The Daily Recall

Hey friend,

In this episode, I explain two principles you can use to improve any technical system and show how similar are a pack pencils, a paragraph of text, Amazon book store, and a web page.

There’s no transcript for this episode, so either give it a listen or watch the video version here.

Happy Wednesday,-Vasili

Hey friend,

In this episode, I explain how to write a diary that your future self will benefit from having.

There’s no transcript for this episode, so either give it a listen or watch the video version here.

Enjoy your Tuesday,-Vasili

Hey friend,

In this episode, I explain my system of language learning that can help you start thinking in English instead of translating.

If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here. If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.

Welcome to The Daily Recall show. I'm your host, Vasili.

Today you will learn one simple trick that can help you become a native English speaker.

I think that most people think about language learning wrong. They start taking classes, read text books, and go to English clubs. That’s how you can get some baseline but it won’t help you to become a native speaker. You keep translating stuff in your head.

Real language learning comes down to one simple metric; how many times you think thoughts in a language that you're trying to learn. And the key to learning English - and any language - is to optimize for this metric as much as you can. This optimization boils down to a simple question - how many times a learning method prompts you to think in English.

Traditional learning methods don’t offer much on this front. If you sit in a class with twenty other dudes and occasionally raise your hand, that’s not how you get many opportunities for thinking in English. And you have this torturous homework to deal with.

Here're some better methods:

* Start taking notes in English; this will prompt you to think in English each time you need to write something down

* Write a diary

* Change your default phone language to English

* Read books

* Watch movies

* Get a job where you have to communicate in English

Whenever you don’t understand a word, don’t look for a translation. Try to understand what it means from the context or go ahead and read the definition of this word from the vocabulary. But do not translate; that’s how you keep building this habit of thinking through translating that prevents you from becoming fluent.

To recap -

Language learning comes down to how many times you think in the language that you're trying to learn. The best way to learn a language is to design an environment that prompts you to think in this language. This approach is way more efficient than any other approach out there because it naturally integrates into your life. When you take an English class three times a week, that thing is actually artificial, and your nature will fight against that. But if you integrate these thinking prompts as routines into your daily life and keep them simple, you will do great.

Thanks very much for reading and see you tomorrow.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hey friend,

In this episode, you will learn how to start reading 1.8k books a year by spending just 25 minutes a day.

If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here. If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.

Welcome to The Daily Recall show. I'm your host, Vasili.

Today you will learn how and why to read five books a day.

When most people think about reading, they think of taking a book, diving in, struggling to figure out what the author is talking about, etc.

When I think about reading, I think of it backwards from the purpose of the process.

The purpose of reading is learning. This means that it doesn’t matter how many books you read; the only thing that matters is how much you learn from them.

The quality of your learning depends on the quality of the material you learn from. Given your reading capacity of 10 books per year and five million books out there it's really dumb to read from cover to cover; you need more options to choose from.

My approach is to scroll a bunch of books every day and read for understanding only what sparks my curiosity. It takes a few minutes to understand if a book is interesting enough to keep reading it; and you can do that by downloading a free sample from Amazon - no need to buy a bunch of books.

And you can do that in a car, when waiting in line, etc. Remember - you're not learning yet. Curiosity works differently than understanding; it's like seeing a girl for the first time. You either like her or not; you don’t think about that proactively - "oh is she pretty or not?"

Here's some math. It takes 2-5 minutes to scroll a sample of one book. 20 minutes a day. This gives you 1.8k books in a year to choose from instead of 10 that you'd otherwise read cover to cover.

Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow.

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi friend,

In this episode, you will learn how to adapt to having no energy and win the time back by doing low energy work that has to be done anyways.

If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here. If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.

Welcome to The Daily Recall show. I'm your host, Vasili.

This is the last day of a three-day series on how to get more done by managing your energy levels.

In Part 1: Prevent, I explained how to prevent the problem from happening in the first place; how to always have a ton of energy. In Part 2: Fix, I outlined what you can do to get your energy back during the day.

Today I will cover how you can adapt to this problem if you're not able to fix it.

When you're in a low energy state, you can still do work.

And the best thing you can do is to take care of things that you have to do anyways.

Buy groceries. Take the trash out. Clean up your place. Because that’s how you can win the time back. If you have to do this work anyways, then by doing it when it matches your lowest energy state you're actually winning back time because you won’t have to deal with this stuff in the future when you will have lots of energy.

But there’s a problem.

When you find yourself in a low energy state, it's hard to figure out what kind of things you can take care of because you can’t think well. You need to have already thought.

I recommend you keeping a "brain gone" list of things you can do when you find yourself in a low energy mode.

Stuff like: process invoices, take the trash out, do house cleaning, do groceries - anything that doesn’t require energy but has to be done.

