This morning I did not want to get up at 5:30 and swim. My bed was warmer and cozier than anything that awaited me outside. In that moment, cold + wet equaled "nope." I had the thought, "It's my birthday week – shouldn't I be able to cheat?" But I have a superpower. I can see the future. And I knew that in about two hours, I would look back on that moment in one of two ways: 1) "I totally did that workout and I'm stoked!" or 2) "I'm lazy and I suck." Then what would I have to offer my family, clients, and friends today?
My superpower programs my anterior mid cingulate cortex (aMCC), the part of my brain that researchers call "the network hub in the brain that performs the cost/benefit computations necessary for tenacity."
Every time I make up my mind to do something no matter what (tenacity), or not to do something no matter what (willpower), I strengthen my aMCC. Cold plunge? Ugh – and I'm totally doing it anyway. Extra work out? Argh – bring it. Read on to understand why the "ughs" and "arghs" are actually helpful.
(And please hang in there with me, because this sort of thing can go all Goggins-y bro brah in a hurry. I empathize with everyone who struggles to do a hard thing or shift a habituated behavior – this isn't about overcoming everything, it's about taking care of ourselves in ways that help focus our attention and build our capacity to thrive.)
The reason I'm sharing this here today is that everyone has an aMCC, and tenacity/willpower is essential to learning and growing, and every time we do something that engages our aMCC we not only become more confident and look back on our performance with positive regard, but our brain actually strengthens its ability to respond. By challenging yourself to do the hard thing – which, by the way (apologies to my positive psychology friends) you can absolutely hate the whole time (so hang on to the "ughs" and "arghs" if that's what's true for you) – you are building your capacity.
So, long snooze button story short, I dragged myself out of bed. And I was immediately rewarded. Not only is it two hours later, and I do feel great that I started my birthday week with 2600 yards in the pool, but I was just one step out the front door when Mother Nature said, "Good morning! I know it's late, but here's the first snow of the year on San Jacinto Peak. You're welcome. Now get in the pool."
What have you done recently that made you feel victorious? Drop me a line – I’m curious!
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Here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.
What I’m Econ 101ing –
The chicken or the AI. As you may have noticed, “Egg prices are climbing to new record highs daily.” I used to love eggs, and then I started considering substitutes like apple sauce, chia, bananas, flax, aquafaba, yogurt, and others. They were cheaper and I didn’t have as many questions about their contents or processing. But now that we have drunken sailors steering the U.S.S. Health Policy into the shallows, and the escalating bird flu crisis has affected 13 million birds in the last 30 days alone, the $50 omelette might not be far off.
In another set of headlines that flips the script on Silicon Valley and American capitalism, Chinese AI company DeepSeek is apparently outperforming Google, Meta, and OpenAI for a fraction of the cost. Their methodology is as interesting as their accomplishments. I suppose it stands to reason that an organization which excels at open source culture and practice will produce a learning technology that gathers and synthesizes more information faster and more effectively, wherever they’re located.
Forbes reports: “DeepSeek’s commitment to open-source models is democratizing access to advanced AI technologies, enabling a broader spectrum of users, including smaller businesses, researchers and developers, to engage with cutting-edge AI tools. This accessibility fosters increased innovation and contributes to a more diverse and vibrant AI ecosystem. By promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing, DeepSeek empowers a wider community to participate in AI development, thereby accelerating progress in the field. Moreover, DeepSeek’s open-source approach enhances transparency and accountability in AI development.”
What I’m Reading by Listening –
This one needs some context. I used to listen to audiobooks when I commuted 40 minutes each way to work (my favorite was Simon Winchester’s The Man Who Loved China), but I don’t anymore, which is slightly ironic, since I started the LIT AF podcast as annotated classic audiobooks. But last week my wife got nervous about a training ride I had on the calendar – in these dark days of distracted drivers I only bike on the road with friends, based on a variety of irrational assumptions, but on this particular morning they had to bow out. So I pedaled the stationary bike in our garage. For three hours. After a few minutes of fiddling with songs and podcasts, I realized I had just enough time to finish a whole book at 1.5x speed, so I listened to Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals. Oliver has written some good stuff on topics that are near and dear to me, like time and happiness, and he’s not an academic, which probably accounts for his straightforward, conversational style. Kirkus Reviews called the book, “A liberating and humane exploration of ways to escape the trap of perfectionism and step into a happier, more productive life.” Full disclosure: I often read (or listen) to books like this because I want to know what people think passes for wisdom these days, and, almost as often, their over simplistic, rah rah pseudo-philosophies and “steps that worked for someone famous but will never help the average reader” make me want to puke. (En route to Oliver I listened to Jim Murphy’s Inner Excellence for about 38 seconds before realizing OMG is our culture hurting but… no.) In this book, I found myself appreciating Burkeman’s premise – that we ought to be operating from sanity rather than striving for sanity.
What I’m Reading (in print) –
I don’t know if I need this book, but I wanted to learn more about the nuts and bolts of AI, and Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning by Robert (Munro) Monarch was highly recommended by a computer scientist I respect, so here I go… From the publisher’s website: “Most machine learning systems that are deployed in the world today learn from human feedback. However, most machine learning courses focus almost exclusively on the algorithms, not the human-computer interaction part of the systems. This can leave a big knowledge gap for data scientists working in real-world machine learning, where data scientists spend more time on data management than on building algorithms. Human-in-the-Loop Machine Learning is a practical guide to optimizing the entire machine learning process, including techniques for annotation, active learning, transfer learning, and using machine learning to optimize every step of the process.”
What I’m Celebrating –
Today I am grateful for a movie maker who made me see things in a different way: R.I.P. David Lynch. As Los Angeles Magazine writer Lina Lecaro put it, “The entertainment world lost one of the greatest visionaries of our time, a vanguard writer, director and producer whose film and television work can and has been lovingly described by every word synonymous with “weird”— freaky, quirky, unorthodox, alternative, boundary-breaking. But David Lynch’s output was so much more too, daring viewers to look at the world from unconventional perspectives, often dark, sometimes silly, always provocative.”
Blue Velvet came out when I was in high school. My friends and I caught a late night screening at a theater in Hollywood and I’m pretty sure none of us have been the same since. Dennis Hopper. Dean Stockwell. Isabella Rossellini. Laura Dern. That ear. Kyle McLachlan continued to walk with us through Lynch’s world between helpings of pie and coffee in Twin Peaks, which came out when I was an undergraduate at UCLA. Man oh man, we couldn’t wait for the next episode – it was so fun to dissect the symbolism and make guesses about foreshadowing in those wonderful days before “binge watching” was a thing. But if I had to pick one piece of evidence to reaffirm my belief in humanity’s creative, quirky side – elevated to high art by amazingly simple, even bad drawing of one image that never changed except for dark – and the reason I discovered Blue Velvet and all the rest of David Lynch’s movies and TV shows, it would be his comic that I ran across in the LA Reader sometime around 1984: The Angriest Dog in the World.
Quotes I’m pondering —
Every morning, even before I open my eyes, I know I am in my bedroom and my bed. But if I go to sleep after lunch in the room where I work, sometimes I wake up with a feeling of childish amazement — why am I myself? What astonishes me, just as it astonishes a child when he becomes aware of his own identity, is the fact of finding myself here, and at this moment, deep in this life and not in any other. What stroke of chance has brought this about?
– Simone de Beauvoir
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David Preston
Educator & Author
Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE
Header image: “San Jacinto Peak” by David Preston
