This is the Monday Medley, a newsletter that goes out, you guessed it, every Monday. I republish it here for sharing and referencing, but if you'd like to sign up you can do so right here:
Happy Monday!
Today is the last day to sign up for the Membership and get your first month free. Just use the code "FREEMONTH." And once you sign up, you'll be able to discuss this Medley in the forum here and prep some questions for the first Member Hangout on Friday.
I released a new video last week on "How I Never Stop Writing," and released a new one this morning on "The Most Important Book for People in their 20s."
I also published a writeup of my experience on my elk hunting trip a couple weeks ago. If you're interested in getting into hunting at all, I definitely recommend contacting Mansal at Sacred Hunting.
And last but not least, Danny Miranda had me on his podcast for a great interview which you can listen to here.
Alright, on to the Medley!
🔥 I've been interested in the world of FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early) for over a decade, particularly the idea of FatFIRE.
And I think everyone else who has some goals around FIRE should read this piece: What if FIRE Doesn't Work?
👨💼 In it, the author lays out ways to prevent encountering The Void when you reach some sort of spot of not needing to work.
One point I particularly liked was about the need for stress:
"I’ll need some stress – not the chronic stress I experience at work, but I’ll need a challenge in my life that makes me experience discomfort. This will mean setting myself a task that I won’t already know how to achieve, or be innately good at. It’ll involve learning new skills. It’ll mean committing to the task (perhaps publicly), so that if I pull out then I’ll think less of myself."
😰 Once you have all the money you need to be comfortable, you'll need to find new ways to create some sense of stress for yourself so you continue to work. We treat stress as a bad thing, but certain amounts and certain kinds are necessary for continuing to do productive work. We'll always have the stress of losing days of our lives, but that tends to be hard to conceptualize in the short term.
I also like this explicit call out:
"It’s impossible for healthy humans to do nothing. And I’m fine with being paid to do something I want to do."
👍🏼 The quickest way to die is to lose any sense of purpose in your life, and all of us are driven to find some kind of meaningful work. Even if your work isn't that meaningful, doing it to put food on the table can keep you going, but once that need is gone? Unless you've practiced creating meaningful work for yourself it can be easy to waste your days in front of the TV or social media, so finding ways to create projects and goals for yourself is essential for being able to create meaning in your life.
❓ They also include some good questions you can ask yourself to figure out what you want to do, either now or in the future when you have more resources available:
☀️ This was a fascinating study on the effects of administering a high dose of Vitamin D to patients infected with COVID early on in their treatment.
The number of subjects wasn't huge, but the results were dramatic (Calcifediol is the Vitamin D supplement):
"Among 26 patients not treated with calcifediol, thirteen required ICU admission (50 %), while out of fifty patients treated with calcifediol only one required admission to the ICU, whereas the other patients remained in conventional hospitalization"
📉 From 50% requiring ICU admission to 2%. That's insane! And it's just Vitamin D. Now, yes, more testing is required, but what I love about research like this is that there is absolutely no downside to going out of your way to make sure you have high Vitamin D levels right now.
My personal philosophy with COVID is that you should assume you're going to get it and act accordingly. Getting your Vitamin D levels in line is an extremely cheap, simple, and potentially life changing thing we can all do to make ourselves more resilient. Especially since Vitamin D deficient patients are about 7x more likely to die from COVID than non-deficient patients.
💉 You should be able to get a test done from your PCP, if you have one, for relatively cheap, or you can use one of the many at home testing kits like Everlywell and LetsGetChecked (disclaimer, I don't know how good their tests really are, but Vit D is a simple test as I understand it).
Or you can just assume you're deficient and start supplementing. The DMinder App is a great wakeup call for just how little Vitamin D you're probably getting.
🤝 Dave Chappelle showed how powerful it can be for a platform to side with its creators over old intermediaries.
🎬 Netflix added The Chappelle Show for streaming, but Dave Chappelle feels he was kinda screwed out of payment for the show by the network, so he asked Netflix to take it down. Even though Netflix probably stood to gain some more loyal subscribers by having such a great show on their platform, they sided with Dave and took the show down.
This was remarkable and brilliant on Netflix's part. They decided to choose a creator over a network, since Netflix knows we're entering into a world with fewer and fewer gatekeepers to creators. A number of the Top 40 songs from this summer were recorded by solo artists in their bedrooms who blew them up on TikTok, and many of the most popular "movies" are solo productions on YouTube.
🎭 I suspect Netflix is looking to the future and asking themselves if they should side with creators, or legacy media, and they're picking creators. I think that could turn out incredibly well for them as they continue to be a huge source of support for comedians and indie documentaries, especially as independent creators start producing higher and higher quality media.
🚬 In their ongoing effort to convince everyone to move away, San Francisco has decided to ban smoking in private apartments. But pot smoking is still fine. Also I don't know how this makes any sense since they said the reason was to cut down on second hand smoke, but now you have to smoke outside around other people? The history book on the fall of San Francisco is going to be fascinating.
👑 And this is a really neat Instagram where an artist draws what historical royalty and leaders would look like as people today.
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Have a great week,
Nat