Category Archives: Book Blabs

Book Blab #4: Balancing books on your head

Book Blabs, Uncategorized

This is not a book review, yet it’s related to books. My wife and I have accumulated a lot of books over the years. Three rooms with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves full of books acquired through schooling, second-hand stores, roadside boxes marked ‘Free’, airport kiosks and can’t-miss gifts from family and friends. I’m in my 40s now and I realize that a time is coming when we must downsize our book collection significantly because of our growing family (a child’s room is not an appropriate place to store old college textbooks) and general aesthetic decorum.

Yet, I’m finding it incredibly difficult to part with books. I can’t part with old or new books alike. I agreed that we needed to reduce the book collection, but I asked my wife to run all to-be-discarded books by me first. The typical result: A pile of 10 or so books is reduced to one or two, so progress has been a tad slow. Why is this so hard? I’m a relentless minimalist is other areas of life. I’m quick to part with stuff and my wardrobe is bafflingly small. But for some reason, books are tethered to my psyche.

I’ve thought about this a lot recently and I think it’s a symptom of middle age. First, my school days don’t feel that far in the past, so my affection for my undergraduate and graduate textbooks is still present. In a sense, they represent my younger self during a time when I truly loved the ocean of ideas I swam in. The information in those books is now two decades old. Is it still relevant? Have the ideas and data held up? I can’t be certain but knowing those old ideas, I feel, could still be valuable. The path of ideas through time is always imperfect, tossed around and shaken like panning for gold that, I would argue, often loses some nuggets because the filter is too narrow. When I see my old textbooks, I often think, “Huh, I bet there is something in there that’s applicable to me and my work today.” What have I forgotten? What would inspire me? It’s a bit neurotic, but honestly, when I place a book in a recycling bin or pack it into a box for charity, I have a momentary image of that book being shredded. For older books, that image is almost unbearable. It’s a step closer to extinction for that literary species, and when it’s gone, you likely can’t bring it back. It will be lost to history, lost to study, and lost to humanity. IBM’s Watson database is restricted to sources like PubMed, which only goes back to the late 1940s. The scientists and theorists not represented there were still awfully smart people who thought deeply about their subjects. How much has been lost? Il n’y a de nouveau que ce qui est oublié.

Second, I’m still young enough to think that I’ll one day read the many, many intriguing books on our shelves. I know this is absurd; at the rate I’m going (maybe 10 books a year), I’ll never get through them all, and that’s if I stopped accumulating more books, which is equally absurd. I’ve read Tim Urban’s sobering Wait But Why post that visualizes a lifetime remaining. But which book will the future me pick up and when are open-ended questions that I can’t answer. In a way, the books we hope to read are a reflection of who we hope to become. In another twenty years, I would think that I will more easily give up my academic materials and the thought of years and years of future reading.

The last reason I cannot discard books is that I love being surrounded by them. I love seeing them. Their spines are short visual cues that trigger memories and ideas. I’d hate to lose that in favor of tidiness. Also, I want my young children to grow up surrounded by lots of books too, so they can see the planents of the literary universe close by. The books are a constant reminder that you are free to explore new worlds of characters and ideas. The house I grew up in had perhaps two shelves of books in a den room. You had to seek them out, they were not present. As a result, I’m sure I read much less than I could have as a child. (The first books I remember truly loving were Duane Decker’s young adult baseball fiction and the Doc Savage adventure series – not exactly contemporary stuff in the 1980s. I was anachronistic even back then. ) I’ve never been a hardcore e-book reader. Perhaps it’s a generational thing, but I suspect that it has more to do with my desire to have physical reminders of the places my mind has traveled.

Today I discarded four books: Three old textbooks and a bland novel. I think I need a decision tree to help me with this but the only rule I’ve decided on is: Is the book yours? You can’t toss your wife’s books, that’s for sure.

Book Blab #3: Deep Work, by Cal Newport

Book Blabs

Reading Cal Newport’s book, Deep Work, was a revelation. My copy is now scribbled over and destined to be returned to over and over in the future. I hadn’t heard of the author before reading the book. In fact, in retrospect, I can’t remember why I bought it in the first place, other than to assume that it’s one of many self-help books I have picked in moments of inspiration while browsing. This is a habit I’ve had for years, and I’m not ashamed of it. Have I ever made major transformations to my life, like lost 50 pounds or gotten rich quick? Of course not, but in my view, the constant desire to improve is worth something since it reflects a future optimism that I hope I never lose. Even the sobering reality in the data of our lives hasn’t fully reset my expectations on what I can and cannot (or will never) do. I absolutely subscribe to the view that our books shelves are a physical reflection of our psyche; self-help books are, I hope, the part of me that honestly wants to be better tomorrow than I am today.

