This kind of dumbstruck me. Most people would probably not think of it, I imagine, but I've always had crazy sleeping cycles. Is the time of the day dependant on the time you get up? For example, if you get up at 8AM, it's clearly morning. But if I get up at 6PM, as I did yesterday, then 6PM is, relatively, morning. And when I go to bed shortly after sunrise the next day, it is, relatively, evening. I always imagined my body would start its internal clock when I got up. But I think now that's not the case.  I feel most productive in the early morning, maybe between midnight and 8AM. This is independent on my time of awakening. When I got up at 5AM every day for two weeks earlier this year, I felt really great and got a lot of things done in the few hours I had before everyone else got up.  But then I remembered that this was also the case if I got up in the evening and stayed awake the whole night. I would get up, eat a big dinner (breakfast?), watch movies and hang around till midnight or 1AM, depending on when other people would go to bed. Then, on my own, I would start getting productive and going into that "nightly flow". I wrote most of my book in that time. And I code best at night and in the early morning. This came to my mind today while I was shopping. Being on the Warrior Diet at the moment, my goal is to have "one big meal a day only, preferably in the evening". And indeed I have it in the evening - around 6PM to 9PM most days. But this is only a few hours after I get up! I was not sure if it was cheating, since it felt just like the Warrior Diet "normally" felt. This seems to be the "sharpest" time for me. When I sleep naturally, e.g. without an alarm clock, my sleep cycles change a lot. Sometimes I get up extremely early, sometimes I go to bed in the morning. But almost never do I sleep more than a few hours between midnight and 8AM. No matter WHEN I sleep, 0:00 to 8:00 is always my best time.

I wrote a guest post on the Supercool School blog. If you don't know what Supercool School is: they provide virtual classrooms via internet, microphone and webcam. Everyone can open one of these classrooms and become a teacher on any subject he or she likes. And everyone with an internet connection can join as a student and learn. This might just be the revolution that education today needs.

Yesterday I puked again. This time in the morning while eating my second bite of a banana. I also couldn't sleep two nights in a row, laying in bed for over 10 hours, trying to get a rest. It doesn't feel like it's related to the Warrior Diet, but I'm not sure.

Nothing special. Somewhat suspicious of vegetables now, I ate noodles (do you say noodles? pasta sounds so aristocratic!) with tomato sauce and beans today. Before that only my usual fruit-shake. I eat my only meal between 18:00 and 22:00. This sounds like evening at first glance, as the Warrior Diet intends me to. But: I wake up around mid-noon and go to bed when it's starting to get bright outside. So it's only really lunch for me, not dinner. On the other hand, I don't really eat anything after that aside from nuts. It may count.

That went well. I don't know what the cause was, but about 2-3 hours after eating dinner I started to feel really bloated. Then I spent the night over the toilet, throwing up at least 5 times. I don't think it's the Warrior Diet's fault, since I've done it before without puking. I didn't eat THAT much food either, so maybe some of the food was bad. I was eating vegetable stew. The bad part is that I can't go near vegetables now without thinking I'll have to puke. Today was pasta and canned tomatoes only.

I've eaten vegan since about christmas. Unfortunately I still ate lots on unhealthy foods and drank a lot of coke. So I actually gained weight. So this month I decided to give the Warrior Diet another try. I first tried this about two years ago and really liked it, but then I quit because it was kind of a weird thing to do. Eating vegan is already pretty weird, so I'm giving it another try. Hopefully my resistance to others peoples opinions has increased by now.

What is the Warrior Diet?

It's about the coolest sounding diet ever. Essentially you don't eat anything but fruit or vegetables all day until dinner. Then you eat a really big meal. The reasoning behind this is as follows: when you're hungry, you get things done and are focused. When you've eaten, you're content and tired. Being hungry gives you energy, eating takes up energy. Of course in the long term you gain energy by eating, that's why you eat a lot in the evening. This actually works. Being hungry is used as a metaphor for energetic people for a reason. Being hungry MAKES you energetic. The warrior diet is not devised especially for plant-only meals, but I intend keeping it that way. Most of the things the creator recommends are fresh fruit and vegetables anyway. The only reason for animal product he mentions is "complete protein", and I'll get mine from beans and nuts.

But doesn't the body need energy during the day?