Another option would be to do nothing. Rest. It's always a great option. You also get to recharge your mind by doing that and you will have more energy tomorrow.

To recap -

If you find yourself struggling with having no energy during the day and Part 2: Fix advice didn’t help, then you need to adapt. Take care of the low energy work that has to be done anyways. This will enable you to win the time back because when you get to a high energy mode again you won’t have to waste precious time on doing this low energy stuff.

Take care and have more energy!

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hey friend,

In this episode, you will learn what to do if you find yourself having no energy during the day and need to recharge.

If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here. If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.

Welcome to The Daily Recall show. I'm your host, Vasili.

Today is the day two of our three day series on how to get more done by managing your energy levels.

Yesterday, I covered how to prevent the problem from happening in the first place. You can do that by asking the opposite question, what should you do to have no energy at all, and then flipping back the answers. Then you can work through that list to always have high energy state.

But s**t happens. You will have travel and just "bad days". So what should you do to get unstuck and return to your productive state?

The first step is to realize that you’re stuck.

This is what I struggle with the most. It's really hard to understand when this is happening to you and distinguish being stuck from just not being able to solve a problem or work on a task at hand.

That’s why it's good to have metrics and take notes. Whenever I start on a big task, like writing a post, I write it down - "11:05 pm - started writing a draft for my stay fit for life essay." Not only this helps to deal with procrastination through intention design and micro planning (people who write down their plans for next hour are 20-30% more likely to stick to them) but it also provides a time parameter that I can use to realize if I’m not moving forward. So if I find myself working on something for longer than 10 or 15 mins and not making any progress and mind starts feeling foggy, that's a good sign that I might be entering - or have already entered - a low energy territory. And if I start feeling foggy or physically uncomfortable then it's also a good indicator.

The second step is to run a procrastination check-up.

Very often what I think is low energy mode is actually "don’t know how to do this s**t" mode. A good way to check yourself is to set up a timer for 10 mins and promise yourself that you will stop doing the thing after 10 mins if you feel just as bad. Timer works because procrastination arises from an area of your brain called the insular cortex which highlights whenever you get to do (or even think about doing) something unpleasant or hard. So it's always a good idea to check yourself for procrastination first - and this actually trains yourself to be more persistent and gamifies the problem; instead of thinking "oh I gotta finish this assignment by tomorrow" you start thinking "how much of it I can do in ten mins if I can stop after ten mins anyways?"

But if you’ve gone through both steps - identified that you’ve been sitting here not making progress for twenty minutes and did a procrastination 10 mins checkup - and the problem is still there; now it's time for big guns.

The first thing you need to do after identifying the problem is to accept it.

This is hard because acceptance lowers your ego. One thing that helps is knowledge; if you know that you're not accepting yourself being a failure and not knowing how to solve this but actually accepting the way your body and mind works, then it's way easier to do it. And acceptance is important because otherwise you'll not be able to solve it. You'll be sitting at your desk for hours and trying to break a brick wall by hitting your head against it over and over again.

There are three things you can do to fix this state:

* First, just go out for a walk. This is what I do whenever I find myself struggling during the day. I stop doing whatever I’m doing, stand up, get my shoes on, and just go for a 10 to 20 min walk. This change in the environment helps to switch your thinking modes; from the focused mode (when your neurons are really close to each other) to the diffuse mode (when you're not thinking about anything in particular). Another aspect of it is to get some sun exposure; I don’t know how exactly it works but getting out of the building and walking to some small park nearby and enjoying the sunshine and fresh air for five minutes does wonders (look up Japanese forest bathing phenomena if you’re interested). One things that helps here is to not change your clothes and be always ready in 30 seconds to go out; if you make it easy for yourself to take a walk, you will do it more often.

* Second, do the coffee-nap-shower combo. Fix yourself a double espresso, take a 40 mins nap, and take a cold shower right after you wake up. Works like magic for me whenever I’m traveling or had insufficient sleep for some reason. I fix myself a cup of strong espresso (>= 2 shots) and also have two or three pieces of 100% organic Ecuador Venchi chocolate. Then I immediately go for a nap. I fall asleep for about 40 to 60 minutes (get some eye mask or ear plugs if you need them) and then I wake up right after the caffeine starts working. And then I go ahead and take a contrast shower to impose some short-term stress on my body.

* Third, workout. I do a 30-50 min HIIT workout and it does wonders. So whatever works for you - running, HIIT, etc. - anything of high intensity to pump up some blood will be incredibly useful here.

Just to recap -

Realize that you're stuck, check up for time effort and procrastination, accept the problem, and deal with it. Go for a walk, do the coffee-nap-shower thing, or workout - whatever you prefer. But don’t let you precious high energy time slip.