Newport’s book concerns our professional selves and the uniquely modern challenge of focusing on important, value-creating work, however that looks in one’s line of work.  Like Newport, who is a university professor, I fall into the category of “knowledge worker”. That is, I’m paid to use my brain, to process and analyze lots of information in a specialized field. Or, as a hiking guide quipped to me years ago, I drive a desk for work. As I see it, basically any white-collar job has the strong aroma of knowledge worker, so I suspect many readers will see aspects of their work lives in Newport’s book. I certainly did, which is one of the reasons I quickly became engrossed. Many, many times did I harrumphed in agreement when Newport discussed counterproductive trends, such as open-plan office spaces or the awful sinkholes that many meetings or email practices represent.  Several times I jotted “Yes! Exactly!” on the margin, dog-earing the page for future reference.

Newport’s book is the first I’ve read that offers both a rationale and a plan of action to reclaim my mental life. It’s given me the hope that I can do more of the fulfilling, scholarly work that I enjoyed as a graduate student and postdoc. If you wish for the quiet thoughtfulness of Maria Popova and yet revere the productive efficiency of Tim Ferriss, then you will find Cal Newport’s book giving voice to your inner feelings, addressing your common work-life battles, and giving you strategies for a counterstrike. Whereas Steven Pressfield’s War of Art is a drill sergeant’s boot kicking you in the behind, Newport’s Deep Work is the captain of the debate team who not only wins your loyalty but also pulls you aside and says, “here’s how I do it…”

The book is divided into two parts; Part 1 argues for the importance of deep work in our lives while Part 2 puts forth rules and strategies to increase the ability to engage in deep work. I confess that I skipped straight to Part 2 after reading the introduction. I didn’t need convincing. I needed help.

In 2003, before I purchased my first cell phone, a close friend of mine convinced me that a mobile phone would “turn down time into productive time”. This was the era before true smartphones, so in that context, what he meant was that he could make calls while in the car, waiting in line, etc. The rapid yet incremental evolution of tech in our lives has chipped away at more and more of our down time, to the point that we fill the spaces with, in my opinion, lots of meaningless distractions. Yes, I often complain to my colleagues that meetings are the illusion of work. True, I never joined Facebook, but in that case, what started as laziness turned into a moral stance borne more from privacy concerns than time management.  I also gave up Twitter late last year, largely because the unavoidable vulgarity of American politics made it unusable for me. I’ve always agreed with whoever said that you didn’t need to read the newspaper because, when big news happened, you heard about it anyway.  I don’t think I’ve missed much. I haven’t been a regular TV watcher since middle school, and though I occasionally watch a movie with my wife, the only media I regularly consume in large volume are podcasts and streamed radio broadcasts of Yankees baseball games. Also, to my credit, I’m generally quite good about not working while at home or on weekends. Yes, I absolutely want to spend quality time with my toddler son and wonderful wife, but I can’t deny the fact that I’m often so drained by my daily computer work that I can’t muster the enthusiasm to flip open my laptop afterhours and stare at another screen. (And because so many of the hobby projects that I want to do, like writing or learning new skills, are greatly aided by using a computer, I never make any progress on them, further sinking my spirits.) Thus, I came into Newport’s book a very motivated pupil.

I loved Newport’s book but this post won’t be much of a formal review. These are my personal Dopplenotes of my takeaways. I’m determined to adopt the DW mindset.