Yes it does. And it uses the stored energy eaten the evening before. It's a buffered approach to diet.  It's actually recommended to eat fruits and vegetables during the day, best in form of juice. I'll just continue making my fruit shakes and drink them during the day, then prepare a big meal in the evening.   I'm curious to see how the Warrior Diet works for me this time. I've always wanted to be less of a pussy and more of a warrior. Maybe this helps ;-)

I just watched Zeitgeist Addendum. It's about four things:

1. The monetary system doesn't work FOR us, but AGAINST us
2. Big companies do evil things to foreign countries for profit
3. What a better society can look like
4. Everything is evolving and we're all part of it (as opposed to static knowledge and beliefs and competitiveness)

The monetary system is broken by design

A better society

Today I'd like to tell you about TaskPaper. TaskPaper is a very neat, little to-do list for the Mac. In fact it's so little it never gets in the way. It doesn't load - at least you never have to wait for it. And it doesn't really let you do more than write up what you want to do. But that's exactly the beauty of it. I tried using some GTD tools and fancy AJAX online todo management systems, and they're just too complicated. What I want to do is open it, type my stuff up and close. Then, later, I want to open it and read what I typed earlier. That's basically it.     There's also the possibility to group your tasks and add GTD-like contexts (@home, @work) to tasks. But the thing that really sets TaskPaper apart from all the other crap is that it's so clean and it really doesn't do ANYthing but list your tasks.   [caption id="attachment_92" align="alignnone" width="300" caption="Clean like a piece of unused toilet paper."][/caption] This is the top of my current TaskPaper-List.

1. To the left is the overview of my categories. You can see that the first entries correspond to the captions of my actual list.
2. To the right there are several categories, each with several tasks. The categorie captions can be found on the overview to the left.
3. Every task has a little dash in front of it. Click the dash, and the task is crossed out. Like the 4th entry in my first category, which means I payed my rent. Later you can choose to archive all the crossed out tasks and they'll be moved to the bottom of the list in a category called "archive".

I just finished "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a pretty good book. Outliers refers to people who achieve the most in their profession, e.g. Bill Gates or Robert Oppenheimer or the Beatles. It's basically about how they got to be the best of the very best. As a preface, I was a bit disappointed. I was kind of hoping for a How-To-Be-A-Success-Manual, and this isn't one. It's more of an analysis. It is very interesting though, and it sheds some light on things I always suspected. And on some I'd never expected. Let me dispel some common myths just in the beginning: talent doesn't do shit, and there is no "self-made man". So here is my conclusion of the book.

Accumulating Advantage

The first part really surprised me. Sports is fair game, right? The most talented and most hard-working kids get selected for the best teams, and eventually they're the All-Stars of their profession.  Wrong. Kids get chosen as "the best" when they're very young. There is a cut-off date for every year. Being born at the beginning of a new year gives the kid a big advantage: being 11 months older than someone at age 8 makes a big difference in strength and intelligence. If you're 3% stronger than your competitor, you'll get better training. Then you'll be 5% ahead. The coaches will give you more attention, 10%. You'll make the better team, 15%. You'll play more often, 20%. And so on. And some day, after the many years to make it to the top of ANYTHING, you'll really BE better. Because you had a small advantage in the beginning that got bigger and bigger. Meaning: as long as there is one cut-off date per year, and it's before, say, the age of 10 (depending on the sport, of course), the game is rigged. School is rigged! If you're born on the day before the cut-off, you're almost an entire year younger than your competitors. Here in Germany, kids are pre-selected by teachers to go to either good, bad or ugly high-school at the age of 9 or 10. Totally rigged. I'd never thought of this, but it makes total sense. Evaluating kids so early on is just stupid and such an arbitrary way of cheating. 10,000 Hours It takes 10,000 hours to become a master. No matter what your talent, how stupid you are or what your profession/game/skill. The Beatles played for 10,000 before they became famous. They'd actually play on stage for 8 hours at a time in Hamburg for months at a time. World-class violinists practised 10,000 hours. If you practice something for 10,000 hours, you're good. No matter what. There is no talent involved; nobody skips the 10,000 hours. And nobody who really puts them in fails to make it. Of course, putting 10,000 hours into any single thing takes a lot of will, discipline and opportunity. More on that later. By the way, 10,000 hours is almost 3 hours daily for 10 years.

IQ is almost worthless

If you have an IQ high enough to make it into college, you're all set. Everything else is nice to have, but not necessary. There's been huge studies on kids with 140+ IQs, some even as high as 200. It doesn't lead to success after about 105-115, which it takes to go to college. Also, it doesn't matter if your grades are better. Not even your school matters. If you went to any normal college or to harvard, you're not more likely to get a Nobel prize. This is pretty democratic. There is a story of one fellow who has an IQ of almost 200, can learn any language in minutes, beats everyone in maths, and still didn't get many places with it. He went on TV a few times, but he didn't even finish college. Sad for him, nice for us: even if your IQ is lower than 200, you'll survive. I almost did an IQ test for this chapter. My roommate Sonja did one when I told her about it and scored 135 on one and 139 on the other. But then she wouldn't let me do the test on her computer and I was too lazy to get mine. I guess I get a -100 for laziness on this one.