Tomorrow, I will explain how to win your time back when this stuff doesn’t help.

Take care,Vasili

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hey friend,

In this episode, you will learn how to prevent the problem of having no energy to do great work.

If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here. If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.

Welcome to The Daily Recall show. I'm your host, Vasili.

Today you will learn how to get more done by managing your energy levels.

In the past couple of decades we’ve come to work from anywhere and anytime. Location and time are not the constraints anymore. You always have internet access and can do great work from your phone. The problem is lack of energy.

The best way to approach the energy problem is to prevent it from happening in the first place. To always have lots of energy.

Let’s think backwards and ask the opposite question:

What should you do to have no energy at all?

The question itself is more useful than any advice you will pick up from this video. Because you can apply it to yourself instead of picking up stuff that worked for me.

For example, if I tell you to wake at five am every morning to have more energy, that’d be a terrible advice. Because I have no idea what your circadian rhythm is. And if you’re a late person and begin waking up early, you'll be fighting your own biology. But if you ask yourself this inverted question, then you'll figure out a bunch of things that make you less energetic and then you can work through that list to prevent them from happening. It's that easy.

Anyways, I will share a list of energy suckers that you might find yourself struggling with as well. Just don’t take it for granted and always think for yourself before applying this advice.

So what should you do to have no energy at all to perform great work?

* Do work that you hate doing. If you just follow this advice, I guarantee you will have no energy at all. You will procrastinate all the time. So that’s a good start.

* Eat badly. If you screw up your nutrition, you will screw up your energy levels. So just eat the stuff that makes you feel terrible the next day. Drink too much alcohol. And you will have no problem at all with having no energy.

* Never exercise and never do any physical activity of any kind. Just sit in your chair all day long. That’s a great way to have no energy because if you do not impose short term stress, which is called hormesis, on yourself, then your muscles deteriorate over time. And that’s how you come to have no energy because your physiology is connected to how much energy you have. So that’s a good one as well; never exercise.

* Sleep badly. You have probably noticed this for yourself. If you have a couple nights of insufficient sleep, then you quickly realize how screwed you are. You can’t lift a finger without filling yourself with coffee.

* Drink too much coffee. If you drink 5 or 7 cups a day, your energy levels will be unstable. You will always feel either pumped or drained. So if you want to have no stable high energy levels, just drink too much coffee.

* Always be worried, anxious, and emotionally unstable. For example, you had a really intense conversation with your girlfriend last night. And now you keep thinking about this stuff all day long. And instead of writing the thing down to deal with it later you keep coming back to this thought over and over again. Purging your working memory. That’s an especially good one because you will have no focus as well.

* Always do deadline-based work and keep your calendar full of meetings. Working under a deadline imposes constant stress on you so you will have no problem with having no energy.

* Never write anything down. Have the same thought over and over again. That’s how you easily get to zero energy levels because your working memory will be overloaded with all this stuff that's flowing at you. You will end up having no good thoughts and will be stressed all the time because of all this cognitive load that comes through your head.

* Never decide. Whenever you not decide on any decision that is right in front of you, you actually decide to not decide. Psychologists call this decision fatigue. And the more you keep snoozing the decision, the more energy it will suck up from you.

Just to recap -

The best way to solve the energy problem is to prevent it from happening. You can approach this problem by asking the opposite question - what should you do to have no energy at all. When you get your answers, just flip them back - ie a negative prescription "sleep badly to have no energy" turns into a positive advice of "get sufficient sleep to have stable energy levels during the day." Enrich this list by adding more things that make you energetic and you'll be ready to deal with this energy problem by preventing it.

Tomorrow, I will cover how to fix the energy problem. It's 3:07 pm and you find yourself in a "brain gone" mode - what should you do to fix that state and come back to your high performance mode?

See you tomorrow!

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hi friend,

In this episode, you will learn how to discover new knowledge by looking for principles behind the facts and leveling up through the knowledge tiers.

If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here. If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.

Welcome to The Daily Recall show. I'm your host, Vasili.

Today you will learn how to discover new knowledge by identifying principles behind the facts.

I’ll begin with a story.

Yesterday morning, I was standing in line to grab my coffee. There was a girl in front of me getting a cappuccino with almond milk. She was staring at a blueberry cake behind the glass and smacking her lips. There were many blueberry cakes, some chocolate ones, and one piece of carrot cake left. But the waitress was smart. She said: "Oh you know we’ve got this very last piece of carrot cake left - would you like some?" The girl grabbed the bait and went to enjoy her morning coffee with the last piece of carrot cake.

That's an example of a fact you can pick up from the world. You get to see many such things during the day - and you can also read them in books or hear in a conversation.