Quick changes I’ve already made:

  • I created a sender filter email that I hope to automatically use to reset expectations on when and how I respond to email requests.
  • I deleted a bunch of social media apps. I rarely used them anyway, but I didn’t want to even see them on my phone anymore for fear that they’d tempt me. I’d argue that Newport’s criticisms of the “any-benefit” approach to social media and networking tools are applicable to e-commerce service as well.
  • I created some custom shortcut keystrokes within Outlook so make the SW of processing emails more efficient. Why I didn’t think to do this before, I have no idea. By the way, I’m now all the way around to the idea that filing emails into distinct folders is pointless. A friend of mine who works at Google told me that their research indicates that email users fall into two categories – filers and pilers. With broad, flexible searching functions, why file away when you can search everything? Evernote users know this, I loved using the now-defunct Google Desktop, and I’m a Gmail user so I should know this too having simply “archived” tens of thousands of email messages. Yet for some reason, I believed that my professional email account had to be organized. A shallow, repetitive task if there ever was one. (Note: yet hard to break, apparently. The compulsion to sort some type of emails persists)

Some of the key changes I plan to make:

  • Spend some time strategizing on what goals and associated tasks should be the focus of my DW. I’ve started thinking about this issue, and it’s pretty tricky actually. What’s the most important work I could do to be successful and for my company to be successful? Between the obvious DW and SW, there’s a lot of gray area. Doing some meta-work and seeking the advice of my work colleagues will be critical here. This applies to my leisure time too, because as Newport points out, one really should have a framework for getting the most out of personal projects as well.
  • Maintain a much higher DW/SW ratio by budgeting SW to no more than 30% of my time. (I did some back of the envelope calculations and my initial daily schedule will include almost 40% SW, so I predict that my colleagues will notice little, if any, change. If my email reduction strategies work, then I should be able to tip the DW/SW balance further in favor of DW. This would make me an aspiring adherent of Newport’s rhythmic philosophy of DW.
    1. Sub-goal #1 – Maintain a visual representation of the number of hours in DW, e.g., a print out of a blank month to X out and/or tally each day’s DW total.
    2. Sub-goal #2 – Experiment with Newport’s “Rooseveltian dashes” to accomplish some DW goals. [This blog point began as a dash, so it seemed to work!]
  • Adopt the fixed-schedule productivity approach, in which I plan in advance, the full daily schedules of each working day. This will take a monumental effort on my part; I’m a poor planner! But I realize that is at the heart of the problem. I’m habitually, continually at the mercy of whatever attention-grabbing SW happens to flow across my desk (my inbox, actually). In addition to better prioritization of tasks, I see the fixed-schedule productivity approach as having another benefit. Combined with the strict SW budget, it creates an incredible validated excuse to decline unwanted intrusions. For example, when a colleague interrupts me with an unscheduled request to join a meeting, I will have a demonstrable written evidence to say that I simply don’t have time in my schedule.
  • Reduce email burden by:
    1. Limiting the number of responses, which should be helped by the sender filter I mentioned above as well as renouncing the obligation to always respond to inbound inquiries. This applies to my co-workers as much as it does to folks outside my company. In fact, I bought copies of Deep Work for everyone in the office; I hope they find benefit in it as I have, but I also want them to understand the rationale for the changes I’m making.
    2. Adopt the process-centric approach to email responses. This will take some effort because it’s natural for me to informal in email exchanges. But I see that it’s incredibly important. The examples Newport gives made me exult in the certitude that I will avoid so many future email traps.
  • Re-organize my office, my desk in particular, to reduce the clutter and prevent distractions. This is more than just Feng Shui. It’s about reducing the number of factors impinging on my limited attentional resources, and as Newport describes, train myself to quickly engage in DW.
  • Spouse-willing, try out the monastic philosophy of DW, perhaps with a Grand Gesture. I’d argue that taking the time and effort to separate oneself and commit to engaging in DW is no different from the time and effort spent going to corporate retreats or professional conferences. Only, I’m willing to bet that a monastic retreat to inhale new ideas and synthesize the learnings is a hell of a lot more valuable than either of the two aforementioned practices, especially for us knowledge workers. And yet, in today’s corporate world, the Think Weeks that Bill Gates is known for are as universally-supported and minimally-practiced as midday napping. I’d like to change that, and I’m absolutely willing to extend the opportunity to my office colleagues.

To read Newport’s book is to understand that embracing DW is a lifestyle choice. It’s a continuous process of refining your work habits and improving your mental discipline (avoid the tempting infotainment sites, combat distractibility by developing sustained attention, etc.). There are many parallels with mindfulness meditation in that it’s both very difficult and requires lots of practice. Yet, like meditation, the practitioner benefits from the practice itself. For me, I don’t want to simply go on an SW diet, like the internet sabbaticals that Newport describes. Rather, I want a healthier DW lifestyle, so I don’t have to resort to crash SW diets to stay sane. But at the outset, when does a diet maintained become a lifestyle? How long will it take? We’ll see. Wish me luck!