Practical Intelligence

This chapter explains what the guy from the last chapter was missing. It tells the story of how Robert Oppenheimer (guy who invented the nuke) was caught POISONING HIS TEACHER for "making him conduct stupid experimental physics" and got away with "probation". This guy had some nice talking skills! Yes, he was actually trying to MURDER someone for giving him silly homework, and he talked his way out of it. Wow. And, of course, he was also pretty intelligent in the IQ sense. Both combined are great. It's enough though to be "good" in this too, just as it is with IQ.

Background

Remember when I told you it was hard to do anything for 10,000 hours? This is where that comes into play. We can probably agree that it rocks to have 10,000 hours of programming experience under the belt in the exact year computers go big (~1985) in silicon valley. Which Bill Gates had, Steve Jobs had, Eric Schmidt had, Bill Joy had. But back then, computers cost serious money! The book states that Bill Gates' school bought ONE computer terminal (i.e. only a client to a huge server computer) because they were very interested in the technology. Meaning, anyone not on that school simply didn't have the chance to accumulate 10,000 hours of programming. Similarly, there's the immigrants who arrived in New York in the 1830s with serious tailoring skills. And the Jewish lawyers in 1930 who had finished law school but were not hired by the big law firms - because they were Jews. This discrimination made them take up the "crap jobs" of that time, which were hostile company takeovers. Which then became the big trend and made them very rich. They did have the 10,000 hours in hostile company takeover law. But they wouldn't have had it, hadn't they been Jews (because they'd have gotten a job at the other law firms). And so on. Basically you are being "led" by your social situation into what you spend your life on, and if it is something that then becomes a huge trend, surprise, you win big time. This was pretty disappointing, because it's not really something you can "do". You can hope your hobby becomes the next best jackpot, but you can't work on it. If it doesn't, you just wasted 10,000 hours. I hope you had fun.

Cultural Heritage

The second half of the book is about cultural heritage in a bigger sense than just "my parents sent me to summer school". There's why people from the south of America are more aggressive and explosive, even the ones studying arts in Michigan. It's just something that gets "taught", like an accent or a way of mind. There's the story of Korean pilots, who crashed their plane because they were too polite to tell the tower they didn't have any fuel left. Korean society is very polite. There's why Asian people are told to work their ass off all year (rice fields need to be taken care of almost the entire year) while we westerners are lazy pieces of shit (our fields just need to be sown and harvested once a year, and it's also a much more "stupid" process, nothing you can be good at). Also, Asian languages make you good at math: their numbers system is a lot easier to calculate with and their numbers are easier to remember, too. In chinese, forty-two is four-two. Adding four-two and two-three is a lot easier than forty-two and twenty-three. Plus their numbers have only one syllable.

Improving on Cultural Heritage

Then there's the "accepting of Cultural Heritage", explained in two examples. I actually think accepting is the wrong word. It's changing. People realized that extreme politeness is not working in airplane emergencies, so they made the Korean pilots talk english and told them to not be polite. People also realized that being a lazy ass is not making you good at anything, so they took the "culture" of Asians to WORK THEIR ASS OFF 24/7/365 and made little kids "accept" this heritage, i.e. they made a school where kids spend 60% more time every day and with 50% the vacations. The kids are literally going to this school from 7 AM to 6 PM and do homework until 10 PM or 11 PM. Surprise, they're very good.  But is it worth that? They have no free time. I'm not sure on this one. I want to be great at things, true. But I also want to have fun in life. There should be a golden ratio.

Conclusion

There is no "talent" in success. That's a relief. There is 10,000 hours in success. That's a relief too, because it means hard work pays off. You need to have been told the right rules and lifestyle from very early on and hit the sweet spot where your skill is already high but the competition is low and you're not bound by any other, "meaningless" job. This one pretty much sucks and makes it all random again. Nobody can predict the future, nobody can choose how to be educated by their parents and where and when they're born. That's just awful. It felt like a cop out by the book, but I guess that's just the way it is. Social evolution.

Wow, I guess it's been 4 days already. That was quicker than I thought.

Good news, everyone!

It's easier than I thought. Even when staying in the hostel in Dublin, buying cheap and tasty fruit was never a problem. They actually had melon and coconut for 1.20€ and 0.84€.   [edit] This is my Day 4 post. I forgot to publish it back then. Funny how optimistic I was, in retrospective :-)