But when you make an observation like that - that the girl changed her mind when the waitress told her about the very last cake left - the very next thing you should do to discover new knowledge is to ask is there any principle behind this fact. In my carrot cake story, she decided for some reason to change her mind and go for this carrot cake instead of of other options. Why did she do that?

By answering this "why" question about why something happened, you get to uncover a principle; that people are more willing to purchase something when less is available. Scarcity increases perceived value by suggesting the popularity of an item. So whenever you see something - the last movie ticket left or the last piece of carrot cake - you’re tempted to buy it because of the fear of missing out and because of the increased perceived value of an object - ie "this stuff must be good if they sold everything!" (For those folks who know economics - there are other reasons as well but I keep it simple here)

That’s how you level up to the principle behind the fact. This conceptual knowledge is way more interesting because you can start thinking - "ok I’ve got this carrot cake thing but are there any other applications of the principle?" You get to think for yourself instead of picking up facts from someone else.

Principles are also easier to remember because they swallow facts. Whenever you uncover a principle behind the fact; the fact becomes just a part of it. This means there are other applications of this principle in the world. And whenever you stumble upon one, you'll get to remember the principle as well and enrich your understanding of it.

But let’s come back to our carrot cake story.

Once you’ve got the principle, you can start climbing up the knowledge ladder.

Because when you realize that scarcity impacts purchasing behavior you can’t help but start thinking about other things that influence purchasing behavior as well. You go up a little bit and ask: "ok I’ve got this scarcity principle but are there any other things that impact how people buy stuff?" That’s how you can easily arrive to understand the price-value idea; that people treat expensive goods as higher quality ones even thought most of the times this is not the case at all. This principle drives a lot of purchasing behavior in humans. And then if you put two and two together, you can understand that by producing tremendously overpriced scarce goods we can actually have a good business because that’s how people buy stuff - think of Rolex or Bentley here.

But you can go up even more. Just ask: "hey this is how people buy stuff but buying is just one of the decisions that we make in life right?" - and you will arrive to a whole new land of what determines how humans decide in general. Humans decide to sell things. Humans decide to marry other humans. Humans decide to fire people, to hire people - there are thousands of different decisions that we make.

And you can jump back and forth between levels and enrich your understanding and grow your conceptual knowledge that way.

Just to recap -

You stumble upon knowledge gems every day. But gems don’t come as diamonds; they’re unpolished and dirty when you first discover them. Your goal is to always look for principles behind the facts and level up your conceptual knowledge tiers. That’s how you get to discover new knowledge and think new thoughts.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your week!

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hey friend,

In this episode, I explain how to live a good life by starting from the opposite question - what makes a terrible one.

If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here. If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.

Welcome to The Daily Recall show. I'm your host, Vasili.

Today you will learn how to think backwards.

Thinking backwards helps you solve a problem of any complexity by inverting the question.

Let’s take a really complex problem as an example - how to live a good life. Many people struggle with figuring it out.

But if you ask the opposite question - how to live a bad life - things get much easier. You can get even more narrow by asking: "What should I be doing to live a terrible life?"

Answers start popping up in your head immediately. Have no money. Have no love. Be lonely. And so on.

So just by inverting the question, we just got a much easier problem to solve.

And then when you get a bunch of those answers to the inverted question - you just flip them back. That’s how you get an immediate list of ideas on what makes a good life - wealth, love, friends, etc.

And you can apply it to pretty much everything. From "what's the meaning of life" type of problems to daily things that you gotta do at work.

Thanks for reading and enjoy your week!

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Hey friend,

In this episode, you will learn how to improve a technical system by inverting the function of its components (and how to make a better greenhouse).

If you prefer watching, you can find the YouTube video here. If reading is your thing, then enjoy the transcript below.

Welcome to The Daily Recall show. I'm your host, Vasili.

Today you will learn how to improve the efficiency of a system by inverting one or more of its parameters.

Let's say you've got a pack of pencils. The function of this system is to draw things.

You can improve the efficiency of the whole pack if you add an object to the system which does the opposite action than the object that is already present. A pencil helps you draw things; create lines on paper. The opposite would be to erase lines. So you can add an eraser to the pack.

Now you've got a pack of pencils with an eraser.

And that's a much more useful pack of pencils because it's hard to make a good drawing without errors; and now you can not only draw but correct and erase stuff.

Another example would be a greenhouse.

Let's say you've got a greenhouse and you need to improve the efficiency of the greenhouse somehow.

The way to do that is to have half plants that produce oxygen and half that consume oxygen. By adding plants that consume oxygen instead of producing it you increase the efficiency of the greenhouse because it becomes symbiotic. Plants complement each other.

That's how you improve systems by inverting what their parts do. You take a look at what’s in there and figure out a way to invert one of the system's components to perform an opposite function.

Thanks for reading and see you tomorrow!

This transcript has been edited for clarity.