This week on Winning In Life, Angus Pryor the Practice Growth Specialist will be sharing with you about how well do you know yourself.
Now, I’ve got to pose you this question, how well do you know you? A mentor of mine, Tai Lopez says that what we need to become is learning machines. For us to be more successful in life, we’ve got to learn what works for us. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. You see, it seems to me that our lives, we live somewhere between what the conventional wisdom is and what our personal circumstances are.
And I, in the past have been guilty of spending too long, living in the conventional wisdom rather than figuring out what actually works for me. Now, I’ll give you some examples. There was a woman in the UK, this is in the Guinness Book of Records, who was particularly partial to these sort of salted snacks, something like a Cheezel or a Twisty or something.
In fact, that’s all she ate as an adult. I’m not kidding. It’s in the Guinness Book of Records. She would go on holidays with her suitcase filled with packets of this, whatever this salted snack was and her body was able to cope quite okay. So the conventional wisdom, eat lots of fruit and veg and all that sort of stuff and she’s a total outlier. Now I’m not saying you should do that.
Well, here’s another one for you. What about caffeine? How does that affect your sleep? The truth is I just read a book by Michael Mosley called Sleep Better. Now, in drug terms, they have something called a half-life, which is how long does it take for half of the drug to get out of your body, half-life. And so for caffeine, for most people, their half-life is four hours, which means if you drink a coffee, four hours later, half of the caffeine is going to be out of your body.
Here’s a thing. The half-life for the population varies between half an hour and nine hours. Now my wife is definitely on the long side. If she has a coffee after lunch, she’ll barely be able to sleep, but for me, I reckon I’m down the other end of the scale. I think I could have a coffee at nine o’clock at night and it wouldn’t impact my sleep at all. How well do you know you?
The other one, which is really interesting for me is around sort of how you manage your weight. Now I’d read a few books, I’d read The Fasting Book, I’d read Tim Ferriss’s book, The Four Hour Body and I tried a particular technique that I used in it and I did it for years and did it work for me? No, it didn’t. And then both of my kids said, dad, you need to track what you’re eating, using that MyFitnessPal app. And I’ve done that and
I’ve lost six kilos. I’m, as of today, a normal body mass index and I’ve lost six kilos in about three months or two months or something. How well do you know you? It’s that, I would say start with a conventional wisdom and then do a little experiment, be a learning machine. Just for two weeks I’m going to try something, test it every day, at the end of the two weeks, did it work? If so, keep going. If it didn’t, try another experiment and off you go.