Book Blab #1: Spring Chicken by Bill Gifford

Book Blabs

41bOH5Mb-uL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_  Spring Chicken: Stay Young Forever (or Die Trying) by Bill Gifford

I can’t say precisely when I began to shift my reading preferences strongly towards non-fiction, but I suspect it was in graduate school.  It was during that period in my life that, perhaps unwittingly, became more productivity-focused and began a habit of reading to learn. reading several hours a day wasn’t entirely new based on my undergraduate experiences, but the regularity of that pace in graduate school was new. Reading A LOT became a part of daily life, a part that I can still happily re-enact into if the pieces of my current life fall, or rather be forcibly pressed, into place. My reading as graduate student was nearly entirely a part of my overall studies, and the goal of my studies was to learn new ideas and information. I guess I’ve shaken the habit of purposeful reading. I’m guilty of skipping over the short story in nearly every issue of the New Yorker magazine for the past ten years, yet I have surely read hundreds of articles on many topics essentially irrelevant to my life. A first hand account of the Arab Spring? Interesting! A new short story by Zadie Smith? Mmmm….only if I run out of reading material on this cross-country flight.

But Bill Gifford’s new book Spring Chicken falls squarely in the middle of that beautiful Venn diagram of book preferences in my head: non-fiction? Check! Science-related? Check! Science I am personally very interested in? Check!

True story: Even as a boy, I made it a goal to live to 100 years. During sporting events in high school and college, I would crack the joke that I was training for the Senior Olympics; that is, 50 years in advance,  which I guess doesn’t sound so funny now that I’m rapidly approaching middle age and the youngest age bracket is 50 (!) years or older. My father’s side of the family has a great track record for longevity: three of the last four deaths were in the early to mid 90’s. My mother’s side is not so stellar, with early deaths due to heart disease (OK, that’s something I can prevent) and acute myeloid leukemia (ugh, that’s NOT something I can do much about).  But by and large, I have always believed that my good genes plus an active, healthy style (what other generation started exercising and eating right as early as I did?) would certainly get me to the land of centenarians.

My takeaways from the book:

  1. Environment/lifestyle can get you to 80 years old, but genetics gets you to 100 years – This insight, based on research on centenarians, was a major bummer to me. As I described above, I’ve wanted to life to 100 since I was a kid, and I thought/think I’ve done all the right things. I have harbored this feeling that no generation in history had the information I did about human physiology or would have avoided vices, ate as well or exercised as regularly as early on as I have. But if data like GWAS data bears out, and barring any future intervention (such as gene therapy or epigenetic modification), it might mean nothing, and I’ll circle the drain in my 9th decade like so many of my predecessors.
  2. The Baltimore Longitudinal Study of Aging – I’d love to be a part of this! Gifford offers some very funny commentary on his interactions with other participants of “BLAST”, as he refers to it. I’m definitely inclined to the Quantified Self end of the spectrum, so I’m sure I’d find it fascinating to learn about my own cognition and physiology in great detail. That said, one downside of QS sleuthing is the repeated blows leveled against one’s inner sense of exceptionalism; that is, we all feel special on the inside, that we matter so much, that we must be unique in some way. Sadly, I have learned my lesson over and over again that I have the same foibles and deficiencies that all people do. I’m part of the same normal distribution and not a outlier (at least on any measure that I’ve discovered). Nonetheless, QS thinking to me is an aspect of self-actualization, allowing me to understand who I am, how I’m built, and what makes me tick. Traveling to NIH from California every three years seems like an incredible opportunity to enhance that process
  3. Better lipid profiling – In Chapter 6, Gifford discusses cholesterol and lipid profiling. Like most men of a certain age, I’ve done the standard lipid panel performed. But Gifford went one step further, and had a lipidologist perform a “Boston Heart panel” on him, which provided much more granularity on his lipid profile, especially with regards to HDL and LDL particle size. I looked this up, and found that Boston Heart is a company and they offer multiple tests. I assume Gifford was referring to the Boston Heart HDL Map test. I’ve reached out to my physician and I hope to take this test myself. As Gifford describes, LDL particle size is influenced by variations in the gene for cholesteryl ester transfer protein, or CTEP. Though Gifford didn’t explicitly state it, I assume that the genetic variant he sought is one that results in lower CTEP activity/affinity, which results in the larger LDL particle size, which appear to be advantageous for cardiovascular health and aging. I assume this because I know that several pharmaceutical companies have tried to develop or are development CTEP inhibitors for high cholesterol and metabolic disease. Now that I think about it, it wouldn’t take me long to see if there is a SNP for CTEP variants and check my raw data from 23andMe  to see where I stand.
  4. We should be thinking about fat and muscle as “endocrine organs”  and not as inert, structural parts of our anatomy. This area of research is fascinating and, at least with regards to the paradoxical IL-6 discovery that Gifford describes, is bound to keep biologists busy for many years and hold many surprises.
  5. The important role that attitude plays in health span. Perhaps not surprisingly, an optimistic, can-do attitude appears to have a multiplicative effect on several important aspects of aging, such as levels of physical activity, approach to social life, and staying intellectually curious. Even if it doesn’t lengthen life span per se, maintaining a positive attitude I would argue simply makes life better. The key question for me is: What strategies can we employ to supplement our baseline temperament to buffer us from the inevitable setbacks and losses in life? Happy marriage? Meditation? Practicing gratitude?
  6. The Biosphere experiment of the early 1990’s – I vaguely remember this from when I was young, so it was very fun to read Gifford’s account of it. One of his key points, which was new to me, was that it turned out to be a long-term, involuntary experiment of caloric restriction in humans. However, while the health outcomes were quite poor, seemingly contradicting the many animal studies showing health benefits, the experiment was ultimately confounded by the exposure of the Biosphere inhabitants to abnormally high carbon monoxide levels. Yikes! At any rate, Gifford’s account of the episode compelled me to put Jane Poynter’s book The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 on my reading list.
  7. The inherent challenges of simple hormonal replacement therapy, especially testosterone in men – Gifford did a great job recounting the long history of attempts to recapture youth by replacing reintroducing something young into someone old. I’ve long assumed, intuitively, that simple long-term administration of supplemental testosterone isn’t a good idea. First, there are hormonally-driven, androgen-dependent cancers, notably reproductive cancers like prostate cancer. Second, Mother Nature always engineers in feedback mechanisms to maintain homeostasis. Jacking up testosterone levels seems like it would lead to both a decrease in androgen synthesis and decrease in androgen receptors, both of which would lead you worse off (if “low T” is really you’re problem). Knowing what I know, which isn’t very much, I do wonder if short term use or late life use of androgen precursors, to boost production (think L-dopa for dopamine), would have a better risk/benefit profile. If I’m, say, 80 or 85 years old, the risk of dying from prostate cancer is low (it’s a rather indolent disease, until it becomes “castration-resistant” and metastasizes to bone) and the benefit in increased muscle mass and vitality would be high. Then again, the first drugs targeting the myostatin pathway will soon be approved, so there will certainly be other means of opposing atrophy of muscles at least.   Also
    • Also in this vein is Gifford’s discussion of the miraculous parabiosis studies recently reported by groups at Harvard and Stanford. These are incredibly exciting,  yet I must mention that experiments that identified the purported age-reversing plasma factor, GDF11, have been called into question since Gifford’s book was published.
  8. Days of Life App – This app calculates (crudely) the number of days you have left to live and will send you a notification each day of the number of days you have left. Gifford hated it. I love it. To him it was morbid. To me, it’s a reminder of carpe diem or, if you prefer, momento mori. The inimitable Kevin Kelly has written about a similar  life countdown clock. I considered having a similar one built as a gift to myself for my 40th birthday, my official crossing into middle age. The app is a simpler alternative, though as I mentioned above, the days remaining calculation is very simplistic. It’s based solely on your sex, the year you were born, and where you live.

There were a few topics that Gifford didn’t touch on. For example, in a recent podcast, Peter Diamandis, founder of Human Longevity, Inc., stated that VO2Max and flossing are correlated with lifespan. The flossing, as a proxy for oral hygiene, doesn’t surprise me at all. But VO2Max? I hadn’t heard that before, and yet I know that altering VO2Max is very difficult. Gifford didn’t mention the correlation, though say that the BLAST study had determined the VO2Max and maximum heart rate during exercise decrease steadily with age. Perhaps the atrophy and hardening, the loss of “elasticity” that Gifford describes, is related to Diamandis’s assertion. This sound like a job for PubMed…..