could not find. I hope you enjoy.
Productivity:
Creating habits and routine is another method of taking the procrastination branch out of the decision tree. If you can make your actions on autopilot the desired ones you will get more done with less friction than having to confront procrastination each and every time you sit down to work.
The ideas from the book Atomic Habits by James Clear is so popular for a reason, he gives a step by step guide on how to set this up for yourself. The concept of habit stacking has been particularly useful for me.
You only have to get yourself to do the first task and the momentum carries you through the rest of the day.
Fitness:
If you are a competitive athlete then you know what the end of a season or training cycle is like, you have been doing the same lifts each session, your body is beat up, and most of all training has gone stale.
This is when it's important to do any and every modality you are interested in for both your mental and physical health. If you are in a closed skill sport the repetitive movement wears on your body and lessens your ability to do much of anything outside of it.
We are built to move in any and all directions with varying degrees of intensity, range of motion, and duration. While it is fun to get really good at something hyper specific, don’t rob yourself of all of the other options your body gives you.
Life:
I’ve been thinking about this a lot and I hope this resonates with some of you. I don't have an answer or a way to tie a pretty bow on it but I can provide the knowledge that someone else is going through it as well.
Who you want to be, Who you really are, and who you are afraid you really are.
I have a very clear vision of the type of person I want to be, and the type of both words and actions I want to say and do. I do my best to act in accordance with those values and make decisions that will help me become that person I want to be. This is who you want to be, it's the least troublesome because we can all easily imagine the perfect and good.
Unfortunately we can also easily imagine the flawed and evil, and find it almost impossible to imagine the middle.
Who you are afraid you really are is the one I think about the most. It is the little voice inside your head that belittles your accomplishments, “what you did wasn't actually hard”, “you just got lucky”, “you haven't really been tested”. This is the house of all my self doubt and distrust of anything positive about myself.
Who you really are is the most difficult to pin down, and I would argue impossible to pin down without outside input. You only see your actions through your eyes, you almost always feel justified and that you made the best decision you could. Your closest friends and family however are able to see it much more clearly, the same way when your friend comes to you with a problem it's much easier to give them advice than it is for your own problems. You don't have the emotional and mental baggage that clouds their judgment. I believe integrating your perception of yourself through journaling and asking those closest to you about what they see you do and how it matches the person you think you are is a good place to start.
My fear is that the inevitable life will place a challenge in front of me that I am not able to face, and who I want to be is in the room next to me. I go to open the door to let him in and face that challenge. Either he walks through and righteously faces the dragon and defeats it, solidifying who i want to be and who i really am as the same person, or I open the door and the real me is cowering in the corner.
I am half excited and half terrified for that test to come but once it does I’ll finally have an answer.
Cool guy from history:
Juan Pujol Garcia aka agent GARBO was an independent double agent for most of his career earning himself with the Iron Cross medal from Germany and the MBE from the British, both of which are extremely high honors. Garcia born, raised, and living in Madrid wanted to help the allied forces in WWII, to do this he approached the British embassy in Madrid and tried to get recruited as a spy unsuccessfully. He thought that MI5 would find value in him if he established himself as a German agent with the intent to double cross them. He posed as a Pro-Nazi government official who would frequent London for work. Complete with a fake diplomatic passport his new identity was believed hook, line, and sinker. The Germans trained him in spycraft and sent him to London with the mission of developing assets in the area. Instead he moved to Lisbon and used any and all OSINT (Open source intelligence) to create false narratives to feed back to the Nazi regime. He created roughly 27 “assets” who each had their own backstories and personalities. MI5 knew someone was feeding Germany false intelligence that led to the waste of resources and time of attempting to take down a convoy that never came. Garcia approached MI5 again who moved him to Britain and assigned him a partner, Tomas Harris. Together they sent 315 letters each over 2,000 words to the Germans who, because of his seemingly vast network, stopped trying to develop more sources in London altogether. These letters were part fiction, part useful fact and part truth about British operations but delayed in the mail until after the information was useful. His most effective con was convincing the Germans to divert their attention to the Strait of Dover instead of Omaha beach on D-Day and the subsequent belief that there would be a second invasion. They believed his intel without question, stationing 2 fully armored divisions and 19 infantry divisions in the Pas de Calais region for two months in the summer of 1944. After the war Garcia faked his death, killed by Malaria in 1949. He ran a bookshop in Venezuela before writing a book about his adventures with the help of Rupert Allason, pen name Nigel West. He died in 1988 buried in a national park by the Caribbean sea.