Archive for the ‘Ben Franklin’ tag
Your Microbiome, Bone Broth, and Fancy New Fitness Gadgets (Sunday Reads #2)
Welcome to Sunday Reads #2 on Refocuser, a collection of my favorite weekly links from around the web spanning topics like creativity, performance, focus, exercise, and positivity. I’m posting this on Saturday this time to make sure email subscribers get this on Sunday.
Speaking of which, join thousands of other readers by subscribing to this blog and email newsletter or by following @Refocuser on Twitter.
On Moving, Eating, and Sleeping
The healthy human microbiome is the new frontier. All the more reason why I’m surprised I didn’t know about uBiome (10% off with that link!) – it’s similar in spirit to WellnessFX and 23andMe. They send you a sample kit for only $89 (!) so you can learn more about your body’s own bacteria in an effort to improve your overall health. Don’t need to twist my arm to do this – I’m in! We’re super early in this citizen science movement but I love it. You can also learn more on Fast Company.
Mark Sisson challenges some of our common misconceptions when it comes to calories (part 1, part 2).
How does exercise really affect our brains and how does it really make us happier? Fast Company set out to understand the science. Turns out addiction to exercise isn’t a crazy concept since BDNF (brain-derived neurotropic factor) and those ever-popular endorphins have the same characteristics as nicotine, heroin, or morphine. Big takeaway: Daily exercise of just 20 minutes is all it takes.
12 Goals: Create Your Vision (Step 1)
Before starting with Step 1, you might first want to read the introduction.
Twelve Goals (or 12 Goals) is a goal-setting program for beginners. If you’ve never set goals before – or if you’ve tried and failed – Twelve Goals can help get you unstuck and on path to achievement. There’s nothing magical or mystical about this process at all. In fact, it’s downright boring and overly practical; you aren’t going to find any talk about magnetism, psychic powers, or the law of attraction. What you’ll find is a systematic way to look at your personal goals over the course of a year, along with some step-by-step advice and accompanying tools to help you achieve them.
Twelve Goals is still very much a work in progress. My hope is that the program will adapt and evolve over the course of 2010 based on feedback from you! If you ever forget how to find these posts, they will be available at www.12goals.com (or www.twelvegoals.com).
Beginning at the End
“Writing or reviewing a mission statement changes you because it forces you to think through your priorities deeply, carefully, and to align your behavior with your beliefs” – Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
One of the underlying principles of 12 Goals is to “begin with the end in mind”, similar to what Stephen Covey proposes in his books. This is a key tenet of any planning process, and is absolutely essential to do as a first step on the path to achieving your goals. When you think about anything you’ve ever accomplished in your life – from remodeling your kitchen to getting a new job – you probably had some level of vision about what you wanted the outcome of your process to be. It may have taken a little while to get a handle on what that vision really was, but somewhere deep down you knew it was there. You probably didn’t just wake up one day, make a phone call, and land a job that afternoon. You likely spent time and energy defining your end result. Beginning at the end is about figuring out what the ideal end result is, writing it down, and then working backwards from there.
Think about creating your vision (or personal mission statement as some call it) as being explicit about what you want your life to be about, and through the process, learning more about what you want your year to be about. Your next year should be a very deliberate step in the right direction – and it’s awfully hard to do that unless you know where you’re going.
An example of vision creation “beginning at the end” that I like to give relates to software development at a large company. In certain divisions of Microsoft, a thoughtful planning process takes place prior to the start of any major release. It’s during this time that the team works to formulate the game plan by looking at market research, doing deep competitive analyses, brainstorming about potential breakthrough ideas, and so on.
One of the outputs of this process is a mock press release or blog entry, post-dated around the time the team expects the software to be released to the world, describing in detail (in present tense, of course) what the “story” for the release is going to be. Frequently the team will also go into depth about what they expect the press, bloggers, and enthusiastic users to say about the release as well as a means to better describe the vision.
